Excessive boost/nitro pull

[Pac-Man]

Hi there!

I didn't know if this has been registered already, but I think that the boost / nitro in its current implementation / setup pulls excessively much.

You only need to press the nitro / boost key only once a second and only for a single frame (e.g. a pretty damn short time) to keep your kart at full speed. You do not consume much of the boost gauge (if done well you don't even see it decrease sometimes), and it makes it possible to race mostly all tracks completely in full, boosted speed.

That's unfair to players who don't know this and makes the A.I. look pretty dumb.

I would recommend to tweak it in a way so that the short key presses do not accelerate that much, and that you have to keep it at least 1 second or so pressed to get a real noticable acceleration.

What do you think?

PS: What's with the weird bumping when hitting cars / walls in 0.8.0? I hope someone wrote that down already.

[Auria]

limiting very short presses could indeed be an improvement. Joerg, what do you think?

[hiker]

limiting very short presses could indeed be an improvement. Joerg, what do you think?

I agree that this is kind of odd, on the other hand I think the 'rocket' approach is fun.

What about:
if there's more than 1 unit of nitro, you get rocket boost and lose 1 unit (so like it is atm, except that you lose 1 unit), if you have less, you only get some smaller acceleration. That might be a good compromise, except it's a bit difficult to explain The nitro bar should then perhaps use different colours to indicate that?

Cheers,
Joerg

[hiker]

You only need to press the nitro / boost key only once a second and only for a single frame (e.g. a pretty damn short time) to keep your kart at full speed. You do not consume much of the boost gauge (if done well you don't even see it decrease sometimes), and it makes it possible to race mostly all tracks completely in full, boosted speed.

And it is boring - agreed

...

PS: What's with the weird bumping when hitting cars / walls in 0.8.0? I hope someone wrote that down already.

Hmm - what exactly do you mean? We added an additional impulse to push karts away from each other and/or from the wall, which avoids the problems of karts getting stuck to each other (what we had before).

On trunk we just fixed a bug in bullet that could cause karts jump upwards on large triangles.

Could you perhaps create a history file? Just run a race (with not too many karts to make the file size smaller), reproduce the problem (again as early as possible), then press F10. This will create a history file - either in the STK directory (if you have write permission), or in the config directory. Then compress it and post it here or email it to me.

Thanks!
Joerg

[bonifarz]

it makes it possible to race mostly all tracks completely in full, boosted speed.

To my understanding, the stacking of max speed modifiers is important, so your overall speed still depends much on the usage of skidding and zippers. The main effect is that you don't need to collect many nitro items. Lots of nitro is actually only needed when driving off road.

That's unfair to players who don't know this and makes the A.I. look pretty dumb.

The first time i realized about this trick was when I saw the AI karts do it, actually.

if there's more than 1 unit of nitro, you get rocket boost and lose 1 unit

The unit measure is not quite clear, although there are hints about this in the challenges. A full gauge corresponds to how many, eight or ten units maybe? And rocket boost stands for the current nitro effect, not the zipper effect, right?

[Totoplus62]

I like current nitro power, a way to solve the problem is to reduce the amout of nitro you can collect; 16 is too much isn't it ?
But with this solution, there is a problem with nitro challenge that I don't find really interesting :S IMHO

[Funto]

I like the rocket idea you mentionned hiker
That reminds me of Back to the Future 3 (one of the best films ever, obviously ), when they are on the train and they add special combustible that changes the smoke color to get more boost.
And indeed that could go with less nitro bars.
Not sure how to combine that with other boosts though.
Idea: a screen-space distortion shader, combined with moton blur and the kart going a bit farther from the camera would look amazing and give a boost impression (only for the biggest boosts though).

[Totoplus62]

Idea: a screen-space distortion shader, combined with moton blur and the kart going a bit farther from the camera would look amazing and give a boost impression .

Yes yes yes yes and yes With a sound for nitro (Flamethrower sound should give a great effect)

Back to the future 2 is the best

[Funto]

Back to the future 2 is the best

Indeed but they're all excellent anyway

[asciimonster]

Can we have the back-to-the-future-style flame-track (Double flames near the rear wheels i.s.o. at exhaust)?

Back to the future 2 is the best

Indeed but they're all excellent anyway

No! Back to the future 3 was horrible!

[Funto]

No! Back to the future 3 was horrible!

How dare you!!! There is a flying time travelling steampunk-style train in it, you can't say that!!

[Totoplus62]

Well, i made some tests with this problem and I was able to run an entire lap at full speed with only 1/1.5 unit of nitro approximately in Bovine barnyard. (the speedometer said that...I don't know if you can overtake this speed limit if you push nitro key all the time)
Maybe we should change this a little bit... (for very very (very) short presses ).

[bonifarz]

I was able to run an entire lap at full speed with only 1/1.5 unit of nitro approximately in Bovine barnyard. (the speedometer said that...I don't know if you can overtake this speed limit if you push nitro key all the time)

The speedometer is actually not very useful at high speed. You can compare your lap time with the record below 47 seconds for two laps on the farm track to get a feeling for practical speed limits. Mhm, we actually had a discussion about the speedometer in that topic, e.g. here.

[Totoplus62]

That reminds me of Back to the Future 3 (one of the best films ever, obviously ), when they are on the train and they add special combustible that changes the smoke color to get more boost.
Idea: a screen-space distortion shader, combined with moton blur and the kart going a bit farther from the camera would look amazing and give a boost impression (only for the biggest boosts though).

I think I have an idea with this.. it could tackle nitro problem and maybe make nitro be more tactical and exiting, that could also fit with the speedometer i made IMHO. I will make illustration when i will have some time, that will be better to explain
Ps: I just watch this movie again, the train scene is sooo amazing

[Moriatti]

Or you could have each can give a certain amount of nitro boost and the press just activates it.

It strikes me as weird for you guys to have both the Nitro Boost AND the Boost Power-Up though.

[E-Dragon]

I´m really satisfied with nitros, skidding and zippers.
You can get very fast by using all of them (tripple boost) and without excessive nitro pull you can only skid and zipper and lose a lot of speed, but that´s what I like most on stk.