Ideas for enhancements, features and QoL improvements

[scf32]

Now that this brilliant project has reached a playable stage and is virtually at parity with the original game, I thought I would humbly suggest a few optional enhancements that could improve player experience while keeping the basic essence and atmosphere of the game intact. I'm hoping others will want to add their own suggestions, but also urge people to keep them realistic bearing in mind that the contributors to the project have given and are continuing to give up their free time to work on it.

To kick off, here are a few of mine:

• Death mode difficulty as a selectable option without using a cheat code, as this is how a lot of hardcore players like to play :)
• Alternative to the CD music (i.e., .ogg files) so that e.g., Neil Biggin's recent remasters of the soundtrack can be used. It would also allow custom remixes or entirely different music to be chosen.
• Support for higher fidelity sound files, particularly the speech. I wonder whether the same basic sound system could be retained? Could the 11kHz PCM in the .RAW files be replaced with 22kHz or higher? Assuming no higher quality source recordings exist, then maybe an audio superresolution tool could do the job, and alleviate some of the distortion.
• Higher in-game resolutions (might be a big ask due to the amount of hardcoding present)
• The track editor is a fantastic tool as well. Is there a fundamental limit on texture resolution or could this be lifted now that the source code is laid bare? It would be nice if we had the option to create our own higher res textures to make use of a higher game res.

[Zizin13]

1. I will add a ROLLER.INI file soon that will have some user-configurable options, this could be done here or perhaps through the installer/launcher deevus is working on
2. Working on being able to play the CD music ripped from the CD by deevus's installer next, should be able to easily replace them with whatever you want once that is done
3. The speech files can be replaced but are currently hard-coded to their original quality, would have to make this user editable in the INI file or something
4. Higher resolution software rendering would not be difficult, I think all that really needs to be done is to ensure the world -> screen coord transforms account for any resolution as well as placing and scaling the UI elements correctly. That said, what I would really like is to implement hardware accelerated graphics, easily toggleable for the people who prefer the look of the software rendering of course. This will definitely happen.
5. Currently the textures are hard-coded to be a list of 64x64 tiles. Anything can be done now that we have the source code of course. So long as the textures are still a list of perfectly square tiles it wouldn't be too big of a project. Modern UV mapping would be a very big project though.

I have some other improvements I would like to make too such as

1. Unlimited draw distance
2. Unlocked framerate
3. The ability to define controls for more than just two single-stick two-button controllers
4. A way to load and play user-made tracks without having to replace the original tracks

Also, we do not quite have parity with the DOS version just yet. There is no network play! This is extremely high priority.

[docfo4r]

Adding to this topic, one thing that always annoyed me a bit is the fact that after a jump you will always land in the center piece of the road if it's separated by walls, even though you clearly jump to the shoulders. In some instances this is very disorienting, like here:

https://youtu.be/WIwGxlyGlC4

To me it looks like a bug, can't see how this is intentional. Do you magicians think this can be fixed, maybe with another toggle from the debug menu?

[Zizin13]

I tried to improve this, checkbox is in ` debug menu as "Improved jump landing". Let me know what you think. It should also behave as the original game when unchecked.

[schlangz]

I tried to improve this, checkbox is in ` debug menu as "Improved jump landing". Let me know what you think. It should also behave as the original game when unchecked.

the new option causes huge issues on tracks with ramps and twisters, after landing you magically teleport back to before the jump so you jump again, depending on how and where you land. you can easily reproduce this on a track like "the crab" (see screenshots)

[scf32]

I tried to improve this, checkbox is in ` debug menu as "Improved jump landing". Let me know what you think. It should also behave as the original game when unchecked.

the new option causes huge issues on tracks with ramps and twisters, after landing you magically teleport back to before the jump so you jump again, depending on how and where you land. you can easily reproduce this on a track like "the crab" (see screenshots)

Confirmed, easily reproducible on The Crab. I haven't been able to trigger anything similar on the Tsunami Twister or Flyby tracks, so it's perhaps those stunt sections are handled differently (mid-air collisions seem to work fine so far for me).

[schlangz]

It's not only "improved jump landing", the glitch on the crab also happens with "no collision limit" checked

[Zizin13]

I believe it wasn't the jump landing at all but the no collision limit causing the teleporting, should be fixed in the next nightly.