[Poll] Existing Karts improvements

According to you, which karts need the most to be improved ?

Poll ended at 13 Apr 2011, 09:53

Adiumy
1
4%
Elephpant
2
8%
Hexley
1
4%
Mozilla
4
16%
Pigdin
2
8%
Wilber
1
4%
Gooey
8
32%
Konqi
2
8%
Nolok
0
No votes
Puffy
2
8%
Tux
2
8%
 
Total votes : 25

[Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 08 Apr 2011, 09:53

Before making another kart it could be useful to improve existing ones...
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby 3dwarehouse » 08 Apr 2011, 14:51

Frankly, none of the karts need to be redone.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Arthur » 08 Apr 2011, 15:05

Gooeys kart is the one looking most dated IMHO.
Adiumy doesn't work well with physics, but that might get handled by hiker sometime? ;)
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 08 Apr 2011, 16:21

I think Mozilla really needs a major update - especially its tail is way too long and sometimes he hits other karts with his tail.

Gooey is not very good either - but since he's not a very known character I think we should just delete him
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby 3dwarehouse » 08 Apr 2011, 18:08

If you get rid of gooey then replace her with someone and has anyone ever made a motorcycle kart.
There is not enough karts anyway right now.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 08 Apr 2011, 18:58

I also think Mozilla and Gooey both need a refresh. Still, I've begun to think how to improve Gooey, I was not able to get precisely how I could make him look better, because the kart's general design is great and should not be changed I think. The back should be changed, though, the very front too, maybe... But it would be a pity for STK to lose Gooey, he really is original and contributes to characters' diversity.

Regarding Mozilla, the tail issue is hard to deal with : what could we do with it ? :think: Maybe wrap it around some part of the kart... Textures need to be entirely changed, I would also change his position to make him less laid down, as it was originally designed :

Image instead of : Image


3dwarehouse {l Wrote}:There is not enough karts anyway right now

Well, with Beastie, Emule, maybe Suzanne, and I wouldlike to make a Geeko afterwards, this could get better soon !
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Arthur » 08 Apr 2011, 19:19

14 karts not enough? I'd say it's a bit on the high side... but then again I play 98% of the time with Tux anyway, so I guess I might not be the best one to ask. ;)
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 08 Apr 2011, 20:22

Well, I think we can say that the more karts STK features, the better it is ^^
But the number of tracks ought to be proportionnal, to me, and it seems there are more people interested in making karts than in making tracks for the moment...
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Arthur » 08 Apr 2011, 22:54

IMHO, the game isn't that much enriched if we have 15 or 16 karts instead of 14. You can only play one at a time...
The most important issue is the size of the game. Sure, 20 karts would be nice (one unique for every player in a 20 kart race), but then the game would be a larger download. No problem for me and you (I guess), but for many with limited broadband or no broadband at all this would be an issue.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 09 Apr 2011, 10:33

You are right. But this is the cost of adding more content to the game. And it can only be worse in the future, nearly 50% of the game size are taken by tracks and textures, around 15% by the music and 10% by the karts (for STK 0.7 on mac). Maybe if it reaches a too big size, a "light package" with less content could be set, or even a system of intelligent download that would enable to download first the necessary files to run the game, and while the game is running the content in background ...

I agree final size is a serious issue, but we can't say "let's stop adding content, because it makes the game too big" ... What we could do, though, is trying to optimize the content's storage and weight : we may gain 10% or 20% of the current content's size optimizing it (less or smaller texture files, maybe check if music compression could be improved, maybe find how to reduce b3d files size, ... I think hiker would know how to proceed precisely :) ). All of this would be a lot of work for both sides : graphists and devs...
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Funto » 09 Apr 2011, 11:07

One thing which I think would be easy to do is to restrict to using DXT-compressed textures and store them in DDS files.
In this case you should use DXT1/DXT1c for textures without transparency or just with pass-through transparency (1 bit of info) and DXT5 for having an alpha channel.
I did a very quick (and not really significative :p) test on 2 images from STK. When converting from gui/difficulty_hard.png gui/to difficulty_hard.dds (DXT1), I went from 20.7 Kb to 8.1 Kb, and when converting tracks/canyon/canyon_asphalt_blend_1.jpg to tracks/canyon/canyon_asphalt_blend_1.dds I went from 58.3 Kb to 64.1 Kb.
Note also that PNG is already zip-compressed, so I think the size of a PNG image in a zip file stands roughly the same.

The downside is that the images are not visible directly in the files explorer, and you need to use a special tool like the DXT plug-in for GIMP.
A solution would be to have a script automatically convert .png and .jpg images to .dds when creating the distributed archives.
This also would avoid having a loss of quality due to working with lossy compressed images.

More importantly, I think the textures should be stored in DXT format on the GPU while the game is running. That would save a lot of space on the GPU and maybe speed up a little the game (if there are less memory transfers...).

About mesh compression, there is OpenCTM: http://openctm.sourceforge.net/ but I don't think Irrlicht supports this format.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby 3dwarehouse » 09 Apr 2011, 12:44

I have superfast broadband so supertuxkart isn't to hard to download.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 09 Apr 2011, 13:39

@Funto : These are great ideas to explore : if every png image was compressed so it makes the half of its current size we could gain around 25Mo ! It would maybe increase a little unpacking time, but also decrease (more than the increase I think) dl time, especially for slow connections.

@3dwarehouse : You are lucky, but STK is played by a lot of people all around the world, as you can see here, and I don't think they all have the same connection.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby 3dwarehouse » 09 Apr 2011, 14:05

Wow!!!!!

Almost every country in the world as downloaded supertuxkart.
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby 3dwarehouse » 09 Apr 2011, 14:07

And why does Brazil have the most downloads?
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 09 Apr 2011, 16:17

Hi,

about DXT, wikipedia says :
While S3 Graphics is no longer a leading competitor in the graphics accelerator market, license fees are still levied and collected for the use of S3TC technology, for example in game consoles and graphics cards. The inclusion of patented technology within OpenGL and its wide usage in software have led to a requirement for the driver to support it and present a major block within open source AMD and Intel driver stack on Linux.


Since many Linux drivers are unable to use these textures, I'm afraid we won't be using that.

However, please note that between 0.7 and 0.7.1 I spent a lot of time converting the big PNG files into JPEG, saving up to 15 MB. More conversion could be done, but converting textures is very painful because you need to modify the blender files too to use the new JPEG texture instead of the old PNG

At this time, wile Kinsu is correct to say that "50% of the game size are taken by tracks and textures, around 15% by the music and 10% by the karts", this is only valid for unzipped data; when you zip the data, B3D models are heavily reduced and then music becomes the biggest offender; second come textures; and last are the models themselves
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 09 Apr 2011, 18:55

Exact, I did not think about that. For music I think there is not much to do, as the files already have the minimum bitrate of 128Kbps for an acceptable quality...

This is a pity for DXT :(
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 09 Apr 2011, 19:15

I'm not sure we lose much by not using DXT, after all JPEG achieves very good compression ratios, and we have within SuperTuxKart for using a separate alpha mask, so even images with alpha may be converted to jpeg

Oh and Kinsu, you were looking for improvements to karts... well someone pointed out that emule is quite high on polygons (2000 polygons, while our average is around 1300 polygons), so another possibility would be to reduce the polygon count a bit ;)
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 09 Apr 2011, 20:24

Well, I watched carefully the number of poly while modeling it, and as the karts stats state (haha) that the proposed low is 1700 and the proposed hi is 3000, I thought 2000 was OK... But it's true I could remove at least 1 or 2 hundred polys : when I modeled it I didn't know textures would hide so well angles, so I detailed a lot where I could have used textures instead to get the same final effect, or where it was simply useless.

In the character selection screen, STK prints 4Ktris when I select Emule, which is above the majority of karts (rather 1, 2 or 3Ktris). There are also Mozilla (7K), Gooey (5K), Konqi (6K). So I will optimize Emule, and then try to see what I can do for Gooey first, then Mozilla for a complete refresh, and maybe Konqi if I can, so they look good with a few polys :cool: ! My planning is full for a few weeks I think :) (I guess I'll have to wait a little before jumping in the code ^^)
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 09 Apr 2011, 20:27

Ok sure, I agree we have many karts to optimise :) emule isn't that bad ;)

Also eventually it would be nice to have two versions of each kart, one for close-ups and a lower resolution one for when the kart is far
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Kinsu » 09 Apr 2011, 21:50

How many poly should be the lowest res ? When every kart is approximately the same poly count, maybe just 1 or 2 subdivide modifier(s) would make it for the LOD (poly count is divided by the number of subdivides that are applied -- EDIT : not true, this is rather divided by 2 for each subdivide modifier --, so it would be pretty efficient) ! And if we are (very very) lucky, Irrlicht could do this itself...

Here is a little sketch for Gooey :
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 09 Apr 2011, 23:22

Nice little concept :)

For the lowest level of detail, I would envision something like 500 to 900 polygons
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Funto » 09 Apr 2011, 23:23

About the DXT thing: the advantages are:
- much less memory used by the GPU -> means we can add more textures or use more detailed textures
- less memory in the zip file for the textures which were PNG before
This feature has been used in most, if not all, commercial games for a long time.

As for the problem with open source drivers, I'm wondering: does STK work correctly with open source drivers anyway, in its current state?
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby Auria » 10 Apr 2011, 00:55

Funto {l Wrote}:About the DXT thing: the advantages are:
- much less memory used by the GPU -> means we can add more textures or use more detailed textures
- less memory in the zip file for the textures which were PNG before
This feature has been used in most, if not all, commercial games for a long time.

As for the problem with open source drivers, I'm wondering: does STK work correctly with open source drivers anyway, in its current state?


I believe STK does run well enough to be usable with Gallium
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Re: [Poll] Existing Karts improvements

Postby hiker » 10 Apr 2011, 09:31

Kinsu {l Wrote}:Well, I think we can say that the more karts STK features, the better it is ^^

I wouldn't totally agree with that: the quality of the karts (visual, as well as in game, i.e. behaviour of the kart while driving) are more important than getting more karts ;)

Note that with 0.7.2 (hopefully ;) ) we will have an addon manager. So ideally we could ship a base package of STK with just X karts and Y tracks, and everything else will be available in the game. Addons will be categorised in 'official' ones and 'fan projects (or so), also artists and people looking for the bleeding edge can enable to get 'early tests' of karts under development.

Note that I haven't specified what X and Y is going to be ;) Obviously if we ship only four karts, it will be boring. Also a lot of the additional framework (mostly challenges and GPs) is much more difficult to handle if we can't assume that a certain track is available. Perhaps we will have one 'model' package containing all official karts, challenges, and tracks; or will offer 'GP' bundles (a set of about 4 tracks and one GP for them) - but as you can see, this is not trivial :) For now I focus on getting the addon manager ready, and expect that 0.7.2 will contain the usual number of tracks and karts. By 1.0 it might change ;)

But the number of tracks ought to be proportionnal, to me, and it seems there are more people interested in making karts than in making tracks for the moment...

Yes, I am a bit surprised by that as well - then again, making a track is a lot more work. And making a good (i.e. interesting, challenging, ...) track is even a lot more difficult than a kart, since atm there isn't much you have to do to tweak a kart (with physics improvement that might change a bit: karts can be faster, easier to steer, ...).

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