Club Deportivo Automodelismo Eléctricos Sevizeta: Petición a Kyosho/Devinco AS: por un LapZ Nitro estable: Tu club de mini-z en Sevilla

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Petición a Kyosho/Devinco AS: por un LapZ Nitro estable - 20/03/2006 06:48 AM

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Firma la petición colectiva reclamando a Kyosho que corrija los fallos de LapZ en PetitionOnline

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Mensaje enviado a LapZ (Devinco AS) reportando fallos concretos:
————Original Message————Subject: LapZ Nitro Bugs, transponder problems.
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2006 13:58:53 +0100
From: Francisco J Montilla
To: ole-johan.ellingsen@lapz.com

Hi!!! Happy New Year

I’m a fellow mini-z’er from Seville, Spain. I founded a mini-z club (see www.sevizeta.com) and will host the first Southern-Spain Mini-Z Championship 2006 race this weekend (there will be 5 more racers on more Southern Spain cities).

We have been using the LapZ system for a year or so at the club for training, but never for races, as it crashed sometimes and we never looked deeply into it, so we didn’t get to know it deep. But this year we’re trying to “standarize” on the racing software, using LapZ Nitro.

I had about 70 racers to manage this weekend. I’m sorry to say it was a nightmare; although I tried to check everything before the tournament, I ended up with problems, having to use practice mode and managing everything manually.

I have a couple questions and some bug reports. I asked for advice from other clubs and everybody tells me they have problems with the LapZ Nitro software, each club uses different kind of “black magic” to try to sort them out, but I think this is not acceptable.

Is a new version on the works? Which bugs are being fixed? Is there any kind of documentation, or best practices to try to avoid the software crashes?

I’d took the compromise of sending all the bug reports needed and do all the tests needed reporting back to you, but I think the Devinco/LapZ behaviour or level of compromise is not being acceptable for a EUR 600 product that is unusable without the proper software.

The bug reports:

System used: Fresh install of Windows 2000 SP4, Office 2000 Premium, and nothing else but LapZ Nitro 1.31 installed from the CD that came with it.

printing: I noticed on some systems printing always failed, AFAIK this was due to this (located it by the error code):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q248055 please confirm; I located the missing DLLs, msdbrptr.dll and msderun.dll copied them to c:\windows\system32 (XP here testing, the racetrack PC is W2k as is a dual celeron 533 with only 192Mb RAM so XP will crawl) and registered them but in didn’t work until I uninstalled and reinstalled LapZ Nitro version 1.31 from the CD.

heat generation/editing: it will happen with the last one always: try it, the last heat isn’t propagated; no matter if Windows 2000 or XP.
If you try to edit the heat and move drivers to the last heat, LapZ
Nitro shuts with an error. After inspection, I see the table
tblDriverInRace doesn’t contain RaceIDs for the last heat. (I set up 3 rounds, dunno if it does make a difference).

I fixed this by manually entering the tblDriverInRace records for one driver on the heat for the three rounds, then I was able to edit the heats and move the rest of drivers to heat 9 on LapZ Nitro itself.
Trying to start some heats (try heat 1 on the database I’m sending you) fails with a “runtime error ‘9’: subscript out of range”. Others (heat 8 or 5) seem to work fine.
Now the questions:

We set up the heat grouping by the position achieved by the driver on the previous year championship. It will be very nice to be able to make LapZ Nitro to generate the heat by that order, also setting the heat car order by that criteria (i.e. with 7 drivers per heat, on 2006 the 2005 champion will run on heat 1, car 1, the 2005 12nd driver will run on heat 2 car 5, etc).

It also seems that moving drivers around is what causes the program to end failing.

Instead of manually writing the drivers for the event in LapZ itself, I opened the tblDriver table and entered the drivers by pasting each column (I had an excel file from an online subscribing form).

I expected that maybe the driverID had to do with the driver
distribution following also a frequency criteria, but I see it didn’t
matter.

I see in the table tblDriverInTournament there’s a field StartPosition that seems to be for this purpose? will heat generation follow this criteria?

And some suggestions: It will be nice to be able to print the heats, but not the results, but the drivers for each, to be able to print and show them prior to the race so everybody knows when it will racing. Maybe you have some nice forms for these kind of things (accesing directly from Access 2000).
© 2005-2006 Sevizeta / Francisco J. Montilla (pukkita) - prohibida la reproducción sin permiso expreso del autor.
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Petición a Kyosho/Devinco AS: por un LapZ Nitro estable - 20/03/2006 06:48 AM