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

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

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

> Pretty much every game has highly ad-hoc things. MarioKart uses
> Cubes with '?' on them for good things and cubes with an upside-down
> '?' for bad things. The confusion-until-the-last-minute thing is
> absolutely crucial for game play. Ditto with herring colours.

Well, that red is good and green is bad isn't obvious, traffic lights
actually do it reverse. Beside that collecting herring and getting
'random item' is also not intuitive, a ?-box however is (they contain
something, herring don't). So herring should if at all only be used as
coin-like things, bonuses should just be stored in boxes like in
Mario. I would remove the evil-?-blocks completly as standard map
items and make them placeable by other players only.

> I don't see how choosing an ice cube over a computer monitor changes
> how things 'hang together'.

It removes the pointless microsoft bashing element.

> That's a ludicrous position. Change absolutely everything except
> what we can't change? I don't know *ANY* commercial games of the
> 'cute' genre that do that.

Commercial games in general are the successors of good or even great
games, thats something that isn't true for Open Source games, which
are often just half finished, unplayable or worse. And starting from a
half-finished not even really playable game under the premise to keep
most stuff is just not moving you very must away from that
half-finished thing and you will just end up with another incomplete
looking patchwork.

> BSOD is on the very skinnymost end of that curve...I couldn't
> imagine a more subtle dig at one of the most truly evil companys on
> the planet.

BSOD is rather close to having Clippy driving around in a kart, its
just Microsoft-bashing put down into shape, not something I want to
have as a playable character or else we could start with creating
Mr-Kernel-Oops and Mr-XFree-just-locked-up.

> It's just an icon.

Herring is not just an icon, its already closly related to Tux being a
penguin, too closly already in case there are other non-penguin
characters that should also consume that item.

> What does a toadstool need coins for?

Coin is a rather generic item.

> Banana's are not in fact part of the natural diet of a gorilla.

In Donkeykong games its used as coin-like item, in MarioKart it works
only to make other Karts slip.

> Herrings only swim in the Northern Hemisphere but Penguins only live
> south of the equator.
>
> Who cares?  It's an icon.

It either has to be generic enough so that one doesn't care about why
its there (coin) or it has to be close enough related to what its
meant to be (Herring->Penguin eating it). If BSOD starts eating
herring things start looking wrong.

>> SuperTux had a golden herring for invulnurability, got replaced
>> with a 'classic' star.
>
> ...and that helped the game how exactly?

It replaced the 'heck what should this ugly item do' with something
more familiar and better regonizable.

>> In SuperTux we have this little IceBlock as BSOD replacement: *
>> http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/iceblock.gif
>
> Yeah - it's OK - but it's going to look silly in a lava-themed level.

Could get a refrigerator on his back or something to keep him cool.

>> And while, since BSOD is just the most obvious Microsoft bashing, I
>> really would prefer to get rid of it.
> Sorry - I just can't agree with you on this one.
>
> So what's the solution to such impasses? Put both in there is my
> recommendation.

Make it a bonus-character that you have to unlock or whatever.

>> As replacement for the butterfly-Tux we could use this little guy:
>> http://super-tux.sourceforge.net/milestone1/images/flyingsnow.png
>
> Change for change's sake again...why change?

Aehm, because butterfly-Tux is one of the ugliest things ever. It
looks like big fat Tux with some wings stuck on him, well, it *is* big
fat Tux with some wings stuck on him, so no wonder that it looks that
way. I just can't stand characters that where only done the way there
are due to technical limitaions and to easy modeling (why create
something new, when one can reuse Tux over and over again), nothing
wrong with doing it that back then, but I see little reason to keep it
that way.

> What is the reason that snow is so good and a butterfly Tux is so
> bad? I can give the reasons why butterfly Tux is good:
>
> The butterfly Tux was originally an angel-tux...your guardian angel
> coming to help you...but then we decided to make it
> religion-neutral, hence the butterfly - a sign of peace of sorts.

I don't care much about what it was meant to be, if it looks like
big-fat Tux with wings, it just has to be dropped.

>> Some other (not yet used) SuperTux characters:
>> http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/eviltux.png
>> http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/yeti2.jpg
>
> So your basic view is that any character you designed is good - and
> anything the original 'consortium' of designers put together is bad?

No, my work isn't necesarrily good, but since most of the original
consortium evolves around character reuse with little changes,
word-plays (Gown), logo-recycling, Microsoft bashing (BSOD) or geek
stuff, yep, I consider it all rather bad and ugly.

> Those are OK - I like the evilTux - but the Yeti is a DISASTER
> because he has fur and doing good fur is a BIG no-no for anything
> but the VERY latest of hardware...and even then, you have to want it
> pretty badly to take the performance hit for it.

It doesn't need to have real 3d-fur, after all its most of the time
only seen from quite a bit behind. The fur should be fakable without
too much throuble with some simple texture mapping.

> The idea of a dinoasur in the abstract is surely a good idea -
> painting it red and calling it Mozilla doesn't make much difference
> to much - and some people will doubtless like the reference.

And some other people would surly hate the reference. I don't mind it
being a dino, I don't mind it being red, but calling it Mozilla just
spoils the fun, Mozilla is a browser, not a game character the
reference just doesn't make 'click', there is just not much that this
red-dino-game character would have in common with some piece of
browser software.

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