We need to precise to which direction this Sub Game should go...
So I exposed the idea to create a Stk Mod that contains Addons karts and tracks as Standard, now we should discuss whether we could add other stuff in this Mod (modified speeds, Story Mode, ...), or if that Mod should only be a Vanilla Stk + Addons.
Another approach would be just to host a sort of "Addons Snapshot" somewhere and still use normal Stk with these Addons, that could work too. In this case it would still be nice to have Addons separated from the main game. The snapshot should be updated only very rarely, at most as often as new major Stk versions are out.
Also we need to select which Addons we should add in this Leaderboard (and in the Mod if we create one; in this case only Addons in the Mod can be added in the Leaderboard). And which Addons Karts are allowed. You did not add AnimTrack, Andet :p ? And TeamWork Lol Personally I don't really care as I don't play Addons. For the Addons karts I just want Libbie Lol (in another words I don't really care as well). They should just not be broken.
One thing we could do is have a mod where we replace each of the 21 main tracks with an add-on. That would make for an interesting Story Mode. And I think we could save the other mods for another sub-game. And since a lot of the add-on music is either the default music or something from the main game, we could add custom music (from opengameart.org or something) like what I do with the add-ons that I play—you can look at my add-on time trials to see if you like the music or not ;).
And I think it's okay if we allow for additional add-ons that aren't in our mod as ILs. My idea was to keep the modded game separated from the ILs. The ILs would be subject to change as add-ons are updated (because I want there to be a sort of up-to-date leaderboard for add-ons in general), but we would also have full runs of Story Mode to our modded game, which may only be updated once in a while. Would people be fine with this?
So for the mod, we can just choose the 21 best add-ons. For the ILs I am ok with what I put on the leaderboard so far, but if someone wants to time trial a different track we could discuss adding it.
As far as karts though, we can choose a few of the well-made karts to put in the mod. I'm uneasy about accepting add-on karts for ILs though, but if someone thinks they should be allowed then we can argue about it lol.
The idea of replacing the Standard Tracks sounds good, and using cool free music too. I am also Ok with having separate Mods; the idea was just to have one Mod with anything so we could have 2x speed with Addons or so and not just 2x speed with everything else or almost the same but that would also make the Leaderboard very complex with so many possible combinations. In this case this Mod will basically be "Vanilla Stk but with different tracks" which main purpose is to make this Subgame exist. We would make one new release of this Mod when one is out for the official Stk.
If I understood, you think that the ILs here should be independent to the ones in the Mod ("keep the modded game separated from the ILs")? But that would defeat the purpose of it. I think that the list of tracks here should match the one in the Mod for each release, but for additional Addons we can just add them to the Mod as new Standard Tracks without increasing its version (these are just Assets) and at the same time in the Leaderboard. What we should not do is to update Addons during a given Mod version, we should only do this when we make a new release of it to have thing like Green Valley in 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 but not Green Valley A and B in 1.0, B, C and D in 1.1 and D in 1.2 or so. In other words each Mod release will freeze its tracks until the next release.
We don't need to restrict to 21, though that is a good idea to not make that number explode; we might choose 20-30 tracks initially then with time we might add one more Addon once a while...
I don't really know much about Addon Karts but if they are all broken then surely we could stick to Standard only. But there must be some as great as the best tracks no :p ?
Canyon 42 actually was never uploaded due to some site issues, but here is the link: https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=11348&p=83119&hilit=Canyon+42#p83119
Let me know if there's anything I can help with ;).
Maybe we could just include the 26 tracks I have on the leaderboard so far. What tracks have you included so far?
Thank you :D ! Yes, I was going to include exactly these tracks and you will see what replacements I did. Also I will do a bit more than just swap the tracks but you will see :p One exception, I will not add Subsea as I tried it and it is really buggy... Many many random bounces, at least with Kiki (and I saw Hexley Ai bounce as well)... That means that we need to remove it from the Leaderboard as well, I will do it later or you can do it too.
Subsea has one turn that bounces you upward and another turn that sometimes does so, but other than that it's fine. I'm okay with either including it or not, but if we don't include it there are other tracks with bugs that we might want to address.
For example, The Island lets you drive on the water without being respawned. The Shiny Suburbs shortcut is more broken than I think it's supposed to be. There might be other bugs I'm forgetting. I'll check and let you know if you want :).
Lol I am Jesus! I definitively don't mind these kind of bugs. But not the random and annoying ones like in Subsea. We could have one or two tracks with insane skips like the Shiny SubUrbs to have some 0.9.3 stuff in this Mod. Just not more. I will also unpatch the Gate Skip and we can do Story Mode Any% or All Challenges SuperTux will also be unlocked at start as I don't really like the "All Challenges" and "All Challenges SuperTux" separation in the main game.
You will also need to write guides for Addons Lol
Add-On guides should be fun :).
The huge skips have all been fixed though, so are you saying use the older versions of a couple of tracks?
EDIT: Oh I think I know what you mean now. There's still a somewhat big Shiny Suburbs glitch that I didn't remove since it's more-or-less intentional but it's not like a huge lap glitch or anything. It saves about 5 seconds on average. There used to be a much bigger one, but that one is gone. I don't know if Shiny Suburbs would be better to have-you can look at my run and let me know if you think it's worth including lol.
Oh Ok that is even better in this case :D I indeed remember that this track was so broken but thought that it was still the case :p I have to test every track (well 21 of them) anyway in order to set Time Limits in Story Mode
But as we have Tux Tollway maybe we could drop Shiny SubUrbs... I will see later, we need to have enough tracks after all
The Story Mode Canyon42 will be Egg Hunt :D ! But I moved one Egg as it was very annoying to get it due to a too thin passage (so don't run this until I submit the Mod). It is not cool that for the categorizations, we cannot do here something like the Normal/Reverse, but restricted to only some tracks for Egg Hunt (not all tracks have Egg Hunt)
Hmm...Theodore already did a run of Egg hunt. I personally think it's best to leave it where it is. ;)
Also what program did you use to move the egg? Or did you just edit the .xml?
Well Ok, also it turned out to be not that annoying finally, though there is still some luck factor (being blocked while trying to pass the thin passage).
I just edit the Xml, using the TAS tools gives me the coordinates by being at the location I want to put the Egg
Nostalgia and Extreme Dimension should be only 2 Laps... I will definitively set only 2 in Story Mode, now I don't know if you would like that they actually become 2 Laps Tracks as well... Similar for On an Iceberg
(I had originally edited my earlier forum post but I'll post separately so people get a notification.)
Theodore can tell me if there are other ones but generally I think the following could also be changed:
Make Blackhill Mansion, Secret Garden, and Bovine Barnyard 4 laps. Make Green Valley and High in the Sky 3 laps.
Also have you decided what tracks you're going to leave out of Story Mode? And have you decided on music 🙂?
I processed 13 tracks and did not find another with issues so far. Ok, let's do this.
Yeah, I am using most of time music from OpenGameArt with each time something related to the track (like Desert theme for Desert Track Lol), in a few cases I am using music from old Stk or SuperTux
Mod finished! The only track I dropped is Subsea, other were Ok for me. The final battle against Nolok is in Extreme Dimension, he was able to clone himself there!
You might already have seen the 4 GPs, I let you discover what tracks they contain (and run them :D)!
Tracks not appearing as Challenges: Shiny SubUrbs (we have Tux Tollway and Green Hill), Kapman Island Resort (well there are multiple Beach/Island themed tracks, it could have been anything), Voxel Village (I don't really like running this one), and Racetrack (I would actually have put it instead of Secret Garden, but liked to have a direct replacement of Zen Garden)
Demo
More details (in particular about changes) and download https://github.com/Fouks0/stk-code/releases/tag/Addons-1.0a Sorry, I don't use Windows anymore so I cannot help if you have trouble to compile with Windows. In Linux compiling should be straightforward, put the "data" folder next to "src", "lib", etc in the source code, run your binary and Enjoy :D ! Tell me if something is broken!
Now the current tracks are frozen, so if there are Addons updates, we will not apply it to the assets of the Mod. However we can add at any time new tracks. I deleted Subsea Btw, there were only one Run after all, which would become invalid anyway if they were to fix the bouncing bugs, making inclusion in the Mod possible.
I am looking forward to seeing your runs :D !
