Re: [TuxKart-devel] Thoughts on Kart Models.

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

Ingo Ruhnke wrote:

>>If you have a better way - I'd truly like to hear it. However,
>>simply tossing out somewhat established characters and putting in
>>wholly new ones doesn't really acomplish very much.
> 
> I simply doubt that the characters are established.

Arguably not (although I happen to think they're pretty firmly
established).  But even if they aren't yet established - how
do you imagine putting a completely different set of characters
into every new game makes that any better?

Clearly there is value in this kind of recognition or all of the
commercial games of this genre wouldn't continually re-use the
same ones over and over.  Heck, it goes beyond games - cartoons,
toys - everything.

> Tux might be the only one that is reasonable established, even so
> their is still a whole lot of room to let him do whatever we want, ie.
> no kind of bonuses and powerups has really been established beside the
> herring and even that is used for all kinds of different things.

But getting that established requires building on what understanding
people have - not tossing out what's already established.

Why change a spinning herring to a spinning coin or a pink elephant
or something?   It's change for change's sake.  By all means model a
nicer herring - add new things that AREN'T herrings - but there is no
need to subtract without powerful reasons.

> Gown on the other side still runs around as pink penguin in xtux,
> looks quite different in tuxkart, and isn't GUI-selectable in TuxAQFH.

Nothing's GUI selectable in TuxAQFH - nor was it in early versions of
TuxKart.  The Voodoo cards couldn't run GUI's on the same screen as
the 3D graphics - so that stuff was hard to do.   In those days, everything
was command-line oriented and most games from that vintage had command
line options.  You most certainly can play as gown in TuxAQFH and you
could originally in TuxKart too.

I have a photo of a little girl - maybe 5 years old - playing as Gown.
Her father sent me the photo telling me that the little girl wanted a
red/white hair bow to look like Gown.

> Geeko isn't used anywhere beside Tuxkart I think.

No - and he's a problem because he's a commercial logo.  Certainly he
should be replaced.

> Bsod was used in the old SuperTux but got stripped away, beside I
> think Microsoft-bashing is something that we should really avoid.

M$ bashing of the *obvious* kind is not good - but a little subtle
play is OK IMHO.

>>Characters don't have to be deep - it's not like I need to know
>>their opinions or politics - but I DO need to know who the good
>>guys are and who the bad guys are...
> 
> There are no good guys in a Kart game and beside that even Nintendo
> happily lets them switch from the bad side to the good one and back,
> nothing wrong with that.

That's true if you only think about one game in isolation.  What I'm
trying to get across is that we need to look at the big picture.

People go out and buy MarioKart DoubleDash having a REALLY good idea
of what they are getting into because they played Mario Tennis or Mario
Golf or something.

Building that kind of recognition for OpenSource games goes beyond
just one game.  That's why the original authors of at least five
games got together to discuss this stuff.

The Big Picture only works well if we don't try to invent the whole
range of characters every time we write a game.

> So far there isn't any kind of established 'magic-system' so far for
> Tux and friends, so we are still rather free on that topic. What
> should happens if Tux collect herring? Should they act as coins, make
> him invulnurable, let him grow or what?

TuxAQFH, TuxKart and TuxRacer all use the idea that blue (really: silver)
herrings are general 'points' to be scored - like coins in Mario games.
Red Herrings do some kind of generally good magic, Green ones are generally
bad magic and gold ones are super-versions of the silver ones.  I believe
that the freeware version of TuxRacer only used the silver ones - the commercial
version used gold ones and (IIRC) red ones...I'm not sure of that though.

xtux didn't have collectables (as I recall) and the original SuperTux didn't
follow the herring convention AFAIK.

Just as with Mario, you don't need to know *specifically* what a mushroom does,
only that it's not going to kill you and that you should probably go out of
your way to collect it.   So, you don't need to know *specifically* what a
Red Herring does.

>>We have to have *SOMETHING* like that or else it's just random and
>>meaningless.
> 
> Well, Mario doesn't throw around with plumber items either, but
> instead consumes mushrooms and throws around turtles. So stuff can
> actually be rather random, as long as it is consistent in the game
> itself.

No - it doesn't have to be exactly the obvious occupation of the character
(although the early Mario games had more to do with wrenches and green pipes
than later ones) - it just needs to be moderately consistent and to change
only slowly and predictably.

> I don't think that cross-game consistentency is all that important,

I couldn't disagree more.  I think it's fairly crucial to the long
term needs of OpenSource.

Anyway - in the interests of not starting this project with a massive
flamefest, let's try to pick a set of characters.

I think Tux is a given - it *is* "Tux"-kart after all.

Beyond that, I think we can agree to drop Geeko...no problem.

I'm fairly passionate about keeping Gown and BSOD - you don't want
to call her 'Gown' - but since we want everything to be graphical
anyway, her name doesn't appear anywhere and you can call her
whatever you like.

My description of what I'd like BSOD's kart to look like is (I think)
fairly compelling.  My son has been building a 1st cut of it - I'll
post a screenshot to another thread.

What about the others?

My view is that it's pretty pointless to simply make up a character off
the top of our heads (assuming we can do that convincingly) - when there
are so many OpenSourced characters out there already.

Beastie seems to me to have a lot of milage because he's a devil with a
pitchfork - which is interesting graphically - and has all the associations
of fire and lava and stuff - which always looks good in game levels.

I think the Mozilla dinosaur is a good pick too.

I think these would be great characters even if they WEREN'T OpenSource mascots,
the fact that they *are* is just a little icing on the cake.

What would everyone else like to see?

---------------------------- 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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