Re: [TuxKart-devel] Re: Tuxkart-devel digest, Vol 1 #36 - 8 msgs

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

Ricardo Cruz wrote:
>  I don't agree with this.
>  Why not making it like any other Karts game? Each characters has its level of 
> difficulty.

They don't *all* work that way.  MarioKart'64 has an 'engine size' selection
(50cc, 100cc, 150cc IIRC) - what this changes is the game difficulty - in
a number of subtle ways...however, all of the characters are present in all
of those 'difficulty' levels.

As I recall, the Crash Bandicoot kart game has difficulty too (I'll have to
dust off our aging Playstation to find out).

Anyway - this is our game - and we get to choose how to do it.

The problem with each character having a hard-wired difficulty level is that
we'd have to make a LOT more characters.  If you want 'easy' 'medium' and
'hard', you'd need (at a minimum) four characters at each level otherwise
the beginner doesn't have four easy characters to race with - and the
experienced guy doesn't have four difficult characters to choose from.

That would force us to build at least 12 characters - but even having done
that, we still gave the player very little choice about who to race at
any given level of challenge.

If we put 'difficulty' factors into the game in other ways that don't
require us to change the Kart graphics each time - then there can be
more characters available at each stage (although we might want to make
some of them 'unlockable' so you have to work in order to play them).

We can change the abilities of the karts at different levels by changing
some constants in the code - speed, accelleration, cornering ability, etc.
We can also (in principle) change the skill level in the AI to do that.

This isn't unreasonable - after all, our human player's abilities
improve with practice - why shouldn't our game characters get better as
time goes on?

I strongly suspect that it's going to be hard to make even 12 character/kart
models that look good...so as a purely practical matter, I think difficulty
has to lie outside of character selection.

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