Racing engine, autoplaying Demo

Community Forums/Showcase/Racing engine, autoplaying Demo

AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#1]
UPDATED WITH MOLEBOX 2.4 no longer give trojan Warnings.

This is a auto playing fun racer demo, the latest build of Cygnus racing engine combined with updated version of the old leadfoot racing game graphics.

You may possibly get a firewall warning, due to the game checking the server for other players to join in Multiplayer.

The engine uses a modified version of Vordermans old ODE wrapper. The full version does have full networked physics but unfortunately you won't see that in this demo. But we do plan on poissibly releasing a full playable demo sometime in the future.

you can change the viewed car with CTRL+# and feel free to play with the setup.ini where you can tweak a few things (and break them ;)

Its purely self playing and as such the GUI is not shown.

Currently it's right on the edge of using 32mb of Vram, and the ODE physics are CPU intensive. So were interested in how well it seems to run on a variety of systems and won't be surprised if there are graphics glitches on low end 32mb cards.

You can grab the 6581k demo at: http://s93153354.onlinehome.us/selfrun.zip

Couple of thumbs:








Clarks(Posted 2005) [#2]
well it performs pretty good here.
and its looking good too.


boomboommax(Posted 2005) [#3]
no track and gfx glitches (intel thing thou so, to be expected)


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#4]
No track? hmmm. I did manage to get that issue quite some time ago.

How much Vram have you got available?


Naughty Alien(Posted 2005) [#5]
things is ok here..

P4 2.8GHz, nVidia A310, 256Mb VRAM, 4 Gigz RAM, WinXP Pro


IPete2(Posted 2005) [#6]
I mustn't have enough (Matrox card) because it just crashed my system - ah well.

I must put my nVidia ti-500 back in sometime!

IPete2.


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#7]

mustn't have enough (Matrox card) because it just crashed my system - ah well.

I must put my nVidia ti-500 back in sometime!



Strange that, though I'd recomend at least a Geforce 2 card- we're not using any tricks a geforce can't do-

Matrox is a nono though IMO- I assume its one of those really old cards with like, 4mb RAM?


Jeroen(Posted 2005) [#8]
Trojan horse TR/Cleaner.A found in the executable.

Looks great! How did you do the A.I?


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#9]

Trojan horse TR/Cleaner.A found in the executable.




errr.. thats a bit odd! I'll double check my machnie later though the build wasnt built on my machine, Me and Evak are pretty security conscious- I'll alert him.

Thanks.

AL is all tricks really- each car can see other cars, and track walls. The cars are not perfect (they sometimes turn the wrong way in a hurry to avoid the other cars, but end up in a wall or something. That gives it a more human feel.

Can you confirm the download contains that virus for us? It certainly comes up clean here.... (at work)

Isnt that the virus that copies itself to your temp folder? (IE where all your downloaded files end up to begin with?) I can't find any information on it.


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#10]
hmmm, interesting the TR thing. I renamed the file for the minute till I find out whats up. I have found that some spyware apps complain about certain things like .b3d files and 3dsmax cdilla. Which virus checker are you using?


JoeRetro(Posted 2005) [#11]
Make sure you have the latest version of MoleBox when packing your files. An older version triggers TR trouble. I had this very same problem, but once I updated to the latest version of MoleBox all was well.

Demo ran fine on my system.

WinXP PRO, Athlon 64-BIT, Nvidia GT6600


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#12]
upgraded to 2.4 (had 2.3 installed previously) so the link works again :)

Hope thats the end of the trojan alerts :(


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#13]
I had a Matrox G400 when it was new, that was at least a year before the Geforce 2 came out. I think the G400 is TNT2 generation and probably DX5 or 6 with no TnL at all. Was the first card to have hardware bump mapping though which was very cool back in the day :)


mrtricks(Posted 2005) [#14]
Runs fine on mine, very nice - but horrible audio glitches when the camera changes.

Oh - and it seemed to try to access the internet when I started it up and my firewall had to block it. I disconnected from the internet just in case.


IPete2(Posted 2005) [#15]
Sorry guys you must have mis-read my post, I am currently using a matrox card (very old) and I really need to put in the TI-500 which is in my cupboard at the moemnt.

I have been very busy with Director ver the last four months so I needed a dual head card (Matrox) with drivers which give me a 2560 x 1024 desktop in one window - lovely (but slow and rubbish for games)!

My TI-500 is awaiting the all clear from my clients before being re-installed.

Just to make sure though I tried it again tonight and it completely crashed my pc - the first graphic screen Fun Racer came up and then bye bye! Totally locked.

IPete2.


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#16]
I mentioned the internet thing in the topic post

You may possibly get a firewall warning, due to the game checking the server for other players to join in Multiplayer.


It's actually a multiplayer game, and for the demo we just disabled a couple of things in the source. but it still checks whatever IP is in the server portion of the setup.ini thats in the root dir.


IPete2(Posted 2005) [#17]
Evak,

You sure did, but strangely nothing asked permission, my firewall always checks with me if a programme requests permission to access the Internet.

Was that the screen where the Internet connection happens? The graphic was windowed and nothing popped up to ask me.

Ah well I will look forward to seeing it when I have a decent graphics card installed. The still shots look really good, so I can't wait to see it moving.

IPete2.


boomboommax(Posted 2005) [#18]
oh ya i forgot i get the audio glitches also


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#19]
Damn. I thought i'd sorted that out.


See what stamping something with 100% Complete does for you?

What kind of glitches do you get? Is it just the really high pitch squeal when the camera moves? I'll have to disable the sound when the camera moves a lot i think. Oh well :/


Vorderman(Posted 2005) [#20]
so the file C27D8FEF-D7AE-42c0-82E6-F30598265639.exe is not actually a Trojan Horse at all then?

Norton goes absolutely apeshit over it, popping up message boxes one after another with no way to get rid of them.

I've deleted the file (eventually) using DOS (after getting hold of an old keyboard that DOS recognizes) but it's a bit of a pain - what's with the packer you used???? Perhaps use a different one next time...?


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#21]
Lol, woops.. Bit of a cockup there! We've updated the download now- so hopefully the virus reports are gone.

I may see if we can get BlitzMediaLinker working with it, though theres alot to package :/ Not entirely sure what was involved with packaging it with molebox either, since I dont do the packaging :)

Vorderman, did you get to play with it in the end?


Ruz(Posted 2005) [#22]
looking good
nice graphic style you are developing too


mrtricks(Posted 2005) [#23]
What kind of glitches do you get? Is it just the really high pitch squeal when the camera moves? I'll have to disable the sound when the camera moves a lot i think. Oh well :/

Yes, that's it exactly.


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#24]
Whew. I can fix that. A bit of a nuisanse as i literally have to disable the sound when the camera moves, but at least its not something i didnt know about :D


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#25]
it was molebox 2.3 really easy to use with good encryption. Costs $60 - $120 depending on what version you get.

Bit of a pain in this instance as it probably put a few people off, but generaly its the best one out there.

Updated it to 2.4 which is the newest version so it should be fine now.


AdrianT(Posted 2005) [#26]
Heh, wish you could edit the topic


Picklesworth(Posted 2005) [#27]
Wow!
Their driving isn't very smooth at times... (They tend to wobble inexplicably when trying to go in a straight line).
Better racing AI than I could do though!

This already beats Big Rigs :)


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#28]
Hi Mr Pickles.

Ive explained the AI here in another forum. Basically, I changed the handling of the cars at the last minute so the AI keeps making incorect predictions about where theyre about to go. :)

Thanks for the response :D


Vorderman(Posted 2005) [#29]
Vorderman, did you get to play with it in the end?


Yep, looking good too. I like the track you're using - the hilly section reminds me of Viper Racing.

They tend to wobble inexplicably when trying to go in a straight line

Presumably they're using a checkpoint marker system? I found that on the straights it pays to have them look a long way ahead for the target marker so they don't weave left and right as they get too close to a marker. As they slow for corners they look a bit closer.


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#30]

Presumably they're using a checkpoint marker system? I found that on the straights it pays to have them look a long way ahead for the target marker so they don't weave left and right as they get too close to a marker. As they slow for corners they look a bit closer.



They usually do, unless they are "Watching" something else, or are close to a wall.

Actually, the problems solved now. It was, as said, caused by the tuning of the AI to the tuning of the cars :). It caused them to always oversteer basically.


Good tips there though for others, though i already use them along with more advanced techniques :D

Thanks for your comments.


Banshee(Posted 2005) [#31]
well i've no bugs to report that arn't already covered so i'll just say that I think it looks quite nice so far. It did seem to be a bit choppy though, but that might have been an illusion from the camera switching and the slower update rate of the rear view mirror.

2Ghz, 512mb, FX5200.


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#32]
I'm stumped with the choppiness however, i just changed the logics update rate to sync with FPS (60/30) so hopefully the choppiness will be gone.


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2005) [#33]
The problem was some idiot used to pack their virus or trojan with molebox (even the demo version). since Molebox packs + encrypts radically, most antivirus apps used the signature of the packed morebox app to recognize this malware. Unfortunately they didn't see the diffrence between this virus and any legal molebox-packed software. A thing that is hard to explain to users...


Damien Sturdy(Posted 2005) [#34]
Fully understood. Damn shame, that... :/