Re: [tuxracer-devel] Course precisions

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

Jasmin Patry wrote:

> > and i can say that there are good performances during the course (nearly
> > as a normal  (smaller) course) but it takes a lot of time to load and
> > have the 3d-preview.
> 
> *nod* Unfortunately, I don't think there's very much I can do about that.

Well, for the load time, possibly nothing can be done (well, you
could optimise - or perhaps do some of the work off-line) - but for
the previews the game could create snapshots of the course previews
as PNG's or something and display those instead of the fully rendered
versions.  You could also render them at smaller size so you can see
all of the courses (or at least - say - nine of them at a time) and
pick them like that.

This would have one interesting side-effect - which is that the
course designer could hide parts of the course that are supposed
to be a suprise by simply painting out the "suprise" section.

The thing TuxRacer *urgently* needs IMHO is a goal to beat - something
as simple as a 'par' time stored in the level's config file with code
to prevent you choosing level 'N' until you've beaten the par time for
level N-1.  That would be enough to make the program cross the boundary
from 'cool demo' to 'playable game'.

It would then be necessary to grade the existing levels according
to difficulty so things start off easy and get progressively harder.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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