Re: [TuxKart-devel] tuxgames

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Caleb Sawtell wrote:
> tuxgames did a review of tuxkart and we will be able to take some of
> there ideas to make tuxkart better the review can be found here :
> http://www.linuxgames.com/?dataloc=/reviews/tuxkart/

Yeah - I can't disagree with most of what they said.  I thought
the 'ding' they gave us for 'Installing' (5 out of 10) was a
little harsh.

Most of the other complaints should get fixed with this GoTM effort.

Other comments about their review:

The sounds seem like 'stock' sounds - well, yes - that would be
because they *are* stock sounds.  (Have you ever *tried* to record
sounds of your own with a microphone or whatever?  It's just about
impossible without a folie stage and professional equipment.)

As for the worry that parents might find it 'offensive' for younger
players...sheesh!  Can I count this as an educational game?...Educational
for parents that is?   There isn't a kid alive of an age who could
play TuxKart who doesn't see fart and belch jokes on TV - or from
friends or whatever.  Compared to the gore and violence in most games,
I think a good healthy belch from a Penguin who *loves* his herring is OK.

Graphics are 'chunky' - yes - they were designed to run on a Voodoo-1
and a 133MHz CPU!  That gives you only a thousand or so polygons to
play with and still get reasonable frame rates.  Most of the karts
are already up at several hundred polygons - so every polygon that
could be shaved off - was.  This is certainly an area we can fix if
we focus on graphics cards with hardware T&L - or even non-T&L hardware
with a faster-than-133MHz CPU.

It's interesting to dig out an old Nintendo 64 and look at MarioKart'64
(which bears 'certain resemblances' to TuxKart!)...notably, the karts
in MarioKart'64 were not rendered in true 3D.  They pre-rendered the
karts from a number of positions - and draw them as flat, 2D billboards.
The result is that the lighting on them never changes. They have to be
very careful with camera angles. As the karts turn, they do so in
distinct 'steps'.  Even so, the couple of levels which we did to look
like MarioKart levels stand up reasonably well to comparison - even though
an N64 is much faster than a Voodoo-1 card.

They are dead on with their complaints about game-play.  My AI is just
pathetic - and interest from users died out before I got around to
writing any 'series' competition modes.  I think a split-screen 2 player
or 4 player mode would help a lot - but back then, we barely had the
throughput to render one scene - let alone 2 or 4.

The complaint about needing a track editor is a bit unfair.  Tuxkart
doesn't need a special track editor - you can build tracks fairly easily
in Blender or AC3D - in a sense, those *are* the track editors.

The version of Tuxkart in CVS supports 'mirrored' tracks which adds some
extra life to the existing levels.

Overall, a fair statement of the current state of the game...but hopefully
that's all about to change.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
HomeEmail: <sjb...@ai...>    WorkEmail: <sj...@li...>
HomePage : http://www.sjbaker.org
Projects : http://plib.sf.net    http://tuxaqfh.sf.net
            http://tuxkart.sf.net http://prettypoly.sf.net
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