Some suggestions and design flaws report

[240-185]

Hi,

I played SuperTuxKart 0.6.2, the official version which is in official Ubuntu repositories. I noticed some issues with the game.

[*] There's a track in a jungle in which there's a portion of the circuit which is loosely condemned by a set of trees. But I still manage to go right through them and lose time on the abandoned track. Plus, player can be penalized of using an "invalid shortcut" too easily on this circuit, whereas on others (like the one which is set in a stadium), using unfair shortcuts is not even noticed by the game.
[*] The design of Tux's Highway is not acceptable. The player can go on the wrong side of the highway, and nothing allows the player to get back on the right side. Using the opposite highway ramp is too tricky (as this may make the player falling into nothingness), and player can go into the tunnels which are after the ramps until he realizes these lead to nothing.
[*] The first thing that at least 85 % of Mario Kart-like players do at each beginning of a race is to press the acceleration button. That penalty time for having pressed the wrong button before the race has started is just ridiculous.
[*] Handling the kart on ascending slopes is VERY tedious, because of the feature of turning very fast if the kart goes also fast. On some circuits, it just makes the kart completely out of control, spinning it for no reason.
[*] Is the music "Boom Boom Boom" supposed to be a complete tune? Hearing the same musical note for more than one minute after some nice chip tune is not what I call... "music".
[*] Nothing indicates the player how to unlock new tracks. I discovered it accidentally by browsing some wiki. So I'd like to say that the main purpose of karting games is to compete against other people in many Grand Prix. Winning some Grand Prix should allow the player to discover more of the game, not by doing some challenges.
[*] Displaying a general classification sorted by general score after a race would be nice.

[Auria]

Hi,

0.6 is a long way behind 0.7, the current development version, so I'd recommend checking 0.7.

About Jungle and alternative paths : 0.7 has support for alternate paths, and the shortcut detection code has been removed in favor of checkpoints, so this is not a problem anymore

steep ascending slopes in general will need to be removed from tracks, this is a known issue; there has also been talk on improving the physics to better support that, but you need to understand that coding the physics is very complicated and that optimal physics may need to wait for after 0.7

challenges will be a bit improved in 0.7, making it a bit clearer that things are locked. For future versions, I would like to replace the challenges menu with a nicer "adventure mode", but that's too much work just now so won't come for 0.7.

Displaying the general classification, I suppose you mean while racing in a GP, is a reality in 0.7/trunk.

About the start of game penalty about hitting accelerate, I have no opinion. We did talk about having some nicer start-of-race action; but we are not mario kart and as such we don't mind doing differently.

And about track design and music, we are coders, not artists (well, ok, not 100% true, I'm musician, but not very good at making racing music) so we welcome all contributions that people can offer to improve the game

[240-185]

0.6 is a long way behind 0.7, the current development version, so I'd recommend checking 0.7.

Erm, 0.7 is quite incomplete It is indeed playable, but after reading your ToDo List, it seems that the half of the game is missing. Missing tracks? Ew.

Regarding the acceleration button, my point is that, sometimes, players press accidentally the acceleration button. In other games, that just makes engines roaring a bit, but here, it is unfairly sanctioned.

As for the music, well, I am a musician too, I may make a remix of that tune but no, I don't want to contribute, thanks.

[Arthur]

I realize you probably mean this well, but I think you may come out as a little demanding - this project is done on a voluntary basis, and such as it is now, it isn't teeming with contributors either (big kudos to the few the project has).

You have lots of valid points though, but you may cut the developers some more slack - especially since you don't want to contribute yourself.

Anyway, welcome aboard.

Disclaimer: I don't contribute much myself, so this post could have come better off from somebody else, but I'll take the chance.

[djinnkeeper]

The early-start penalty is a bit of a turn-off. I understand trying to maintain the project's sense of identity by saying that "we're not mario kart" .. but c'mon .. while standing on some of its own merits, this game is clearly a clone of Mario Kart - why shy away from this fact? Embrace it and don't avoid rational features under the guise of individuality.

I don't want this to seem like a knock on the game. I play it every so often and find it entertaining, but let's not pretend like some features aren't obvious placeholders, discussed or not.

[Auria]

We don't pretend some features are not placeholders, we says we're not enough devs to do everything we'd like the game to contains ^^

[stked]

[*] Is the music "Boom Boom Boom" supposed to be a complete tune? Hearing the same musical note for more than one minute after some nice chip tune is not what I call... "music".

In a long race, it gets really annoying. I'm working on a new one (well, not really, too much STK Lite).

[Evolution]

On Canyon, the tune is MUCH too short (1lap or so)

[hiker]

The early-start penalty is a bit of a turn-off. I understand trying to maintain the project's sense of identity by saying that "we're not mario kart" .. but c'mon .. while standing on some of its own merits, this game is clearly a clone of Mario Kart - why shy away from this fact? Embrace it and don't avoid rational features under the guise of individuality.

Well, admittedly this is a feature that is a left over from the original TuxKart. My current idea of an initial speed boost would be that the first player to press accelerate after "Go" gets a major boost, the 2nd player a minor boost, and all other no boost. While I haven't tried that, this feels imho more like racing, while the MK approach is (all in all) rather boring: yawn at "ready", lazily press accel during "set" (ok, a few ms after set iirc), keep on yawning, speed boost Having to hit the accelerator key at the right time feels much more like racing ... but we will see how this feels once we have implemented it (patches welcome )

If this shouldn't work out (and we don't get a better suggestion), we might implement the MK way, though I seriously think it's not ideal in terms of race feeling.

Cheers,
Joerg

[hiker]

On Canyon, the tune is MUCH too short (1lap or so)

Well, there is of course always the space-niceness trade off: people have already complained that STK is too big considering its quality (though admittedly that was a while ago), and we have about 55 MB of music files already. Long term I would prefer to offer an additional music download pack, which would contain longer music or more variety - but we need someone to take care of this: select the music, make (if necessary) shorter versions of the music for the main distribution, ...

And things might get better once we have the addon manager working - we might just reduce the number of tracks (and music) in the base package, since it will be much easier for people to then download additional tracks.

Cheers,
Joerg