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[Zizka]

This looks super fun. The controls look really smooth. It reminds me of the old nes racing games like NC Pro-Am.

Do you plan on implementing relief? It would be *really* awesome if you could. I'll try out the demo and let you know what's what.

Can you upgrade your car between races?

[marcgfx]

thanks zizka, quite a few people have mentioned RC Pro-Am never played it myself though. What do you mean by "implementing relief"? I tried to google it, but could not come up with an answer. Would love to hear what you have to say about the demo. I haven't had much time to improve lately, but one thing I really want to get behind are the loading times.
Cars currently don't upgrade, but it would not be that hard to implement. Just not sure if it would add to the game.

[Zizka]

Oh ''relief'' is a French word but it exists in English too:
2 : characterized by surface inequalities

So basically, will you have slopes, jumps that take you off the ground and stuff like that? I find that's pretty necessary in driving games. 

As for upgrading, in racing games back in the days, you would collect cash by driving and use that to improve your tires, engine, buy turbos and whatnot. Gave more depth to the game. But then again since you're allowing to use different cars I guess it's not necessary.

[marcgfx]

currently I don't have any slopes/jumps. I have been thinking about jumps for a while, but have not implemented them so far. there are a few issues, due to the fact that my game visuals are entirely 2D. the shadows are prerendered into the car graphics, so to add jumps I would need to first separate car and shadow. implementing the jump itself should not be too hard though. thanks for the input!

[diegzumillo]

I love the demo! Reminds me a lot of Rock'n Roll Racing. Which had jumps and slopes, by the way, so you might want to give that game a try to see how they did, if you haven't already.

But yeah, I had fun. It's very, very hard though. My best run was on the ice track, where I held second place up until someone blew me up.

[SunWuKong]

Great looking game! There is a lot of charm and life in the examples you posted!

Played the demo and like the feel of the game. I didn't notice if there as controller support but that would be great if there was. Reminded me of the game Super Sprint with the cars and the look of the track.

Well done and keep on keeping on!

-Tim

[marcgfx]

thanks guys, glad you liked it! really motivating to know someone actually played it and enjoyed it
I've been told it's quite hard on the normal difficulty. currently normal means that neither player nor AI have advantages. I'm thinking about removing some of the special items for the AI though, as it can get a bit bothersome/feel unfair. I sometimes get the feeling the AI is out to get me, although the execution of the extras they collect is entirely random.

there is controller support, but the current GUI does not indicate this. there is still quite a lot missing.

I guess I will have to be adding jumps, so many people seem to think they are required. Might be worth trying out, but I am not sure how they will benefit the game.

[marcgfx]

Yesterday I purchased a packet of 10000 font, so now I've spent hours trying out different fonts. there are just way too many options, but I'm still not really happy. The font I'm currently going with does not have monospaced numbers and that sucks for displaying things like time (XX:XX:XX) as it always changes size. So I'm using a different font for the numbers. Real pain in the backside this font business...

On the upside I was given a nice little poster by Zizka, from Super Toaster X

[marcgfx]

I've found a nice application that lets me modify ttf fonts (fontforge). So I managed to fix the fonts numbers to be monospaced. The only issue now is, I am not sure if I am allowed to do so. The licence states I may not modify, reverse engineer, etc. but I am assuming this would be limited to me trying to redistribute/monetize the font. I hate legal stuff...

I would appreciate your feedback on the font-choice, can you read it well enough?
http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/nav.html

[diegzumillo]

I've found a nice application that lets me modify ttf fonts (fontforge). So I managed to fix the fonts numbers to be monospaced. The only issue now is, I am not sure if I am allowed to do so. The licence states I may not modify, reverse engineer, etc. but I am assuming this would be limited to me trying to redistribute/monetize the font. I hate legal stuff...

I would appreciate your feedback on the font-choice, can you read it well enough?
http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/nav.html

I hate legal stuff too. I think it doesn't qualify as a violation, because kerning, the thing you are changing, is not part of the font... maybe? I don't know.

Looks good though!

[marcgfx]

thanks diegzumillo, but I've already changed the font again. I was not only changing the kerning, so I don't know how legal that was. It's now a 100% free font, but I did have to manipulate it again to get it to my liking. fontforge is pretty cool and I'm slowly getting the hang of it

[yaomon17]

Well in the demo I got shot, ran into one of the springy desert trees, got back onto the track, ran into a pool, ran into a mine of some sort and then ran out of bounds again. I am very good at this game 
The font is good as it. I don't think I have extra good font reading powers so it should be a fine font.

[marcgfx]

thanks for trying yaomon . Some people think its really hard, for others it seems pretty simple. I will likely be kicking out some of the extras for the opponents, currently it's fair, but a bit much I think.
I am pretty happy with the font now too, so glad you can read it!

one of the things I'm struggling to decide about now is the minimap


I have three variations.
1. previous version. the minimap is built by using lots of circles (even the track). looks ok, but it does not really represent the fauna/map very well.
2. render the whole map using webgl. this is the most accurate representation. but its a little harder to make things out.
3. track in white, ditch the rest. It's an adaptation of the first version. but if I do decide to go this route, I will likely try to also render it with webgl/anti-aliased. to fit properly, I would also need a small shadow like I have around the numbers on the left.

currently I'm sticking to 2, but I am not sure if 3 might be better. any opinions?

[yaomon17]

Between 3 and 2 I prefer 3. I find readability on the minimap to be the most important. Some of the darker car colors can take a few seconds to find with a quick glance at the minimap. Ideally, the map will allow for the player to have a quick peek at it to get informatio they can't get from the main screen such as how far the are ahead/behind cars that are off the screen. 3 might be a tad too aesthetically bland, so maybe a version of 2 with higher contrast between the cars and map would be the best.

[marcgfx]

yaomon, I think you are right. so I just spent 6 hours on this, instead of sleeping. not the best idea I've had.

[flashysquirrel]

i tried your demo, it's really good, i would say it's more of a micro-machine-like than a mario-kart like
reminds me good memory
a few feedback : i wish it was a little more slipery (at least on some maps) to give a nice feeling of drifting
when we drive off-road and the vehicule ralents, it would be nice to see some smoke animation to make it more obvious that we are off-track

anyway, good job, and good luck with that !

[marcgfx]

thanks flashysquirrel : the drifting depends on the vehicle, some slide more than others. it also depends on the track, but yes I'm still tweaking a lot of stuff. I noticed the dust was no longer working as it used to, fixed that, thanks for the input!

I've spent hours on this issue:


when the track is muddy/fades out into the background I had issues with overlapping polygons. when they overlapped, they doubled the color strength of the track. this added a lot of unwanted triangle shaped areas. sometimes hardly noticeable, but they really annoyed me. It's also easy to see the errors in the minimap.

network stuff:
I did a few experiments and I've noticed that if I can keep the lag below 200ms it should be quite acceptable. At least it sounds like it could be achievable. I will still need to handle higher latency, but if the standard case is around 100ms I would be really happy.

[marcgfx]

I implemented game history a long time ago. history lets me go back to earlier occurrences and was originally created for the AI editor and for saving replays. Later it was used for adding ghosts in the practice area (mario kart style).

As the framerate is not guaranteed to be constant, I am using dynamic time for the normal game calculations. The problem with practice was that to store the ghost in history I required a constant time step. So I reduced the framerate to 25fps. this works, but it's not a smooth as the game.

For network-delay solving I will also need access to history, so I addressed this issue today. I run the game at whatever speed I want, while calculating the history at a constant time step. e.g. my constant timestep is 1. my input time is 1.5 -> I calculate one history timestep and 0.5 non history time. in the next frame I go back to the last history timestep and start calculating again. I do more calculations this way, but I have more control/possibilities. So far it's working quite well for practice mode, but I am sure there will be a lot of issues turning up in the future.

while implementing the history stuff, I came accross an odd bug. I noticed some speed-up arrows seemed to have more impact than others. turns out my collision detection was buggy. I use sectors to find the collisions. If two objects are in multiple sectors, they would also collide multiple times -> the speed up was also applied multiple times   

[marcgfx]

getting ready for networking:

it seemed so easy in my last post. It's everything but easy. It worked fine for the practice mode, as all I was doing was going back to the last calculated frame. when I try to go back a few frames, things start to get pretty messy. So far I don't store destructible trees in history, dust/explosions are also missing and quite a few other vital parts. I have managed to get the basic car movement worked out quite well, but as soon as it leaves the safety of the track or gets a boost from an arrow it's all messed up.

feels like I opened up a big barrel of worms. at the bottom there may be some gold coins, but I'm not sure if I am really willing to dig through all that slimy stuff  

[marcgfx]

managed to sort out most of the mess I made for myself. added some new features too:
- the track name is spoken while zooming in before the race
- there is a screeching sound for the tires when taking fast turns. I'm really thinking about adding tire treads but am not sure how to do that sensibly. if would have to work on track and off track.