Reflections

Another day, another showoff. This time: reflections. As these reflections are faked, the still look pretty nice. The technique used is sphere mapping with final texture that I render within every render pass.

Ps.: The numbers in the top is not the frame-counter!

Arcadia competition deadline extended

The PGD annual deadline for the Arcadia competition has been extended by 2 months to Nov. 29 2009. This because the Pascal Game Development community wants to show off what you can do with pascal. Also they want to prevent people from dropping out.

What does it mean for us?

2 extra months is a lot of time… Also we have some plans to polish up the graphics, make a nice HUD, active working car dashboard and much more.

And well… we almost dropped network play and a on-line score system and now we have time to actually implement it.

What does it mean for you?

You have to wait 2 more months before the game is released!

…And YOU can still join!

http://pgdannual.com

Race game graphics showoff

Here are some screenshots of how the game looks with lights and post effects at the moment. Still no other scenery than the track and cars.

Artificial Intelligence

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.