Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-26829117-20170904090146/@comment-5904736-20171017000901

Amrosa wrote: Jackimo1999 wrote: One thing I can see working, and being really popular, is if Firemonkeys added procedurely generated series to the game. Basically, it would work like the exclusive series do now, in that you fully upgrade a car and then unlock a series, except instead of having an "Exclusive Series" category, they could just be incorporated into the car's menu, replacing the upgrades button. These randomly generated series would reward gold upon completion, but there's a catch. Cars must be serviced in order to run. These are the cars at their absolute best, and fame and R$ would be rewarded based on how far ahead of the average car you are, incentivising destroying the AI instead of winning by small margins. Players would also pay an entry fee of R$ to gain access each time they complete it, reducing the ever-increasing problem of the top players having literally too much R$. Because these series would be randomly (more or less) generated, human direction wouldn't be needed, so they could be implented across every car, meaning players can use their favourites instead of Firemonkey's favourites.

So to recap, this system would give players more gold, give them something to do with their mountains of R$, reduce the relative effectiveness of Le Mans farming, allowing players to use their favourite cars to farm gold instead of the most profitable ones, provide a variety of experiences on tracks both new and old, and generally stop the game from getting stale. The only downside is that instead we got the one-time use exclusive series that force players into the same cars they don't want to race, meaning this will probably never be implemented.

Then they would need to change how the AI works, otherwise you will be racing against RaduTan, ZimFrank, Dr. Perriwinkle, and Auralpod very soon in ever single race, and good luck getting podium positions there, especially if the Cup races continually start you dead last on the grid every time.

And another problem is that the series actually do feel like they are randomly thrown together with no thought whatsoever into what makes a good and exciting race. Really fast cars on really slow, short tracks. Really slow cars on the longest tracks with several laps or Elimination events where you can't even get the to first corner without being eliminated. No sense of through-line or cohesion in the story of a series. The Ferrari F14 T ES is just a mishmash of races on every track that the car isn't on in different legend series, definitely not worth the cost of admission for. It's supposed to be a challenge. A way to test youself in your favourite cars. This is endgame content I'm talking about here, when you've exhausted all other options for how to use a given car. As for qualifying, a simple system based on your place in the previous events could work really well, similar to how some real-life and other gaming series use championship position to determine the grid.

As for the 'randomly' generated part, they wouldn't be wholely randomly generated. They would be procedurally generated, meaning it's not just a mish-mash of random events thrown together, but a random mixture of events within a carefully contructed framework.

For example, I've built a prototype of what this would look like for the car you happened to mention, the F14 T. The series is broken down into 20 teirs, across ten tracks. Teir 1 and 2 take place on track 1, tiers 3 and 4 on track 2 and so on. At the end of each odd numbered tier, there is an endurance and at the end of each even numbered tier, there's a cup. These are our main events, and are universal across every tier. These take place on the main, or 'GP' versions of each track.

The rest of the events, aside from our main events, are a mixture of the remaining events, (head to head, hunter, speed snap, etc) besides drag races because those can only take place on certain tracks and therefore are a pain to code. These would require safeguards to make sure you don't end up with duplicate events or 10 eliminations in the one series.

For Head to Head and cup races, the length of the races would be determined the same way it generally is in real-life, by taking a set distance, dividing it by the length of the lap, and rounding up to a whole number. The set length would obviously need to change for each car, and potentially change throughout a series. For example, the Supercars championship and WEC both have wildly varying race lengths, with the main event for both series being four times the length of a normal race. This could be easily represented in these exclusive series.

Alogether, this means that these "randomly" generated series are actually a lot more coherent than the vast majority of the human-designed series in the game, with players getting the feeling of progressing through a race weekend and championship instead of just checking races off a to-do list. And again, this is supposed to be for players that have exhausted all other options and want a new challenge on new tracks in old cars, instead of replaying a Le Mans 10 lapper for the millionth time.