Re: [TuxKart-devel] Answering to steve barker and about the tuxkart and supertuxkart merge..

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

Coz - wrote:

> Maybe I misread, maybe you did and forgot, maybe someone else sayd so 
> and I tought it was you XD It was just that I tought it would be a nice 
> way of separating, one who has more driving related features(for example 
> different ways of taking a curve or small speed boosts while being 
> behind a driver, something that would not be wise in a kart game where 
> the other karts probably have rear weapons coz it makes you an easier 
> target, I don't mean to make any of the games being better than the 
> other in the end).

The original Tuxkart has both weapons and speedup/slowdown collectables.

It doesn't really seem likely that I'd be talking about taking things
out of the original game does it?

> I just picked supertuxkart coz I tought that you might work on tuxkart, 
> not that I wouldn't be interested in tuxkart but prolly supertuxkart 
> would collect more dust, and I don't want to see the GOTM effort, even 
> if it wasn't something very productive, go to waste.

The original Tuxkart is only about 7,000 lines of code - I wrote it
over about one or two weekends and built additional tracks as I felt
like it.

If I had an urge to do something major with it at this stage, I'd
probably just start over - so it's unlikely that I'll do much more
than fix bugs and maintain portability and such.

It's possible (since I'm now leading the Nintendo DS Linux porting
effort) that TuxKart will make an appearance on the DS.

>> Neither SuperTuxKart nor TuxKart project have at the moment anybody
>> activly working on them and there is really no good reason why they
>> shouldn't join back into one sooner or later.
> 
> Oh. And a big Oh this one is XD
> I like the 'there is really no good reason why they shouldn't join back 
> into one sooner or later' part.

No reason if someone is prepared to do a lot of work to make that happen.

> Now I wonder what I should really do to get the project back at how it 
> was supposed to be in the first place.. either try to implement the 
> things of supertuxkart in tuxkart, or to fix the bugs in supertuxkart? 
> O.o Suggestions?

Well, the major problem I have with the mods that were done to TuxKart
was that it made the thing really hard for me to maintain.  (And notice
that whilst I don't plan major improvements to TuxKart - I *do* actively
maintain it).

The original TuxKart relied only on the PLIB library.  That made maintenance
very easy.  If PLIB changes then *maybe* I have to upgrade TuxKart  (but since
PLIB is one of my other projects - that's an easy thing).

You don't write a moderately successful game and say "Well, that's done" - you
have to deal with between several - and dozens of emails per week from people
who have some stupid problem or other with it.   That support can easily eat
100% of your spare time - so programming 'defensively' to make installation
as simple as it can possibly be is a driving force behind game design that you
won't appreciate until you've been slashdotted!

The new version depends on at least one or two other libraries too.  It
doesn't *need* to - people just gave up on using the PLIB facilities largely
because they didn't understand them...but also because PLIB doesn't implement
full-screen rendering under all OS's (although that could have been fixed).

That drastically increases the difficulty of maintaining TuxKart and would also
cause a large spike in the number of people emailing me to complain that
it doesn't compile on their machines (typically because one or more libraries
either isn't installed, isn't installed in the right place, or with the right
header files, or is of some horribly outdated version).  Helping those people
can become a phenomenal burden and limiting the number of packages my games
depend on is something I'm quite fanatical about.  That's why I wrote and
maintain PLIB - it's "one stop shopping".

Some of the new track designs are OK - others are either too many polygons
or are ill-structured - I'm not sure which and I don't have the time to
track down and/or fix the problems.  The new kart designs are OK - although
they aren't what I would have chosen to do.

All of the new GUI stuff is way more complex than it needs to be - I'd
be strongly inclined to simply delete all of it - it adds nothing.

The one single thing that TuxKart *REALLY* needed, it didn't get - and that
was better AI and Kart-handling physics.

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