Re: [TuxKart-devel] Some crude Kart sketches

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

Ingo Ruhnke wrote:
> Steve Baker <sjb...@ai...> writes:
> 
> 
>>The karts are all tending to look very similar - I really think they
>>need to be more wildly different.
> 
> They already do look quite different from behind, once the characters
> and karts are colored it shouldn't be any problem to figure out who is
> who.

Try looking at these when they are ten to twenty times smaller than they
are in the screen shots you have now - that's more like they'll look when
they are farther ahead of you.

> Beside that I want to keep them look all kart-like, I don't want
> the MarioKart DoubleDash look where some looked more an 'agricultural
> vehicle' then a gokart.

Certainly I didn't like the agricultural vehicle look - but I strongly
feel the need for more extremes of variety...that uniform look is one
of the problems with the existing game - something I really hoped the
GoTM effort would be able to fix.

This ISN'T supposed to be a realistic go kart game - it's supposed to
be wild - crazy - cartoonish.  The karts need to reflect that.

The (incredibly ancient) TV cartoon "Whacky Races" is the look I wanted
to aim for.

We need to really push-the-envelope in thinking of radical and weird
Karts or this won't have the 'punch' it needs.

> One problem they currently have is that they already do differ to much
> in size, dino is huge, tux drives a kart, eviltux more something that
> looks like a F1 vehicle.

Yeah - that's a good idea from the 'differentiating them' perspective,
but it'll make life harder for collision detection and AI because a
narrow gap that a smaller Kart could get through would be impassible
by a much larger one.  That screws up the idea of being able to make
a single 'map' that shows the overall direction people should go...
unless we make all gaps large enough to accomodate all karts - but
then when the player is driving a smaller kart, we cannot make small
gaps that are challenging to get through.

There are also some 'ikky' problems when it comes to the spacing of
some collectables that would turn nasty if we had karts that are much
larger than the 'typical' size.

Overall, I'd hope we could keep them all within maybe +/- 10% of a
standard size.

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