Hot Rod Hottie
Community Forums/Showcase/Hot Rod Hottie
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| A Hottie is what a racing drivers calls a fast lap, Hot Rod Hottie lets you race a souped up American style Hot Rod (called "Funny Car" in Britain) to achieve fast laps. You have 15 minutes each to drive at 3 different tracks. You earn money for fast laps and for the number of laps you complete at each circuit, if you carry on playing the game will return you to the first track after completing all three. Money can be used to upgrade and repair your car in the pits. Always keep some cash in reserve for repairs. There is no car reset key so if you suffer a breakage you must get your car back to the pits. Failures can happen at any time but are more likely to occur if you abuse your car. The nature of failures will vary dependant upon your driving style and what aspects of the car you abuse the most. Hot Rod Hottie features co'ckpit alteration of brake bias and fuel mixture controls, to my knowledge no other race game has ever simulated these before despite them being common controls for all race drivers. If you do not understand them their default settings should suffice. The anti-roll bar torsion is implemented but not configurable at the wheel at this time. It can be configured in the pits by adjusting the suspension with which the physics currently has it tied. Controls ====== ~ or \ Bring up the joystick config panel, I am unsure how this performs with joysticks which accelerate & brake on the same axis (feedback would be useful). F1-F4 Camera Views Cursor Up Accelerate Cursor Down Brake Cursor Left/Right Steering Right Shift Gear Up Right Control Gear Down Page Up/Down Fuel Mixture Insert/Delete Brake Bias P Pause Download ======= http://www.bansheestudios.com/ftp/HotRodHottie.zip Frequently Asked First Question ====================== "Did I just blow my engine?" Yes you did. 1st gear can only take so much. To conserve your engine when it is running hot try changing up sooner, ease off the throttle during big jumps and turn the fuel mixture down (puts more air in the chamber, produces less power but less engine overrun). This isn't a physics sim, it is meant to be auto-correcting during "moments" rather than realistic because in this sim you would find yourself upside down within the first 15 seconds of pulling away. I've been working on this since last Friday so it doesn't have much spit and pollish. I just wrote it to play with, i'm now going to return to my Waterworld project to get it ready for the next tournament.   Note to mods: Can the word co'ckpit when used in full please be removed from the word sensor. It's such a commonly used word in games... EDIT: I just uploaded a fix, it seemed I caught a key on one of the last compiles which changed a variable name and the lack of strict variable handling kind of messed things up. The laptime cash reward was calculated at 0 seconds and that resulted in a payout of around half a billion pounds... Anyway it's fixed now. |
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| I blew my engine before I figured out the gear shifting. :-) In most racing games shifting up and down is done with the A and Z keys, so the right shift & right ctrl seemed a bit unintuitive. Nice start so far, but it could use a little refining in some areas: - If you fly out of the canyon over the edge of the world, you get dropped back on the track again -- but although you are at a standstill, you are still in whatever high gear you were before the mishap, you may want to reset that as well - If you are in a high gear and rapidly change back several gears, the pitch of the engine gets very unrealistically high |
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| The car handles like crap... it's like floating in air. Not much else to say about this one.... |
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| Why go for "the only game to have in car mixture and bias controls" levels of realism, and leave it so you can turn on the spot whilst stationary, and have you car sink into the ground whilst moving? Okay it has no spit and polish, but some basic realism would be good. |
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| Becky, what they meant to say was 'Yes, it doesn't have much spit and polish' but it's a damn good start and looks like a lot of fun. Of course they did, didn't you. You've been working on this since last Friday? I think I'll give up now. |
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| Does a race game have to be a 2D overhead skidmarks remake in order to put gameplay and fun above realism? If you where looking for a tokamak or newton demonstration then i'm sorry you've come to the wrong place. I'm not sure that i'm personally bothered about the realism of a race car when not moving as personaly I use the throttle, but if I wanted realism I wouldn't be playing a computer game anyway as my other hobby is racing cars. This is one reason why i'm not writting a sim, sim race games hold reduced interest to me because i'd much rather go do the real thing and I regularly do (current injuries pending) - but there is no real equivellent of racing a hot rod around a canyon and taking huge air. :) The addition of the fuel mix and brake bias is fixing a glaring ommission rather than adding realism. If I take this project far enough to do multiplayer races then they add a lot to the strategy of a 15-25 lap race. Professional game devs seem to think we are too stupid to figure them out, I have more faith in people. |
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| Sorry but the bad physics make the game boring to play. No fun at all. |
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| Used to be a time when a new offering was given encouragement on these forums; it wasn't expected to be the finished version on first issue. Unless these threads are now being visited by a bunch of 13 year olds looking for free games. If so, go elsewhere guys. This is a programmers forum. |
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| What he said - if you've nothing constructive to say, don't say anything. I thought it was a bit of fun for a couple of laps - not bad for an early WIP. |
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| Thanks guys but there is no need to chip in and defend, there's no point getting into an argument over some ill thought out critiques. Constructive criticism is appreciated and maybe I can make this into a good project with their help but the 3 posts sladering the project here make no such pretentions about their motive. It doesn't take a psychology degree to figure out that posts such as those are nothing at all to do with the game, and consequently, it's not worth getting flustered over. When a game has room for improvement the posts are structured like xlsior's constructive and gratefully received post. When a post just spews forth destructive critique like some of those above it's clear the authors have either another agenda (and I recognise one of the culprits from that irc channel fallout where his mate led an attack on me over his massoginistic ideals) or a sense of self-inflated opinion of their own production qualities and a different view of what the showcase is for. The showcase is what we make it, and not all of us have the same opinions as to what it is for. |
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| This is quite nice :-D I'm currently working on a project where I need some car physics, check your email Becky! |
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| I think we tend to call them hot rods here in britain as well, and have done so for decades... although I have never heard anyone sane call a fast lap a hottie. I think the physics are really bad. Try using something like ODE to give it more realism. You can have a great feel to it and use a physics engine. Physics engines give it that bounce and fun you need. Right now it feels like a hovercraft... |
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| Something else I noticed: I was using the default view, where you only see the hood of the car. when getting up to speed and going pretty fast, I hit a canyon wall head-on, and for launched over it -- but the angle of the car changed a bit compared to the camera, and for a moment I had about a 100-pixel gap between the end of the car hood and the bottom of the screen, making it look pretty obvious that only a partial car was drawn in this mode. You may want to look into drawing a slightly large piece of car, or make the camera viewpoint folow it more closely. |
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| Sorry you did not like my comments, but I can assure you they were 100% to do with the game. As are these comments which I hope you will take constructively, as they are meant. There is negligable slowdown of the vehicle when not accellerating or braking regardless of the steepness of the terrain. When steering, whilst in motion, the car turns to a point, and when the steering is released, it turns back in the other direction a bit rather than continuing in the direction you steered to. If you come to a halt facing up a slope you can start rolling backwards, the speed goes negative. If you then accellerate you speed up in reverse i.e. you go backwards faster, rather than forwards. |
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| Thank you. @geehawk, thank you for the constructive feedback, I will address the reverse speed bug. I think the steering phenomenon you are referring too is the way the game simulates slide. The null throttle slowdown atm is too week, it was right once then I changed stuff. @xlsior, I think you're right, the camera routine is probably in the wrong part of the main loop and showing a frame behind or something like that. @OneEyedJack, yes and no on the hot rod front, the main thing is I was making it clear that the user wasnt going to drive a £50 scrapyard wreck but a souped up hot rod. On the subject of the word "hottie" hang around a pit lane and you'll hear words like "hot one", "hot lap", "going in hot", "on a hottie" and "came in too hot" are all things you'll hear, hot=speed in the paddock. If you think i'm insane for saying that, then errr, ok. I do race cars for a hobby btw so I have a bit of an insight into the jargon... :) Oh sure "hottie" could also meen a broad, therefore... I intentionally avoided using a physics library because I wanted something more like skidmarks, maybe I should fix the camera in the corner of the map to make that point as it strikes me that point hasn't come across - and that's clearly an error in the game or I need to think very carefully about what the "target audience" wants. If games need to be realistic now - and by realistic I meen the feel you get from physics wrappers rather than anything remotely real (as GT4 feels about as real to me as driving a very much simulated car with the very alien feel of a joypad) - then i'm clearly wasting my time making this. That isn't a sarcastic way of me saying i'm right you're wrong, I meen it as it sounds. I didn't want to write GenericCarFeeling01 game, I wanted something a bit different and I guess i'm pretty much alone in wanting that as the responses of this thread suggest very strongly that is not something most end users will want. Race games need "accurate" (and I use the term jokingly in this instance) physics. There is a feel that is required of race games and if it is absent then it's going to flop. This was important for me to (re?)descover and is the most positive thing I draw from this thread. It has much wider ramifications than just race games too: Games players have expectations and woe be any game which forgets that. At least it only took a weeks work to figure out, i'll start on something else soon - which may or may not be a race game. |
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| although I have never heard anyone sane call a fast lap a hottie. My GF is a fast-lap....... As for fun- you dont *need* physics, but they help. i did some really naff physics for Quad2- I dont have a download of it avail from my servr ATM, but it turned up here anyway: http://www.caiman.us/scripts/fw/f1086.html Give that a go becky- your demo could be something if you detach the wheels and add a bit of the "x-factor" *smirk* you seem to be able to show |
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| Its so nice to see playable demos being posted. I think sometimes people forget about the concept of work in progress. keep up the good work Becky ! I wish I was so productive ! |
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| Becky, sent you an email, don't know if you've got it or not, if not I'll resend.. Thanks, Chad |
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| It was an ok game, but really to many bugs to make me want to play it past first gear. 1) When driving on the side of a hill the car stays at normal rotation, then it sort of jumps to align with the hill and then back again. The whole time pulling towards the hill. 2) I dont know when it started happening but the steering reversed causing left to become right etc. 3) You can drive up anything almost without deceleration. 4) The handling felt like I was driving a tonka truck. Otherwise I guess its an ok game for a weeks work. Still lacking plenty IMHO. |
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| Thank you for the constructive feedback but i'm done with this one. You cant fix something if it isn't broken - and the problem here is my game is doing pretty much what I actually wanted it to do - save a few physics elements I hadn't got around to yet. The problem here is the game concept - nobody wants unrealistic gameplay in first person, they want to know it's been written with a proper physics engine to get that generic "i've got a computer simulated race game" feel of realism that I personally loath. I plan to carry on not making any attempts at a serious race game in the full knowledge I cant possibly hope to satisfy my own standards on the subject, but next time I attempt a fun driving game I wont make the mistake I did here of blurring the line to simulation and fix the camera very firmly in the corner and I will keep the physics very arcade gamelike so that the distinction is made. It's either that or write a game with a physics engine to get that generic modern race game feel and pretend it's totally realistic and call it Gran Tourismo 4. I'll be sure not to even manage to get the top speeds right and only allow play on a joypad, fail to comprehend what multi-link suspension does, miss-understand the term power to weight ratio and instead focus on top end torque as a measure of a cars straitline performance, and i'll modify the cars performance in their class based upon corporate sponsorship (and how many times I can get the player to say skyline in one sentence). I may sound bitter, I guess maybe I am - but i'm angry at my own judgement for completely failing to capture any gameplay in something I produced. I want to have a higher standard than that. By this stage, in my idyllic world, a product with my name on it should show it's potential by now, and on the evidence of this thread this project doesn't have potential and instead has a list of complaints. There's no "wow" factor, something i've too arrogantly grown accustomed too over the years, I needed to mess this up just to be reminded I dont have a middas touch. The reason is simple: I enjoyed playing with it myself and then I forgot to satisfy what people who play games actually want. This game isn't broken, it conforms to it's design. It's a bad design. |
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| I was talking to a friend last night and he mentioned a game that looked like it *could* be cool. But it only had concept art! Also many incomplete games are these fancy engines and graphics but with ZERO gameplay yet. You can see the *potential* but until they actually add some semblance of gameplay, the engine means squat, it's just a tech demo. Becky: Don't worry about it, I love your engines, and obvisouly you do to, but maybe the next step is to start with some kinda simple gameplay to make a rounded "mini-release" and then enhance it from there. That should get you out of the engine rut and into the gameplay one, which ultimately is where it's at! |
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| This game isn't broken, it conforms to it's design. It's a bad design. That, is an excelent quote. Can i use it? (attaching your name of course...) |
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