Thoughts on: many-oppoents and shared highscores

[hadg]

The way my girlfriend and I play STK is mostly as single-player with 15 AI opponents, i.e., "all characters in" (this includes Geeko, the openSUSE mascotte, which I think is an add-on from the openSUSE packagers). I would encourage you all to try playing like this; the game becomes pleasantly... violent. The challenge, of course, is to beat each other's best times, usually on 4-lap races, AI Expert.

Some thoughts on this:

[1] The purple bouncers are a pain in the backside. Yes, they help to keep the pack compact, but they ruin the life of the player who is winning!

I preferred the parachutes in this sense! Perhaps the parachute effect strength should depend on ranking? I.e., first kart slows down most, second kart a bit less, etc.

In powerup.xml, we changed the rubber balls from 0/10/20/30/60/0 to 0/20/20/10/0/0, and this helps. (The karts at the back don't care about the leader -- they want cupcakes!!)

Still, in some circuits the winning tactic is to stay in 2nd position as long as possible, which is not really the idea of a racing game.

[2] Invulnerability ("seeing the stars") seems overly protective; sometimes there's nothing to fire a plunger at, because all five-six karts in front of you are seeing the stars. In stk_config.xml, we reduced explosion invulnerability-time from 6 to 3 (seconds), and this helps.

Also, I couldn't resist increasing the explosion radius a bit... it's cool to use a well-aimed bowling ball to take out six or seven opponents!! Perhaps the bowling ball could have a greater radius than the cupcake? Because it is a skilled weapon?

My suggestion on invulnerability would be: it should only protect against explosions, i.e., not against plungers or swatters.

[3] Shared high scores: oh dear, this is a problem. It seems that two users cannot use the same highscore.xml at the same time! Ouch. (All that trouble to set up an SMB share, mount it on the laptop, symlink highscore.xml to the share... we still have to take turns playing!) A tool to export and merge-import highscore files would be useful here; better yet, a file that is only locked momentarily when reading/writing (and released to other users in between). I got started scribbling together a Perl script to merge highscore.xml files, but am a bit stuck for time at the moment (balancing with actually PLAYING stk, and all that! ).

[4] Quick circuit advice, three shortcuts that I think should be made illegal (apologies if this has already been done -- the openSUSE packagers sometimes have other priorities): XR591 passing behind the electric fence; Green Valley at about 26" cut across the fields (bit of nitro to get up the slope); Lighthouse cut the final loop i.e. go straight for the start-finish line.

Thanks again to everybody for all the hard work!! STK 0.7 was a brilliant game, and it just keeps getting better!!

[bonifarz]

Yes, I agree with most points here, it is very nice that many settings for rules like item rolls etc are conveniently modified to your liking, and races with 16 or more karts can be fun, even though they tend to get quite chaotic. And yes, as the number of karts increases, the weights for parachutes and rubber balls can break the flow quite a bit.
There are indeed a couple of shortcuts, some of which have already been addressed, it seems. For example, the mentioned XR591 track had a few more serious ones in the 0.8-alpha pre-release, and the number went down from four to two shortcuts per lap.
Concerning the invulnerability after getting hit, I assume it makes sense to avoid some frustration of getting stun-locked. I think most of the time you will find some target, maybe firing backwards.

[antoine]

The way my girlfriend and I play STK is mostly as single-player with 15 AI opponents, i.e., "all characters in" (this includes Geeko, the openSUSE mascotte, which I think is an add-on from the openSUSE packagers). I would encourage you all to try playing like this; the game becomes pleasantly... violent. The challenge, of course, is to beat each other's best times, usually on 4-lap races, AI Expert.

Yeah, I love playing the game with my girlfriend. Though we play two players. Unfortunately we only have one 360 controller (which work wonderfully btw) and a logitech controller (horribly oversensitive). Regarding this post's general sentiment, do you think that as time goes on that with increased playtesting we could create slightly adjusted settings for different player sizes? Or is there a way to easily turn off certain powerups and weapons from a race? The purple bouncer/cupcakes aren't so hectic when I play the game alone as I like having 3 computer opponents.

#1
I agree it's frustrating to be on the receiving end of the purple bouncer. In the latest Sega kart racing game they have a novel way of keeping the player's packed together. Instead of blue shell/purple bouncer, there is a powerup that places obstacles in front of the leader. This is a better solution in my opinion, because the leader can retain the lead, but it requires more skill. I haven't actually played the game, so I don't know what these obstacles are, but maybe a series of bananas or gums that look something like this would be effective. The x's are obstacles, the O's are empty track that is safe to drive on.
XXXOX
XXOXX
XOXXX
OXXXX
XOXXX
XXOXX

I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement or how it would work dynamically on different courses.

#2
I agree that could feel more balanced.

Bowling Ball
I didn't even know this is how the bowling ball worked. Are you saying, the ball doesn't disappear after it hits the first opponent, that it continues forward? IMO what if a players who is hit by the ball flew forwards hitting other players who in turn hit other players, like dominoes OR actual bowling pins. That would probably really unbalance the bowling ball though.

[bonifarz]

[...] do you think that [...] we could create slightly adjusted settings for different player sizes? Or is there a way to easily turn off certain powerups and weapons from a race?

Do you refer to the number of karts in a race or specific kart characteristics? For the former, as well as for the second question, testing is straightforward.

settings for rules like item rolls etc are conveniently modified to your liking

To be more specific: In your STK-install directory, take a look at data/powerup.xml. At the bottom of the file, you will find an array of weights that define the chances for rolling a certain item type. There are 5 player groups, each with a different distribution of item weights: The leader and the very last kart have their own item sets, and the remaining players are divided in three groups of about equal size. Let us make an example.

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

  <!--      bubble  cake  bowl  zipper  plunger  switch swattr rubber para  anvil -->
  <end33  w=" 0      30    30    30      30       10      20    30    30     0"
    w-multi=" 0      30    30    30      30        0       0     0     0     0"    />

"end33" refers to the last third, except for the very last kart. The sum of all weights is 330, so the probabilities are 10/330 ~ 3% for the switch, about 6% for the swatter and 9% for the other nonzero entries, including rubber ball, parachute and triple cake ("w-multi").

So as the number of karts increases, the overall chance of getting hit by a parachute or rubber ball from any of the karts behind you raises, as there are more and more karts in the end33 group. If you want to play with a very large number of karts, it is therefore convenient to move those items with global effects (also the switch) to the groups with only one kart in them. That's more or less what I did when I posted some weights here - which was actually my very first post on these forums.

[Totoplus62]

[1] The purple bouncers are a pain in the backside.

I agree the "purple bouncers"--> basket-ball now !
There is a simple way to solve the problem (i want to create a thread about balancing weapons)
Basket ball has to be less frequent (like the blue shell in Mk). We just have to add a 30sec invisible timer: when someone has colected the basket ball, the timer is activated and nobody can collect this weapon during this period) ---> we can have one basket-ball every 30 sec maximum

But if a player collect this weapon and don't use it (for example he collects another gift), the timer is deactivated until someone else collect the basketball.

[Funto]

Or we could just scale the probability for all "global" items (bouncing ball, maybe the parachute too?) so that it becomes independent on the number of karts, by dividing the constant probability by the number of karts. This should probably be done per group of karts (e.g get a probability for end33, another one for another group, etc).
As for compatibility with probabilities that are kart-specific, we need to scale those uniformly up so that for each group, for each kart the sum of all probabilities is equal to 1.