STK tounament LAN party animation

[Sylvain-AGU3L]

Hello,

I'm member of a local LUG in Annecy France

https://agu3l.org/

We plan to organize local animation of STK LAN games and tournament.

On the normal kart courses mode. I didn't play yet with real players. I did setup a kit with 8 laptop and fixed LAN IPs and a wired switch.

It's raw snap installed STK on Xubuntu. I'm in contact with some local social center to play some event with the public.

Basically what I did, was just to collect some used laptop from local enterprise who agreed to gave us some used material.
On STK side, I'm still discovering the game, seems really fun. I start a local game server on one of the 8 PC and other are joining.

Players will be encouraged to change his/her name at the game start. I found that I've to add a new player with a new name in some menu then start playing with the new player. It seems player's mascot associated with the name are random at this point.

I also sized one of the laptop's display to be linked to a video projector so setting one seat as a watcher to expose the game to watching public on public event or for waiting players.

I would be happy to share experience and feed back I collected by organizing such event and describe a setup kit if you want to reproduce.
The idea of such event is to play short game (4min) and have multiple seat for player in LAN, probably young players. Then speak about free-software and related mission we could have to promote free-software.

If you are interested to contribute, or have already done such event, or would like to suggest anything, or have more question, please contact me. I would be happy to share with you.

Regards,
Sylvain

[Alayan]

Hello,
Players will be encouraged to change his/her name at the game start. I found that I've to add a new player with a new name in some menu then start playing with the new player. It seems player's mascot associated with the name are random at this point.

The mascot associated with the player in the settings is as good as random, but it doesn't show up anywhere else in the game so it doesn't really matter. Players can also pick a custom kart color in the profile editor.

I also sized one of the laptop's display to be linked to a video projector so setting one seat as a watcher to expose the game to watching public on public event or for waiting players.

From what you're saying, it seems to me (although that's not very clear) that you will be sharing the PoV of one of the players ? Using a projector to show the race to a public, it might be better to set up a separate STK instance to join the LAN server as a spectator. Spectating isn't very developed in STK, but you can at least switch between the PoV of different players (and also switch camera settings) with some hotkeys, which is useful to show the players that are in a close battle rather than someone lagging behind or far ahead.

The idea of such event is to play short game (4min) and have multiple seat for player in LAN, probably young players. Then speak about free-software and related mission we could have to promote free-software.

It seems you would have people who are mostly new to the game play against each other. While this can be fun, I would warn you it's likely there will be significant differences in skill between the players and that this will show up during the races. The powerups offer catch up mechanisms, but speed boosts often just mean crashing more and not gaining time with players lacking experience of racing games. Generally the game is at its most fun when the players are closely matched.

I would recommend setting the Game difficulty to Intermediate (Novice is a serious option to consider strongly too, although it might feel slow, especially for spectators ; in any case avoid Expert and SuperTux), and removing some standard tracks from the game because they are too difficult for new players : The Old Mine, STK Enterprise, XR591, Minigolf are all unsuitable for first-time players. First-time players may have some trouble on any track, but at least they won't crash on every curve.

I would also advise to test graphics setting and performance playing on a LAN server. You might need to remove Black Forest and Cocoa Temple from the track selection if the laptops are too weak to handle 8 players in a LAN on these tracks. It's better to have a more limited selection than to have players endure unstable and low framerates that suck the fun out of the game.

Depending on how much time will be spent playing the games (if I understand correctly you will switch players between games and have a few games total ?), you might even narrow the track selection further.

[Sylvain-AGU3L]

Hello,

Thanks Alayan for this detailed reply.

You're right. For the projection part I will use what you describe as « separate STK instance to join the LAN server as a spectator ». I've setup 8x laptop and connected them to a wired switch with manual dedicated fixed IP preassigned. So this should be a portable Game LAN Kit that I could reuse to organize event around the Game topic.

I found, that 8 seems the maximum seat for a race game type. I only have 8 laptop actually though. So it quite matches too.

We also ran the LAN game on 8 connected laptop, was quite good. But I didn't really tested with 8 real players yet. The refurbished laptop I used was given to our LUG by a local company. The hardware is Thoshiba protege z20t https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/lapto ... rtege-z20t which still gave quite good performance on STK out of of the box.

Our feeling was that the game was quite slow from player perspective and push to SuperTux difficulty level to have decent speed feeling. My mileage will vary, I will have more real feedback after organizing a real event. I don't know the track yet by their name.

We also collected some gamepad from console on different branding. They behave differently. The buttons get assigned somewhat randomly. I didn't figured yet how it works, nor if I could save buttons layout and start the game with that specific layout. Or I could also label the pad with a number and assign it to a pre-configured laptop with the same number in my game kit.

Kart driving didn't seem to be difficult to drive on the track I tested. I mostly only run the first few track in the "create server" lobby on the first page.

Can I exclude track from been displayed? I didn't hack the config yet. Nor I try some dedicated server setting. The local "Create Server" menu was quite enough.

Can I have player ranking system?

To be continued.
Regards,
Sylvain.

[Alayan]

I found, that 8 seems the maximum seat for a race game type. I only have 8 laptop actually though. So it quite matches too.

More is possible using a dedicated server, the 8 limit only exists in the in-game server creation UI (and in most cases it's a good limit).

We also ran the LAN game on 8 connected laptop, was quite good. But I didn't really tested with 8 real players yet.

The refurbished laptop I used was given to our LUG by a local company. The hardware is Thoshiba protege z20t https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/lapto ... rtege-z20t which still gave quite good performance on STK out of of the box.

The game performance is quite track-dependent. The two most demanding tracks are Cocoa Temple (Temple Cacao) and Black Forest (Forêt-Noire), and you really need to test them before letting them be played. Based on the laptop's specs, I'd expect it to really struggle to deliver smooth gameplay on those tracks in a 8-players LAN even at low settings.

Our feeling was that the game was quite slow from player perspective and push to SuperTux difficulty level to have decent speed feeling. My mileage will vary, I will have more real feedback after organizing a real event.

If you have not played old 0.6 or 0.7 versions, you don't know what slow means. On a more serious note, if you're concerned about the kart feeling slow, then yes avoid Novice. But I still really recommend Intermediate for kids discovering the game. Players not used to racing games will crash often enough in Intermediate.

I also suppose that you played without any use of drifting, which considerably affects the feel of the game. New players usually ignore it (and still crash), but it's ubiquitous at a higher level.

If at all possible, have some sort of pre-event test to gauge player strength and put players of similar strength against each other during the event. You could also organize something on the fly to use the results of a first few races to determine who will play against whom in subsequent races. It's not very complicated in principle, but it brings its own challenges (including communicating how it works to the players).

You used the word "tournament" once in your first post, but it's unclear what you mean by that. The best format strongly depends on how many players you expect to participate and how many games in total you want them to play. It's important to limit lopsided matchups between stronger and weaker drivers as much as possible to ensure the participants and spectators have fun.

We also collected some gamepad from console on different branding. They behave differently. The buttons get assigned somewhat randomly. I didn't figured yet how it works, nor if I could save buttons layout and start the game with that specific layout. Or I could also label the pad with a number and assign it to a pre-configured laptop with the same number in my game kit.

The input ("Commandes") options should allow to set the gamepads as you wish. After configuration is done and saved, the game will keep a peripheral profile and it should work without issue after a game or computer restart.

You could also consider letting players use the keyboard to play if they feel more comfortable with it. Using a keyboard is really not limiting to play STK well.

Kart driving didn't seem to be difficult to drive on the track I tested. I mostly only run the first few track in the "create server" lobby on the first page.

I assure you that if you let players play the tracks I recommended to exclude, you will get players crashing on the walls or falling out of the track a lot.

Can I exclude track from been displayed? I didn't hack the config yet. Nor I try some dedicated server setting. The local "Create Server" menu was quite enough.

Using the server config file and starting a STK server instance offers more options, which can be useful, such as forcing tracks to be played with the default lap number.

The simplest way to exclude a track is to remove/rename the tracks you want to exclude from one of the instances (preferably the one with the server). It then won't show up in the track voting screen. The game doesn't currently have a way to set in server-config tracks to be played/excluded.

Can I have player ranking system?

The only currently supported way to get an in-game ranking would be to use a GP. You can set a server to be in GP-mode and how many races should be played in the GP. However you can't switch players while the GP is going on, so you'd likely want some form of selection before putting players in a group that will play a full-Grand Prix together.

Otherwise, you need some external spreadsheet to input results into and to get rankings from.