DailyGP

Runs one fully automated Grand Prix a day on a TimingSystem track, drawn at random from a tagged pool of tracks.

How a day runs

1. Track selection (schedule.track-selection-time) — a track is drawn at random from every track carrying the track-tag tag (DailyGP by default). Only open tracks with a start region and grid positions are eligible, because a heat cannot be loaded without them, and the tracks in the excluded track queue are held back. The Grand Prix is announced so players know where and when they will be racing.
2. Qualifying opens (schedule.start-time) — a TimingSystem event is created with a qualifying round and a final round, each holding one heat:
   • qualifying gets a time limit of qualifying.duration-minutes and starts immediately, empty;
   • the final gets grand-prix.pits pit stops (only on tracks with a pit region), a lap count calculated from race.duration-minutes and the track's reference time, and DRS (race.drs, on by default) and push to pass (race.push-to-pass, off by default).
3. Drivers join — there is nothing to sign up to in advance. Players run /dailygp join at any point while qualifying is running and are put straight onto the grid; driving through the start region begins their session. Late joiners share the session clock, so qualifying ends at the same moment for everyone and joining late costs running time rather than extending the session. The field is capped at grand-prix.max-drivers, or at the number of grid positions on the drawn track if that is lower.
4. End of qualifying — the first driver to complete their final lap opens a qualifying.finish-grace-seconds window for everyone else, counted down on a boss bar. Qualifying is finished when that window closes, or as soon as every driver is done.
5. The final — the qualifying round is finished, which seeds the grid with the qualifying order, and the final is loaded and counted down. Only drivers who took part in qualifying are on the grid: TimingSystem allows late entries into qualifying heats only.
6. End of the Grand Prix — the winner crossing the line opens a race.finish-grace-seconds window for the rest of the field, again counted down on the boss bar, after which the final and the event are finished. The classification and the winner's statistics are saved, and the event then removes itself from TimingSystem.

A qualifying session nobody joins is called off when its time is up, and both sessions are guarded by a watchdog, so a heat that nobody ever finishes - because every driver logged off, for example - cannot leave the event running indefinitely.

Chat and boss bar

The plugin broadcasts three things and nothing else:

1. The track announcement, when the day's track is drawn.

2. The info card, when qualifying opens:

            » DAILY GRAND PRIX «
   ---------------------------------
    Track: Nordschleife
    Race: 24 laps · 1 pit stop
    Qualifying: open for another 10 minutes
    Drivers: 0/12
                 [ JOIN NOW ]
   ---------------------------------
   

   [ JOIN NOW ] joins qualifying on click. The card is also sent to players a couple of seconds after they join the server while qualifying is running, so anyone arriving mid-session knows there is one, and it is what /dailygp info shows whenever there is a Grand Prix to describe.

3. One line when qualifying ends and the final starts.

Everything else - drivers joining, the winner, cancellations, watchdog timeouts - goes to the server log only, so chat stays quiet.

The two finish grace periods are shown on TimingSystem's event countdown boss bar ("Qualifying ends in" and "Race ends in"), which every driver and spectator of the event sees. It is taken down as soon as the session it belongs to ends.

Replies to /dailygp commands still go to whoever ran the command, and TimingSystem's own heat messages - the starting countdown, lap times, finishes and results - are unaffected.

Colours

Chat, the info card and the holograms share one palette, defined in Palette: red headings framed in blue (» LIKE THIS «), white values, grey labels and dark grey dividers. Changing the constants there restyles every part of the plugin at once.

Overtaking aids

race.drs (default true) and race.push-to-pass (default false) are applied to the final only. Both only mean anything when there is a car ahead to catch — DRS opens for a driver who crosses a detection region close behind another, and push to pass is a rechargeable boost for attacking or defending — so neither is applied to qualifying, which drivers run on their own with collisions off.

DRS needs DRS detection and activation regions on the track. On a track without them it simply never opens, and the plugin notes that in the log when the race is created. TimingSystem keeps DRS shut for the first lap.

Excluded track queue

The grand-prix.excluded-track-queue-length most recently raced tracks are held back from the draw, so the same track cannot keep coming up. Each track that is drawn goes to the front of the queue and the oldest one drops off, becoming available again. The queue survives restarts in plugins/DailyGP/excluded_tracks.yml and stores track ids, so renaming a track does not lose its place.

Keep the length below the number of tagged tracks. If every eligible track is in the queue there is nothing left to draw, so the queue is ignored for that one draw and a warning is logged rather than the server going without a Grand Prix. Set it to 0 to disable the queue.

Event cleanup

A Grand Prix leaves nothing behind in TimingSystem. Once the classification has been written to last_grand_prix.yml and the winner's statistics to player_stats.yml, the event is removed with EventDatabase.removeEventHard, so /event list does not fill up with one dead DailyGP-... entry per day. Everything the plugin needs afterwards - the results board, the win counts, the streaks - comes from its own files, not from the event.

Events are also removed when a Grand Prix is cancelled, and when the server shuts down mid-race: the plugin's state lives in memory, so an event left half-run could never be finished or recorded after a restart, only orphaned. If you would rather keep finished events for inspection through /event and /heat, drop the deleteEvent() call from finishEvent() in GrandPrixManager.

Statistics and leaderboards

Every Grand Prix that produces a winner is recorded in plugins/DailyGP/player_stats.yml: the winner's total goes up, their streak grows, and every other driver's current streak ends. A win is only recorded when the leading driver completed the full race distance, so a race stopped before anyone finished leaves the statistics — and everybody's streak — untouched. The classification of the most recent race is kept separately in plugins/DailyGP/last_grand_prix.yml.

Three holographic leaderboards present that data, drawn with FancyHolograms:

Board	Shows
Latest Grand Prix	Finishing positions and race times of the most recent race; drivers who did not go the full distance are shown as DNF with their lap count
All-time wins	The drivers with the most Grand Prix wins
Win streaks	The longest run of consecutive wins anyone has achieved

They are refreshed whenever a Grand Prix finishes — the data cannot change at any other time — and are recreated at their configured locations on /dailygp reload. FancyHolograms is a soft dependency and every board is optional: without the plugin, or without a location configured under holograms in the config, the Grand Prix runs identically and the board is simply not shown.

Lap count

TimingSystem does not record how long a track physically is, so a time trial time set on it is used as the measure instead:

laps = round(race.duration-minutes / (reference lap time * race.pace-multiplier))

The reference is the 5th best time on the track, not the outright record, so that a single cheated time that has not been deleted yet cannot inflate the lap count and leave the race running far longer than race.duration-minutes. On a track with fewer than five recorded times the slowest of those available is used, which errs the same way: towards a slightly short race rather than a very long one.

The pace multiplier accounts for race laps being slower than a time trial hot lap. Stage tracks always run a single lap, and a track that has never been completed falls back to TimingSystem's own finals.laps setting.

Commands

Command	Permission	Description
/dailygp info	dailygp.use	Current Grand Prix status
/dailygp join	dailygp.use	Join the running qualifying session
/dailygp drivers	dailygp.use	List the drivers taking part
/dailygp now	dailygp.admin	Call a Grand Prix on a fresh track right now
/dailygp reload	dailygp.admin	Reload the configuration
/dailygp selecttrack	dailygp.admin	Draw today's track now
/dailygp start	dailygp.admin	Open qualifying for the scheduled Grand Prix now
/dailygp cancel	dailygp.admin	Cancel the current Grand Prix

/dgp is an alias of /dailygp.

Racing outside the schedule

/dailygp now runs a complete Grand Prix without waiting for the daily schedule: it draws a fresh track and opens qualifying immediately, replacing a Grand Prix that was only waiting for its scheduled start. A Grand Prix that is already on track is never replaced - cancel it first.

/dailygp start, by contrast, opens qualifying early for the scheduled Grand Prix, on the track that was already drawn and announced.

Setup

1. Create the track tag once: /ts tag create DailyGP.
2. Select each track that should be in the pool and toggle the tag on it: /trackedit tag DailyGP.
3. Adjust plugins/DailyGP/config.yml and run /dailygp reload.

REST API

TimingSystemRESTApi exposes the Grand Prix over HTTP when both plugins are installed, through /api/v4/readonly/dailygp (live state), /dailygp/results/latest, /dailygp/stats, /dailygp/stats/:uuidorusername and /dailygp/excluded-tracks. DailyGP does not depend on the REST API, and the REST API only registers those routes when DailyGP is present, so either plugin runs perfectly well on its own. The data comes from the same managers the plugin uses, so nothing is duplicated.

Building

Joining a running qualifying heat uses EventDatabase.heatDriverNewLate and Heat.addLateDriverToGrid, which are not in any published TimingSystem release yet, so the plugin builds against the TimingSystem source checked out next to it. Install that first:

cd ../TimingSystem && mvn install

Then build the plugin:

mvn clean package

Requires Java 21, Paper 1.21.4 and a TimingSystem build that supports late qualifying entries. Rerun the TimingSystem install whenever its source changes. FancyHolograms 2.8.0 is compiled against but only needed at runtime if you want the leaderboards.