"The Island" converted to 0.7 format

[sj04736]

I have converted "The Island" track (islandtrack) completely. I'd like to think I did a pretty good job this time.

All of the track files are in the attached zip. In all cases where there is both a png and a jpg in the archive, the track model uses only the jpg. The extra png files are lossless versions of the jpg files.

Lap counting seems to work. There are 4 check lines. The only line that might have an issue is the lap line, because it is only the width of the drivelines, so if you cross the finish from the beach below the finish line, it may not be counted properly. The drivelines at this particular point were widened as a precaution (though it leaves an ugly bulge on the minimap).

In the old .loc file for this track, kart starting locations were specified. The new version does not have this, and hopefully it does not need it, although the track has not been tested with large amounts of karts.

If there are any concerns, or I forgot to do something, tell me and I'll try and fix it.

(P.S. - I used the same sky texture as 0.6 uses, but I had to alter it slightly to give the sky a similar look to 0.6)
(P.P.S - Water nodes don't reset karts properly, it seems. Also, this one moves a bit too much and could give certain people motion sickness )

[chaorace]

Thanks I appreciate track conversions allot because there aren't enough track that are compatible with .7 as of now!

[Auria]

Hi,

thanks a lot for the great work
I just committed the track to SVN. Very appreciated

[chaorace]

Ok I really appreciate the work you've done for this track but I ran into a few minor annoyances:

-The brick walls make navigating the course difficult for wall huggers (like me)
-The corner at the top of the hill is hard to navigate and it is especially easy to fall to the bottom without any barriers
-the crook right before the finish line makes it easy to miss the starting line and not have your lap counted

I really appreciate the track and Hope you will continue to make STK a better game.

I made a gallery of areas in particular that may need some tweaking:

Places where the wall can stop wall huggers in their tracks:

http://img814.imageshack.us/img814/1192/wallcrash3.png


http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/921/wallcrash2.png


http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/5518/wallcrash1.png

Spot where it's easy to fall off the hill:

http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/1434/fallingoffhill.png

Spot where it's easy to miss the startline:

http://img686.imageshack.us/img686/5672/missingthestartline.png

[sj04736]

I agree, the fact that it is very easy to miss the start line is a big issue. Unfortunately, I can't really think of what to put there...
Here's some ideas that came to mind:
* rocks (it would be difficult to make them look like they're not an intentional path blocker)
* a fence (really blatant path blocker)
* a cliff
* a beached pirate ship (even a canoe lying on the sand would suffice)

I'll keep an eye out for gpl-compatible models that could fill that big empty space.

[chaorace]

Actuaaaallllly... I figured just straightening out the track would be great , but if it is not within your power it sounds wonderful to put a beached pirate ship there instead. In fact, I'll personally bring up a a concept drawing.

Edit how's this?
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l0hrgbBCTs1qapkbho3_500.jpg

[hiker]

Hi,

thanks a lot for your contribution!!

I agree, the fact that it is very easy to miss the start line is a big issue.

Yes, this is a known issue, unfortunately one I don't have a good solution for atm. As background: the quads are used to determine how far along a track a kart has driven, and the check line is used to determine when a new lap starts. So if the lap line and the quad line are not 100% identical, it can happen that a kart crosses a quad line but not the check line, meaning that its distance along track will be close to zero, but no new lap is counted --> kart will change its position for a frame or two, which leads to bad flickering of the icons. That's why I actually made the lap counting line identical to the quad line.

Possible solutions:

• Re-introduce a separate lap counting line. This is easy enough to do, but we will have the problem of flickering back. This could perhaps be solved by only updating a kart's position after X frames at a certain position. So if the kart crosses a quad line first, it will only take a frame or two before the corresponding lap counting line will be triggered. But I have to verify that this might not have any other side-effects.
• Extend the lap counting line. If we ignore floating point rounding errors, this would work - but I am not sure how to do this nicely in blender? Specifying e.g. '5 more units to left' as an attribute can of course be done, but you can't easily see/model this, so it's difficult. nAny suggestions (which don't come back to the first solution, i.e. copying the original quad line and then modifying it, which can introduce small errors again).
• As you have suggested: any kind of model to block the other paths would of course work.
• Another (imho) good solution: just move the start line to a completely different location on the track. This would be rather easy to do (well, some work on the drivelines of course).

Cheers,
Joerg

[sj04736]

I have updated/changed a few things based on feedback:
* I scaled the track to be larger (x and y only) slightly. May not have been enough to be noticeable
* I made a canoe model and stuck it on the beach by the start line

Blend file for the canoe is included. It uses materials only, no textures.

To use this track you need to copy the attached files over the ones from the my previous attachment (or over SVN)

[Auria]

I agree very much about this track having design issues; mainly it's too narrow. Unfortunately it's also one of the best-looking tracks we have so we can't easily just remove it because of that We'd gladly welcome any help at making the road larger

Joerg: I personnally favor the attribute to expand the start line of X units. It's not ideal, but it's not a big deal either, as units are easy to visualize in blender; and anyway we don't even need to ask artists to do that, we can tweak the number ourselves when we receive a new track that suffers of this problem.

sj04736: thanks, I'll take a look at the modifications. The main problem with basic scaling is that the track will look weird; stretched walls and trees, flattened rocks, etc. Ideally it would take real modelling work to make the track wider without disturbing other models

[chaorace]

It's always fun to be part of the development process, too bad I can't contribute more... I guess I'll continue to search for oddities to complain about (lol).

[Auria]

Hi,

just a quick notice to tell you that I have modified your original (unscaled) blend file, because the palm trees had the wrong texture; the corrected result is now in our media repository