Stunt Race - 1st Video
Community Forums/Showcase/Stunt Race - 1st Video
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| Finally managed to get a decent recording of the game being played, so i've uploaded Video 1 to my YouTube account, so you guys can see that the game is not just screenshots :) This is the first track being played in single player mode for a couple of laps. No sound yet as I've still not found an engine recording that I like. It's tricky to make out in the video but I've been working on improving the track editor so the track mesh blends into the scenery a bit better. I've also changed the ground texture so it's got some desert plants on it, as the whole thing is a bit too brown otherwise. Might add some trees or cacti if I get a chance, although I want to maintain 60fps at all costs. Also you can can see stage 1 of the damage effects with the crumpled rollbar. Xors can't move a parented animmesh without screwing up so the bars have to be in preset stages of damage, but it's a start. The wheels also wobble around and the whole car shakes as the damage increases. There's not yet a way to actually get damage in the game, but that's next on the list. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWGUSiJhSCU More videos to follow at some point, although they take an age to upload. Edit : Tuesday 18th Oct: Added video 2 - this shows a number of changes: - added driver arms (only arms so far!) to the steering wheel. - added engine / turbo flames. - added more detail / mapping to suspension and dampers. - added Track 2. - added sounds for engine , impacts , skidding , turbo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Y5lUZLKHI Last edited 2011 |
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| Better than F1 2011 as it`s got NO FREEZING ISSUE!!! Impressive!! Codemasters Better Hire Him!!! LOL :) Good Video :) |
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| Hi Vorderman, finally a video. Great! Congratulations, the gameplay looks great. Good job. |
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Might as well post a couple of new screenshots to show the changes in better detail:   |
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| Plenty of times you get the feeling you are really inside the kart. If you add stereo sounds, playing this with a steering-wheel controller must be very entertaining. I have a critique. When you are going up a ramp, you can feel the car is rotating in steps. This is understandble for me and others that can realize the track is made of polygons, which are straight in their nature; but gamers might not. You should increase the mesh detail in ramps, and leave optimization to the straighter parts. This way going up a ramp will be smoother. |
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| A video. Cool :D Not sure about the particle effects. Kinda felt like I'd been shot at with a laser blaster. But a real sense of being inside a kart flying through the air - very smooth movement. |
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| Looks good but the sparks wouldn't come up through the floor like that. Also, when the wheels are spinning you wouldn't be able to see the tyre tread - it kills the illusion of speed. Also, the writing on the sides of the tyre - as you pick up speed, gradually replace the texture with a motion-blurred equivalent. |
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| Blimey you lot are picky... 1. I know the sparks should be underneath the car, but that means you never see them, so they spawn a bit in front so they shower over the camera. I'll take a look at the graphic used (I think it's one of the Lotus System's default ones) and see if I can improve it so it looks less like a laser attack. 2. I can make the track a lot smoother, but the physics system bounces the car around more as the wheel objects cross from polygon to polygon, so more polys on corners means you spend less time with the wheels touching the ground, which means you skip across the surface and crash. I can certainly make the jump run-ups smoother though. 3. The tyre tread idea is good, should be easy enough to test. Last edited 2011 |
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| Maybe move the sparks to the sides so it looks like the suspension is bottoming out when the car lands? |
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| OK here's a test with the motion blur on the tyres, and it does look a lot better when you're playing, so nice one GfK! Just need to figure out how to get it to swap textures smoothly as the car's speed increases....  Last edited 2011 |
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| See, that looks like its moving even in a screenshot. |
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| was a fan of the original game and played a lot on atari st & amiga :) |
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| 2. I can make the track a lot smoother, but the physics system bounces the car around more as the wheel objects cross from polygon to polygon No, I did not say the entire track. Just the ramps. Just need to figure out how to get it to swap textures smoothly as the car's speed increases.... Add a float Uniform or Global to your tire shader; Add a sampler of the speed texture (and its normal map) to your tire shader; Use the value of that uniform\global to perform a LERP between the regular texture's and speed texture's color values (and normal maps). |
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| 2. I can make the track a lot smoother, but the physics system bounces the car around more as the wheel objects cross from polygon to polygon No, I did not say the entire track. Just the ramps. Fair enough, just explaining why the corners are quite polygonal also. Add a float Uniform or Global to your tire shader; Add a sampler of the speed texture (and its normal map) to your tire shader; Use the value of that uniform\global to perform a LERP between the regular texture's and speed texture's color values (and normal maps). I shall give this a try although I'm not too hot with shaders, but it sounds fairly simple. |
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| Looks great. Well done. |
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| re the tyres..couldnt you just have two sets of wheels and show/hide when appropriate. Also it would be nice if the vehicle darkens when it goes into shadow. |
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| Also it would be nice if the vehicle darkens when it goes into shadow. This is already coded in, but not yet re-enabled since I swapped over to Xors from the standard Blizt3D renderer. |
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| Sorry, didn't mean to sound angry or anything :) I shall give this a try although I'm not too hot with shaders, but it sounds fairly simple. If you need any help with this please send your tire shader to my e-mail and I'll implement and explain it in detail. |
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| Thanks, but I've just finished battling with the shader and got it working - took a while to figure out that "Lerp" doesn't compile whereas "lerp" does... >:( All working now though! |
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| Perhaps the car is not finished , but the car itself looks far to clean and doesnt seem to fit the environment imo. We're you planning on dusting it up some ? |
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| Awesome! Dabz |
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| Looks awesome man. The only things that I would be very picky about is the colour of the car frame. Unless the paint was slightly fluorescent, it wouldn't be that colour. I know, ultra picky right? :D Original:  Modified the hue:  |
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| Perhaps the car is not finished , but the car itself looks far to clean and doesnt seem to fit the environment imo. We're you planning on dusting it up some ? Good point, now that I look at it you're right...so after a quick bout of texturing the car is now much more beaten up. Still got the main top rollbar (the deformable piece), the engine and diff etc. to texture at some point.    |
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| And a group shot to show all 8 cars, now with the colour saturation taken down a fair bit as mentioned by Ross. The 7 AI cars don't yet have their top rollbar which is why they look a bit odd compared to the orange player car at the front - I need to make a lo-res AI vehicle mesh at some point as they don't need the moving wishbones, steering wheel etc...  Last edited 2011 |
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| Looking absolutely GREAT :D Is the sliding effect in the corners deliberate? Sometimes it looks like your stepping the back out for a controlled slide? Either way it looks a cool effect in the vid :) |
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| Ah, much better! Looking great :) |
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| This looks great... |
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| Very nice change, they fit much better. |
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| Is the sliding effect in the corners deliberate? Sometimes it looks like your stepping the back out for a controlled slide? It is deliberate - the cars will hold long powerslides if you can balance the throttle - too much and you understeer and slide wide, too little or brake and the car will oversteer and might spin out. If you get it right you can power into a corner, ease off a bit and the rear slides around a touch, then you power on and hold a 4-wheel slide with the steering mostly straight or a bit of opposite lock. That's why I love the Tokamak physics lib, because it lets objects slide across each other in a nice controlled way, although I also have a heck of a lot of code doing stuff to the materials and friction on each wheel, adjusting angular and linear damping for each wheel dep. upon speed , throttle input , brake input, sideslip , applying extra forces to help hold the car straight if it's going mostly in a straight line, force the nose down a bit in the air etc.. to get it all balanced. Most of the control code / physics I wrote and tweaked over 2 years ago, so even I have trouble understanding why some bits of it are there, but it seems to work well so I just leave it alone. |
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| Glad to see the 'glow in the dark' prestine colours and textures have gone. Looking much better! :) That powersliding feature sounds cool. Really looking forward to playing. Just hope it will run 60FPS on my system. |
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| The vehicles look great after the makeover. Good job! I reckon there should be more weight applied to the front of the vehicle though, so that when it's airborne a nose dive happens sooner, giving the feeling of, "this landing is going to be bad!" as you career towards the ground. Have a look at this video clip to see what I mean. The illusion being, you are almost out of control: Amiga SCR - See part from 0:58 As for other potential improvements, it would be nice to have some head-wobble, although some players might find this nauseating(?) Or maybe some blurring upon heavy impact? An example of both can be seen in: NFS: Shift - See part from 2:24 |
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| I know this would be a huge step, but if you're talking about motion-blur, you can implement what is a very nice effect based on sampling a velocity texture that gives a really nice result. It's camera-based, so works well with the P.O.V camera you got in there. Read more here: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch27.html |
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| I reckon there should be more weight applied to the front of the vehicle though, so that when it's airborne a nose dive happens sooner, Currently it's balanced so that the car noses in at about 45 degrees on the large jumps on my test track - any more and it results in a crash every time, so I'm going to leave it as it is at the moment. I've yet to try a full on Rollercoaster style over-the-cliff track so I'm not sure how much nosediving the car will do. Been working on the spark effect this evening, for use when the car hits the track hard, as apparently the old effect looked like a Star Wars laser battle. It's still not working exactly as I want (ideally I want the sparks to appear locally to the camera / vehicle and not work in world-space, so you can see them and not leave them all behind) but I've no idea how to do that and there seem to be no docs for the Lotus Particle system, so this will have to do...it looks quite good from external cams at least...   Last edited 2011 |
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| Not sure why there are so many sparks coming over the front of the buggy? You mentioned that if they went under the car you wouldn't see them... but if you are racing against other buggies it won't matter if you don't see your own sparks, as you'll see all the sparks coming off those others... |
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| I think brucy is right, its my opinion that modifying the effect just so it enters the cockpit view makes it a little strange looking, think of most racers that have damage you cant see damage effects when in first person cockpit view unless its happening on the hood. You could still have visual indicators though, a nice DOF that fades out quickly after a tough landing could translate shaken vision and such.. great looking game anyway, just being picky |
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| A buggy with a built-in firework display! :D Does look better though. I think we all agree this is looking fab with promising gameplay. But enough with the sparks!! lol. They will be seen on other buggy's. Forcing them to be seen on the buggy you are driving is simply distracting. All the best with this project. |
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| Sorry guys, I like the sparks so I'm leaving them - the cockpit view feels a bit empty without them (unless I can get the other damage effects to compensate). Also, I'm aiming for a constant 60fps even on my low-spec Win7 laptop, so DOF effects are certainly out and showers of sparks from the 7 AI cars are probably not going to be a good idea, although I shall give it a try in case it's not too slow - I've no idea how often they'd be triggered by a full field of 7 cars, maybe it won't be too bad. |
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| In terms of DOF and/or sparks on all vehicles being too slow to use, I expected Xors to have better speed than that, have you tried the DOF yet ? I can get by with 60fps full dof and 2500 mesh particles, and multiple copies of the game running on my machine in b3d + fast libs , I certainly expected Xors3D to do better than that. Are you using any type of tweening or delta timing ? or is that even possible when using a physics lib? Last edited 2011 |
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| This looks really cool. I have to ask, though... Xors Did you come across any resource/tutorial sites that helped you adopt Xors? The demo shows off a few things but the docs are practically sample code-free (meaning it would actually make extra work for me, having to suss out how things operate in practice, rather than lessening it!) A shame as it seems to have some nice features.Bright green FTW, BYW! |
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| Did you come across any resource/tutorial sites that helped you adopt Xors? No, not really - I just went through my program, replaced all the Blitz commands with Xors commands, commented out all the sections that weren't absolutely necessary for the program to run, then tried to fix any errors. Then I added back the other bits one at a time until it all worked again. Mostly it was fairly simple, just a few differences between the two systems such as some of the functions that return counts start at 0 in Xors and 1 in Blitz, apart from that it worked pretty smoothly. There are a whole load of examples included in the Xors download - have you checked those? They seem to cover almost everything. A load of the Blitz ones are in a "deprecated" subfolder IIRC. Are you using any type of tweening or delta timing ? or is that even possible when using a physics lib? Just the standard locked-logic tweening routine from the code archives - it seems to work fine with Tokamak. Last edited 2011 Last edited 2011 |
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| Ah well that's good to know at least, cheers. I was really thinking along the lines of stuff like shaders, which you'd expect to be represented by an example that demonstrates how to load and apply each effect, but there's nothing. Ditto for the physics API*. I'm way too old to be reverse (forward?!) engineering the correct code from a staid old list of commands :D Anyway, I've dragged the thread hideously off topic. As you were! *EDIT: There are a whole load of examples included in the Xors download - have you checked those? I should say I saw the physics example -- by "ditto for the physics API" I mean what's there is, for my money, similarly insufficient (it's such a complex area that, without full docs, it'd actually create rather than alleviate work!)Last edited 2011 |
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| which you'd expect to be represented by an example that demonstrates how to load and apply each effect, but there's nothing. Ditto for the physics API In the download I have there are 2 sets of Blitz samples: Samples\Source\Blitz3D - 35 Blitz samples showing basic functionality. ShaderPack\Samples\Blitz3d - 12 sample Blitz programs showing how to do various shader effects. Do you have these? They were more than enough for me to get it working, including shader effects on the road and wheels. |
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| AHA! And there I was, thinking the examples would all be in the Samples folder! That's exactly what I was looking for -- cheers for pointing that out (and don't let me derail the thread any further!) |
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| Vorderman, that looks fuppin' brilliant (in the words of Father Ted) |
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| looks excellent. question about the rollbars.. are they meant to be bent like that or do they deform? |
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| I hope they will deform at some point, once I work out how to do it. |
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| Added video 2 to show the new stuff added over the past few days, see original post at top. |
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| wow!! congratulations Vorderman!! seems amazing!! |
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| The wheels look 10x better now. |
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| Looks awesome. I like how the exhaust flames change colour. |
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| The wheels look 10x better now. yeah yeah... :) |
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| Top notch! Now, whack some guns on, get networking in, and let me at it! :D Dabz |
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| Now that's the business! :D Loving the exhaust flames. |
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| Loving the exhaust flames. +1 Last edited 2011 |
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| Where do I send the money ?! From the videos, you seem to have really captured the feeling of the 'original'. Can't wait to play this, it's looking superb. Huge respect to you as well for your commitment with the project. Mark. |
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| Cheers guys, it's been a long road but finally I'm happy with the way the game is going, I have a style that I like and feel like I'm making some forward progress rather than going round in circles. I'm now working on the front end (ugh) so that I will be able to move about the game in a nice way - select a track , play the track , go back to the front end etc... At some point also I have to re-implement the multiplayer mode - I have it working 2 player splitscreen , and all the old network stuff is still there, just turned off, but it's not been used for about 5 years so the chances of it working are slim I think. Last edited 2011 |
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| going round in circles BOOM! BOOM! ;) |
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| I thought the project was given up. Great that you are still working on it. Stuntcar Racer on C64 was great. If you need a beta tester, contact me. At some point also I have to re-implement the multiplayer mode Yes, please.. |
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| Wondering how this project is progressing. |
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| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Y5lUZLKHI Have a peek at the comments Steve, but, it looks like it's stalled (Pardon the pun) a little, which is a shame! Dabz |
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| Yes a real shame. Especially as it's not too far off completion now. Looks and sounds the business. |
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| Yeah sorry guys, I've not had any time to work on it now for quite a while, which is a shame as it was getting towards being finished (at least in terms of gameplay, AI etc..). Hopefully at some point I can get it finished, just need to find time in between everything else, for example learning XNA / C#. I got the Xors3D version running at a constant 60fps on my low-end laptop, so at least the problem with Blitz3D using directX7 (and thus being emulated on Win7 and slow) has been avoided. It had a memory leak but I think the Xors guys sorted that out, but I've not had a chance to test the new Xors for ages now. Last edited 2012 |
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