Skidding Improvements / Additions

[Alayan]

- Three skidding stages (maybe yellow, red, purple)

Like Asher said, this is already planned for the next release, the code for it has existed for over 2 years now.

- Being able to jump straight by pressing the skid button without steering
- Being able to jump over gum and small patches of off-road

I have no intention of changing the visual skid jump into a physical jump.

It would come with plenty of unpleasant side effects (no grip, no acceleration, etc. during the jump for example), and dodging a gum at the last moment by jumping over it would significantly reduce the role of gums.

Off-road has an activation time, it doesn't reduce the top speed instantly, so for a brief incursion there shouldn't be much time loss (specifics depend on track design). Giving some ability to jump over small off-road patch would be fighting against track designers. If a track author wants to make small incursions on off-road worthwhile, there are already tools for that.

- No delay when skidding into the opposite direction than before, even after getting a skid-bonus

The delay is a core element of how drifting works in STK. During drifting, there is an offset between the visual kart rotation and the direction the kart is going, when a skid starts they diverge and when a skid ends the direction the kart is going aligns itself back with the visual rotation. You cannot start skidding again until the kart rotation and direction are back to being aligned.

From a gameplay perspective, there is a lot of properties (skid timings, kart turning radiuses, etc.) that are tuned with the current delay in mind so that would throw them out-of-whack, and in the end drifting is very good in STK and I don't see the benefit in making it even better.

- Higher steering angles award the skid bonus sooner

This has already been discussed in the past, we will not do this.

Such a system would:

• Slow down straight lines and light curves,
  
• Make it much more difficult to get an intuition for the drift timings,
  
• Reduce the value of anticipation and positioning. With a timing based-system, you have incentives to try to start the drift as early as possible and end it as late as possible to get a higher drift time and collect a higher boost level (until you hit the highest one of course). Of course with an angle-based system you still have tricks to change your initial orientation, but I believe it has less depth.
  

I don't dispute that an angle-based system has some advantages and merits, but I don't think it would improve STK, and I think it's fine for STK to do some things its own way.

The whole purpose of skidding is to help with curves. Despite this, with the current (STK 1.5) mechanics a player faced with a perfectly straight path will be continuously skidding in wide arcs for the speed boost granted by the skid bonus. In my humble opinion, a control design in which the optimal way of moving is making additional meaningless movements is a bad design, just like Quake's strafe-jumping. On the other hand, making the skid bonus favor high steering angles would mitigate its abuse. Unsurprisingly, that's also the solution adopted by STK's main competitor.

The core purpose of skidding is to make gameplay more dynamic, by requiring additional inputs from the players and requiring some of their focus for positioning and timing. Just to help with curves, there would be no need to have a skid speed boost at all, the skid hop alone would be entirely sufficient.

Even if you increase the base speed by 50% (and engine power to match), and fly around tracks quite faster than you ever would in normal STK, the game still has less depth.

If you want to talk logic, there is simply no justification outside of gameplay for drifting giving any speed-boost in the first place, curve or no curve.

Mario Kart is aimed at a very casual audience and they determined that the skill gap between "snaking" and non-"snaking" players in Mario Kart DS was too high, and essentially killed it for that reason. For SuperTuxKart, while we also want to make changes to improve the enjoyment of casual players, we are not so concerned about good use of the game mechanics creating skill gaps. Also, unlike Mario Kart DS, continuous drifting in STK doesn't destroy your fingers as you just need to keep a button pressed, instead of quickly alternating between two buttons all the time.

Mario Kart, by the way, rewards with speed boost pressing a button while jumping from a ramp, making it faster to go over a jump ramp than just straight on the ground. If you take away the gameplay context, from the realistic perspective that tells you that turning on straight lines is a meaningless movement, shouldn't going onto a ramp to do an extra jump also be called a meaningless movement?