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Philo

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Query. If I have two rabbit sensors, are there in effect, two rabbits? Since they're tied to the sensor itself, if I have a sensor fore and aft, could I use the difference in position to control drift thrusters, to swing around corners? 

Something like turn so the ships faces the fore sensor's position, and kicks sideways if the aft sensor turns away from the rabbit that's a bit further behind?

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1 hour ago, Markus said:

Yes, there are as as many rabbits as sensors. Each sensor gets a new rabbit. We plan to show the rabbit to make it more easily understood :) 

Maybe make it a sensor sitting, to avoid clutter when design is done? (draw a tracer to the target? ) 

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I don't see a logistical problem, and I would default it to 'off'. But when we have more sensor targets, like hoppers or enemies or whatnot, it would have to be considered to make sure it makes sense for that kind of target. 

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So . . . we're gonna need at least one race course whose track crosses itself over and over again, and has separate routes for both drones, so they have to cross paths over and over, with the attendant collision risks.

Also, I'm missing the course hazards.

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2 hours ago, Alpino_WILL_STEAL_ oats! said:

looks like the updates almost done!

Don’t get your hopes up. We only saw a brief snippet of a race. We don’t know how many other modes the devs want, or how many bugs there are, or if they want to add any special fancy features to mapmaking, or if they are want to keep improving the [whatever they do to generate the courses], or pretty much anything else. We have no idea when the update will come out. Don’t make any assumptions, and even if the devs give a date, they might find something that they want to improve before then and postpone it.

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My understanding from their previous comments is that the course is NOT procedurally generated, and that they didn't have plans for such - that may have changed with the spline work they talked about, though. 

Hey devs - you've said the rabbit is tied to the speed of the sensor.  What if there's a bunch of lateral movement for some reason?  Does the Rabbit pull away, or did you mean it's tied to your progress through the course?

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For the time being, there is no plan for procedural tracks (we have to finish everything else before that). After that we haven't decided yet.

The rabbit stays on the track, regardless of where you are. If you are very far from the spline, I assume it takes the nearest point of the spline of where you currently are and then takes a point a bit further down the spline. Arno did the logic, but I assume it works somehow like that. So when you, for some reason go backwards, the rabbit will also go back a bit, but it will always stay in front of the directional sensor in the forward track direction. There are as many rabbits as there are directional sensors :) 

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I was more concerned with whether the rabbit would move forward because you moved sideways - but you answered that to my satisfaction, it sounds like the rabbit can't outrun you, and that's all I was concerned about.

With the spline design, procedural tracks look more plausible; throw up a semi-ordered array of track points for the spline path, pile up borders paralleling the path, randomly vary width, throw in some other semi-random hijinks.

I recognize that it's not something you're planning right now.  But when you're satisfied with race mechanics and are ready to see what else you can do with it, I think all the tools for procedural tracks are right there.

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If tracks aren’t procedurally generated, then there should be a track editor (training only, custom tracks don’t work in tournaments). If the tracks do end up being procedurally generated, then there should be a “show advanced options” button in training where you can edit parameters of the track generator like length, width, curviness, and any other aspects that could be customizable.

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Both very good ideas, procedural tracks and a track editor. @Roger is a huge fan of a editor :) There are a few problems with both ideas, though :/ 

Procedural tracks: We could make interesting tracks (I think), but racing those is probably most fun if you either have a highscore you can compare yourself to (against human players) or at least have a tricky timelimit which you would have to hit to win. The highscores are not possible currently with the system we use (Steam API limit) and the second is a very difficult problem. We probably can generate a interesting track, but how long a interesting time would be is very difficult to solve. There are simple ways (like calculating length&curves and use a magic number), but that won't solve the problem, as that value is rarely a fun timelimit. We could try to use an AI to race the track and then use that as a guide, but the possibility-space of how you can make a drone is so big, that the reference value would be not worth anything.

Track editor: Would generally be very interesting but it takes quite a while to create a stable and intuitive editor. And then even if you could share them via Steam Workshop, we still could not add highscores to those, because we use the Steam API (same limit as above). So you could make tracks, but it would be hard to compare yourself against other players, so the fun is not as big as it could be, and spending months on making a good editor is probably not worth it.

These are some thoughts why we don't make procedural tracks or track editor at the time being. If one of the variables changes, like, using a different system for highscores/matchmaking, the decision might change. That's our ideas/arguments for the time being :) (giving a bit of insight of how we evaluate things internally)

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31 minutes ago, Markus said:

Procedural tracks: We could make interesting tracks (I think), but racing those is probably most fun if you either have a highscore you can compare yourself to (against human players) or at least have a tricky timelimit which you would have to hit to win.

2

How about using the number of the month, plus the number 1-10, as a seed for procedural tracks?  That way you'd have a set of ten tracks that persist for a month to gather high scores. (Would you remember all high scores?  Could you also generate "You did better than x% of users' best scores?  Even beating 50% can be rewarding for players that aren't really completionists.)

Better yet, use the number of days since an arbitrary past date, multiply by 3 and divide by 12 as a seed, (and add one for to the result for each subsequent track,) so that instead of 10 tracks every thirty days, you get one new track every 3 days.  

The editor strikes me as really challenging.  A lot of work's involved in design and coding; the UI, the internal framework.  And if tracks are shared, making sure they have a scoring mechanic as well as doing sanity checks to make sure they don't have inherent flaws, like a rabbit path that hits a wall.

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We also had that idea with the months/days (for daily challenges) for a possible system. Might work but not yet sure. We have to evaluate that at a later time.

More players than 2 is something we can't yet decide, because it would need reworked collision layers in the engine. Nothing yet decided about that :) But we want to add more new game modes further down the line :) 

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  • 3 weeks later...

So guys, I know you've all been busy, but we're a feisty lot with a fickle attention span.  Might we get some more information on what the current implementations are looking like? Understanding that what we see today might be different than what you decide to work on tomorrow, it often gives us some insight to offer some ideas and feedback, and . . . and . . . and I wanna see.  I wanna.

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