TLDR;

Prepared to help with finding and reporting bugs? If so then you may be ready to submit your comp’s data and have it scored and published. The first thing to do is open an add a comp issue. You’ll find further instructions there.

It’s Complicated

The backstory is that GAP is a set of rules, laid down by CIVL, that regulate how to score hang gliding and paragliding competitions. Nobody scores by hand but that is nearly the attention to detail needed to implement a program that does the scoring. This program will need to work with spherical and ellipsoidal Earth models, find where tracklogs, those windy and loopy trails, cross and re-cross the turnpoints cylinders of the day’s flying task. The rules don’t say anything about how patchy and spikey a tracklog can be and still be accepted. Does the tracklog start at yesterday’s landing point? Does’t it end when the pilot switches off their vario doing 100km/h in the team car? I’ll leave off enumerating a laundry list of difficulties. Suffice it to say implementing GAP is no easy task.

I’ve had a go at implementing GAP in flare-timing and have asked a few questions about how to interpret the rules. I didn’t want to look at how the official scoring program did it as that could be wrong, no disrespect intended for the voluntary development effort already put in to that program. The initial motivation I had for re-implementing GAP was to independently produce a set of working and result files that could be used to double-check the officially generated results and show a bit more working in the process.

What’s in it for you?

By submitting your comp you’ll get to have it scored (and published too if you wish). All that you need provide is the comp’s *.fsdb file along with tracklogs in *.igc or *.kml format. By finding problems and raising issues with the scoring, you’ll be helping to make competitions fair and transparent and possibly we’ll be able to find and clear up more ambiguities in the rules.

Thanks for Helping Out.

I want to thank scorers that have already given me comp data and answered questions I had; Igor, Davis, Billo and Wesley. Jörg and Daniel, developers of FS, have helped fill in gaps in my understanding of the rules and have explained how FS goes about scoring.