ToDo

Below is a list of possible ideas (including long-term, pie-in-the-sky ones). For an overview of the main planned features, please look at the Milestones page. If you want to work on any of these items, please contact us, so that we don't have several people working on the same thing.

This page is also not updated as often as Milestones is, so some stuff from Milestones may be missing here.

Finally, also check our tracker, it contains many enhancement request tickets.

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 :)

1 Programming

Programming

General

Add more challenges, make sure that challenges are getting more difficult (e.g. don't start with a difficult challenge), and lock the more difficult to drive tracks (so that a beginner doesn't start with a very difficult track and gets frustrated). Note: this task does not need any programming skills, challenges are defined in simple text files, that can be edited with any editor. --Hiker 03:00, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Add tests, e.g. it could be tested if the 'fall through track' bug is indeed fixed

Add a small message in the main menu screen that describes STK's open source nature and copyright.

Game play

High scores should be shared between different users on a machine, e.g. /var/games
- There are some problems with this approach (e.g. access to highscore files must be locked), so it's not as trivial as only changing the location of the highscore files.

Add a tutorial. Ideally that would be implemented as a kind of very basic challenge sequence. Challenges could support a somewhat longer introduction page (perhaps highlighting some details, or giving a hint), and this page could be used to introduce new features the players should be using. E.g.: use skidding at least three times or so).

Save challenges results in highscore lists. People could win different medals (or trophies), depending on how well they are doing. This would need an improved challenge menu, since it can currently only display a very limited number of challenges.

Further tweak and add collectibles

Save a GP (since some GPs can be quite long, so you might want to continue the next day). Should we prevent cheating (i.e. people might safe, and run the next track over and over till they win)?

Graphics

Support more eye candy.
- Light effects
- Normal maps
Performance options too, like LOD or billboards

Physics

Tweak skidmarks

Make the characters have different characteristics.
- Suggestions for this are already in, but a lot of playtesting is needed once we have the new physics up and running. --Hiker 19:52, 20 November 2007 (PST)
- Additionally, the AI would have to be aware of the differences between the karts as well.

Sound/Music

Per-kart sounds : support for them is coded, but not enabled because we don't have good sounds for the various karts

Multiplayer

Add Networked Multiplayer
- LAN support was already in STK, but does not work anymore. At this stage we have no intention of maintaining the LAN only version, and instead focusing on the WAN version. Going from LAN to WAN is not trivial!

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

Track Editor

Currently, [blender http://www.blender.org] is used to create the tracks. It would be nice to have at least a simple 2d interface which would allow people to design the track, perhaps supply a height map or so. While we currently have no plans of writing a track editor (since we have barely enough time for STK :) ), we would welcome anybody starting to work on this! If you are interested, please contact us, so that we can discuss the design.
- There is a separate track editor package on http://sourceforge.net/projects/stked/ . The current svn data of the track editor will be removed from STK once stked is up and running. Note that this editor was for now never released since the original developers are not around anymore, and we can't support the editor. Hopefully the stand-alone project will make this a success.

3D Visual Art

Add more karts and/or improve existing ones
- Depending on performance impact: we might add a 'high quality' option in the menu, so that people with a lower end computer can use the lower quality karts.
Add more tracks and/or improve existing ones

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, ...).

Automatic Updating

That would be a nice, 'professional' feature to have.

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, ...).

Someone on the forum suggested a game mode where there is a "leader" that drops goodies and baddies; and the goal would be to catch as many goodies while avoiding the baddies

More battle modes

Suggested on the mailing list : In Mario Kart Double Dash there's a mode called "Bomb Blast". The thing that i like about this is that when you blow someone else up, if you don't have full health, one point of health will go from them to you. If you have full health the point of health dissappears. This allows for a much more interesting game as a person in a really bad situation (i.e. one tire left) could rise to the top by blowing others up. The game also lasts longer because of this. Another mode which is fun if DD is "Shine Theif" In it there's a shine sprite which all the karts battle for. There's also a timer. When the timer reaches 0 the game ends. Every time the shine sprite is gotten by another kart (if you blow up the kart with the sprite you get it) the timer goes gets reset, but each time it gets less and less. At the end of the round the game gets very intense and is a lot of fun. Obviously a shine sprite wouldn't be used in stk but an alarm clock or a balloon could do nicely.

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)

User ideas

Ideas from the now locked Game design ideas page.

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