Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby darkhog » 13 Feb 2018, 05:05

This would make easier to make levels as the Stunt Rally editor is very easy to use. Obviously it would need to be adjusted to STK-specific stuff, but the basis is there for a good course editor.

Using Blender as a track editor isn't a good choice IMO. Let's face it - Blender has a lot of unneeded (and potentially confusing for someone who never used Blender and just want to make a cool SMK track) fluff, not to mention Blender isn't the most intuitive modeling program even when you don't have to abide to any arbitrary restrictions - I still don't know how to do half the stuff that is possible in Blender and I'm using it since 2.3x (2.37 I think, but not really sure), the constant UI changes aren't helping either.

With a dedicated track editor a lot of confusion would go away since the user would only have access to tools that are actually useful when making a track and couldn't make a track that is unreadable by SMK by accident (obviously making a broken track would still be a possibility but at least it would be only broken in gameplay terms, not as in crashes the game or looks weird, most likely due to flipped normals).
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Re: Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby MTres19 » 13 Feb 2018, 05:56

It sounds nice on the surface but I doubt that Stunt Rally and STK have many similarities internally. STK's engine is somewhat low-level partially because that's how samuncle (who is responsible for nearly all the next-gen tracks) wanted it—custom shaders, scripting, etc. Porting the SR track editor wouldn't just mean changing the XML schema and using a different 3D model format; it would include creating an abstraction over STK's format (in order to simplify the UX) that would make it very difficult to meet the quality of e.g. Cocoa Temple. Worst, it would introduce another maintenance burden which I don't think would be well received. Just my 2¢...
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Re: Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby darkhog » 15 Feb 2018, 12:57

Who says you have to change STK's code to accommodate SR editor? You could just make SR editor save in STK format.
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Re: Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby MTres19 » 15 Feb 2018, 15:55

Yes, my post above explains why it would not be trivial to port the SR editor.
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Re: Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby QwertyChouskie » 15 Feb 2018, 18:40

If the idea is for user friendliness, maybe it could replace https://github.com/supertuxkart/stk-editor which never really got developed. I don't expect anything to replace Blender though ;)
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Re: Idea: Track editor using Stunt Rally editor as a base

Postby Auria » 17 Feb 2018, 01:41

That would likely require heavy modifications to the SR editor. It is feasible, for sure, but would require a contributor to dedicate a significant amount of time, so something like that will only happen if some contributor volunteers a lot of their free time to work on that
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