Do one kart and do it well

[DanRabbit]

Hey everyone,

as a short intro, My name is Daniel Foré and I'm a designer by trade and founder of elementary OS.

One thing that I immediately noticed about STK is that every character has their own unique kart. While that's kind of interesting, I think it hurts the game more than it helps.

Let's be real: 3d artists are not in high supply. The time that artists spend trying to improve the models for 16 different karts could go into improving 1 really awesome kart model. You could simply swap out the kart texture for each character to keep an element of uniqueness. This would bring consistency and quality since we're focusing efforts into improving a single kart model.

This switch would also mean separating the character model from the kart model. Why is that good? Because it means you've laid out the groundwork for swapping out different kinds of karts. So maybe instead of 1 super freaking awesome kart, we have like 4 really good karts but that each have advantages and disadvantages like acceleration, turning, offroad, etc. Now we've adding an element of personalization, strategy, and we're still doing the consistency and quality thing. But we've also now opened the door to building karts as an addon. So we've made the game more expandable as well.

Basically, we're talking about a strategic choice that should yield greater quality and depth of gameplay for less work.

Anyways, just my thoughts. Good luck to the team!

[Auria]

Hi,

this has already been discussed, and at this point there is no plan to change that. One of the reasons is that the character usually takes much longer to make than the kart anyway, and we couldn't fit our existing characters all into the same karts since they are too diverse. So switching to "one kart to rule them all" does not help us much in the end since it would require remaking all characters anyway. But yes, lack of 3D artists is a recurring problem

[hiker]

this has already been discussed, and at this point there is no plan to change that. One of the reasons is that the character usually takes much longer to make than the kart anyway, and we couldn't fit our existing characters all into the same karts since they are too diverse. So switching to "one kart to rule them all" does not help us much in the end since it would require remaking all characters anyway. But yes, lack of 3D artists is a recurring problem

We also had a GSoC project proposal last year to split characters and karts (which would be required to do what you suggested), though with 70+ applicants we just couldn't mentor it. Interestingly, afaik it's mostly artists who don't like the idea of using a fixed set of karts.

For the record: I still like the idea of being able to create an avatar like 3d character (like a Mii), and use those as drivers for a smaller set of karts

But indeed the difficulty of having only a few karts (and being able to switch karts for characters) is that the animations must match, i.e. the hands must reach the wheels etc. So the same issue as always: if we had enough artists and programmers to implement it, I would be happy to try, but at this stage: it's so far down the priority list that I can't see that ever implemented (a character editor would be a significant amount of work for code and art development).

Cheers,
Joerg