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

[Ingo R. <gr...@gm...>]

Steve Baker <sjb...@ai...> writes:

> 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?

Different characters give you a clean start, you simply arn't bound by
older stuff. Sure one can always reuse old stuff when its good, but
being forced to reuse old stuff just because its old isn't really a
good start.

> 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.

There is nothing wrong with reusing stuff, I just want to reduce it to
the good parts and throw everything else away.

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

I don't think there is a understanding in peoples mind at this point,
just because some game used some item back in the past for something
doesn't mean that some noticable amount of people still remembers
that.

> Why change a spinning herring to a spinning coin or a pink elephant
> or something? 

Because I am hell of a lot confused by having red-herrings as bonus,
green-herrings as bad things and hell-I-can't-remember-which-color-
herrings as speedups. They all just look kind of the same when driving
with high speed.

> It's change for change's sake.

Yes, in parts that is true, but thats the point. The game has to fit
together as a whole, one can't do that if one keeps all the old stuff
around. To make it all fit together one has to start from scratch and
then only bring back old stuff that was good and useable. One needs a
good reason to *keep* something old, not one to change it.

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

Well, if its subtle enough than it might be ok, however so far I have
mostly seen only the very damn obvious kind MS bashing in linux games,
thats why I better avoid it all together in the first place.

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

I just don't consider this 'Big Picture' finished or even mature
enough to call parts of it fixed, thats all.

> 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. 

As said above I find using herring for a whole number of different
things a pretty bad idea. Sure I could now start and create different
looking herrings and such, but I easily get a far better result by
starting from scratch and not using herring for each and everything.
Just for the record, herring shouldn't be used in Tuxkart as Coin,
since other drivers might not be penguins, so something generic could
be better.

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

SuperTux had a golden herring for invulnurability, got replaced with a
'classic' star.

> 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.

I need to know that Green Herring will basically halt me and I have to
play quite a lot to know what Blue Herring is about, not using Herring
would avoid this confusion completly.

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

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

Speaking about logos and such, we could reuse them for the basic
design of the Karts, not sure if its such a good idea, but it might
work and be much less abvious then using them as characters. So for
Geeko it would be something like this (just green, four wheels and in
Kart shape):

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/luxrota-uv7.jpg

> 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.

I am not even sure if Penny should be a penguin, after all I have a
hard time imagine a female penguin that doesn't just look like Tux +
bow in the non-existing hair.

> 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.

In SuperTux we have this little IceBlock as BSOD replacement:

 * http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/iceblock.gif

And while, since BSOD is just the most obvious Microsoft bashing, I
really would prefer to get rid of it.

> What about the others?

Nolok, which is the bad guy in SuperTux:

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/nolok.png

As replacement for the butterfly-Tux we could use this little guy:

http://super-tux.sourceforge.net/milestone1/images/flyingsnow.png

Some other (not yet used) SuperTux characters:

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/eviltux.png
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/yeti2.jpg

> 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.

The problem is that there aren't any characters, just logos and stuff.
And well, just throwing them all together won't give a very good mix.

> 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.

Might be useable.

> I think the Mozilla dinosaur is a good pick too.

Would need a serious redesigned, a dragon like creature would be good,
but I wouldn't call it Mozilla, Mozilla itself is just too huge.

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