A while ago we participated in the PGD compo “Arcadia”. After a long wait with an extended deadline finally we have the results.  And guess what: we are 3rd out of 4. Actually we hoped on something better because we put a lot of effort in this game.

Why we came in 3rd: you can all read it here.

The main reason is that we are 3rd, is that our entry suffered from input lag  due to the high system requirements. With this we really  missed some points.

You can see the results here at the Pascal Game Development website.

As we made a nice game for the competition we also have some future plans for FUR. First thing is that we want FUR to be BIG. This means:
- More cars
- More tracks in different settings
- 1 or 2  extra game modes
- Last but not least: Multiplayer!!

We already did some work to make it BIG! Last week I started to rewrite the GUI system to be more dynamic. It features very basic scripting engine. Also it might be useful for other games we release in the future.

Next thing is that the physics library is out dated and the car physics are too heavy. This also requires a migration to a new version of the physics library we use: Newton Game Dynamics 2.0. Some new features of this library that can come handy in the future is procedural destruction and multi threaded physics calculations which will speed-up things a lot.

As we want to migrate to a new physics engine, we also require some internal changes on the vehicles code.  In this case we require a rewrite of the vehicle physics and vehicle system. For the eye it should remain the same, but the code should be more efficient and creation of vehicles more flexible.

Stay tuned!

The PGD compo deadline is near. Only one week left and still much to do.

We’ve done a lot the last couple of days like adding light flares, tuning car physics, track testing, adding sounds, made a game over sequence, score counting  and of course fixed a lot of bugs.

Things we still need to do include online and local score table, enter name and game over menu, skid marks, sparks and multi player support.

Anyway here are some random images I took while developing: enjoy!

Today we where working on tire smoke. Here is a movie that shows the smoke as we have it implemented. The thick smoke was just for fun. Enjoy!

Created a new track again. While playing I thought I give it a shot and started recording it. Enjoy!

No waving palm trees or white sands, but rough industry and large factories on the shores: Industry Beach. This is where you don’t want to be  unless you want to race!

This car is named ‘Sturmwalze’. Reason is: it’s fast and is has 3 huge tires in the back. It drives fast, but is hard to handle. (Yeah I love physics!!)

The texture still needs some work.

Update: Added WIP texture.

A new vehicle has born: the Blastback. I created this model a few weeks ago, but today I finished the interior. Its still kinda crap and not finished yet, but I still want to show it off.

Triangle count: 8.000

Driving a computer controlled car around the track.

Last few day I worked on the vehicle AI.  To get the AI working I did 2 thing: created AI itself and scattered “control points” around the track so the AI knows where it needs to go.

The AI is very limited, but works well. The only thing it does is follow the track, brake a little in tight corners and goes full speed on the straight roads. As it is not very thoughtful and always brakes too late, it often crashes into the walls. To compensate this, the AI has the ability to drive backwards and steer a random direction for a short period of time. Most of the time this is enough  to follow the track again. Also vehicles are not aware of each other or objects/walls on and around the track.

I made a movie that I put on YouTube to show what the AI does certain situations. The movie shows only AI, no input is given by a human being. I also enabled the lights on the car for a more visual-appealing look.

ps. 1: Sorry for the choppy frame rate, I think my hard disk is fragmented.
ps. 2: The white dots are the places where lights are located.

For the PGD Annual our team agreed to create a “state of the art” arcade race game that features stuns like loops, corkscrews and jumps.

About the game

This is a race game that is all about a high speed adrenaline rush. 3 (4 if time would let us) different vehicles to choose from and 3 tracks to race on. Each track has a difficulty rating that is either easy, medium or hard. It can be played in single player mode as well as multi player.

Technology

To try and get all this adrenaline flowing Hell Tech Game Engine is used in combination Newton Game Dynamic for physics. The tracks are predefined points with spline lines between them extruded to create nice curves, so the car would drive smooth. Also we try to have some network multi player up to 8 or 16 players.

Progress

We created a Game Design Document which briefly describes that we make a race game.

The progress so far: we have the engine and the physics in place. These still need a lot of tuning to do on the car as it can drive, but it constantly fly out of the curves, dramatically rolls over and finally comes to a full stop on its roof. And this all with no sound!

This leads us to a quite a big to do list. Tune the physics, create all the game logic, AI, make levels (tracks), textures, models, sound, music, menu… Well, everything except the engine and the physics.