Vehicle "snake"

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Vehicle "snake"

Postby Sascha Willems » Thu Dec 02, 2004 2:54 pm

Out of curiosity (and some spare time) I've made something you could call "vehicle snake". It's a vehicle that has 12 trailers attached via joints and is in my eyes a nice demo of what you can make when you put some newton features together :

Image Image
(Click for bigger view)

You can download the demo (binary only) here (435 KBtes).

If someone is interested in the source (Delphi) drop me a line and I'll also release it (after cleaning up).


But this demo also has a reason (more or less) : I plan on doing a game that is based on what you see in the demo but expanded and competitive. I haven't outworked the game idea, but it should be something like this :
You have a given track with some nice obstacles (that goes up and down) and two competitors (either two humans, or perhaps one human against the AI. Now you have such a vehicle snake as in the demo I posted here that has some stuff on it's trailers (also like in this demo). You now have a given amount of time to cross the finishing line of the track. The winner is the player that has the most stuff still left on his trailers. I'll work out the idea some more and try to get something finished in the next weeks, as I'm shure that it would gameplay-wise make some real fun.
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Postby tomek » Thu Dec 02, 2004 3:03 pm

Hahah nice idea:) Newton snake:)
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Postby Bourricot » Thu Dec 02, 2004 3:13 pm

Nice work and also funny.

demos on your website are very instructive, so if you dont mind put the source code..

Thx.
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Postby Sascha Willems » Thu Dec 02, 2004 4:24 pm

I've noticed that the car felt bumpy when doing circles, so I updated the demo.
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Postby _vlad » Thu Dec 02, 2004 4:55 pm

Nice demo.
I'm sure a game like you describe it could be fun.
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Postby Julio Jerez » Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:17 pm

did somebody say lego :D
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Postby Sascha Willems » Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:23 pm

There may be a coincidence as I spent many hours of my childhood building stuff with lego, and lego and programming (especially games) have much in common, so you may be right ;)

But I'm quite shure that I'll make a game based on this as you have almost limitless possibilites. It's even enough to change the limits of the ball and socket joint connecting the trailers to give a totally different feeling. So in the final game you could not only have different tracks, but different vehicles (different form, different number of tires, differen torque and weight and much more), different trailers (size, wheels, number), different loads and much more. You could even make it so that the player get's more and more trailers attached to the vehicle over time. I also thought about the players first racing to a place where they get the load on the trailers and then race back. If I get this done right, it should become a very fun to play game!
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Postby The unProfessional » Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:05 pm

There's a game that recently came out on the PS2 where the entire object of the game is to continue gathering junk, becoming a larger and larger ball of junk, until you can eventually pick up buildings.

Looking at your demo, you could drive around collecting vehicles. If you crash, you lose a few. But if you reach a certain point, you move on.

Simple, yet addictive.
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Postby Thomas » Fri Dec 03, 2004 12:44 am

very nice! :)
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Postby walaber » Fri Dec 03, 2004 5:00 am

very very cool little demo!! I hope this becomes a full game, it has lots of potential.

There's a game that recently came out on the PS2 where the entire object of the game is to continue gathering junk, becoming a larger and larger ball of junk, until you can eventually pick up buildings.

that game is called "Katamari Damashi", and it's fantastic!! it's one of the few PS2 games I own... I highly recommend it to anyone, it has a really interesting use of physics, and EVERYTHING in the game can be picked up, from small thumbtacks to entire buildings.
Independent game developer of (mostly) physics-based games. Creator of "JellyCar" and lead designer of "Where's My Water?"
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Postby Sascha Willems » Sat Dec 04, 2004 2:23 am

I've heard of that game (looked at the review cause it had such unusual box art), but since I have no PS2 (my last console was a Sega Mega Drive, but that was long ago) I haven't seen it in action. But at least the review sounded nice, but it's not something in the vein of what I'm doing.


I've already started working on the game itself and most of the basic stuff is ready. You can already load a "map" from a 3DS file and also the vehicle and the trailers can be loaded from a 3DS file. Once the game is finished, I plan on releasing some docs along with it to assist users in making their own maps/cars/trailers. I'm normally using the meshes names out of the 3DS to determine the function of the meshes and I also place the joint positions within the 3DS file, so anyone can later change those things without having to do coding or so.

I also must admit that, though it's in it's very early stages, it's already addictive. I drove around the "track" many times and already found out some things you need to do in order to bring as much stuff to finish as possible. Once again newton is impressing me with both, it's stable behaviour (if the pivots are set correct, and also the masses, the vehicle snake acts quite real) and it's speed!
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Postby Haddd » Tue Jul 12, 2005 3:42 am

I'm interested in your code, because i'm trying to do a roller coaster style game.

can you publish your source code? will be very helpfull for me.

Many thanks :D
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Postby buhrmi » Tue Jul 12, 2005 8:15 am

Hey Haddd.

I am not 100% sure but I really really really think that using a full blown 3D rigid body dynamics engine for simulating a rollercoaster is not the right approach (dont know how you spell that :wink:). I doubt that even a incredible good engine like newton will provide stable results when dealing with these tiny-winy joints distributed over several coaster cars jointed together, etc
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Postby Sascha Willems » Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:42 am

I don't think the source would be of any use since it's very very simple. I just connect the trailers with the car and each other using a simple ball-and-socket joint (and enabling collision between the bodies connected). That's it, not more.
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Postby Julio Jerez » Tue Jul 12, 2005 10:55 am

Did I hear somebody wants to make a rollercoaster?
Is this a simulation of a game? and what kind of coaster
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