Suggestions regarding Frontend customisations

[kiwi]

While working on the Hood Frontend, I found some limitations regarding the customisation possibilities RVGL is offering. It would be cool if some of them could be addressed in one of the next RVGL updates.

1) Make it possible, to define the car drop position at the car selection

At the moment, the car will be dropped depending on the coordinates defined for the CAMPOS ID-3. The car drop itself can't be defined. Very much fiddeling-around is necessary, so the car drop is working as intended by the creator. If there would be a seperate section where the position (X Y Z coordinates) + the rotation (0.00 to 1.00 - like at the STARTROT) could be defined, this would be really really nice.

2) Make it possible, to define the box drop position at the car selection

Same as in (1), it's not possible to define the exact position where the carbox from the selected car will be located, before the car "drop out" this box. It seems it will be placed at a positon which is a mixture between CAMPOS ID-2 and CAMPOS ID-3. (?) I was not able to find this out. I was also not able to reproduce a position of the box, like it is in the Default Frontend. Here, the box will be placed very near to the floor - the car will rather dropped then placed on the floor. In the Hood Frontend, I was only able to drop the car pretty high above the location, where the car will land.

3) Make it possible, to define the trophy ceremony drop positions

At the moment, only the camera positions for the trophy ceremony can be adjusted, but not the car drop positions. But not in a way like it is for the car selection screen, where the car will drop at a position related to the CAMPOS ID-3. Instead the car drops for place 1, place 2, place 3, and "loose"-place are hardcoded and fixed for the Default Frontend positions. (I worked-around this, by placing the winners-podium at the exact same coordinates as in the Default Frontend inside the .w-file.) Also the firework at the trophy ceremony will take place at hardcoded coordinates.

4) Make it possible, to define the size of the track preview pictures

At the moment, the "frame" where the track preview picture is at the track selection screen, have a fixed size. And this size is very big. If this size could be adjusted, it would be possible to make for example a track selection inside an old computer screen, instead of a big TV screen. The track preview picture itself will be placed by adding the bigscreen.m object, by the way.

5) Make it possible, to define win and loose songs

At the moment, there will be played the song as defined in MUSIC, at the trophy ceremony. No special song can be defined. There is also a bug related to this: After the trophy ceremony, when again inside the frontend, the default frontend track will be played (or maybe the track, which is defined in REDBOOK?).

6) Make it possible, to use a skybox

At the moment, the carbox textures will be used for the skybox. (I worked around this, by modelling a skybox inside the .w-file).

That's all for now.

[kiwi]

After working on my Simple Frontends (Blue/Red) the last two days, I would like to request some more features for Frontend customization.

7) Remember last chosen car

At the moment, the chosen car will be placed on Frontend CAMPOS ID 3. The car will stay there not all the time. When finishing a Singleplayer race for example, the car is gone from this spot. It would be cool, if RVGL would remember the car and place it on this spot again, after returning to the frontend.

8) Remember last chosen car after restarting RVGL

Same as above, but it would be ultra-cool, if the last chosen car would also be remembered and placed on CAMPOS ID3 after restarting RVGL. The last chosen car will already be remembered: At the carbox screen, it it selected - it would be just a matter of placing it.

9) Remove car-place bug

If you hit enter to fast at the car selection, the car won't be placed on CAMPOS ID3. Can this be corrected?

[607]

9) Remove car-place bug

If you hit enter to fast at the car selection, the car won't be placed on CAMPOS ID3. Can this be corrected?

What makes you think this is a bug? In the original Re-Volt, it is also the case that the car only gets taken out of the box if you look at the box for some time, and stays in it (at least on the frontend) if you just carry on.
If your suggestions 7 through 9 would be implemented non-optionally together, they would make it completely impossible to not have a car there, which is actually the default condition in the original game (and to me, that makes complete sense: first pick a box, then look at the car more closely if you want).

[kiwi]

For me it's a bug, cause as soon you choose a car, it always should be taken out of the box. No matter how fast you enter the next screen. How else should you be able to drive the car otherwise (if it's still in the box). Having the last car outside the box also make sense to me.

For sure this feature request could also be implemented as an optional thing (for example via a parameter in the frontends ini file), so the original behaviour keeps untouched for the default frontend.

[VaidX47]

9) Remove car-place bug

If you hit enter to fast at the car selection, the car won't be placed on CAMPOS ID3. Can this be corrected?

What makes you think this is a bug?

I could say it's a bug as well, since the game still does full box placement animation without interruptions, but never actually spawns any car on the ground. You could also argue and just say the animation should be cancelled/reversed right after advancing to the next screen, so how it was originally intended, I can't know.

[Huki]

9) Remove car-place bug

If you hit enter to fast at the car selection, the car won't be placed on CAMPOS ID3. Can this be corrected?

What makes you think this is a bug?

I could say it's a bug as well, since the game still does full box placement animation without interruptions, but never actually spawns any car on the ground. You could also argue and just say the animation should be cancelled/reversed right after advancing to the next screen, so how it was originally intended, I can't know.

This is intentional. It was done this way to avoid needlessly loading the car after the screen was skipped. So the box goes back up without placing the car on the floor. Funny enough, the original versions didn't remove any previous car that was there on the floor either. In v1.2 this was changed so at least the previous car gets removed when the box comes down.

With that said, @Kiwi: your suggestions 7-9 could be worth adding as a frontend.txt option. It won't be for the upcoming release but I'll look into it shortly after. I'll also look into 1-6.

[607]

Thanks, Huki!
Interesting, I forgot or didn't know that behaviour was slightly different before 1.2.
I guess if this is implemented, Kiwi's suggestions could be the default. I'm probably the odd one out again as far as preference goes, here.

[kiwi]

I just wanted to start working on the winter edition of the Hood Frontend, and I realised that texture animations are not supported for frontends at the moment. My plan was to add falling snow by the use of texture animations.

So I want to add this to my list of suggestions as well:

10) Support for texture animations in custom frontends