Well thats stupid, the pass to get into the IGS should be one of the cheapest ones.

As much as I really want to hear the IGS talks (I could care less about the rest of GDC) as an indie developer I can't really justify spending a month's rent (and subsequently a month's development time) on a pass.

We need a totally seperate IGDC, imagine a big hall filled with nothing but booths of indie games! Indie games are getting so big now, why not an entire convention dedicated totally to them.

that Expo pass includes all the indie goodness GDC provides? Maybe we will be able to go after all. I assumed it would be like 600 bucks. I just want to see the IGS talks and schmooze.

congratulations finalists 

the actual networking isn't the issue, it is how we send the physical state of the game across it.

Our current method simulates the world all on the server and sends it out to everyone playing, the clients don't figure out anything themselves. This makes it very accurate and almost impossible to cheat, but means that you are waiting a lot to get information from the server in order to figure out what is going on in the game. That leads to some lag and delay depending on how fast your connection to the server is.

We are working on a physical simulation that will run on the client in parallel with the server so that the game can use that first to figure out where things should be before hearing back from the server. It is a pretty big change but probably necessary in order to make the multiplayer feel more solid and playable on a wider range of pings.

not planning that far ahead about a console part, it will be enough of a challenge to get the pc version out.

The backing up camera is totally not by design and will be replaced, that it on our annoying things list too. Once we get the networking more ironed out we are going to be doing a lot more game play and item tweaking (and adding more items and more game modes). Right now we are jamming (well our programmer is) on making it more playable over the net so that we can have a proper base for testing.

made a new character over the last few days, say hello to Cacti the cactus



I am trying to get to 9 (stock) items in every custom item category (karts, characters, wheels, hats, accessories) and this makes 9 characters. I think I just need to make a few more accessories to fill everything out.

*edit* actually I can't count, this makes 11 characters

I just finished editing a trailer for the game that will hopefully be posted on our IGF entry page, take a look.

just finished doing a new character. this one is a silly sally, he looks quite ridiculous in all our hats and accessories.

small update, things have been pretty quiet the last few weeks as we are doing some re-writing of the network system, keep an eye out on the blog for more on that soon. I took advantage of some of the down time to give the Zero Gear website a face lift: http://MyZeroGear.com

I think it better reflects the game and our style, let me know if you find any issues with it.

started working on another kart, just finished texturing it, now I have to do all the fun stuff to get it into the game.

the graphics options are in the Ogre pop-up that comes up every time you launch the game. If you are trying to improve performance I would make sure you have no AA enabled, vsync off, and a low resolution.

How do you change the resolution?
 

At that Ogre pop-up in the beginning, you can click on all those options and change them, one of them is resolution.

the graphics options are in the Ogre pop-up that comes up every time you launch the game. If you are trying to improve performance I would make sure you have no AA enabled, vsync off, and a low resolution.

what kind of hardware do you have?

the server is included in game directory, if you find the server directory just launch the exe and it will start a local server. There is some more detailed explanations (like how to switch levels) in the manual which you can read by choosing help from the main menu.

It would require programming some kind of super bot that could handle all kinds of different game modes, as well as any new ones people made.

3D graphics are the future!

**EDIT**
Beta spots are full for the moment, we will open up more again in the near future

http://steamcommunity.com/id/marshmonkey

small update, I wanted to test out youtube's new HD video so I took some quick shots of another "goal" game mode map I am working on:

http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/12/rinkydink-level-video.html

I think with technical excellence ... it should not be about how much technology you have, but about how you use it.  So World of Goo for example (the 2008 winner) is an excellent application of a technical element (point mass simulation) to game development.  They had to implement their own technology -- it wasn't off the shelf -- but the impressive part was more about putting that technology to good use in the game design, not *just* implementing the technology itself.  I think that's the right sort of thing to win.

If you just reward the game that's most technically complex, it would feel patronizing and misguided to me, like "congratulations for knowing computer science," instead of "congratulations for being good at making games."  The award should take both aspects in to account -- not just focusing on the technology in isolation but on its use for game design.

I think that is a great way to look at it.