Vehicle Demo (Final)

[Sascha Willems]

So now that version 1.30 of the NGD-SDK went public I also release the final version of my vehicle demo (which took me more than time than I thought ).

To get you going, some screenshots first (click for bigger view) :


You can download it here (~3.7 MBytes).

What's in the demo :

• Vehicle with different drive types (front, back, 4WD) and a fully functional gearbox (6 gears and one reverse gear)
• Over 120 dynamic objects you can interact with (tire stacks, stack towers, balls, and more)
• A looping and a jump
• An icy sea to show different material behaviour
• A huge racetrack
• Dynamic shadows (stenciled shadow volumes)

Comments are appreciated, but please consult the readme.html before posting something that's said in there.

Note : The dynamic shadows are very demanding. So if the demo becomes to jerky, turn them off (either in the launcher, or by pressing "s" ).

[darqSHADOW]

404. =)

DS

[Sascha Willems]

Sry, I had to upload a new version with a small change. Maybe you tried to download it right then. Please try again.

[Cheery]

AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRHHHHH!!!
It was slow!

I wonder if you could do it faster to make frustum culling for it if it doesn't exist yet

otherwise it looked good. I like from the car skin!

[Sascha Willems]

It's using an octree and that octree uses frustum culling to cull not visible nodes. But what system do you have, and what resolution did you use? Also (see readme) turn shadows off, which gives a huge speed boost.

[Cheery]

No shadows, 640 480 resolution, intel pentium 4 2Ghz, radeon 9600XT, MS XP pro

[Sascha Willems]

That may have to do something with the current version of newton, as the demo uses some new collision primtives that aren't optimized for speed as far as I know.

[BigB]

nice nice, but a bit slow

[Sascha Willems]

I know, but it's a preview. After it's "finished" I'm right now looking into some things that could gain some speed (especially when shadows are off).

[Alain]

Excellent work Sascha!

No problems here with speed.
Pentium 4 2.8GHz, 512MB ram, NVIDIA Geforce4 Ti 4400.

Only with the shadows on It slows down.

[Sascha Willems]

I have just uploaded the final version of this demo. See the first post for updated information. It now should also run at the same speed, no matter how fast your system is. (Which doesn't mean that it's faster now, so you still may have to turn down resolution or disable shadows=

[Xpoint]

With my computer(P4 2.80GHz, Geforce FX5200)it runs almost good with 1280x1024 without shadows

btw, is source comming out 2?

[Sascha Willems]

No, I don't plan on releasing the source. There is so much stuff in the source (3DS loading, Octrees, Frustum Culling, dynamic stencil shadows, and much more) so that people would only get frustrated trying to get out how vehicles work.

But I'll do some smaller delphi demos with sources to demonstrate the new features of newton. I've just release (see link in my sig) a demo with fully documented source that demonstrates the different joint types newton has to offer.

[Xpoint]

But i don't only want your source for the vehicles, i'm intrested to in your 3ds loader and everything else, becose i'm working on a game with others, and i can learn very good from your example

[Robert Lettan]

Running the demo, it's far more demanding on the graphics card than it is on the processor.

• AthlonXP 2600+
• 256MB PC2600 Ram
• GeForce FX 5200 64MB AGP8x
• Forceware 66.83 (Developer)

using Fraps:
640x480 (Windowed) .. Without Shadow ( 60-148:75 ) With Shadow ( 25-30:28 )
1024x768 (Windowed .. Without Shadow ( 35-60:40 ) With Shadow ( 9-10:9 )
(Min-Max:Mostly) [edit.. silly mistakes]

Unfortunately, the Controls seem to be Framerate based, so the faster the program, the better the physics appear because the more responsive the controls.

As even in the most active physics events the FPS didn't drop, I'd say what is slowing this down is mostly the rendering pipeline. Some things could do with some tweaking.
Not to mention the Shadows appear to have ZDepth issues.

As for the physics themselves, when using Front/Rear Wheel Drive the brakes didn't work quite right, you'd slow down and stop using them but let go and it'll continue as if you were still accelerating. In 4wd this was never an issue though. Overall is a cool demo though.