tepples wrote:By braking fills the boost meter, did you mean "Kirby Air Ride"?
No (I've never played it), but looking on YouTube there does seem to be something similar happening.
Espozo wrote:Reading your idea, when you say "that nobody could navigate at full throttle", are you talking about the turns come up on you as fast as an F-Zero GX TAS and you can't react, or the car just can't handle quite fast enough?
The latter.
The scenario I'm looking at is roughly as follows:
1) head into a tight hairpin turn at high speed
2) brake to a significantly lower speed, causing your boost/shield meter to increase somewhat (as long as it isn't already full), while simultaneously hauling your machine around the corner with the main stick augmented by skillful use of both shoulder buttons (ie: best technique is barely adequate at this reduced speed)
3) after making the turn, hit the boost button long enough to expend the shield energy you gained by braking, which is less than the kinetic energy you bled off by braking (ie: the regenerator is not 100% efficient) and results in even less kinetic energy being added back to the machine (ie: the booster is not 100% efficient either)
One might expect the energy gained from braking to run out before you manage to return to the speed you were at before braking, but this isn't an absolute physical requirement, because as you come out of the turn the baseline engine output is already accelerating you, so the booster energy doesn't have to make up 100% of the braking energy in the time it takes to push it back out through the engines. On the other hand, aerodynamic drag does a fair bit of braking and you can't recover that, so it's a matter of what the ratios are like...
Either way, the upshot is that it makes slowing down for the turns less painful because you can speed back up more quickly afterwards without a net loss to your shield gauge (and it helps you feel cool for pulling off the maneuver, hopefully). It's not about exploiting turns to go faster than you could drive in a straight line.
This idea seems like it could take a fair bit of tweaking and still remain a workable gameplay mechanic. As long as it isn't exploitable and doesn't result in players cheesing straightaways by alternately boosting and braking or some nonsense, it should be fine... and the best way I know of to prevent that is to observe the Law of Conservation of Energy.
...
I'm not sure I like this talk of removing the top speed. Unless you're driving in space, which makes the obvious air inlets on F-Zero machines kinda mysterious, simple aerodynamic drag
will impose a top speed regardless of how the engines work - it's like terminal velocity when falling. I know F-Zero isn't a physics sim (yet - heh heh heh), but an in-atmosphere vehicle with no top speed is a bit too much for my suspension of disbelief...
...
...say. Could that right stick possibly serve as a throttle? Pushing it forward would accelerate your machine, pulling it back would brake. Moving it to one side would, uh... thrust vectoring? This could get complicated, and I'm not sure it doesn't step on the toes of the left stick and triggers...