penalty time

[Modzog]

Hello there,

First of all thanks for the great game.
I got 2 kids (boys) 3 and 6 and they love this game.
However I have few things that I would like get out of me :-D
Difficulty of challenges makes additional stuff unreachable for my kids so I was forced to play the game for them to unlock stuff.
I unlocked everything in version 0.6 and after I upgraded the game to 0.7 everything was lost.
My kids were cheering about new nicer look but moaning about all the tracks they lost.
So once more I'm forced to unlock stuff for them.
The only thing which purpose I don't understand and drives me mad is penalty time. Especially in tours.
What is pole position good for when each time I start a race I get penalty time and I loose pole position in few milliseconds?
Being penalized for nothing is only stain on this jewel :-)

Thanks
Best regards

Modzog

[hiker]

First of all thanks for the great game.
I got 2 kids (boys) 3 and 6 and they love this game.

Now you are putting a lot of pressure on my nearly-three-year old, who isn't really up to it yet

However I have few things that I would like get out of me :-D
Difficulty of challenges makes additional stuff unreachable for my kids so I was forced to play the game for them to unlock stuff.

Yes, I can see that. Long term we hope to have challenges in different levels, but this is (due to limited developers) still far away, since we are all working on more urgent/important stuff

I unlocked everything in version 0.6 and after I upgraded the game to 0.7 everything was lost.

And this will unfortunately be the case till we are getting closer to 1.0. ATM tracks, physics, and challenges are still being tuned, so we usually lock everything again with each release (though that depends a bit ... often it's because some file format changes). The dependencies between the challenges can be complicated, so if we would just accept what else was done before, things could be unlocked in the wrong order (e.g. a GP using a track is unlocked before the GP, resulting in problems running that GP). So we usually play it safe.

But: you can always cheat and manually edit the challenges.xml file, and just set all challenges to solved.
...

The only thing which purpose I don't understand and drives me mad is penalty time. Especially in tours.
What is pole position good for when each time I start a race I get penalty time and I loose pole position in few milliseconds?
Being penalized for nothing is only stain on this jewel :-)

Well, then you are starting too early - press 'accel' after the 'go' is on the screen, not (like in Mario Kart) while 'set' or so is shown. I generally like the feeling of the current quick start more than what Mario Kart has - gives more of a 'race' feeling imho.

Cheers,
Joerg

[KroArtem]

Show your kids some magic, change all values in challenges.xml file like this one:
<canyon solved="false" /> to
<canyon solved="true" />
Then relaunch stk and voila!
Speaking about penalty time, hiker is right. Btw, I was also confused first time when I received penalty time every time I start a race. May be it'd be a good idea to add information about penalty time to the 'Help' ingame?

[hiker]

Speaking about penalty time, hiker is right. Btw, I was also confused first time when I received penalty time every time I start a race. May be it'd be a good idea to add information about penalty time to the 'Help' ingame?

Well, I hope we get the tutorial ready (though I haven't seen any more activity for a while now ). What about a warning message if you press accel (say) in the 'first half' of the 'set' part of ready-set-go, i.e. an explanation message if you are really really early, but not if you only miss by a few milliseconds.

Cheers,
Joerg

[Auria]

I added a small message in SVN, so that when you get a penalty time it briefly explains why

[mjminfo]

I added a small message in SVN, so that when you get a penalty time it briefly explains why

Auria It's my opinion that Hiker message fits in better than what you provided, any chance to change it ?

press 'accel' after the 'go' is on the screen

Don't accelerate before go

concerning the supertuxkart.pot file, the name of the tracks that changed lately , you sent only 1 time the name of the tracks, but there is a lot of strings that still include/make reference to the old tracks name. Ex: the challenges, the GP's, etc ...

Have a nice day and keep up the good work.

Jorge

[Auria]

Not sure which message is better, any other opinion?

Regarding the names of tracks, the updated names will automatically follow in GPs. Challenges may need to be quickly review, but really if one says something like "race in farm" the use of the word farm wouldn't be wrong, the farm track is still a farm

[Modzog]

Hello guys,

Thanks for the reply :-)

Oh, I dint know Im penalized for pressing accel too early I though its a feature to penalize human player at the start :-)
Now ill know and only part that AI sees of my car is its back :-D

No cheating necessary for now.
I use unlocking of features as reward for my kids. If they are good during the day I unlock one new feature when they sleep :-D
I got 2 more challenges to go :-D

I got one more question. Is there any "progress bar" of network multi player development ?

We got 3 PCs at home :-)

Thanks

Best regards

Now you are putting a lot of pressure on my nearly-three-year old, who isn't really up to it yet

Don't worry every kid is different and somehow special. :-) The later he starts to play PC the longer it takes till he gets carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosed :-D
Just joking ;-)

[hiker]

Oh, I dint know Im penalized for pressing accel too early I though its a feature to penalize human player at the start :-)

We definitely need a tutorial

I got one more question. Is there any "progress bar" of network multi player development ?

Not really (well, it's at 0.01% - we had a 'LAN' only multiplayer test in 0.6.2 (iirc), but it wasn't particularly stable). And this will take quite some time (esp. with only two people doing the development). So from our milestone page besides some minor releases (0.7.1 coming), 0.7.2 will have an addon manager, 0.8 the (hopefully) final physics - then I can get started on networking.
...

Now you are putting a lot of pressure on my nearly-three-year old, who isn't really up to it yet

Don't worry every kid is different and somehow special. :-) The later he starts to play PC the longer it takes till he gets carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosed :-D
Just joking ;-)

Don't worry, I was joking, too - I hope to have networking ready by the time she can actually play it

Cheers,
Joerg

[3dwarehouse]

Yea, you can disable the penalty in stkconfig.xml file.