Open Alayan-stk-2 opened 4 years ago
Hello, I see that there's a lot of things ongoing under the hood. ;) This track and also the Black Forest track are resigned. Are there other tracks also planned for changes? Will the current status of these tracks somewhere be "conserved"? I.e., will it be possible to still use the old (current) versions locally? If not, will the new versions ask for higher gfx performance? It would be sad to not be able playing these with the kids on older but still decent hardware. Sorry, if this is not the right place to ask. Should I then rather ask in the FreeGameDev forum?
Anyway, I admire you people for what you are doing for the STK community. Thank you so much, and all the best for you. Cheers! 👍😀
Black Forest isn't going to change much for 2.0 (hopefully some poor textures will be fixed, though). It's our reference track when it comes to complexity and quality, and making sure that new or updated tracks aren't more demanding on hardware to get decent FPS is one of our goals. The new versions will be more demanding than the old ones.
However, most current STK tracks are far from that demanding, and also far from looking anywhere as good or being as interesting to drive.
Improving or replacing many old tracks so as to improve the baseline of graphics quality and gameplay quality is important to keep making the game better. We have a basic renderer available to give playable framerates on crappy integrated graphics and mobile graphics, but we can't indefinitely hold back quality improvements to cater to those.
The current versions of the track (in the future, old versions) should remain available as addons.
Improving the overall performance of the engine so that the same quality/complexity gives higher performance is another long-term goal, but it's nothing easy.
Thank you. I do not know if Amazon's Fire TV, Android TV, or IGPs like the 610 fall under the category "crappy", but I know that many families cannot afford platforms with dedicated high-end gfx cards. Just my 2 Ct. 😉
This track has a long story of redesigns. About 10 years ago, the route was completely redone along with visual improvements from "make eyes bleed" to "low quality". Then a few years back, samuncle did a graphical overhaul with much better lighting and somewhat better models and texturing.
== Route ==
This track's route is really challenging, which is good when it comes to allowing comebacks and making skill matter. But it's frankly unfriendly to newbies, and while its difficult character should not be erased, some adjustments are needed.
The beginning is fine, a curve into an almost-straight.
=== Item positions ===
== Modelling ==
Looking at real mine pictures is helpful to gather ideas
=== High-level ===
=== Medium-level ===
=== Low level ===
== Shading == Once again, I've no real advice on this topic.
== Textures ==
== Audio ==