Various enhancing ideas

[wolterh]

Hi, I will post some ideas that occurred to me that could enhance the game.

* Shadow plane - let the engine give karts a shadow according to a plane with the shadow texture present in the model file. Currently, modelers have to guess how and where to put the shadow, edit and test time and time again until it matches the kart. It would be even better if the engine could render the shadow of the whole 3D object according to a sun in the map. However, users should be able to select either method to save performance if needed.
* Various material rendering options:
- Luminescence - it would be great if one could set a material to skip being shadowed by the engine, to create light effects and other eye-candy.
- Reflection - materials should be able to have a reflective index (perhaps [0.0,1.0]) so they can look more like metal and reflect the outer world. This would make karts look better without the need of awesome textures.
* Make puffy's window transparent blue (maybe with some bubbles), so it actually seems like he is in a fish tank.
* Make nitro look more subtle, and make it luminescent so it looks more like fire. Currently it just looks like a long chain of blue smoke :S
* Emit smoke from the kart's exhausts all the time. This could be a nice effect and make exhausts look more like exhausts. Should be an option as well, as particle emitters can get resource needy. [1]
* Make a kart viewer - it would be nice if there was a tool to view karts and their animations instead of having to race and win/lose in order to see them and test them.

[1] I had suggested as well to read nitro/smoke emitter objects in the model so that they could come out from the proper parts of the kart in-game, but Auria notified me that this was already being thought of. I also suggested - getting the same answer - tiremarks to be emitted from the lowest point of each of the wheel objects, and to respect their dimensions.

[STKRudy85]

* Make puffy's window transparent blue (maybe with some bubbles), so it actually seems like he is in a fish tank.

It's done

[Auria]

Hi,

* Shadow plane - let the engine give karts a shadow according to a plane with the shadow texture present in the model file. Currently, modelers have to guess how and where to put the shadow, edit and test time and time again until it matches the kart. It would be even better if the engine could render the shadow of the whole 3D object according to a sun in the map. However, users should be able to select either method to save performance if needed.

Discussed in another thread

* Various material rendering options:
- Luminescence - it would be great if one could set a material to skip being shadowed by the engine, to create light effects and other eye-candy.
- Reflection - materials should be able to have a reflective index (perhaps [0.0,1.0]) so they can look more like metal and reflect the outer world. This would make karts look better without the need of awesome textures.

"Skipping shadowing" is already implemented, it's a material property (see materials.xml file, and for tracks we now have the "STK Browser" blender GUI to set material properties)
About creating light effects and other eye-candy, can you be more specific? We do have plans for more eye-candy, though of course we will need specifics when we code

* Make nitro look more subtle, and make it luminescent so it looks more like fire. Currently it just looks like a long chain of blue smoke :S

Agreed, this is on my todo list for later versions. I'm not sure how to make good-looking fire however Maybe animated particles would help, but I'm not much of a graphist so I'm not the one that can make them

* Emit smoke from the kart's exhausts all the time. This could be a nice effect and make exhausts look more like exhausts. Should be an option as well, as particle emitters can get resource needy. [1]

Maybe, not sure, might get annoying?

* Make a kart viewer - it would be nice if there was a tool to view karts and their animations instead of having to race and win/lose in order to see them and test them.

Agreed, this would be useful; though ideally the game would show exactly the same thing as in blender So maybe a simple blender script to properly loop would be sufficient

[wolterh]

Yes I included some of the other thread's suggestions for the sake of this thread's integrity .

The light effects - I think - need merely the shadow skipping property, so then I think we're done. So is the shadow skipping option a game logic property on blender or does one need to use the STK browser script?

Its nice to hear that the nitro is being worked on, on a near future. I was looking at some videos yesterday and I do think that the solution is, if not particle emission/effects, animated layers of glow with alpha filtering, in a conic form (as nitro fire is very strong and thus maintains a mildly consistent shape). I'll try to work out a concept in blender to show the idea to you. Realistic fire does look like somebody pretty hard to reproduce, even harder with low performance computers in mind.

I think a smoke very low in opacity would look great, so that when you are driving, the smoke particles get left behind, but when the kart is stationary, the smoke kind of accumulates vertically and you can see it. This suggestion occurred to me because I think in the Crash game they have it. The smoke, however, would dissipate quickly, as water vapor. Should be optional as well.

[hiker]

Hi,

...

* Emit smoke from the kart's exhausts all the time. This could be a nice effect and make exhausts look more like exhausts. Should be an option as well, as particle emitters can get resource needy. [1]

Maybe, not sure, might get annoying?

IIrc we tried that (or even had that) in a much older release, and it wasn't at all appealing, so we removed it. By now we have more options to tweak, so perhaps it could be made to work again.

* Make a kart viewer - it would be nice if there was a tool to view karts and their animations instead of having to race and win/lose in order to see them and test them.

Agreed, this would be useful; though ideally the game would show exactly the same thing as in blender So maybe a simple blender script to properly loop would be sufficient

You can set the start and end frame in the timeline (for the repeat part), set the begin animation to the current frame, and then hit play - and it will play the end/lose animation, and repeat the repeated section of it. Admittedly, getting this done using a button in the kart exporter gui might be a bit more handy.

Cheers,
Joerg

[wolterh]

I just heard about a game called Speed Dreams, which is a fork of the TORCS game, isn't STK a fork of it as well? They have implemented some gorgeous fire/nitro, reflective materials and I think dynamic shadows as well, maybe looking at their code would help improve STK a lot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd4Kmu--PYA

[Arthur]

No, SuperTuxKart is a fork/continuation of TuxKart, which AFAIK doesn't share any code with TORCS. That being said, STK doesn't have much TuxKart code still in, though there are probably some bits and bobs here and there.

[wolterh]

New enhancement suggestion:
* Allow vertex appearance properties to be set in blender. For example, if you have some painted vertex, and you want them to skip shadowing effects, you should be able to assign them to some vertex group, or something similar, for this to be accomplished. Currently this is only possible with textures and modifications to the materials.xml file.

[Auria]

New enhancement suggestion:
* Allow vertex appearance properties to be set in blender. For example, if you have some painted vertex, and you want them to skip shadowing effects, you should be able to assign them to some vertex group, or something similar, for this to be accomplished. Currently this is only possible with textures and modifications to the materials.xml file.

This is a little difficult now; but you could create a feature request (TODO) ticket asking for the ability to set material properties for whole objects, this I think we could do

[acme_pjz]

I think there is a bug about smoking effects in current SVN (more clearly, it's SVN a week ago): in Hacienda track, after get a big nitro somewhere not far from the start point you'll jump down to the road. But when the kart is above the sand ground the smoke occurs ... note that now the kart is still falling, there shouldn't be any smokes

[Arthur]

acme_pjz: You need to update, this was fixed in r7382.