the overworld looks a bit empty of life

[tavariz91]

Hi!

I justed noticed that you always are alone on the overworld. What I suggest is to put a battle AI and say 5 stock karts as soon as we have the AI.
There could be other cool stuff, as the "tux balloon" (on the northern resort track), Thunderbird flying in the sky and a shark aileron sometimes coming out of the water. A seagull could be nice too.
Actually the only "animal" I could see is a skull that floats on water (but it's hard to push it there ).


Again, I don't know how to make it, but I know how to open tickets (and let our nice GSOC students work on it?)


Regards,

Tav'

[rubberduck]

i think too

the overworld should be a bit bigger,

i love it to make some stunts in the overworld

and some creatures walking and flying,

more hills and some pandas please!!!

[samuncle]

Adding more objects isn't so easy.

The overworld has some performance issues. It s very slow on old computers and low cost devices. That's a problem
Making good objects is a long process and we don't have the required number of artists.
In a professional game procedural generation is used to fill large area. However it's not planned to include it in stk.

It's always the same problem. We are a small team and we don't have time.

[Totoplus62]

Overworld is enough big IMHO
But adding more existing elements could be a good idea

[rubberduck]

But adding more existing elements could be a good idea

i think this too

the overworld should have more special elements
i think, that in future you have two or three worldmaps/overworlds(like in new supertux-versions you have the first worlmap and a second one) instead of one bigger worldmap
this should be more theme-based for example the first overworld could have an an icy-like world in it
and then you have a second overworld
each overworld should have a enemy at the end and the last enemy is nolok in the last worldmap

[Bertram]

Hi,

This made me think:

What about unlocking new content or location parts in the overworld map along with the won cups?

By new content, it could be inhabitants giving hints about the game, stunt object like a springboard (just for the fun of it :]), new unlocked tracks,
of simply eye-candy objects

I understand all that needs to be developed first and it's not urgent at all for the next version. Just a thought if it can be of interest of anybody.

Best regards,

[Auria]

At this time I don't think having many overworlds is a good idea. First, some people dislike having to drive between challenges, this makes the problem worse. Second, this adds loading time in the transition between them; third, we have very few 3D artists and would much rather have them improve our tracks than making new overworlds

[hiker]

I actually like the idea, but also understand Auria's concern (which are mostly caused by the harsh reality).

Advantage:

• Less loading time per overworld.
• More opportunities to make the overworlds more interesting (since the overworlds will be smaller, we have less performance restrictions).
• Easier to distribute the work among several artists (each can work on one overworld).
• Much easier to integrate high level addon tracks - they would just add a new overworld (which would still be a bit of additional work), though it would require us to have a 'hub' world that can be extended. Addons packages could be available as complete worlds to download.

Disadvantages:

• We don't have several artists to distribute the work to
• Overall more loading when switching between overworlds.
• Huge amount of work to redo the challenges, since they would need to be grouped and unlocked in a different order.
• Might be difficult to group tracks: often tracks that belong to one group have a very different difficulty (which we atm balance by unlocking them later). If we lock the overworlds and unlock them one at a time, the increase in difficulty might be less smooth (not sure that it is actually that smooth atm, but that's the idea we have at least )
• More drive-around time to get to the next challenge.
• Have I mentioned that we don't have enough artists? Oh yes, I have

More fleshed out suggestion:
We start with a hub world which is a kind of training ground (tutorial). From there some kind of portals, gates, doors, ... are available (mostly locked or invisible at the beginning) that will bring you to the various overworlds. By racing there you would accumulate points (same as what we have now), which will unlock more challenges (same as currently), but also unlocks more doors. We could enable a kind of quick-travel/short-cut mode to reduce the drive-around time: from the hub world you get access to a map showing the unlocked overworlds with their challenges. From there you could jump immediately to wherever you want to go. Also stk would save your last visited location, so if you go to story mode again, you might actually skip hub-world and directly go to your overworld. The various overworlds could contain additional challenges (I am thinking of Easter Eggs here ), which would make it more interesting to drive on them.

This would be something I would add when going from 0.9 to 1.0 But if anyone has a good idea how to get more artists ... let's start on it now

Cheers,
Joerg