Gameplay challenges (on master)

[CryHam]

Ok I've picked the text about this into new topic (since charlie hijacked a track topic).

by charlie:
Not all tracks need to be super hard.
Really, in the longer term, the game needs to have some kind of 'introduction' tracks before you progress to the much harder ones.

by Wuzzy:
charlie: You must be blind. There are currently 46 tracks rated “easy” or “very easy”. This is close to 50% of all tracks. You can sort for difficulty in the track browser, so if you want easy tracks, you’ll find them. In championship mode, there are six tutorials (well, sort of). Is that not enough for now? Why do you come up with this stuff anyways? Do you want to imply that my track is “super hard”? I think my track is somewhere between “easy” and “medium” because there are no stunts at all, there is nice weather, a non-slippery road, there are no bumps but only a few sharp turns and only two banked curves. Certainly far away from “super hard” according to my standard. Whatever, I don’t want to drift even further off topic.

by charlie:
Maybe my words were inartful. I did not mean to imply there were no easy tracks already present. I just think the presentation of the game [as of when I last played it, which was a few releases ago] doesn't quite purvey a transition from beginner driver to expert. It just kinda throws everything at you. The championship mode tutorials are a good start.

People love playing things in succession. Look at the millions of games out there where you have 50 levels to play in order, trying to get [insert rating system] on each one. Almost all of them would not get played if those levels were just presented as a 'take your pick' like SR currently is. There is just something appealing about an already-decided order, a series to progress through, something organized for you. Maybe you hate that, but it is human nature.

by Wuzzy:
charlie: I do not want to discuss this topic here, it is off topic. Feel free to open a new topic instead. I have an opinion on that topic, too, so please go on, but not here. Thanks. It seems it was all just a misunderstanding here.

[CryHam]

First of, charlie please don't hijack other threads, create a new topic like this (in general or featues subforum).

And I agree. Currently when starting game you can do whatever you want (and I really like this). I don't write much gameplay logic and especially I don't have time to test it, but:

There could be more stuff in progres.xml and it could be so that:
1. At first game start you have only few slow cars available and few easy tracks and only easy tutorials.
2. After finishing easy tutorials (or most of them) some easy champs will become available and better rally cars
3. Then after driving (eg. half of) them, difficult champs become available and the fastest cars
4. Finally after driving (half of ?) them, the extreme ones are available and the rest of cars eg. UV, OT etc

Also (this is probably the other ekhm crappy commecial games approach that all tracks are hidden and only those you drove in champ become available in single track mode. I don't like it, or at least make some easy way (in progress.xml or Gui ?) to unlock them.
As for 1., What about when there is a new release ? should this also reset all progress ? I think no. Sometimes not much changes, only few new tracks.

Lastly there should be some sort of eg. fireworks particles and various finishing screens after ending each of the section (tutorials, easy/difficult/extreme champs, and all of them). There is also already a todo issue about: Lap stats, game Achievements.

[charlie]

I'm not advocating a 'fixed' progression of tracks or hiding tracks etc. I think that goes against this game's very nature.

However at the moment it will appeal to niche players. If you want to broaden the appeal, you need to consider how to make the game 'softer' on less savvy players.

[CryHam]

Cool.
Well if you have ideas then post them.
In my vision the game's goal (for people who like it and want to play it "through") is just like the points 1,2,3,4. Also driving all tracks (and cars) at least once. So finishing all champs is kind of the progress of your game's achievements atm.

I know also that the Gui is quite bloated (especially Track and Car tabs), I like them so but also I'm open to suggestions.
If anybody has a better idea of Gui layout here are the screenshots, just move stuff around or write what you wouldd change.

[CryHam]

Champ colors are yellow for easy tutorial, dark yellow for hard tutorial, light blue for easy champ, darker blue for normal champs (for later), and darker violet are the mastery and hard champs. (I'm not going to write championship every time )

[Wuzzy]

I personally would not have a problem with the “locking tracks down” idea as long as I could cheat my way out. :P I guess it’d basicly break down to editing a bunch of text files.

I do not think that playing in succession does make much sense to me if its only purpose is to unlock new tracks.

I see you want to add some sort of challenge into the game.

I have slightly different ideas.

First, there should be the concept of a “challenge”:
A challenge is a certain track/car configuration with a given time you have to beat. Precisely a challenge is made of:

• a track
• a track direction
• a number of laps
• a goal time to finish all laps
• a car
• restrictions
  
  • Minimap allowed?
  • checkpoint arrow allowed?
  • ABS allowed?
  • TBS allowed?
  • automatic transmission allowed?
  • other car settings

“restriction” here means that a certain feature is not available during a challenge. Those restrictions only apply to a challenge. They shouldn’t apply to a track in general as this would destroy flexibility. The restrictions can be used to make a challenge more, well, challenging. You could for example disallow the minimap on a foggy map. And even the checkpoint arrow. I suggested the players to turn off the minimap and the checkpoint arrow by themselves for the track “MtFog” to make it more challenging.

Alternatively, instead of a fixed car a certain car from a given set of cars could be selected

An exampe for a beginner challenge may be:

• track: I4-Sunset
• direction: forwards
• laps: 3
• time: 4 min or less
• car: LK4
• minimap allowed
• checkpoint arrow allowed
• ABS allowed
• automatic transmission allowed

So to win this example challenge you gotta drive 3 laps on I4-Sunset in less than 4 minutes.
Please note that challenges are meant to kept seperate from the tracks. They are not meant as “achievement” or stuff like that. The player should explicitly start a challenge. Technically, challenges are just races against the clock. The whole challenge system could peacefully co-exist with access to every single track in the game from the beginning, like it does now. I don’t understand the whole “unlocking” idea—what’s the point of it? You can create challenges without that “unlocking” thing.

The current championships are, to be honest, not good in a gameplay sense. You can choose any car you want and even change it while in the championship. There is always just one lap and it’s always the forwards direction. Especially the short tracks come too short in the championship because they are also just one lap long. You finished them before you really started to drive. This can be very easily fixed by increasing the number of laps. Not including reversed tracks is also a big waste, because these are very well drivable, too. And they “feel” often very different to drive. They just look the same. Then the timing/scoring system seems to be completely broken. I understand that I somehow get a score which is around 100 and that I need 80 to advance. 100 is possible if I am not a fool but I think it is very easy to get more than 80. This not true for the short tracks but it is very often true for long tracks. You could fall ten times into the deepest abyss and ram everything like a n00b and you still get over 80 points.

An alternative to the current championship model would be to make race series. I do not know how to call them otherwise (does not matter for now). In order to win you have to play some challenges in a sequence and if you have finished, all times get added up and if the sum is below a certain total goal time, you win. In this case you can have any time for the individual challenges (goal time of the indiviual challenges is ignored here); only the sum of the times is important.
Example: You have a series containing the challenges A, B and C. The series’ goal time is 10 min. You could win if you take 3 min for each challenge. Or you could win if you take 6:59 min for A but only 2 min for B and 1 min for C. Even if A had an individual goal time of 3 min, you’d still win the series because only the sum counts in a series. But if you drove challenge A on its own than you need to beat 3 min, no matter what.

Lastly, maybe there could be a bronze-silver-gold system for the challenges and series: There is a long goal time for bronze, a medium goal time for silver and a short and difficult goal time for gold.

There is still a big question in the room: How does one determine good goal times, that is, one that is easy, one that is medium hard, one that is hard.
I have one idea to solve this. Let an experienced driver play the challenge as good as he/she can. That player is not be neccessarily the the track builder. Let’s the time the player takes call the “reference time”. Add 2% to the reference time, you have the gold time. Add 10% to the reference time, you have silver. Add 30% to the reference time, you have the bronze time. There should be some minimum requirements to a reference time: The driver should not have crashed or collided with something. There must be a ghost of this reference time—this almost certainly slows down the car and it is proof that the reference time could be done better.

PS: The GUI as it is now is almost okay to me. The only thing which bothers me that it is probably hard to translate it without some sick abbreviations because there is few space and it barely even suffices for English. If possible, leave more room for strings in general, think of the other languages.

[CryHam]

Very good idea with the Challenges. I shall implement it soon.
Thanks for details, the challenge series is also cool thing.

Exactly, there is a problem with track time and score.
Well it works now, but 80 is not a challenge (and 60 completely not), unless you picked a slow car or crash every second tree on track.

Now it is implemented so that, I have finishing times for each track (I drive it with ES or S1, and add about 5 sec, so that i get 120-130 score for my best drive) (they are in config/championships.xml at end).

So the 2 problems are:
1. score depends on track's length (e.g. if you drive 10 sec. later on short track the score difference is very high, while driving 10 sec later on long tracks doesn't matter).
2. score depends on car (i.e. if you pick slower car your time will be bigger and thus you won't score much) not sure but this is quite okay I think, you just need to pick better cars for some championships (and sometimes just use normal sim)


So I think I will just switch to simple time difference (not like now divide: your_time / best_time and get score (this makes 1. problem)) just substract the difference: your_time - best_time.
But this won't work for other cars (problem 2.) so I'll add a factor for each car to multiply your_time (I guess now). Maybe even compute it based on our car stats (eg. 0-100 kmh time or quarter mile time).

This should (I hope so) allow driving any car on any track and scoring the same (regardless of track's length (1.) and car engine power/mass (2.))
It will be up to challenge setting to allow certain cars e.g. rally cars (ES,S1,S8,FN) etc. Maybe I should even create car groups (or add more car types ?).

[Wuzzy]

Maybe I should even create car groups (or add more car types ?).

I would prefer car groups, altough I would call them “classes” . I am not so much interested in new cars. I wonder what the others think.

[CryHam]

Ok. I reworked the scoring. Is on master.

Now, you have race position. If you have 1 this means you drove awesome.
Probably shouldn't have position more than 10, but will show until 30.
We also have points (is the new version of score). Score was about 80-120.

Points are from 0.0 to 10.0 and more. Right now 5.0 is required in normal sim championships/tutorials, 2.0 in easy.
You will have more than 10.0 if you drove 1st and have better time than track's time.
And points are 0.0 for position 20 and above (means you drove really badly).
Simply put, this is so.

Every car has now a factor for time, you can see track time will change on times bar, if you pick different cars.
This way you can drive any car in champ/tutorial, even OT or M3 and you can finish 1st with them.
Testing is most welcomed.
I can't just drive all cars on all tracks in both simulation modes

Car factors are in config/cars.xml (for both sim modes). Track times are in config/times.xml.
There may still be some values that aren't very good.
The code computing race position and points is on top of Championships.cpp.

Ah. And also Gui looks better now (hope so).

[CryHam]

So the Challenges are implemented now. I've made already 40.

Some are already fun (and challenging). All not yet thoroughly tested.
They are mostly short, 4 to 7 minutes, and usually need to be driven without mistakes to win.
There is also reverse checkbox to make it more challenging (reverses all tracks).
Still to do is bronze,silver,gold logic (now it is always gold if you pass).

If you want to make a challenge see this, has help text for syntax
https://raw.github.com/stuntrally/stunt ... lenges.xml
Have fun

[dimproject]

I made challenge!
Name - Fast cars
Description text - Fast cars and tracks.
Car type - Asphalt
Tracks - mosport, weekend, virginia

I thinking this high speed challenge.

[CryHam]

Right. I already forgot about asphalt, let's have one challenge with asphalt then.