GeekPenguinBR {l Wrote}:Hi, Alayan!Alayan {l Wrote}: (...) People in the STK community hardly get hyped up on a track when they just get a name, a short description and that's it. (...) Screenshots, and better a playable demo, work much better to create interest. Sven released a first demo of the new Fort Magma and got plenty of feedback.
Humm...four years ago I put screenshots of "1750" showing months of work and supposed interesting elements like pirates, ship, cannons, fort, etc.. Except for a developer and the forum's global moderator, almost nobody cared (when there was much more participation in this forum) and only three users posted their impressions. Unfortunately, the same didn't happen on this topic:
https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic ... 858#p69858
I wasn't really active at the time. I had a look at the topic.
It is clear that you had a lot of interest about the theme and made research for it.
The SuperTuxKart community in these forums has never been huge, but you got 4 people telling you it looked great and wanting to see more, plus samuncle giving feedback.
samuncle {l Wrote}:I'm a bit sad you still use Maya and while I do understand you have more experience in Maya, you should really consider switching to blender. Because it just creates more work for you of reimporting everything in blender.
Also you should do your screenshots in the SuperTuxKart engine so we can see how it looks in game which is IHMO better because that's at the end of the day how people will see it.
My suggestions:
1) Use stuff from the library (like the plamtrees and plants) to cut down your work. If you do another model please submit it so we can have more diversity
2) You say the path is done and won't be changed and the track is fun. How can you know that since you didn't tested the track ?
3) Test your track in SuperTuxKart
4) Also since it's Open Source why do you want to prevent people to do a similar track ? Yes we never had a pirate track but the new Las Dunas arena that I made was greatly inspired by your own work and I though you welcomed that kind of improvements .
5) We should include your objects in the core games, especially generic ones like the cannon, the characters, and the building
6) while you might not like the idea, there are a few European buildings made for candela city, who are already included in stk. Maybe that would be a cool opoprtunity to reuse them.
Anyway, I will keep an eye on your project, but please don't hesitate to post a playable track. I already said it's easier for us to get an idea when the track is playable.
Now, I know that I'm repeating myself and what others said, but this is really crucial, having others test the gameplay early on is essential. Maybe a lot of your reluctance comes from the Maya<->Blender conversion troubles, but testing on a track missing textures still is much much better than not testing at all. I will keep repeating this until you release early demos of your projects so we can ensure the final track has a good layout.
Because tempanon is right, having a track pretty is important, but if you want it to be in the core game and not just an addon, then it must have good gameplay. Canyon42 never was a strong candidate for the core game because it was boring to drive.
In your 1750 project, from your screenshot the planned driveline looks boring by itself, besides giving the impression of connecting different parts you put next to each other
Alayan {l Wrote}:The start line is not exactly there (in the top straight) and the track runs counterclockwise, but this doesn't affect your analysis, since the curves are really easy in both directions, normal and reverse. This was my first intention and the main concern, since "Las Dunas Stadium" received a lot of criticism due to the spiral and the sharp curve after the jump through the flames.
In this track (Netherlands), some changes may turn two or three of those curves a bit hard if you prefer and it's relatively easy to do, but I need to mention that not all driveline is easy: there are some narrow parts and I plan to put an animation for the two trams (low speed, of course), what will make them collide with the driver's kart like happens in "The old mine" when a coincidence of both (kart and tram) path occurs. I have the intention to make a tram running from left to right while the second tram running from right to left. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. Actually, I have seen some people saying they hate the possibility of collision in "The old mine".
Anyway, this will be widely discussed when I put the screenshots and explain the concept of the track. I will try to upload the screenshots as soon as possible this week, then everything will be clear for all.
I don't want to go back over Las Dunas too much, but the issue was not that it was too difficult. 90% of the track was spent on one of two paths, the common path to minimum ; the longest path was the most difficult and required active braking on a zipper jump to not crash (this is very very counterintuitive) and a player not familiar with the track would have had trouble landing on the road in the other two ; it was too short ; it had checklines/rescue issues.
The spiral in the easy path gave trouble to some people but I just tested the track again, and I think the spiral part is fully playable with STK 1.x physics, and a good gameplay element.
If you look at the new Fort Magma preview, the track has some difficult part and that's really not an issue.
Some generic tips to have a more challenging track in the flat/no jump theme :
- Challenge will rely on how corners are designed, on how the track borders are, and on obstacles you'll put on the road.
- Don't count on bananas. It's the easy way out, but it's not fun to play on a track with a lot of them, they should be added when the track is almost finished, and in small numbers, for example in a box banana box kind of setup that works well with the switch powerup. Shifting Sands has bananas in a few spots and it doesn't fix the track issues.
- From easiest to hardest, the border types are : off-road that slows down little, smooth wall that send you back on road without losing much speed, off-road that slows down a lot, fall into rescue, wall that can stop the kart (e.g. old mine) or other elements the kart will crash on. For an outdoor track, you will want to rely on off-road in many spots, following the conventions on how much stuff like grass slows down. But in cities and in small country roads you can have more dangerous borders.
- As for corners, a single curve alone will rarely manage to be difficult unless it's very sharp. On a (mostly) flat track, you can't do stuff like a spiral, so it's best to rely on how multiple corners chain together. A good example exists in Sven's Snow track. At one point, it features a right corner. Easy enough, the player will skid. Then, a short but sharp enough left corner. The player's reflex is to drift left, but this leads to crashes because there is immediately a right corner. Another method is to not have a constant angle in a corner, but rather to begin with a light curve ending on a sharp curve, or the opposite. This makes it more technical and associated with corner chaining can create something very interesting.
- You'd most likely want to have somewhere an alternative/secret path on a short section that can allow to gain maybe 0.5-1s but is much more technical than the main road.
- Even if those may not have much of an impact on perfect play, having a small secret path is very appreciated by players. Bonus points if it works in reverse or if you give a reverse-only counterpart to a normal-only secret. While this is first a gameplay feature, it can also allow you to show off something different in the theming.
- Finally, as for dynamic obstacles, you really want something that can be seen ahead of time. The Old Mine cart receives a lot of hate because most of the time you can just go full speed and ignore it, but sometimes it will strike you. There is the red light, but in many situations the right play is to ignore it (you'll go before/after the cart), and when the good play is to slow down, you lose significant time compared to a player that cross the same spot 1s later or sooner. A good dynamic obstacle may require you to change your path but the other path should only lose a small amount of time (something like <0.2s). So, your tramway idea could be good, but it needs to account for what I wrote about. I don't think the trams crossing the road would be good, but they could be interesting if they share the road. For example, road section on one side, tram section karts can drive on, and a road section on the other side with item boxes and some nitro, so you need to cross the tram line if you want to get items. The player could decide to cross the line early or later in the shared section, with the good decision depending on where the trams are but without significant advantage depending on when you reach this part of the track, assuming correct play.Variations are possible, but | | is better than --|-- I think.
Also, unrelated to gameplay, you should include a portion with a cobbled road.
On a final note, deleting comments in a thread is a bad idea. I understand the desire to move the discussion to this thread (I would move the posts manually if there was a clear option with my mod powers, maybe somewhere in the threads settings rather than message settings) but this way makes the discussion hard to follow.
EDIT : I checked, and I found a split topic option... If you had not deleted your messages, I could use it to clean up the original topic and get a discussion that makes sense.
XGhost {l Wrote}:
Not sure but I believe you only released one track on the forums (Las Dunas)? If so, I wouldn't judge the amount of interest only on one project.
Las Dunas Stadium (here we go again...)
The number of finished tracks released by me was just only one as you know, but the amount of projects fully described is almost 10. Only "Viking Rung Fortress", "1750" and "1001 Nights" got some positive feedback, while the rest were basically ignored in the comments. Why should I waste my time working days, weeks, or months to finish them?
Once more: Las Dunas Stadium was an attempt to make a very different track, with a higher level of difficulty, some innovations, more objects than the common, and a good looking and impressive aspect due to (supposed) well-modeled objects and beautiful textures. That's not my limit, that's not the best thing I can do and that's not a thing to be proud except for three of those aspects I have mentioned:
a) Innovations did: a different way to model in 3D with fewer triangles, a bit more advanced animation for the blimp (if compared to the simple straight path of the samuncle's plane in "Paradiso Island" or the seagull in the second version of "Subsea"), a TV channel and logos created for the track, etc;
b) New and different objects for the game (the blimp itself, a TV van, TV camera, truck, monster truck, etc.;
c) Beautiful general and much more detailed look if compared to most tracks at the time, where you saw just one house, five trees, ten stones, and very basic textures.
More than 150 objects and a lot of new textures and maps done for long months in the free time by a guy (me, myself) that frequently suffers from headache after hours in line working on the computer and by his brother, who was under the stress of academic life and monthly exams. Not to mention all the rest of the difficulties and stress for other reasons.
My workflow
XGhost {l Wrote}:
Wait, does that mean you basically modeled the whole scenery already but it's just not yet textured?
Did I say something like this? I said here and in other topics that 1. The tracks are almost finished and textured, but with a provisory name. 2.I Work on other software that is not Blender. All the track is being done in other software and will be exported as obj. to Blender, where the textures will be applied. However, I'm not skilled in applying textures on Blender and, to be honest, I don't like all the processes of applying textures on Blender.
The Partnership
GeekPenguinBR {l Wrote}:
As far as I know, the name of the track is one XML attribute in track.xml? Nobody really cares about the names of the other files, they might follow a working title, but that doesn't get displayed ever ingame...
As said above, worldblender offered his partnership to help me applying textures and maps. Then, I will turn his work easier, grouping similar objects and textures, allowing him to apply any texture or map in all the groups with just a click. For instance, all the files are named in order to be easy to find them, eg. "Mills_wall_bricks_nougat", "Mills_wall_bricks__brown", "Mills_wall_bricks_orange", instead of using the normal form in English. This will allow him to find all the textures of wood in sequence instead searching for "brown_bricks_wall" in "B", "orange_bricks_wall" in "O" or "white_bricks_wall" in "W", but I will only send him the files when I have the final name and rename every object, texture, and map. At least, the first name.
The track in the "Netherlands"
XGhost {l Wrote}:
Maybe you have concept art or moodboards to do that. You probably have a ton of research material ready that inspired you, show us that instead. I think we all believe that you are able to use your artistic skills to get there later.
I have a hundred images, including pictures and video for reference, of course, and I have posted some links months ago:
https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic ... eld#p84332
The basic track to test
XGhost {l Wrote}:
It does not matter if it is textured or not, if there is scenery around it or not (maybe there is, that's great and already gives an idea of how it might look in the end). Ideally your track can be distinguished from the surroundings and the road layout is clear. If you have missing scenery that would lead the player, just put in simple primitives (cubes, spheres, cylinders) that give a sense of the objects or just use some planes with arrows on them for now. If you would let us drive a simple layout, we could give you feedback and new ideas on that. You can slap whatever theme or setting on it afterwards. If you got key-elements on your road that are tightly connected to your theme, then spend a little more time on only that, blocking the thing roughly together.
XGhost {l Wrote}:
All you should care about now is the basic racetrack.
I can upload a track as simple as you described, but (attention here) this is one of my three tracks with flat terrain, and couldn't be different: there are a few ups and downs, but the terrain is flat, since it recreates the Netherlands, not Switzerland or Brazil. Flat driveline, almost no objects, and all objects without texture will give a very, very bad impression to every none who tests, no matter how fun the track may be to drive on it. In other words, this (and only this) is a track where the good impression depends on the proper scenario. Anyway, I can upload a track with empty scenery, but the feedback will be lower rated than the project deserves.
GeekPenguinBR {l Wrote}:
However, this track has not a complicated or weird path design and most of the length of the path (except for only one part that has an essential design) can be changed and redesigned at any time if necessary (but I bet it won't be).
XGhost {l Wrote}:
You don't know that. You also don't know how much valuable feedback you might have missed already by not testing it with actual players. It's the same rookie-mistake we see countless times every year the new students start their first projects. You are and always be the worst judge on creations of things you made yourself. Almost universally true.
This is the shape of the racetrack, path, Driveline, or any other name that someone may prefer to use. Is there any way to be a problem for someone? Just a quick look reveals the lack of major difficulty since there's no jumps or crazy experiences like in "Las Dunas Stadium".
Changes in the shape can be made if necessary.
Hi, Alayan!
Alayan {l Wrote}:
(...) People in the STK community hardly get hyped up on a track when they just get a name, a short description and that's it. (...) Screenshots, and better a playable demo, work much better to create interest. Sven released a first demo of the new Fort Magma and got plenty of feedback.
Humm...four years ago I put screenshots of "1750" showing months of work and supposed interesting elements like pirates, ship, cannons, fort, etc.. Except for a developer and the forum's global moderator, almost nobody cared (when there was much more participation in this forum) and only three users posted their impressions. Unfortunately, the same didn't happen on this topic:
https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic ... 858#p69858
Alayan {l Wrote}:
But, starting from the top straight and going clockwise, it looks like this would play as : easy left, easy right, easy right, medium right, easy left, easy right, easy left, small straight, easy right, easy left, easy right, easy left, long easy right, easy left, easy right, and back to the starting straight... This seems like an easier track than Scotland, and scenery by itself isn't going to make the gameplay interesting.
I think it's fine to keep with the "no jump, rather flat" theme, and it's ok if it is easier than average, but some changes are needed to ensure some challenge between experimented players.
The start line is not exactly there (in the top straight) and the track runs counterclockwise, but this doesn't affect your analysis, since the curves are really easy in both directions, normal and reverse. This was my first intention and the main concern, since "Las Dunas Stadium" received a lot of criticism due to the spiral and the sharp curve after the jump through the flames.
In this track (Netherlands), some changes may turn two or three of those curves a bit hard if you prefer and it's relatively easy to do, but I need to mention that not all driveline is easy: there are some narrow parts and I plan to put an animation for the two trams (low speed, of course), what will make them collide with the driver's kart like happens in "The old mine" when a coincidence of both (kart and tram) path occurs. I have the intention to make a tram running from left to right while the second tram running from right to left. I'm not sure if this is a good idea. Actually, I have seen some people saying they hate the possibility of collision in "The old mine".
Anyway, this will be widely discussed when I put the screenshots and explain the concept of the track. I will try to upload the screenshots as soon as possible this week, then everything will be clear for all.
Hi, tempAnon093!
I wouldn't say you seemed harsh. At least for me, who served in the Army and Navy hearing people shouting straight into our faces and nor rarely offenses, as considered normal to adapt the new soldiers or students to the hardness of a millitar life. This said, let's go back to the track about the Netherlands.
As said before, it's a track that depends a lot on the objects to be considered good or very good. This doesn't mean that the driveline/path/road/ etc. is boring. Not for me and maybe not for the majority after testing, but I really would like to offer a good first impression releasing the track with textures.
Anyway, I would like to spot and let clear for everyone that I'm not against a test of my tracks before the textures added. It's just this track because it's flat and I know that some people have a previous hatred against flat tracks. So, I believe that seeing all the objects, textures, and the context they would be less or not hater.
I don't like the idea of people seeing me like a mad or a retarded guy with an obsession for screenshots and against to release a track to test, but as the conversation goes on on this topic, it seems that there is a popular outcry asking "Stop acting like a demented person. Stop being mean and immediately release a damn track to be tested!" and I insist on saying "No! Just screenshots. I'll never give you an empty track to test it out. Test it mentally. Look at the layout and see how fun it is to drive. Or are you idiots who can't do that?" This is obviously not me, and I think I already made it clear why I will only release the test track after showing the screenshots.
As said, I'm trying to finish some sectors (my projects are divided into sectors: city, rural area, etc.) to put the screenshots with all the explanations. Then, I may release the empty track to test.