Race For Kicks

Race For Kicks v2.0 website as of September 2020

Race For Kicks (sometimes stylised "R4K") is a tournament hosted by Cas and, since middle 2020, also by KyLiE, which spawned as a natural continuation from the historical Race For Immortality event and has been active intermittently between 2016 and 2018, having become more regular in 2019. Before 2019, races could start at any time of the month and be anywhere from two to six weeks long, approximately. Starting season 2019, there is one race per month, usually starting on the first day of the month and closing at the end of day 25. For each race, one fixed car (or more, like in race 2, season 2018) is mandated for everyone to use (usually, a fast car) and the rules are those of a moderately strict OWOOT with and without replay handling. The tournament is run at https://www.raceforkicks.com.

Origins

In middle October 2016, an event called Race For Immortality was held by Cas to record the skill level of the racers that were active at the time. The race had to be OWOOT to make this measurement reliable, so Cas chose to set rules similar to those in Paleke's World Stunts Championship, where he had first participated. The success of R4I prompted Cas to continue with a similar approach, so the rules were refined and the website was improved. Because "immortality" had already been achieved, there was no other reason to continue racing but for fun, so the tournament was called Race For Kicks. The first race was held shortly after R4I ended in late November that same year.

Races

Tournament beginnings - 2016

The tournament opened as a direct continuation of the Race For Immortality event that was held between middle October and late November 2016. This single race, featuring the Porsche March Indy on the track called Bliss, could be considered the first and opening one to Race For Kicks or something separate. It was a very successful event, which led to Cas opening the new competition site with a new track in early December that year called Dubai. Following the Shoutbox at ZakStunts[1] and the first forum thread for R4K[2], it looks like the race started maybe on the 9th of that month and first posted replays were checked on the 13th. Then, on the 31st, Cas says he's forgotten to publish the replays, meaning the race has already ended before that date. It didn't have much participation and the replays appear to have been lost for this race.

Season 2017

One could say a season 2017 exists, yet, it was only individual races all held during that year, some with significant separation. Information on the races held in the tournament that year appears to be very incomplete. Only the complete information of the last race so far has been recovered. The track used was Rulos, by Cas, and the race ran from 10 September 2017 to 10 October 2017. On this particular race, all participants used replay handling and the results were as follows:

Position	Racer	Lap (RH)
1	FinRok	1:21.00
2	dreadnaut	1:21.80
3	arturbmallmann	1:30.20
4	Cas	1:31.15
5	Shoegazing Leo	1:38.80

Before that race, basing on information from the forum and from the tournament chat, it is known that a race was held starting 3 January 2017 on the track New Year - 2017. That race probably ended on 16 February 2017. Next race started on the 22nd of the same month and the selected track was Gálvez, a track that had been designed by Paleke for the 2006 season of his WSC. Because AbuRaf70 had participated in it back then and now had passed away on the 21st of January, his final lap from 2006 was posted at the beginning of the race, so that other pipsqueaks could "race with him", as a tribute. That race ended on 31 March 2017. Apparently, there wasn't any other racer until the one described above.

Season 2018

After significant changes in its PHP code, the tournament was reopen on 12 September 2018, for a brief season. The first race ran from that date until 20 October on a track by Overdrijf called A Literal Race, honouring Race For Kicks with its design (which graphically represents the tournament's name). Overdrijf was wanting to race with his creation, the Superkart, which wasn't among the available cars for the 2018 season of ZakStunts. Cas offered to start a R4K season with a racer for the Kart.

As intended, this was a three-race season, with the other two races running approximately from the 1st till the 25th of months November and December. The second race featured the then brand-new DTM pack consisting of three cars by Overdrijf, as Cas had shown interest in experimental and custom cars for his tournament. The track was also of Overdrijf's design. The third and last race, "The Palms" (a track by Cas) was run with the Xylocaine XF, making 2018 a fully custom-car-based season.

Participation this year was good, an improvement from 2017, with most interest having been concentrated on the DTM cars and their corresponding race.

Season 2019

Cas had planned to make races more regular starting season 2019. The season started later than planned (by the end of February for the race of March), but since then, it maintained a pretty good regularity. Every month included one race that typically started on the first day and ended just before day 26. The site's interface hadn't changed much, but there were already some plans for the next season. Nine races were held in this season.

In 2019, participation was good as well, especially in the first half of the year. Both custom and original cars were used. Among the custom cars, there were races for the Melange XGT-88 and the Speedgate XSD and again, for the Xylocaine XF and the DTM pack.

Season 2020

This season started a little late too. Cas was busy with plans to leave the country because of the huge crisis in Argentina, but then the CoViD quarantine forced a stop and so, he dedicated his time to completely rewrite the code and give R4K a new style. With version 2.0, Race For Kicks can handle permanent competitions as well as races (even more than one at the same time if it should). A much more powerful messaging system and a more versatile administration and moderation panel were implemented. The new version was presented in March, but including only the permanent competition with the tracks coming with Stunts. The first actual OWOOT race was held in June.

In total, six races were held with most participation being concentrated towards the end of the season. Three tracks by Cas and three by KyLiE were issued, including a longer endurance race called Pacific at the end. As always, custom cars played an important role, with a DTM-based race and the last race in the season featuring the McLaren Honda MP4/4 for the first time. KyLiE teamed up with Cas to administer the tournament also hosting it himself.

Season 2021

This season was the first to include twelve races and follow and almost perfect start/finish schedule organisation with all races beginning on the 1st day of the month and ending on the 26th except that of March, which ended on the 27th.

A great variety of cars and tracks was featured. The tracks being designed by Cas, KyLiE, Ayrton and Ralphy and the cars including both original and custom cars and introducing for the first time both KITT and the CERV III in March and October respectively. Participation was very good in practically every race.

In the month of November, the race was held on the track Bliss in commemoration of the Race For Immortality event, five years prior. Also a free-style race was held in December on the track Hidden Valley, to celebrate five years since the beginning of the tournament.

Season 2022

Year 2022 started very regularly, just like the previous season. In March, the race featured the Fiorano Circuit track by Ryoma, also introducing his Ferrari 456 GT.

Many small changes to the PHP code have been added throughout 2021 and this has continued in 2022. At the beginning of the year, true automation of events was added, thus allowing for races to auto-start and auto-end. Race start and end announcements are issued in the general chat. Also, some old bugs were fixed, like the one preventing the normal functioning of local moderators.

The information from the two races held in 2016, including that or Race For Immortality, has been added to the race history, although most replays have been lost for the track Dubai.

Rules

While occasionally, a free OWOOT race may be held in R4K, by far the majority of the races follow a strict OWOOT set of rules. Following are such rules as described in the website:

Simplified

Race for Kicks is an OWOOT racing event. This means you must remain on or over the asphalt/dirt/ice at all times (one wheel on or over the track) and you must execute all stunts. You may not use shortcuts or skip stunts in any way.

How being OWOOT is defined

Replays are checked by using the F3 view, rotating the viewport upwards to the maximum and then clockwise (to the right) three times. No change is to be made to the zoom level. If at any point, from this view, there is no contact between any of the pixels of the car shape and those of the main material of the track (asphalt, dirt or ice), then the replay is invalid. Even if it is apparent that there would be no pixel overlap, the replay is valid as long as there is contact. The reason is that overlap is an abstract concept (as the background pixel really does not exist) and in curves and chicanes, it may not be clearly defined. Other rotations or zoom levels may give different results, but these are not to be taken into account. Still, it is recommended that you avoid any situation that may produce doubts. The term "OWOOT" is old and the concept has been evolving for two decades. While it may suggest that the wheels have something to do with the rules, actually, any part of the car in visual contact with the road is enough.

Executing all stunts

Each track element usually has an intuitively defined stunt-action. For example, when facing a loop, you're supposed to roll through it, not jump off. When you get to a tunnel, it is understood you must go through it, not over it or on top of it. If you get to a slalom, you're expected to dodge the stones, not go straight through them. This is usually described as "following the yellow/white lines", although this is rather vague (for example, it's clear that there is no violation in rolling inside a pipe).

Speed-ups

A speed-up is something you do that is clearly going to improve your lap time, but consists of more than just driving, rather exploiting the game's unreal physics. In many tournaments, this is not allowed. In Race for Kicks, speed-ups are allowed as long as you stick to the OWOOT rules. For instance, when driving on a highway, you may use the boulevard division to jump and accelerate, but the bolevard division is not considered part of the track (asphalt), so at least one wheel must remain partially on or over the asphalt for the replay to be valid. Also, at a pipe entrance, you may use the side to jump in, but the replay will be invalid if the car is seen to be fully off the asphalt. Jumping at the start of banked roads is OK, but make sure you don't fly over the grass if there's a banked corner just after the straightway-to-banked-road transition.

Replay handling

You are allowed to use replay handling. If you did not use it, you can specify that when uploading your replay and this will show up in the scoreboard. Currently, there is no efficient way to verify replay handling use, so replays labeled NoRH will not add any scoreboard advantage.

Replay publicity

All replays will remain private during the race and will be published once it ends. Races can, while logged in, make their own replays public if they so wish (there is an option in the Scoreboard section for this), but once they do, they cannot revert their replays to private.

Car and gears

For every track, a car will be assigned and all racers must use that car. You are free to use any colour and to select manual or automatic transmission. It is planned to improve this in the future so that racers have some degree of freedom in choosing a car.

Season scoring system

While the tournament is called "Race For Kicks" and it's more oriented towards race results than season results, there is a very simple scoring system that allows for seasons to have their scoreboards and thus, a podium being formed.

For each race, every racer that participates gets 2 points. In addition to that, racers' positions in the scoreboard are taken from their best replay in that race and the racer that gets the best result gets 3 extra points, the next one gets 2 extra points and the third one gets 1 extra points. All other racers in the scoreboard only get the 2 participation points. So, the podium racers will get 5, 4 and 3 points respectively, while everyone else in the scoreboard will get 2. Racers who didn't participate in the race will get no points for that race. As the season progresses, the points of each race are added until we get to a final season scoreboard.

Development

The original Race For Immortality website

Race For Kicks started as a direct successor from the Race For Immortality event. For that race, a website was built that had the ability to receive uploaded replays, but the page was very simple: being a single race, there was no need of a menu or a race switching system. The site did not even have a way to log in. Racers would first register and then would have to enter both their user name and password every time they submitted a replay.

Reconstruction of Race For Kicks v1.5

The first post in the forum announcing Race For Kicks opening is from 9 December 2016. The site was located at http://dimioca.com/r4k and hosted at http://bngjj1-user.freehosting.host. At the beginning of 2017, a more versatile website was ready that one could log-in to and include a menu with options. This was Race For Kicks v1.0. It was semi-automatic, because the administrator had to upload tracks manually through the server, but at least, for the user, it was fully functional. The look was still reminiscent of R4I and of Bliss Track Editor, with its deep purple background.

Changes were being made gradually at first, but then, significant modifications were made, so that tracks could be archived and uploaded from the administration panel and the history was available for racers. This is version 1.5, which looked very similar to version 1.0, because it was based on the same code, but highly improved.

On 26 July 2019, Cas announced that the website could be going down because the hosting server would stop providing free hosting. On 6 August, the service was discontinued and the tournament had to move to another server. It was established at http://r4k.fnhost.org. The domain name dimioca.com was still working, but Cas let it expire and just directed everything to fnhost.

For season 2019, the system was completely rewritten. This resulted in the new look that can be seen today. The new website is now fully automatic and requires virtually no work to be done from the server panel, unless a bug is found. It includes a PM system, versatile profiles and much more.

On 25 September 2020, the site was suddenly down. A message read that something had expired. First impression everybody had was that the hosting for R4K had expired, but after a close look, it was clear that the server fnhost.org itself had ceased to provide all services without notice. Even their domain expired. Again, Race For Kicks had to move on to another location. At that time KyLiE noticed that the tournament was down and got in touch with Cas offering help with hosting the site. Since 28 September, the tournament is held at http://www.raceforkicks.com.

In 17 October 2020, Cas noticed that the old host (fnhost.org) was up again and that the old R4K site was preserved. As of that date, such copy of the tournament is discontinued and there are plans to remove the contents. All users should go to https://www.raceforkicks.com.