First of all hello everyone as it is my first post here.
I went through all suggestions to make sure I will not write about something that somebody already mentioned.
There was one suggestion about different landing animations - I have got a similar idea, but not exactly landing but the final part of the whole animation after landing.
It could be divided in to two groups of celebrations. Happy and unhappy celebration in short. Basically ski jumper could have some moves to express his satisfaction after the jump.
There are few jumpers that I remember very well, with characteristic moves after successful jump.
1. Sven Hannavald
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlvA0wyU ... re=related
2. Gregor Schlierenzauer at 0:26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rnt3K699 ... re=related
3. Andreas Goldberger 0:23
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcUjkYdo5_4
4. Andreas Goldberger 0:47
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpyi4tt5 ... re=related , celebration with the national flag after winning the competition.
There are many more very characteristic moves.
On the other, after very poor landing which will be reflected in low notes, there could be some move of the head or arms to express dissatisfaction.
One more thing for the visual side of the game, the bottom of the hill is completely empty, in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gip7erce ... re=related at 0:29 you can notice national flags usually around the big logo which in this case could be replaced by the name of the hill.
I understand all additions of this type will be very expensive from the performance point of view - but this is only suggestion and it could be included in the game as optional, allowing user to turn it on or off.
I have noticed few posts about the game physics. I see the point why few people complain about that. I am not sure about situations when the body of the ski jumper is almost straight in the vertical direction - this is quite difficult for me to imagine in the real conditions. Have a look at this short clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiO2AWXec0E. There are two things all crashes have in common, as the body of ski jumper is much heavier than a pair of skis, the first key observation is that the body doesn't move that rapidly and that much in the air and secondly skis are the ones that cause the mayhem. While in game the body behaves as the integral part of the skis and any movement in skis is straight away reflected in the change of body position.
I don't know how this part of the algorithm works but if there is a variable that affects the movement of the ski jumper with respect to the wind, speed etc. Then to overcome this problem could be another variable - basically one variable for skis and another one for the body. This way by moving the mouse the skis angle will be adjusted first and then the body will follow the skis but a little bit slower to do not have a possibility of a backflip. On the other hand if the line of skis will drop to much below the horizontal line then it would be possible to see something similar to that what happened to Morgenstern in Kussamo.
Last suggestion from me - is the hill loading screen. I don't know if Jussi can use real names in the game in any form but it would be nice if the loading hill screen will have the Real hill record together with the full name of the hill record holder - nothing fancy but very welcome as I haven't seen that in any other game. There is something similar with the Lap records in the Formula 1 2010 game.
Something like that will do nicely:
Holmenkollen
Location
City or town Oslo
Country Norway
Size
K-spot K-120
Hill size HS134
Hill record Andreas Kofler
(139.5 m 14.03.2010)
Finally, big thanks for such a good game Jussi.