Re: [Supertuxkart-devel] Supertuxkart 0.7 Alpha 3

[Joerg H. <jo...@lu...>]

Hi Caius,

thanks a lot for the very long and useful feedback - we highly
appreciate you taking the time to do this. We have actually posted a
list of known problems on our forum (and in the announcement on our web
page) - nevertheless a few comments from me:

...
> - The AI on Novice is a bit too challenging. They race at the same speed 
> as the player.
Yes, tweaking the low level AI is still a thing we have to do. They do
actually accelerate a bit less than the player, but I doubt that one can
notice this very small difference. We developer usually play on hard, so
the low level AI was a bit neglected ;)

> - A stress test with 19 karts lasted for about three to four tracks 
> before crashing. Some of the karts are duplicated.
Hmm - I don't like hearing a crash - do you have any details? E.g. a
warning message on the terminal or so?

Karts must be duplicated, since we have only 12 karts (and stk will try
to avoid duplicating a player kart). We might make more karts available
as an addon package later.

> - The AI path for Island, as well as the placement and location of the 
> banana peels need a serious looking at. Larger karts like Mozilla will 
> ram the inner wall on the first hill, and the banana peels are placed on 
> a downhill slope which, due to the nature of the camera in STK, are 
> impossible to avoid.
The island is a 'difficult' track: on one hand it's one of the best
looking tracks, on the other hand it's generally too narrow to be much
fun. We might try to tweak the drivelines a bit to make the ai better,
but no guarantees before the release - imho the track either needs a
thorough re-design, or it should be replaced (not in this release though).

Generally track design is one of the main issues stk has atm (the other
are the physics) - steep uphill/downhill sections are not very much fun
to drive atm, and some track allow way too many involuntary shortcuts.

Re the camera: we have actually tweaked the camera to show more of the
scenery, but I guess we have to evaluate this a bit more. If you look in
tracks like the art museum (which wasn't part of 0.7 alpha 3, but might
be in 0.7 if we get the licenses sorted out) it definitely is much
better, but I agree on other tracks the camera might be too low.

> - On certain occasions, the AI is unable to continue racing because they 
> will just drive off the path. On my stress test yesterday on the Beach 
> track, one of the Adiumys kept driving off to the left after the sharp 
> uphill turn, and on the Island track, Tux keeps driving off to the left 
> shortly before the first hill.
Beach is most likely to be replaced - it has a lot of unwanted shortcuts
and other problems (like the one you have mentioned), and we have good
replacement tracks ready (or hope to have them soon) - like the farm
track (once the items are defined), and the just developed Scotland track.

> - Quick start is mostly useless for every kart except for the two 
> positioned right at the front because karts that use quick start from 
> the second row and back will ram the kart in front of them.
I agree, and that's one our todo list for 0.7, too - we might either
tweak it, or even remove it completely. In a later version I we will
improve the physics and I hope to make it work in a way that other slow
karts will be pushed out of the way (here again a point about track
design, see above - with wider tracks we could position the karts better
to avoid this issue in the first place).

> - There are two banana peels placed at an out of the way location near 
> the start of Tux Tollway.
> - Animations are apparently carried over when the challenge won screen 
> is shown. I saw Adiumy stuck in right-turn animation.
What exactly do you mean? In the challenge won screen I don't think you
will see many karts (only gnu iirc). Are you talking of the grand prix
screen (where the karts drive onto a podium)? I thought that was fixed
... perhaps I should have a look again ;)

> Here are some additional comments that aren't really bug-related:
> 
> - The additional zoom in at the start of every race, as well as the 
> music that accompanies it, is brilliant.
> - The new status messages, while amusing, can become even quite jarring 
> if you somehow manage to hit yourself with your own bowling ball (e.g. 
> "Puffy strikes Puffy").
I admit I am not entirely sure about those either. They are very
difficult to translate, and while we recently got a patch that added
special messages if a kart hits itself, I am not sure that it brings
much to the game - it's just more text on the screen, and (esp. since
little kids might play the game) make the gui just look more 'crowded'.
I'd actually prefer to give feedback visually (e.g. rotate the icons in
the minimap if they got hit by something you did). But we won't change
this for now, and wait for more feedback.

> - I'm getting used to the font now.
;)

> - I've won every race (so far) using Mozilla and I cannot replicate this 
> on Puffy or Elephphant.
Strange - I always have problems with mozilla ;)  - and so had others
based on some bug reports we had. But admittedly I drive with my
favorite kart most of the time, so I don't spend that much time driving
with mozilla.

Before the 1.0 release we hope to give the kart different properties ...
once the physics are done so that we are happy ;)

> - Adiumy has a nice kart, but it's not the most practical because, like 
> Hexley, it's prone to being knocked silly.
Yes, while all karts have the same physical properties, the size is
different, and that makes quite a bit of difference.

> - Despite being unable to race on many of the tracks, the game has 
Is that because some of the tracks were still locked? You can modify the
challenge.xml file to unlock them (due to missing tracks not all
challenges to unlock everything are available ... and some challenges
are actually too hard atm, we have to tune some down a bit).


> already reached a state where it is stable enough to be enjoyable.
Thanks  :)

> - Good work on the animations, especially the steering ones.
Yes, Rudy did a great job here!

> - The new music is just as good as the old ones, and the old ones were 
> excellent.
> - I miss the old music for the Shifting Sands track ("Desert Dunes" by 
> Zhetty).
We might make additional music available as addons.

> - I always run STK on my early-2008 MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5.8; 
> apart from that crash at the end of my stress test yesterday, the game 
> runs really smoothly.
Good to hear that. Performance-wise STK is not too good, and lower end
machines might be struggling to work smoothly with even 8 karts I'd suspect.

> - This is the first time I've seen the speedometer reach 300 t/s. It 
> probably goes off the scale when nitro is used.
Yes, it does. We actually increased the speed of the high level AI after
tuning the speedometer, that's something that needs to be fixed.


> To sum up, I had a great time playing this. Even the eventual crash 
> wasn't enough to wipe the smile off my face. :)
Great - very good to hear that. I hope that for the 0.7 release we can
smoothen the remaining rough bits and pieces a bit (and of course remove
all bugs and crashes).

Cheers,
   Joerg