Skidmarks Construction Kit
Community Forums/Showcase/Skidmarks Construction Kit
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A project I was working on back in 2001. It was nice to see it still build on fresh install of Windows7 with latest Blitz3D so I took some screenshots and added them to the gallery - better late than never! Palm trees are a bit damaged.  The editor supported off road and circuit based tracks. |
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| cool project! download or demo? |
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| Unfortunately, the truck suspension system is in a pretty poor state of disrepair so will not be releasing in current state. |
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| I remember the Skidmarks game. It was awesome! The title always made me laugh because, as a juvenile, it used to remind me of dirty pants :D |
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| I wish I kept all my code from 2001 |
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| Looking good so far! |
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| I've still got skidalpha5 and skidalpha11 (executables only) from Guildhall days! skidalpha5 was sort-of isometric, flat surfaces, hatchback cars, while '11 is 4x4 trucks on off-road tracks. Both run, but feel a little broken unfortunately! (Feels like some sort of timing errors in '11, with the truck suspension/collisions being a little odd, like you say.) |
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| Looks good so far. I worked on a racing game in the past, may try again later... So tell us a little more : -what kinds of vehicles did you plan to put on the track ? -what about checkpoints ? what did you use to know that the vehicle was not taking shortcuts ? (personally i used a one sided flat mesh (rectangle made of 4 vertices, 2 triangles) + meshesintersect()) -what about bends and AI ? How your AI was supposed to manage its acceleration/deceleration/braking and to turn with the appropriate amount to stay on the road ? (personally i used paths with nodes of prerecorded player paths) |
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| Looks great, the palm trees just looks like a storms blown thru - it is an island after all ;) |
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| -what kinds of vehicles did you plan to put on the track ? 4x4 Trucks including some pretty cool sprite based shock absorbers that were all rigged in Lightwave (and are currently a bit bung on the spring function front). -what about checkpoints ? what did you use to know that the vehicle was not taking shortcuts ? The green submerged rectangles in the screenshots are linked in order. When you are in front of the first box it makes the second box the active box and you have to be in front of that to make #3 active and so on... The track pieces have the linkage boxes built in and you can link offroad to onroad segments but no forking. -what about bends and AI ? How your AI was supposed to manage its acceleration/deceleration/braking and to turn with the appropriate amount to stay on the road ? (personally i used paths with nodes of prerecorded player paths) The AI corrected their path by about 1/8 of what was need to hug the center line and they recorded positions along circuit (distance from start in circuit meters) where collisions with the sides happened so they wouldn't go top speed on subsequent laps. It wasn't need for speed 3 but it was starting to show signs of producing some pretty fun racing. |
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| Ok... But if your AI path depends on a middle line on the road, then how do you prevent one vehicle to go through another ? |
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| They jostle about each other and I was hoping to achieve a bit of flocking behaviour. It was always fun to graph the final cars in the Amiga version as they had many hours of testing and fine tuning so in general their 4th lap was significantly faster than the first. Chris is getting some nice results in that department with recent versions of Epic Skidmarks. |
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| They jostle about each other and I was hoping to achieve a bit of flocking behaviour. It was always fun to graph the final cars in the Amiga version as they had many hours of testing and fine tuning so in general their 4th lap was significantly faster than the first. Another way to approach that is by modifying the behaviour a little: Have one car follow the centerline directly, have another one target a spot on the centerline one carlength in front of it, have another target a spot on the centerline two carlengths ahead, etc. That makes some cars more aggressive when it comes to cutting corners than others. since the cars can't occupy the same spot it could give some more dynamic flocking behaviour . (Kind of how Pacman behaved: to prevent all four ghosts from following pacman in a single stack, one of them tried to always find the shortest path to pacman's current location, one tried to get to a spot behind it, one tried to get to a spot in front of it, and the 4th ghost would randomly wander around. That way they would all take different turns and essentially work together to block him in, rather than all following an identical path.) |
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| If you are not thinking of finishing it.Any chance of sniffing the code. |
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