Reading Game Saves... No it is not for cheating purposes

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mr.Slow
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Mr.Slow

Mr.Slow

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So I am looking at the different lists and sites that give you car information. They are great and I am thankful other people spent the time to put them together.

But there is something I have been wanting to do since GT4 and I think being able to read game saves would help a lot: I would like to have a database where you can pick a car and it will tell you what races you can do with it. It would be grouped by "Easy Peasy", "Fair Challenge", "Needs tuning", "Can participate but will finish dead last even if max modded" or something along those lines.

How would reading games saves would help with this?
Well, compiling all the info will take a long time. You'd have to BUY/WIN 1000 cars and then try them on each and every race. There are many races that you would not have to try simply because a given car cannot participate but for those that it can participate in you'd have to try different levels of modding until you exhaust all possibilities. This is DEFINITELY NOT a job for one single person.

That is where gamesaves would come in. From what I can gather the following info is present in a game save:
- List of cars owned
- Mod level for each car
- Race replays (not sure about this)

So if the database is compiled by (to use the buzz term) "User generated content" a bit (or a lot) of coding could yield a submission system that would work something like this:

Part One (ON YOUR CONSOLE)
1. Buy a car
2. mod it
3. Win a race with it and save the race replay.
4. Copy your games save to USB stick/drive

Part two (On the database site)
1. Log on.
2. Go to the submit page
3. Upload your save
4. After the upload is complete the site reads it and displays the name of the race from your LATEST race replay save along with the information regarding the car you used, its state of tune, the finishing position and the finishing margin.
5. Click submit and your are done.

Part Three (On the website)
1. Any member or guests picks a car from the database and a combination of the following criteria: Mod Budget, Finishing margin (in bands), driving skill required (would be inferred -maybe- from the profile details of the person who submitted the car/event)
2. List of races that can be participated in where the finishing position / margin and other criteria fits the given car is displayed.



So the question is: Is there a way to READ game saves?
 
Try the Hybriding forum. They may be able to help.
 
It would also be useful for compiling car lists.

At this point I'm assuming all those with online car lists have been very diligent in recording every purchase independently of the game itself. This is something I haven't been doing, so now I have over 950 cars and no external record with which to update mygranturismo or anything else.
 
I think most of that went over my head to be honest, I do play GT5 quite a lot though. 👍
 
SlyckTires
It would also be useful for compiling car lists.

At this point I'm assuming all those with online car lists have been very diligent in recording every purchase independently of the game itself. This is something I haven't been doing, so now I have over 950 cars and no external record with which to update mygranturismo or anything else.
Click to expand...

Well, I know mygranturismo an the other new one both have a "my garage" feature where you can select the cars you have. Would that help you?
 
Mr.Slow
Well, I know mygranturismo an the other new one both have a "my garage" feature where you can select the cars you have. Would that help you?
Click to expand...

Only problem with that is you're going to have to go thru your garage yourself and tick them off on the website, which sounds like a hugely laborious task.
 
SlyckTires
Only problem with that is you're going to have to go thru your garage yourself and tick them off on the website, which sounds like a hugely laborious task.
Click to expand...

Yes. that will be painful.

I thought of an alternative this afternoon. In a previous life I was a crack software developer and did some image recognition stuff. If you could use the api of an ocr package like paperport you could to parse screenshots and gather information that way. It would be more open to cheating but it may be better than typing all of that info....
 
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