NGD-Powered racing game

[tomek]

I decided to put it also in this forum

screenshots from first milestone







I'm using 1.30 vehicle joint with several hacks and tweaks to achieve arcade gameplay feeling. Car behavior is extremely good, I would say that it's even better than in many other racers - Newton is doing wonderfull job here.

[The unProfessional]

How're you doing on performance? How many vehicle joints are active at a time?

[tomek]

I've got four vehicles and I noticed that most 'time-consuming' part of newtonUpdate is collision detection, not integrating suspension(although it's also costly - if you want 16 vehicles, what worse - in complex environment - it will need high-end CPU to perform well). After tweaking collision-related parts, by setting elasticity, softness, friction, twekaing moments of inertia etc., most of the time is spent on doing graphics.

[The unProfessional]

Well nice job... it's lookin great

[leblebi]

That looks good!

When can we try the demo? Also somewhat unrelated, but how do you create those tracks? What editor are you using?

[vinhk]

nice GFX too !! full of 60-70s style, cool !!

[tomek]

Thanx guys!

When can we try the demo?

I could send it even now, but as it's commercial game I don't want to let it spread to early. Finish is planmned for march, so then I would post demo, maybe Julio and Alain will publish it for download. Currently
demo takes 10mb, and I don't think that final demo will exceed 20mb or even 15mb.

Also somewhat unrelated, but how do you create those tracks? What editor are you using?

I'm not doing it on my own. My 'employee' is using 3ds max. Then, we are exporting it using my own exporter and passing data to converter which is doing many things including shadowmap calculations.

Also, some unrelated info:): I'm writing everything on my own. The only external libraries I'm using are DirectX, Newton, TinyXML, ogg/vorbis.

Recently I switched from my own rendering setup to D3DX effects - because of 'rapid prototyping' possibility. Earlier I was using TinyXML for parsing XML's and importing data, but I recognized that using ID3DXEffect much more easier that writing own setup routines based on XML's.

I'm trying to avoid hardcoding as much as possible, especially physics parameters. My vehicles are using about 30 different constants, so recompiling code wouldn't be efficient.