I realized, that the game offers more vehicles than the three cars available in the beginning. You have to unlock them completing events. However, it is not transparent in the game, that there are more vehicles that can be unlocked. I changed the vehicle selection screen, so that it also displays locked vehicles. As long as a vehicle is locked, you cannot use it for the race and a big "Locked" text is displayed on top of it. This should give the player some appetite to unlock them by driving more events. :-)
I attached a patch with the changes.
Thank you very much. It is great to see also the still locked cars in the selection menu. I uploaded it in r986. Only now it is very much into everyones face that there are cars they can't drive yet. And this begs for an answer we offer nowhere except our web page. (Until now people racing the events would just discover that they suddenly have new cars but now it is clear that there must be a way to unlock them but in the game itself there is no hint how this would be possible.)
Do you have any suggestion how we should include this information?
The unlock information is stored in the description file of the events. So the information can be taken from there and could be displayed on the event screen (the one in which the races are listed). Maybe some screen space can be reserved for this purpose below the list of tracks.
I would actually prefer this info being displayed in the car selection menu since there is still free space available and because I would first wonder about how to unlock it there . It could be displayed in the left column below the car name and class like: "Unlocked by winning Alps Trophy".
Now I have looked closer into it and I figure it is much easier to provide this information in the events' race overview since this information is stored in the event file. Otherwise it probably would be necessary to scan all events each time a car is shown in the car selection menu. Or do you think it doesn't really matter in terms of simplicity and performance?
Last edit: Onsemeliot 2020-10-04
I agree, that it is even more motiviating to have the information right away in the vehicle selection screen. Then you immediateley see what needs to be done, if you want to drive the car. So I created a patch (see attachment) for the vehicle selection screen as you suggested. The information is displayed below the "Locked" label.
Thank you very much again, Martin. In r987 your patch is included. It is fantastic to have this information in the menu too. The only thing missing now seems a hint that those numbers and names are related to events. Is ist easy to add this like: "Complete event 02. Alps' Trophy to unlock"? The only problem I see is that it might be to long for just one line of text in some cases. Maybe it should be set over two lines in gereral.
That's funny, in my first implemtation I actually had "Complete event ??? to unlock". The text was not too long. However, I thought the word "event" is kind of redundant.
I think this is a question of taste. If you like, you can change the string in the code. Nice coding task for a non-programmer. ;-)
Allright I added "event" in r988 since to me it isn't clear why people should assume that they have to complete events rather than single races to unlock the cars. And it could potentially be annoying to look for single races you can't find because you aren't even aware about events (and that they contain different maps).