Style Guidelines

Note that these are only guidelines, not hard rules. They are not yet fully respected in the main package, they are more an overview of what we would like to have as a general style in a 1.0 release.
If you want your contribution to be part of a certain package (like the main-package or a special add-on/mod), discuss your idea with the community before putting too much effort in it, and send screenshots on a regular basis, so styling issues can be discussed before being spread over the whole model.
If anyway possible, use blender for your creations and send us the .blend-files together with the exported models. Blender offers you the best tools and esp. for tracks, there is just no way to get around blender, yet. Most of our current artists use Blender and can therefor be a better help, if they get the data as a .blend file. Further note, that .blend files can really help us to improve and care for your models in the future.
If often best to make it clear if your track is complete or if you still plan to improve it. We will show interest if we think about adding your contribution to our official packages. We will try to give feedback in that case and afterwards wait till you tell your project is finished before we do another review.

General (for karts, tracks, etc.)

The SuperTuxKart environment is generally meant to be light and/or colorful and/or comic-like.
This does not mean you cannot do darker stuff, but they should remain caricatural in a way that makes them not too grim
Do not overdo the light mood though ;) Avoid putting too much different colors toghether on the same screen in a way that hurts the eye.

The textures may be realistic, it is the mood and theme we want to be light.
Avoid candy-colored, plastic-colored or plain-color textures
Avoid using textures where you can easily see the tiling/repetitions. Avoid easy-to-spot repeating patterns.

Try to keep an appropriate balance between high-poly and low-poly. For instance there could be a style problem if you put a high-poly sphere next to a plain cube. Objects that are always seen from far should not waste vertices either.
STK needs to run on a wide range of computers, and thus we need to avoid very high-poly stuff. Try avoiding using huge amounts of mesh - especially where you can't see the difference, or in places the user is not likely to (or plain can't) see.

For the main-package: Avoid using too much city/industry elements, instead explore lots of different, exotic and even unexpected worlds. Prefer known and coherant universes/worlds (fictive or not) over a bunch of colourful non-sense (i.e., use consistent themes referring to real-world places, stories, past civilizations, etc. use your imagination to come up with something original yet coherant :)

Avoid very (and even moderately) steep slopes, as physics will have trouble with them

Avoid facades that look awful as soon as a kart leaves the road.
Re-use textures from the main texture directory (or from existing tracks, though tell us which ones!) instead of creating new ones when possible. This helps keep the size of the game down.
Keep the style consistent through-out the whole track
Use sky planes/maps as much as possible. Currently with plib we need to fake it with mesh, though in irrLicht it should be possible to do real ones with moving clouds and all.
Integrate your track in the environment. No flying tracks unless they make a lot of sense. You better discuss your arguments before starting to work on such a track if you want it integrated in any of our packages.

About checkpoints (not yet implemented but to come) : Checkpoints should part of the theme and environment of the track. So while they are obvious and visible, they are integrated. So they might be just a repetitive element that is visible from a distance. If the track is futuristic or a city-track, it might be an actual sign, maybe a road-sign. on a track in the woods, desert or something similar, it might be big stones on both sides of the street. Also, the checkpoints should only be placed at points where they actually stop big shortcuts and not repetitive on certain distances

For the main-package: karts should relate to a certain open-source mascot.
- Ideas : ~~Gnu~~, Pidgin bird, SUSE chameleon, BSD beastie, firefox, thunderbird, mono/blender monkey, KDE dragon, Ogre, windowmaker panda, Perl camel, ~~PHP elephant~~, snort pig, workrave sheep, XFCE mouse, python, adium duck, tortoiseCVS/SVN, cairo insect, mantis insect, etc...
Their style should be cartoonish and not to serious or futuristic.
Avoid plain colors and plastic-looking karts
Don't add outlines (those will probably be a feature in the engine one day)
Keep roughly the same size as the Tux kart (to be friendly with the physics engine. especially avoid making it thin and tall)

Licensing considerations : since SuperTuxKart is included in many linux distributions with strict license requirements (e.g. Debian), we cannot accept tracks with unclear licensing terms (or textures not clearly licensed). Our license of choice is Creative-Commons-By-SA 3+. Note that "I asked the guy and he said 'yeah you can use it'" is not a valid license (yup, happened)

The visual quality SuperTuxKart has steadily improved from version to version. We thus have to say that unfortunately we can't accept everyone's contributions. Keeping the visual side improving is important to achieve a high-quality game. Therefore, in general only contributions from people with decent blender experience will go in. If you are new to blender, you are free (and even welcome) to try learning by making tracks; however it must be said right from the beginning that unless you learn very fast or have natural talent, your [first?] tracks will most likely not go in main -- possibly not even add-ons. Note, however, that there is nothing preventing you from releasing your own add-ons on the forums, to share with others.

Finally, a final note that, while not really related to art of style, does apply : some humility does help ;) e.g. please don't repeatedly post comments like "when will my track be added into the main package?" or so. This helps keep a better mood in the community in general ;) If your track is high-quality, we will surely see it and show interest.