Car cards!

[dreadnaut]

Because there are never enough ideas mid-flight! It's all because I re-discovered this old post by Duplode:

Thanks God, I don't have to make that "Vehicle data" section.

I wonder about which data to include. For the purposes I have in mind it would be nice to summarize the key features in a way that wouldn't take half a screen per car. For instance, one unoriginal idea would be a NFS-style bar chart with acceleration, handling and so on, plus a few icons for things like PG...

The first thought was of course "that would be cool!", because in my mind I was looking at actual printed cards, like collectable ones, with the Stunts cars!

Now, actually printing them might be going too far, but let's say we had the space of a playing card, back and front, how would you showcase a car? What would the bars on the chart be? Let's say there's space for five. Maximum speed? Performance on different terrains? Magic-carpet-ness? Which icons do we need? Anti-, flexible-, powergear?

How do you see these cards? how about your Paint skills?

[Cas]

Oh!  I remember when I was at primary school, some card sets were popular called "Súper Triunfo". This brand included card sets such as "planes", "helicopters", "motorbikes" and "cars". Other brands would make similar cards with super-hero themes and the sort. The way you would play is that the cards were shuffled and each player would get the same amount. You would look at the front card in your deck and pick one of the the attributes, say "max speed", because you thought that particular vehicle was specially good at that. Then you'd call "Speed: 200". The other kids would check the speed attribute in their cards and the one who had the greatest one would take all cards, put them at the end of his deck and continue with his own front card until only one player with cards remained

I'd go for top speed, acceleration (or time from zero to top speed on a straight paved road), number of gears, length (of the car), grip (which unit, not sure) and breaks (also not sure which unit). This, if it were for cards like the ones I described. Now, if it's just to have the most important information, booleans and discrete attributes such as power-gear, creator (or original), etc., would be more significant than some of the ones I listed before.

In the wiki, I tried to create pages for some cars and I realised I didn't know how to add or remove attributes from templates or to make some cars have some attributes that other do not. If I understood templates better, I'd be glad to help in creating such pages.

[Overdrijf]

This could be a cool idea.

A bit of a problem is which stats make sense. What what we use for instance to give a grip on handling?
We do have some numbers on the wiki that might be a good start. As an example the stat block from the kart:

Max horsepower (est.):   90HP
Transmission:   6-speed
0-60mph:   2.9s
0-100mph:   5.6s
Half mile:   16.70s
Flat track top speed:   154mph
Real top speed :   156mph

If every number is superimposed over some sort of bar graph where the maximum length of the bar is the best value available (or probably even better the best value available on an original car, so we don't have to redo stuff when someone releases a new cheat car), that would give both the relevant precise number and a feeling of how it compares to the rest of the stunts world. I'm not sure what the minimum length of the bar would be for things like 0-60 seconds. Maybe calibrate it such that the slowest original car sit around 10% of the bar filled, or higher if that looks better? And just roll with a linear relation from there on?

On top of that we could do things like (ingame) car length. Not sure if that adds a lot. (EDIT: Although it's a good indicator of magic carpet-ness and jump length, so I changed my mind, add car length.) A good stat for grip would definitely be nice. My own attempts to come up with something for the purpose of car development have failed, the relation between the corner grip stat and the car length is complex. If we do come up with a good number the addition of a second bar for terrain grip (sand road) would be an easy addition. We could ditch up to two of the acceleration stats to make room if needed.

Edit: After reading Cas' post again: brakes are a pretty simple internal number. Doesn't interact with mass or anything. I'm sure we can figure out a way to transform that into a real world number, maybe with some tests on brake road length at a certain speed for several values of the stat.

I'd also like to get the acceleration curve Stunts renders for every car in there, maybe as part of the picture somehow?

I'm also unsure of how the pictures should look. Plain side view like on Zakstunts? Diagonally from the top-front-left as an action pose, posed with Stressed for high resolution and good details? Or an actual ingame action shot, cool looking but low res?

I have no idea what these cards would ever be used for, but they might look cool. I'll see if I can do a WIP concept this week, to get a handle on how ugly it might look.

[Cas]

It could be high-res from stressed on a high-res background drawn to resemble the track and maybe a gas station behind or something. I like it in presentation pose, like you described

[Overdrijf]

I did some test shopping, this could end up looking kind of cool.

See this as mostly a layout and visual content test. For example: I completely forgot again that I was now in favor of car length when it was time to write some example stats.

Card sized version:

Click here for full detail version, somewhat larger.

I thought it might be nice to have a picture of the real life car on there somewhere, not sure how I feel about that now, it kind of clashes with the style of everything else. I also added the ingame acceleration graph. I added number of gears and type of power gear as symbols. For regular, bug-free and anti-power gear cars the symbol is relatively subdued. The symbol should get bigger if the car has power gear, maybe a star shape with a larger letter (or two) in it, and maybe glow or something. I went with a way to be able to base both bar length and bar color on the stats. The lowest stats are blue, the highest stats pretty reddish. Anything that goes over the best or highest original stat becomes even redder and when high enough runs off the card. As you can see I didn't fill in everything yet, I figured this gave a pretty good idea of my concept for this. (I do notice that the black doesn't stand out enough when not super zoomed in. Maybe a different text color? White or something? Black with a white outline is unreadable on a screen but might work in print?) The color of the borders on this one is based on the color of (the primary paint job of) the car. I didn't have a great idea for the filling in of the main text field, but the lone piece of banked road I used in the action picture looked pretty good there, so I left it in for this test version. There might be a good idea connected to it somehow. Speaking of the picture: I composited it of a Stressed shot of the car and that of a banked road. I manually added detail to the banked road because I couldn't take a large enough screenshot. I also touched up the car a bit in those places where the model is a little rough, some white background was shining through the cracks between a few panels, for instance. The main image of the car does not get bigger than this unless A) I lower the quality or B) I use a bigger screen to make the Stressed screenshots or C) I use a different program for taking the pictures. I went with "bridge size" cards, which are the most common kind at least in Europe and the easiest to get printed if someone were ever to take this all the way. It also seemed quite a good format for something that would have a list of stats on it. "Poker size" is a little wider, tarot size is quite a bit bigger overall. For the font I used what I had open from my last project (Arial Nova Bold). I liked how it looked, and I figured someone else would be a bigger font geek than me and know the perfect Stunts font.

Those are I think most of my thoughts on this for now.




Edit several weeks later: I now think that the stats should be about things like power gear, magic carpets, phazing through objects, stuff like that. If we just do things like top speed they're regular car cards, not Stunts cards. It's going to be a bit of a challenge to find proper ways to quantify these things.

[Cas]

Great work, Overdrijf!  About the real picture of the actual car, only problem would be that some custom cars may have no real counterpart.

Some pictures for you guys to see the cards I was talking about before. I had superhero ones and I had a motorbike set, but not the one in the picture:

[CTG]

As far as I remember, we had a conversation about that in 2012 +/- 2 years. Or maybe Stunts pipsqueak cards. Memories fade away.

Edit: found it!!!

Probably you all know the games with truck / racing car / airplane / etc. cards, competing in HP, top speed, length, weight, whatever. It would be fun to make Stunts pipsqueak cards (number of races, victories, forum messages, WSM participations...)

[dreadnaut]

Wait, was there actually an Ikarus card? Was it a racing bus?