Long term ideas
Contents |
Long Term Ideas
This pages collects some nice ideas, which haven't been really discussed, but which we found worthwhile to remember. And most of them would require a significant amount of designing first to get it right. So don;t just start to do a quick hack, instead best option would be to first start discussing this on the email list, and summarising the results and design on a separate wiki page.
If an idea is listed here it does not necessarily mean it will be implemented, we will have some discussion about the features here on the list first. Unless someone just sends us a patch :) (again the warning: please contact us first, so that you are not wasting time by implementing something which someone else is already working on).
Multiple Players on a Network
Allow some players on a network to compete together! Isn't it a good idea??
Online Highscores
This is obviously nice to have, but implementing this might be a bit of an effort: error handling must be good, and we have to make sure that people don't cheat by running a customised version of STK. Most likley, we would use the replay feature: a highscore would be submitted with the replay file so that everybody sees what happened. People could download a highscore run and race against a ghost
Automatic Updating
That would be a nice, 'professional' feature to have.
Adding Package Management
The idea would be that (long term) STK might only come with some tracks, and that additional tracks, music, karts, ... can be downloaded. We would need a package manager to be part of STK, which would keep track of which version of which packages are installed, notify the user of updates of existing packages, new packages etc.
- It would be somewhat difficult to allow separate track, karts, and music packages (e.g. if a music package is installed, we must play this music for certain tracks. So the music should indicate which tracks it should be used for, even if not all of these tracks are installed yet. Similarly, new tracks might refer to music which is part of a separate package). It might be better to have only one kind of package, which would include music and track. While this is less flexible (since the new music wouldn't be used in existing tracks), it might be easier than handling all different combinations
- Of course the user should be able to select music, e.g. a menu should be available were different music can be selected.
Mini Games
While this is already listed on the somewhat optimistic Milestones page, the concept of this is quite different from a normal racing game (e.g. the AI would need to be aware of other goals, ...).
Eye/ear candy
Some eye/ear candy could include:
- voice (e.g. count down, important messages)
- Perhaps a 'fly over' for each track, a voice over could give some kind of commentary about the track (obviously the player must be able to skip this).
- have some nice 'end of race' and/or 'end of grand prix' animation - e.g.:
- a camera might show what the other karts are doing
- highlights of the race might be replayed (nice challenge: how to identify exciting bits of a race)
Support for Profiles
It would be nice if different profiles could be supported. I.e. the user can select a profile at the beginning of STK, and gets all settings, challenge progress, key bindings etc for this profile. This can be useful e.g. to have one profile which has unlocked all challenges, one profile for optimising challenge points, or one for friends, guests, perhaps one for multi-player (different key bindings) ... There is some thinking necessary on where to store the profile:
- either a shared directory (which means that all users having access to that shared area would be able to use all profiles), or
- in $HOME (which means that you can't simply load an existing profile if you are using a different user id).
The current preference is the first approach, though there are some things to be aware of (e.g. prevent different user from using the same profile at the same time, might need file locking, ...).
User ideas
Ideas from the now locked Game design ideas page.