Hello
"In real life you will never see a big Matryoshkas like that."
Okay, I was wrong, no problem with that. It just seems unusual.
Giant matryoshkas in parks are common in countries of the former USSR.n
That's okay, I admit I'm not a specialist in Russian culture and I made no research about this topic.
Everything we (me and my brother) do is based on references. Until this moment, I have more than 600 pictures of reference for this track.
Very good. I like to hear that. Usually beginners don't understand the importance of references. That's a very good thing Thumb up
. You are in the good direction
Well, this is a game (maybe most players are kids or teenagers, so we must to remember them when we create a track or just when we post a comment) and, like Mario kart, some environments and situations are "Childish", unreal and, sometimes, absurd, but, there's nothing wrong. It's just for fun.. This is not the real world. In real life we never see a race with elephants, chinchillas, penguins and monkeys driving karts on nuclear plants or above the Earth, in the space. STK is a fantastic world. A world of fantasy, of course.
I agree with you at 1000%. I just wanted to avoid the classical cliché of someone who want to make a track and find random assets online and try to put them together without any logic. (And you will agree with me unfortunately we see this a looooooot).
Remembering the title of the post, the track is not called Space Port. The provisory name was "Soviet Town", but, since you advise me to avoid the explicit reference to the former USSR, I will find another good name. I will not name it "Rocket Center" because, for most, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear "Rocket Center" are the NASA Space Flight Centers. I can see US citizens downloading the track thinking that they would find Protons, Space Shuttles and a lot of symbols of USA in the environment, so they start the game and see a track in the former Soviet Union...
The name can be Cosmodrome ^^. I won't argue with that it's your choice you do whatever you want
.
It's obvious I know, if not I would make a track on the "Valley of Dinossaurs" or "Allan quatermain and the lost city of gold" or any other old adventure movie like Indiana Jones. But, if the track was in a soccer arena a match should be happen at the same time? Well, the "Classic volcano" is not erupting while the karts are there (this would be terrible, by the way). "Bovine Barnyard" is a farm, and a farm is a place where people cultivate plants and have animals (cattle, poultry, suines, etc.) as livestock but we don't see a farmer on his tractor, cows being milked or cattle becoming meat, of course, but, everybody understand the scenary and the context. They don't need to see the things happening to realize what the site is about.
Well I agree the old classic volcano isn't erupting and you can be sure if it was made by me, it will be erupting during races ^^. I agree with you on bovine barnyard and in its next gen counterpart (harvest) there is a combine harvesting corn in a field.
That's part of our philosophy: Making and epic adventure in stk universe. In every track made by me at least next gen ones there is always one or two big cool things to see. For instance in cocoa temple there is this waterfall and the pyramid.
If you don't want to follow this philosophy it's your right. However in the guidelines it's specified:
Playing at Supertuxkart should be an epic journey in its fictional universe. Avoid using too much city/industry elements, instead explore lots of different, exotic and even unexpected locations in stk universe
This track is placed in a remote town where there is a space rocket center. The focus is the town. The rocket center is an important plant to enrich the visual of the track.
It's your choice and I respect it. However I think it's a bit sad. However you can still do in the background rockets taking off,
like thatThis track is placed in a remote town where there is a space rocket center. The focus is the town. The rocket center is an important plant to enrich the visual of the track.
There is a lot of space centers in USA too and, most time, people visit the museums to see static spacecrafts because launch is a rare event. In the real life, rockets are launched every 3, 4 or 6 weeks, not every 15 seconds. In 2014, fourteen launches are scheduled in Baikonur (Cosmodrome) and just eight in Kourou.
I know perfectly that in real life there isn't rocket taking off every ~15 seconds from a launch pad. But we are in a video game, everything is allowed. You can imagine a big rocket near the player who take off only one time, and in the distant background rockets regularly glowing in the sky.
Now, imagine, the professionals who works in Nintendo playing my track with a rocket (or watching the video on Youtube) lift off at every 20 seconds. I don't know, but, I think that they would mock and laugh.
OH yes probably :P because in their track Sunshine airport
there is plane taking off every ~5 seconds from the nearby runways.
And yes we know in reality there is no such thing as you said before, it's in a fantasy world.
Look, Samuncle, you seem a nice guy trying to keep the quality of the STK project and this is good, but, you seem me pretty angry about my museum even if you haven't seen it just because the museum takes off the focus from the launch pad. I will not waste the opportunity to include a lift off in a track on a rocket port because I'm planning a second version of this track at night, but, for while, I will not put the focus in the rocket pad itself because this demands a lot of work modelling complex parts that may look exactly like in the real world and, as I said, this game was made in only a few days because we have other things to do and I had already a track ("Holliday on Port") with mapping and tests in progress. So, we will not spend much time (extra time) in this track.
You see it's a fact that i have more experience than you. Now making chocolate was a challenge and it took me 6 MONTHS, 6 months of hard work crafting this new track and a lot of failures.
So I know all the difficulty of making a track especially something with the quality of chocolate. That's hard and it takes a lot of time. In my tracks I try to batch all ideas that can fit in the track so I don't have to make a new one. That's why in the track Cocoa temple, you have a pyramid, a canal, waterlocks, waterfall, etc. Sure I can do 3 tracks but it will take me a loooooot of time.
AFAIK, you never made one complete track (if I'm wrong I'm deeply sorry, but I can't remember if you did one). So you have a lack of experience, okay you are two working on this track and I was alone, but you can trust me it will be something difficult to do.
Even so, you see my thoroughness (posting a map with the plant and the symbols placed where I think they should be trying to help you all to see what I have in mind. Then, I made some fast concept arts while I was working on the pieces in 3D. I'm really interest to contribute with the STK project but it's stressful when somebody doesn't likes almost everything I post and I must wasting my time justifying my ideas instead working on the track.
Okay so my only goal is to help people if you don't want my help no problem, we won't loose our time. I don't spend 1h to write a detailed answer + making a concept art just to bash someone. My time is precious.
I saw your concepts and they are pretty fine, maybe a bit dull and sad but otherwise I perfectly understood what was your plans. I'm just dubious about items because items is something done generally at the end to balance the track.
The only thing I strongly disagree is the museum.
Be cool Samuncle, we will not make STK fall down in quality. On the contrary: we (me and my brother) are trying to take this track to the higher quality possible in a professional level
That's perfect it's my goal too
Unfortunatelly, STK has a lot of limitations: time lap, file size, time to upload, image quality limited to 1024x1024, etc.,
The time lap limitation is to HELP you. It prevents people of doing huge tracks that look empty at the end. Trust me a huge track is painful to finish and to fill it with objects. It's also for players and it might causes performances issues with the engine.
The image quality is pretty high when you think about it. Many professional games don't use by default 1k. Going to 2k would be IMHO useless and will skyrocket our memory usage. 1024 is the perfect size you can do a looooooot with that. Yes it's a limitation but try to reach it before asking for more ^^.
I was able to make
this with only 1k textures + some other at 512, and the result is pretty descent.
I said, my brother works on modelling and I'm an artist (even if I have another activity) and we do professional works. He doesn't make rockets like cartoon rockets.The Soyuz rocket seeing in this track looks exactly like the real Soyuz rocket (the model in 1967) with the limits of this game, of course
STK isn't a realistic game, it has it's own universe. We prefer references and mashup but not an
exact copy. You can take parts from several different real rockets. I did exactly that with
my plane, it's similar to an MD-11 but it has winglets + other details inspired by other planes.
Again it's not Call of duty it's STK, you can take inspiration from the reality but at the end it should be something original. You might love space and Soyuz rockets, that's fine but your goal isn't to make a copy of the real world.
Everything is perfectly aligned with precision. We don't make pieces and aligment based on eye view. However, we can't do everything that we would like to do due to the limitations of a game that's downloaded instead sold in packages with gigabytes like Mario kart.
It's nice however you loose the point I think. You should see a stk track as an attraction in an amusement park not as a depiction of the reality. And it doesn't mean putting a cartoon rocket however rockets can have interesting stuff. If you put a launch pad like that
http://www.blogcdn.com/slideshows/image ... t-bp-1.jpg even if it's not like the reality it will be perfectly fine.
As a player and fan, I don't like to see how some fans of Mario kart mocking and ridiculing the quality of STK (even in the official videos of Supertuxkart Project), calling it a "Cheap Mario kart clone" or making statements about supposed "bad graphics" of the game. If the level of criticism there (on Youtube) was in the same level as it is here, in the official forum, those guys would shut the up forever. Unfortunately, nobody gave them a deserved response, since they are doing bad propaganda about STK.
We are spending countless hours trying to improve the quality of stk, not just the visual. I think with the new engine we have done a pretty descent job (have you tested Cocoa temple ?).
My personal objective is to make the most beautiful game that we can do. But don't miss the point, you don't need a 100% depiction of reality to make a great game. And speaking of quality and epicness I think a launchpad with rocket taking off is far more attractive than a museum
. But that's my personal opinion.
"Okay so no political stuff except you are using a real life organization, the KGB."
No. I said "The country is very bureaucratic and haS a KGB too". Note: "a" KGB. In other words, a rigorous organization for State security like the KGB, not the same organization neither the same name but a fictional organization inspired in the real KGB.
Okay, we just try to avoid putting a big KGB logo in the game ^^.
My original idea was to mix good humored contexts placed in scenarios that looks like the real world. I think that most tracks are thus.
Yep that's the goal. But don't try to make a perfect representation of the reality ^^.
This is interesting to see, because, according to the "official guidelines for Supertuxkart", It's not a too cartoon game. So, we (the new contributors) don't know when and where we may represent the real world or the cartoon style.
Yes I made a mistake sorry. But stk isn't cartoon but it's not a perfect 100% accurate depiction of reality
Another question: the official rules say "Avoid making the track too long (over 1m30 is definitely too long - between approximately 1m00 and 1m30 is considered appropriate for one loop without using booster and or items (like nitro))." This mean that, if my track had a time lap of 1m20, it would match perfectly the rules. Even so, I believe that the time lap will be around 1 minute. I will test it this week.
Yes if it's 1min20 it's perfectly okay