@Derpy Ah, I didn't immediately understand how this works.
That does seem like another increase in investment unless one already has it.
Overall, I'm not the target audience (I am generally averse to anything controller-oriented, and not big on racing specifically), so it's hard for me to judge whether this is a worthwhile project.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica interesting concepts, but it is still an one-shot toy you will use only for one game, until the initial novelty fades. Then you will return to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe until they don't make a new one.
like the VR kit... cool concepts... but basically has 2 games that will get old very quickly.
@Derpy That's the suspicion. I'm sure I played hundreds of hours of competitive League of Legends; I'm not sure whether players are interested in playing a game like this for hundreds of hours.
@Derpy Yeah, limiting, especially for someone living in a flat with carpets in most rooms, and the only smooth surface being the kitchen and two corridors that everyone uses all the time.
Let's think about it: you are a kid, spend 10 minutes thinking of a nice race course, set the toy down and start playing. Then you do time attack for a while and then you quit. Your mom tells you you have to put the race track away.
Do you see the problem?
the time attack.... is tied to that specific track you made.
If you place the first gates in hard contact with an immovable feature of the flat, you can theoretically place the other three accurately enough based on feedback from the software.
For a given value of accurately enough, of course.
look, technically you could have the game asking you to place gate 1, then the game drives the car to gate 2, asks you to put down the gate there and so on
Can't say I foresee they actually implementing something like that....
> Time Trials: Players create a course and then race to set the fastest time possible – competing either against their own personal best, or handing the controller to another player for an exciting Time Trials head-to-head that requires only one Nintendo Switch system and one Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit game.
@Derpy Once you already have a track-model and all the functionality required for a game, it's not a huge feat to move and rotate it to fit the new anchors. The hard part is placing anchors after the initial one using meatbag limbs instead of robotic ones.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica the actual game sites description looks almost like there is no memory - your time attack data seem to be implied to exist only during one game session until you move the gates.
@Derpy Well that's the easiest cop-out. But again, so long as one can accept a human-typical degree of fuzziness of gate placement, it's not impossible to store track data and realign it when a track is reassembled.
@Derpy In faact, if you use something like Bezier Points for storing track shape data, you can probably tolerate . . . oh what would it be, maybe 5%? (this is eyeballed) . . . error in gate placement relative to a major piece of the track size.
Of course, expect risk of artefacts in case of overly complex shapes being rebuilt! (Like some of the ones in the trailer.)
Tomorrow you want to play Track A a little more, you build it and go thru the tedious "track rebuild" process with the game telling you where the gates should be placed (a little left, no, too much left... a little on the right... left again... now spin 23° clockwise...)... then you realize you actually want to play track B... build that again.....
and since you mentioned it, no, first time I ran thru it the course was in a place, but I no longer remember when it was. Now, if the whole course fitted in (for example) a 2m*2m meter square, I can place the first gate somewhere and if the game remembers the actual shape, it can autodrive the car to show me were the gates would be placed....
But if it is only the first gate, then maybe originally the course turned left under the sofa, but now the gate has moved and that turn heads straight into a wall.
Hmm. In fact, if an autodrive function already exists, I think I can find a way to use it to facilitate reasonably precise gate placement.
Obviously the game won't remember the placement of your sofa.
Which means any memorised tracks should not rely on obstacles.
Overall, this seems like a doable and moderately interesting game design challenge, one that I would probably find enjoyable as a job task. Playing the game proper still seems like not my cup of tea.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica what I mean is that if you move the track route to a different place in the house because you don't remember where you played before, while the game could remember the route it is not guaranteed that the same route is still doable from a different starting point.
Which also means that if your house changes you can lose the ability to play old tracks because you no longer can rebuild them with the new furniture placement.
Oops, that came off ambiguous. 'Oh no' as in 'oh, we are extremely unlikely to be adjacent'.
@Derpy Another thought occurred about the autodriving: friction coefficient of floors and/or tyres may change across time, so cars really should be equipped with precise ways of measuring both position and facing, preferably those that don't rely on visuals.
@Derpy There's a difference between 'speed with which the car tries to operate' and 'speed at which it actually moves across the track'. I'm not sure how big the discrepancy may be, but it's a thing worth checking when writing an autopilot.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica yep, but that means it is at least doable. If now are running on adhesive paper and the car moves slower, the course should be scaled down....
Again, it's a mess. I think they time trial will just be an one-time thing.
Compete with friends for a while and then all data is discarded.
Them saving old track info and offer a way to rebuild it seems less and less likely.
BTW, another thing....
Can be good or bad depending on how you see it.
Since you decide the course design.... I assume that even the grand-prix mode can be made more easy or more hard depending on how you place the gates?
I mean, you can make every course just a circle for no challenge. Story mode courses are basically just "effects" added over the course - or at least that's is what the trailer shows.
@Derpy Oh, definitely doable unless there are special restrictions of some sort.
Again, it's not actually that difficult to write some checks on the amount of curvature in a Bezier path, but of course such restrictions may outright disqualify some room layouts from being suitable for grand prix tracks.
GameXplain - usually a trustworthy source - claims to be shown a demo of the game.
In the video they say "but be aware that your time and ghost data are only as good for as you retain that track design because once you change things up they will be gone for good"
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica so... seems we have an answer. Time Trials is an one time thing that reset as soon as you move the gate. A tad useless imho.
@Derpy Oh well, the easiest cop-out. At least I found the 'game' of thinking how to implement recoverable tracks an amusing enough exercise and discussion.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I assumed it used the old 95% rule
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica not at all. If you look at how you put down the "path" the game obviously memorizes it. So it should at least do some basic enforcing....
I mean, I can live without a perfect replica of the 95% rule but... just checking gate order seems a little ... odd at best.
@Derpy I can't immediately think of a way to both allow people to make mistakes and drift off the track and enforce small self-loops like the ones that have been shown in the video, at the same time. But maybe I'm missing something.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica look at the video about the 95% rule they had in the console games, could probably be adapted.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica But the video seems to imply that both paths I added in the picture above are accepted, while I would expect only the green one is (red does not cover 95% of the distance between the two gates)
@Derpy Paths like these seem likely to result in a microloop taking less than 5% of the whole path sooner or later with the way users tend to do stuff.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica I oversimplified the thing, watch the video, don't take my word on it. Furthermore, I am probably also forgetting some parts of the checkpoint check system.
Basically, the Mario Kart games have checks in place so that if by some bug/glitch/unplanned game physics abuse you are able to skip too much of the course between two hidden checkpoints, the lap is invalidated.
I would expect that the live version has something similar in place, especially because they already studied the problem in more detail than us talking here now.
That would be my bare-minimum expectation at least.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica yes, but after you put down the gates, you have to do a "paint lap" run to paint the route you plan to take. During that run the car must be tracking down the course in some way. Speed and distance traveled maybe? Anyway, it knows where the path is. If you notice during the augmented gameplay, the route is visible.
And the game controlled cars follow the route.
So the game knows what track you should be using.
So, the game knows where you are on the track. It has to, otherwise it couldn't draw the augumented reality elements on your Switch display (the item boxes for example)
@Derpy True, but how far from the track can a car diverge in the microloop? If the allowed divergence towards the centre of the microloop is equal or greater than the microloop radius, the looping becomes skippable.
@Derpy At this point we're probably beyond all reasonable doubt that this is more of a nice gimmick that is of little value for 'standard' competitive racing experience.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica Well, that the game was a gimmick.. probably clear from the start. I mean, I understand the novelty of playing in your house but.... would you compare the fun of whatever course you can do in your house with the average Mario Kart course?
And before you say that you can do obstacles, bridges and such...
I thought about it too, but I am not confident I want to risk a 100$ car falling from a cardboard bridge I made between the table and the sofa.
Wouldn't be comfortable to create an aerial track.
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica you know, the first time I saw the game trailer, for a second I thought the game was actually Mario Kart with Micro Machines circuits - until they showed the actual toy car I was thinking it was just a Mario Kart game with house themed courses.
