Ring Racers Suggestions

SeventhSentinel

SeventhSentinel

In charge of way less than you might think
Administrator
Sonic Team Junior
Kart Krew™️
Welcome to the Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers Suggestions thread. Before you post, there are a few things you should know:

1. Try searching to see if your suggestion has been posted before and see if anything comes up. You don't want to beat a dead horse, after all.
2. Please keep discussion to a minimum. If something is going to involve a detailed and long discussion longer than 30-40 posts, please post in a new thread in Ring Racers Discussion.
3. Keep discussion of other's ideas civil. You knew this already, though.

Remember that there is absolutely no guarantee that Kart Krew Dev will use anything posted in here.
 
I think there should be an option to turn off stuff like hutstun, or at least let us adjust the values so we can do stuff like 26 second hitstun
 
Tyron said:
We'd like to keep the GitLab to technical issues and outright mistakes if possible. Subjective stuff should be discussed on the forums.
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I want to get the point across that a suggestion that can be created on the forum may already be on GitLab. and yeah, I agree with you!
 
yfyfyfyfyfy said:
I want to get the point across that a suggestion that can be created on the forum may already be on GitLab. and yeah, I agree with you!
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Could you please move all of your suggestions from Gitlab to here? We'd really appreciate if you closed all of your suggestions and reposted them here instead.

Having separation between technical bugs and suggestions is important for making bug fixing easier for programmers. As well, Kart Krew members who are interested in looking at suggestions will be looking here, not the gitlab.
 
Migrating my Git stuff here:

Remove IRONMAN requirement for "L" Signposts​

Regardless of whether or not this privilege should exclusive to weird gimmick characters, Heavy Magician is the only character in the vanilla cast who has art for this, and the hardcode already has the ability to display fallback graphics for sprite2 sequences that don't exist on the current character.

All the code's already there, make SPR2_SIGL available to other characters. Creators may have ideas for other gimmicks that are worthy of "L" signposts, or they might just do it because they want to make more silly art. Either way, don't need to force creators to write Lua for this.
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Allow separate accel/speed/handling/weight stat modifiers in Lua​

For SRB2Kart I had developed an addon called "Chaos Drives", which allowed racers to collect Chaos Drives to affect one of four stats. In Remix Mode and Perfect Chaos Mode, these stats were supposed to yield the same bonus as setting the racer's speed/weight directly. A character with 9/9/9/9 would simultaneously benefit from maximum acceleration, maximum speed, maximum weight, and maximum handling for a highly performant vehicle.
However, this required strange multiplication that would yield different results based on load order, as the majority of other mods would affect speed additively, not multiplicatively. If I used additive bonuses instead, this would introduce an issue where characters who were supposed to have identical bonuses (e.g. 9/9/9/9) would experience different benefits from the same speed-boosting items.
[...]
Thus, I would like to change the way that racer stats are used by requesting some new fields in the player structure: additive modifiers for the two main stats and their inverse counterparts.
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Noticing that suggestions are being closed in the repo, figured I'd move them here:

I have a rather non-standard way of controlling the game, with right bumper acting as acceleration, B for brake, and D-Pad Down for both look back and aim back.
Rather expectedly, this control scheme messes up with menu navigation. The worst example being D-Pad Down, now acting as both "go back a page" and "move down the menu" in some menu pages.

I believe that separating game controls from menu controls, and being able to bind these separately, would be a good way to prevent this situation from happening.
The command addfolder is an immense quality of life addition for quickly testing things.
It allows the user to easily drop in or modify files via external editors without having to reimport them through a WAD editor, as well as conveniently using Git to create a repo on the project folder and performing version control upon it.

It does have its issues, like lacking the manual sorting that a proper archive would permit, but its advantages are pretty good for modding in general.
While tricks not executing as soon as a turn/look button is pressed is welcome for some, I feel like the game wasn't originally designed with this control scheme in mind, and it feels weird having to release acceleration before holding it again just to perform a trick.

I'm thinking that there could be an accessibilty option to cycle through different behaviors for it. I'm thinking of the following:
  • Immediate: Trick is executed as soon as a direction is pressed. This used to be the trick behavior in 2.1 and earlier.
  • While accelerating: Trick can only be executed if acceleration is being held.
  • While not accelerating: The opposite of the previous option.
  • Latched: Trick can only be executed if acceleration is being held, but it can't be the same held button prior to the trick. This is the default behavior since 2.2.

Personally, since acceleration is used to move forwards, I feel it is significantly more intuitive for the common player to have to release it to be able to turn in the air. `While accelerating` sounds like a more natural mechanic to me, being the middle ground between what it used to be and what it is now.

The While not accelerating one was not exactly thought out in full. I figured that since some accesibility options translate into player flags, there would be one remaining permutation available in a potential 2-bit setting. So, hey, here's a fourth.
Thinking about it a bit further, it's just as intuitive as the opposite version. It might prevent players from accidentally executing a trick due to holding acceleration just as with the current scheme, but this one just requires releasing acceleration to perform a trick instead of releasing and pressing it again.


There's also a separate problem regarding accesibility options and storage thereof - Adding more accesibility options is now troublesome due to there being no more available bits for player flags! I believe that accesibility flags should exist in their own player field instead of being smuggled in pflags. But that's something for a different issue.
Currently, accesibility settings are parsed then sent over the net as player flags. This is fine, but has the caveat of filling up the player flags field with unnecessary flags.
I believe that a better solution would be to make a new field for them, something like accflags, for easy access to said flags and for a more intuitive way of figuring out where accesibility related content is.
Whenever the game wants to make you focus on a particular game control, it displays a button graphic associated with said control. This, however, ends being misleading.
I don't use a Saturn gamepad (lol), so I don't have buttons A to C then X to Z. Not to mention that because you can remap your controls, the game making mention of said controls can become obsolete if you happen to shuffle them around.

Optimally, I would love to see the game use the appropiate bound button graphic instead of the one associated to the control.
This works well, however the graphics may not quite correspond to what's available in the physical device.

An approach would be using different graphic sets for the buttons, but I can see it not being an easy task considering not everyone uses the same joysticks, There are bajillions of controllers in the wild, and creating custom button graphics for every possibility is overwhelming and frankly, pretty annoying, but creating a few sets of buttons for the common ones (Dualshock, XBox, I think that's about it lol) should be doable.

A different approach to this is to allow players to display their own custom graphics - This is modding grounds, of course, but it can allow mod makers to release button packs for whatever weird ass controller is out there, or allow a more self sufficient player to make their own graphics for their own use.

In case that there's just no appropiate button graphic, or the player wants to get rid of graphics for some weird reason, then simply naming the control with its raw name is not a bad idea. It can make some text a bit too long with stuff like "Try R BUMPER!" or slightly less intuitive like "Try X BUTTON", not to mention tutorial dialogue, but it's better than no control indication at all.


This is what I've had on my head while typing this out:

In here, button names are minimized to just "PAD n" or "PAD AXIS n" as probably represented by the OS, and it works. It's short and descriptive enough to fit in places that prompt a button. Obviously a normal user would not be able to parse which button is button 21, but... at least it's not misleading, lol.
There are also graphics attached to a particular control. It's a good way to go about it, provided the joystick being used isn't mega trash and decides that a particular button should have a different button code than standard.
 
It'd be fun if you could select what characters could appear in a Grand Prix in singleplayer.
For example, say you REALLY don't like Mighty for some reason. Just turn him off! Then you'll have every other character in the game, just not Mighty.

reasoning for asking this is kind of spoilery so ermmm

I love how many different characters are in this game, but I'm starting to unlock more and more non-Sonic characters and sometimes it'd just be nice to have classic characters only LOL
 
crystallinegazer said:
It'd be fun if you could select what characters could appear in a Grand Prix in singleplayer.
For example, say you REALLY don't like Mighty for some reason. Just turn him off! Then you'll have every other character in the game, just not Mighty.

reasoning for asking this is kind of spoilery so ermmm

I love how many different characters are in this game, but I'm starting to unlock more and more non-Sonic characters and sometimes it'd just be nice to have classic characters only LOL
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Wonder if this could work the other way, hiding all but 1 skin making all the racers just 2 skin. I know you can do it with cheats but it'd be cool to have a Tails only race no items in vanilla
 
Ashnal said:
Could you please move all of your suggestions from Gitlab to here? We'd really appreciate if you closed all of your suggestions and reposted them here instead.

Having separation between technical bugs and suggestions is important for making bug fixing easier for programmers. As well, Kart Krew members who are interested in looking at suggestions will be looking here, not the gitlab.
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I think the developers have already considered and rejected or accepted the suggestions they needed.

Anyway, here's (almost) the whole list:
the following suggestion were received negatively:
the following suggestion is closed, but I think it still has a place:
 
amperbee said:
Whenever the game wants to make you focus on a particular game control, it displays a button graphic associated with said control. This, however, ends being misleading.
I don't use a Saturn gamepad (lol), so I don't have buttons A to C then X to Z. Not to mention that because you can remap your controls, the game making mention of said controls can become obsolete if you happen to shuffle them around.

Optimally, I would love to see the game use the appropiate bound button graphic instead of the one associated to the control.
This works well, however the graphics may not quite correspond to what's available in the physical device.

An approach would be using different graphic sets for the buttons, but I can see it not being an easy task considering not everyone uses the same joysticks, There are bajillions of controllers in the wild, and creating custom button graphics for every possibility is overwhelming and frankly, pretty annoying, but creating a few sets of buttons for the common ones (Dualshock, XBox, I think that's about it lol) should be doable.

A different approach to this is to allow players to display their own custom graphics - This is modding grounds, of course, but it can allow mod makers to release button packs for whatever weird ass controller is out there, or allow a more self sufficient player to make their own graphics for their own use.

In case that there's just no appropiate button graphic, or the player wants to get rid of graphics for some weird reason, then simply naming the control with its raw name is not a bad idea. It can make some text a bit too long with stuff like "Try R BUMPER!" or slightly less intuitive like "Try X BUTTON", not to mention tutorial dialogue, but it's better than no control indication at all.


This is what I've had on my head while typing this out:
View attachment 120466
In here, button names are minimized to just "PAD n" or "PAD AXIS n" as probably represented by the OS, and it works. It's short and descriptive enough to fit in places that prompt a button. Obviously a normal user would not be able to parse which button is button 21, but... at least it's not misleading, lol.
There are also graphics attached to a particular control. It's a good way to go about it, provided the joystick being used isn't mega trash and decides that a particular button should have a different button code than standard.
Click to expand...
I completely agree with this. I used a Saturn-esque pad for launch and while I love the controller itself, the bindings I wanted to change as I wanted something a bit more comfy to me. But then I was being thrown off by the menu prompts not lining up, as well as the Input Display (I use an 8BitDo M30, Ring Racers' shows it as a Saturn 3D Pad and not a standard Saturn pad). Other games I've played offer displays for other popular controllers, usually Xbox, Playstation and Switch. There's mods to add these into the menu but their "default" layouts also don't match mine with a face button being used for accel when I use the right trigger (and also mark the game modified locking out Online play).
So, I would love to be able to assign each action a button so I can get things nicely matched up as best as possible, even if the only pad is a Saturn 3D one! Like, swapping X & B for Brake on the Saturn pad.

As for suggestions of my own, I would only want one change done to the Rival system: being the Rival not having their doubled Ring boost either while close to & in front of you, or at all.
I don't mind rubberbanding AI, like some of my favorite racing games of all time have seriously insane rubberband like Black Box's Need for Speed games. But I almost never see them rubberband out in front so blatantly. The Ring boost is something the Rival loves to do up front and/or while passing and that really takes me out of the experience, often causing a lost round. The best rubberband is the type that goes unnoticed either until after you look at the replay or never at all like with modern racing games, and adjusting just the Ring boost would go a long way in hiding it while racing.

Also, what happened to .vgm file support, or chiptune files in general? It was something that was much loved myself for being able to use high quality rips (not that kind) of Genesis titles and whatnot that also were very low on space use. The new Volume setting in the MUSICDEF file would have been genuinely perfect for these files as well as I can't edit them and boost the volume on more quiet rips.
Was there a major bug with keeping these files supported in Ring Racers? If it could be reimplimented one day it would hopefully be loved by mappers and those making music packs, since size was getting really big toward the end of the Kart days' addons with music being the biggest contributor to it. If not, understandable since tools are available to convert them to .ogg for use in RR, but I would love to hear the history behind the cut. (And the cut to midi files in Kart as well, now I think of it...)
 
oh, and a couple more suggestions that I wanted to post, but didn't because... I don't play DRRR anymore. this may not be relevant for 2.3 (I haven't played this version but judging by the changelog it is still relevant).

  • in grand prix, Gear and CPU lvl of bots should be configured separately. I hated playing in gear 2 or less because the game felt too slow, but even in 3 the game became too difficult (for me, casual player) to just enjoy. More customization for the players is always good
  • despite all the updates, I think bots still cheat too much. let them cheat on master difficulty, because that's what it's made for.
  • ability to disable the rivals system. I like one character and play only for him, but oh my God, I’m so tired of big as an opponent who is always faster than me (this refers to this issue, but I was told that I've a skill issue, so yes, sorry). every race feels the same. also, if by some miracle there is no contest for him, blaze will replace him and all this will continue
 
So long as Match Race swaps are the best way to unlock colors, there really should be some unambiguous "You got 'em all!" audiovisual feedback, as you won't actually see the challenge grid until you finish going through maps.

Alternatively, make the remaining spraypaints collectable without hiding them after 100, since there is feedback for when you collect a spraycan but don't actually unlock anything.
 
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Please allow hosts to use any kind of room modifier that is currently behind cheats. I do not want force people into spectator when they change their skin, which can be modified using restrictskinchange. This works fine in Kart and is even disabled by default, but in RingRacers it became enabled by default AND locked behind cheats. I get the locking of cheats in singleplayer, but I am the host. Let me do whatever I want without completely putting my server in "cheats" restrictskinchange is not a cheat, nor does it alter the way the game is being played. Its just making the game more inconvenience for no reason. In the 5 years of playing Kart I have never seen any host abuse cvars such as these to the point they have to be locked behind cheats, so this is just limiting the host for absolutely no reason. Again I understand its needed for Singleplayer though.
 
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