The SuperTuxKart project has caught my attention just a few days ago. I decided to give it a try, tested the challenges of 0.7.3 and was honestly surprised by the big fun factor.
It is also nice to see that many gameplay constants are read from xml files, so you can test various settings without making a mess in the sources. One thing I considered interesting to play around with are the relative weights for obtaining certain items based on the karts ranking. I had the impression that the values in the powerup.xml (0.7.3) are somewhat tentative (of course, as more power ups are certainly on the way) and that a little fine tuning has quite some impact on the game experience. Below is a snippet of said powerup.xml with yet another set of weights.
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
...
<!-- Distribution of the items depending on position of the kart:
First place, last place, and three more groups for all other karts.
The order of the items must correspond to powerup_manager.hpp.
The first line (w=...) corresponds to the weights of
getting a single item, the second line (w-multi) to
getting three identical items instead of just a single one.
altered weights by Bonifarz:
All weights are normalized to a sum of 100 (probability in percent).
All probabilities are multiples of 5% with a maximum of 25% per item.
Switches and parachutes are used mainly by the first and last kart, respectively,
to keep the game enjoyable also with very large numbers of karts.
A strong bias for obtaining zippers in the last third helps a little to catch up.
-->
<!-- bubble cake bowl zipper plunger switch swattr rubber para anvil -->
<first w=" 25 5 15 0 15 25 15 0 0 0"
w-multi=" 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" />
<top33 w=" 15 15 15 0 15 5 15 0 0 0"
w-multi=" 5 5 5 0 5 0 0 0 0 0" />
<mid33 w=" 10 10 10 5 10 0 15 0 0 0"
w-multi=" 10 10 10 0 10 0 0 0 0 0" />
<end33 w=" 0 0 0 25 0 0 10 10 5 0"
w-multi=" 10 10 10 10 10 0 0 0 0 0" />
<last w=" 0 0 0 20 0 0 0 15 15 0"
w-multi=" 5 5 5 25 5 0 0 0 5 0" />
<battle w=" 20 15 25 0 0 10 15 0 0 0"
w-multi=" 5 5 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" />
</powerup>
I tested this one during a couple of 20 kart races and found it quite enjoyable this way. Of course, this depends much on your personal taste, and I am not a big friend of perma-para-mode
In case this attempt is inspiring for any other STK gamer out there, I decided to post it here. This sort of xml modification does not seem to be covered by the list of contribution types in the corresponding guide, so I put it in the STK general board - I would not classify a bunch of numbers as a contribution either.
Keep up the good work with STK,
Bonifarz
