Dedicated Manager for Online Nascar Simulations (DeMONS)
Last updated: 2:30pm (central time), 12/01/2002

What Is It?

DeMONS/3 is a front end manager for dedicated servers for Nascar Racing 2003 Season.

Many thanks to the following people for their help in chasing the demons out of DeMONS/1, DeMONS/2, and now DeMONS/3:

  • Eric Busch (*)
  • Shawn Wise (*)
  • Bill Cregger (**)
  • Jeff Causey (**)
  • Paul E - WSRL (***)

(*) Shawn and Eric were great help in getting the INI settings and command line parameters properly arranged in my little brain box. Without their help, I would still be sitting there mumbling "What the hell does that do?"

(**) Bill reported the first bug in DeMONS/2. I know, it's a dubious distinction, but what the hell, it helped everyone else. Jeff also gets mentioned because he's probably the most dedicated user/tester I have.

(***)Paul has been continuously on my case about adding stuff to the program. Without him, I doubt that DeMONS would even still be avaiilable.

Why Does It Exist?

One of the things I think is wrong with the Nascar Racing series of sims by Papyrus is that all the WON/Sierra stuff is included *in the game*. In my oh-so-humble opinion, this is a "bad idea" (tm). The WON/Sierra interface should have been made an EXTERNAL nuthin-fancy windows app. This would have allowed much more freedom to enhance the functionality of their system, and would have reduced the sim to be just a sim instead of what it is today. I feel very strongly that it would have simplified the code in the sim program itself, resulting in a better experience while driving, and better compartmentalizing the code.

What Does It Cost?

DeMONS is (and always will be) free software as long as I own the rights to the software. If Sierra or Papyrus wishes to contact me about buying the software (including source code and all other related files), I'm willing to listen - grin.

How Does It Work?
  • Host Configuration - This utility allows the server admin to setup an unlimited number of "hosts", each using their own schedule.
  • Launcher - This program actually watches each schedule and runs specified races at scheduled intervals (or dates and times). This is ALL this program does. It uses very little cpu time (not even measurable on my system). Each host schedule runs in it's own thread.
  • Scrubber - This program is used only by server admins running on Windows 95/98/ME machines. The reason it's needed is because the Windows versions listed do NOT read the N4 track INI files using normal Windows API calls (the problem does not exist on Win2K or WinXP).
  • Results Massager - This program imports the results file created by the sim, and massages the data into a format of your choice.