Re: [Supertuxkart-devel] SuperTuxKart 0.7 Alpha 2 Thoughts and Bug Reports

[M G. <aur...@gm...>]

Hi Androgeos,
> Hey all, I thought it's about time I posted a message here, given the
> huge number of changes between STK 0.7 and 0.6. I'll write down my
> thoughts about the 0.7 alpha first before reporting the few bugs I
> came across while playing.
>
> 0.7 seems to be heading in the right direction so far.
thanks for the feedback
> The new menu interface takes a while to get used to, since it's so
> different from previous versions. Even the font takes a while to get
> used to, and as of this message, I've not gotten used to it yet. 
The thing is, it's hard to find good fonts that have more than basic
ASCII characters - we need at least latin-1.
> The confirm screen resolution page is also a bit weird, with so much
> white space between the confirm/revert buttons and the dialog box text. 
That should be easy to fix, I took a note of it.
> What bothers me more, however, are two rather big issues I have with it:
>
>    1. A good number of screens, such as challenge screens, do not have
>       a "back" button, meaning that anyone who doesn't have the Escape
>       key, or cannot figure out that the Escape key is the only way
>       out, will be in trouble;
>
Indeed, this is a known issue and will addressed
>
>    1. the Fire key is used to confirm selections, when the
>       Enter/Return key is arguably a much better choice.
>
This is our most frequent user complaint when it comes to menus, yes ;)
This situation has been addressed in trunk, and will also
appear in the next release of STK 0.7
> I like what's being changed with regards to character icons on the
> track. While the older method of colour-coding everyone works, it
> feels a lot less impressive when it's a huge circle moving along the
> track. Seeing the character heads makes things a lot better.
>
great, I'm glad you like it too
> The new "Magic Switch" powerup is great fun. Not only does it present
> an opportunity to remove gum on the track, it can also be used as a
> scare tactic. I enter each race with powerups with the dread feeling
> that, some time during the race, I may drive right into a banana peel
> that was a present only milliseconds before I picked it up. I've
> already fallen victim to this once, when the powerup expired just
> before I drove into a nitro tank, which was originally a banana peel.
>
we still need to improve powerups, but i too think it's a step in the
right direction =)
> The status messages that come with the successful use of every
> offensive powerup are a bundle of laughs. Leave them in the game,
> please. :D
:)
Ideally, though, I'd like to have more status messages, so that they are
less repetitive; we could have a bunch of them to randomly
choose from. Feel free to submit ideas :D
>
> On the downside, the AI and some of the paths it takes may need a good
> inspection. On the lowest difficulty level, I'm seeing multiple cases
> of the AI acting a little weirdly, such as driving off-course, being
> rescued, and driving off-course again.
Yes, AI is known to be bad. It has improved a lot soon after the release
of alpha 2, if I remember correctly
>
> The karts vary in terms of quality. Not exactly a serious issue, or
> one that's worth looking at at this point in time, but it's a bit
> jarring to see, for instance, Gooey racing alongside Nolok. The new
> kart models are brilliant, all of them. Put them beside each other,
> and there's a wallpaper right there, but when you put them beside the
> older karts, they stand out a bit too much.
Hey, we totally agree, but we're programmers, not artists =D We found
that it's incredibly hard to receive high-quality contributions from
artists, or to get artists to stay with the project after having
contributed one or two models; or simply they don't have enough time
because Real Life gets in the day. By all means, if you can help improve
the quality of the karts, do so!
>
> The rescue butterfly also appears to be missing. There should be an
> indicator of when the Rescue button is pressed, just so that the
> player will know when they need to get ready to be placed back on the
> track. It doesn't have to be the butterfly; even a simple icon to
> indicate a rescue in progress is fine.
IIRC it's now a parachute.
>
> Now, onto bugs:
>
>    1. When playing as Adiumy on On The Beach on Novice difficulty with
>       Pidgin, Wilber and Eviltux as opponents, the game jams when it
>       attempts to load the results screen, two seconds after I've won;
>
There have been a couple similar reports on the forum; we identified at
least one cause for such hanging, and it's fixed in trunk. It appears
there is still at least another possible cause for this that we still
need to fix. Best way to help us is to run a debug build of STK in a
debugger
and send us a backtrace when it happens, or find a way to reproduce the
issue.
>
>    1. When playing as Pidgin on the canyon track on Novie difficulty
>       with Nolok, Hexley and Tux as opponents, both Hexley and Tux
>       will have ridiculously long lap times (my screenshot reports
>       38:46:1 and 60:22:9 respectively), and the game jams when I try
>       to set up a new race at the results screen;
>
does it happen everytime, or happened only once?
again, a backtrace from a debugger would help. for now I can't even try
to reproduce since lap counting in canyon is buggy
(which may explain weird lap times)
>
>    1. Secret Garden appears to be impossible to finish in Race mode.
>
known issue, its lap counting is not set up properly ( see
http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/ToDo#To_do_on_trunk_before_0.7_is_about_feature-complete
, Joerg could have advertised this page better along the release ;) )
> On the whole, however, I'm really pleased with what I see, and look
> forward to the eventual release of 0.7.
thanks!

-- Auria