Thanks for sharing all the details bigsnake.
Your last vid looks awesome.
I'll try your last (or next) release I guess. I hope my laptop will be able to run it.
Keep up the good work :)
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Thanks for sharing all the details bigsnake.
Your last vid looks awesome.
I'll try your last (or next) release I guess. I hope my laptop will be able to run it.
Keep up the good work :)
I'm using a laptop, I just put the settings all the way down
In the future, the last 3 countries yet to officially adopt the metric system finally get their act together
in more general news... I just found this thread, tried physics test 2, then the Zone test... the steering is unbelievably improved in that timespan.
Nice work! I'll be keeping an eye on this
Sick video Jabberjaw.. That project certainly looks promising!
Seems like I’ll have to boot up my windows partition to test this stuff :) Interested in how the track focused camera feels like. Just watched Qirex doing its lap in WO3 and I cannot wait to see a craft floating this smooth along the racing track again :)
Hopefully it should run well. I'm about half way there with a new version, it's going to have an audio/graphics options menu so you'll be able to better tweak the graphics outside of the default Unity presets. You'll also be able to turn off the bloom, anti-aliasing and realtime ships reflections to help save on performance too.
Seeing what's going on right now, it's defenitely WipEouts Rebirth XD
Alpha 0.01
I think the game is ready to enter an early alpha stage, the physics from here on out will only be receiving small tweaks and bug fixes here and there. This version has an options menu, once you click Apply it will create an XML file in Documents/BallisticNG, let me know how that goes.
This version is noticeably larger then every other version because it features music by TheConzio, quite a few tracks.
Note: I actually forgot to update the credits .txt file, just amended it so the next version will mention TheConzio.
Download Link: https://db.tt/WabW6Tgh
any chances of making the game running on extremely low tech hardware? my PC is 12! years old, XP32/SP3 - 1GB RAM - 128MB VRAM - directx9.0c.
Agreed with the low specs, my laptop played the previous build fine, but the new version runs incredibly slow even on the lowest settings.
It will be hard to get the game running well on 12 year old hardware but directX9 is possible. In a matter of fact you can force directX9 right now. Create a shortcut to the exe, right click and go to proerties then add "-force-d3d9" (without quotations) to the end of target. You can alternativly also force OpenGL, you can use the switch "-force-opengl" (again without quotation marks) for that one.
There's still plenty of optimizations I can do and I'll do my best to get the game running faster. If you'd like to help make it easier to understand how the game performs on other machines, I just made this Google Form that I will be putting on the original post.
Is it possible to have an option " leave background off" ? That would probably do it as my computer ran version 4 just fine
Runs awesome on my hardware on ultra settings at 3440x1440 - I guess like most modern games it's all GPU and the rest of the machine barely matters. For reference; my cpu/ram/etc are all from 2009, but I have a GTX780Ti
fun little bug: if you barrel roll when falling off the track, you get the boost when you get dropped back onto the track
Unrelated: I cannot say I'm a fan of the new music. it would be great as in-game radio for a car game exploring a city, but it doesn't feel right for a futuristic racer
Guys please, don't ask for the game to run on a 12 years old PC...
I'm downloading the last version right now, will try it.
My laptop is core I7 with 6 GB of RAM and GT 650M, I'll try to see if I can run it (graphic card is still a mobile GPU...)
Great to know it's running well on the higher end :)
When it comes to the rendering side there's not much I can really do for the lower end, the view distance on the lowest eliminates a large portion of geometry so it should improve it, plus anything you can't see isn't rendered either. If you are getting worse performance with the latest version then that's just a more accurate representation of what to expect as the game grows unfortunately, when there's nothing but the track floating in the void there's very little to do. Without realtime reflections for the ship enabled I'm looking at a 0.8ms render time (on my graphics card) with 350k polygons, that polygon count is just a bit over the recommended ~150k polygon count for 3D mobile games. With realtime reflections it's 4.5ms and 2.5m polygons, quite the jump. I'm using an R9 280x for anyone who wants to compare that. I will work on a stats screen that you can use to see how the game is performing.
If you find the CPU usage of the game is however too high then that's something I can work on, my code is in no way as optimized as it could be and I'll be working on that as time goes on. I would much prefer do that once all features are in though otherwise it's going to hinder a lot with progress.
Known Bugs and issues
[!] = Fixed
- Barrel Roll boosts not canceled on re-spawning [!]
- Restarting a race from the menu reloads the track with nothing happening
- Menu options are not updated when the game is next run
- When loading a song the game freezes for around a second
My settings are similar. I'm running a laptop with an i7@2GHz, 8GB ram and a Mobility Radeon HD 6570.
I'll update this with my results, I'm currently downloading it now.
EDIT: I can say that it works nearly perfectly on my system using the "Laptop" setting, right up to "Normal". I start to get 90C+ on "Normal", though, so I don't want to take it further, but it does seem like my system will handle "High", even though the CPU might overheat.
EDIT2: Don't worry about the overheating thing, though. My laptop has heat problems. Can you guess what make it is?
My Wife's laptop is not that old, maybe I need to just reformat it so it will run on the low end at least. I don't have enough cash to get a laptop until fall.
@JFthebestJan : because it would be a shame to have a drastic visual downgrade to be able to run on PC from the last decade.
I agree with you that not everyone need a recent PC, but if you want to play recent games with your PC then you are part of the people who shoud see the need of a decent hardware.
EDIT : tried it. Gameplay is awesome dude! It runs great in high+720p on my laptop. It does not feel smooth in 1080p but it's not important.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nycdp please excuse the performance, I don't know the track.
I think there is a real issue with the shadows. Otherwise it seems OK.
I understand the counters for BRs and HyperThrust. That's clever sir :)
Thanks, and if you want to try and squeeze out any extra performance try turning off the ship reflections in the options menu :)
I'll have to change the shadow resolutions for the different options because those shadows in that video are way too low resolution.
I just made the first official song for the game, it takes a lot of inspiration from Cairodrome.
It's not really the shadow of the ship that bugs me.
Attachment 9452
Look at the attachment. The area in the red square should be in the shadow and it's not. And when the ship will go forward, the zone will go in the shadow.
It's not a big deal, it's just to share a feedback :)
EDIT : also, the time in the bottom left is going out of my screen. You think it's something wrong with my screen set up?
Ah right, yeah that's because realtime shadows in any game are limited to a certain distance otherwise they will destroy the framereate. I need to build the lightmaps, only problem is that the new system Unity 5 has is stupidly slow because for building static lightmaps it's overcomplicated. I've actually had Unity sat here tonight building them when I've been busy with other things and it's taken 5 hours so far, this is on an 8 core processor running at 4ghz so you can imagine the frustration of this over the older lightmapper which would have done this in around 1/2 hour.
For the HUD cutoff, it's a scaling issue. I still need to get used to the scaling in Unity's UI tools, I'm looking to have that fixed soon-ish.
All right, many thanks for your answers :)
No problem :)
I'm currently adding new graphical features and optimizing stuff all over the place, I'll keep this post updated with what's going on.
Alpha 0.02
Download Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5d637pbro5...00.02.zip?dl=0
Alpha 0.02 is a bit of a graphics update to what already exists, I've tried to both make the game look better and make it run better. There are a few physics changes but nothing too much, the modern camera has been made a bit smoother too. For Jabberjaw, if you are not able to run this in the lowest then I will upload a version with only the track, only for this release though because having to build the game twice and upload it twice will be annoying after a while.
The last vids look awesome !!!!
I must try this when I'm back home :)
When you'll add weapons, don't go in too much weapons please. W3O had too much of useless weapons for example.
My feeling :
- boost
- shield
- missile
- maybe rockets
- mines
- as you add counters for BRs and Hyperthrust, why not an item to give an additional BR and another to refuel 50% of Hyperthrust?
Thanks mate! :)
Super Weapons?!?!!
Recently ditched Windows on my pc to make the switch to linux.
Just as a heads-up: the game works well under Wine.
Ok, tried new alpha.
I really need to practice a lot, this is really fast :)
I think I have some visual glitch I didn't see on the previous version, and it looks more ressource consuming (1080p is really not playable now).
Also, I still have the "zoom issue". I don't have the same zoom as there is on your video. That's weird o_O'.
I like the new musics.
The sensations are really good! :)
It's running about 20-25 fps or so, better than before, but not great for testing.
Also, how do I get to the options screen with draw distance,etc?
Press escape then it's the options button.
I'm going to be looking at the UI scaling so it works correctly on all resolutions, I'm hoping I can get it done without having to write my own scaling.
I tried 720p and 1080p and in both cases the UI scaling was wrong.
I can try things for you if you need ;)
Hopefully that shouldn't be necessary, I think I've realized what's going wrong so I'm fixing it now.
Technical things:
The actual UI are children to 2 other elements, one is for scaling the entirety of the UI and one acts as a pivot so I can make the UI move around. The pivot doesn't scale, plus those two parent elements fill up the entire screen space. By reducing how much screen space they waste up and then moving all the UI elements (like the lap counter for instance) to the very edge of those, it should hopefully scale correctly.
EDIT: Fixed, the next version will have the fixed correctly scaling UI in. I've also repositioned a few things so everything lines up nicely.
Awesome demo bigsnake! You are developing this very quickly!
Feature request: can the ship fish-tail out as much as the ships in 2097? To me 2097 was kind of like Sega Rally (around corners at least) but floating in the air.
With this remake, and a few others floating around, its an A-G funk era decked out with a gangsta twist, to quote Warren G.
There are options in the settings that can create this feel
The game surely is really unknown to many, some 30 people knew it, but all of them are interested. I was wondering if I can do some advertising.
Posters that pay homage to the old Sarah Cox nosebleed ad of the original, for example a nosebleeding dude holding a game controller with the title Getting High: Now Toxin-free, Legal and Fast.
Or if that's too offensive, how about something cheeky like: This game is so fast, it finished the race when you finish this sentence.
Marketing is key to get your game known, after all, no publicity is bad publicity, as they say. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Cool work!
Look forward to seeing this progress. Couple of things though: maybe you can save yourself and others some time if you make the audio pack separate from the demo? Looks like it could save 200MB from the download size. Also, is it possible to use something like github for releases? You've mentioned a lot of updates but since you're uploading builds through dropbox, newcomers to the thread might be confused when they can't actually find the latest build you're talking about, and the link to the latest build in the O.P. leads to a random post that has nothing to do with being a link to the latest build :P
Anyway, keep it up!
Done, link for the repository releases is here :)
Having the audio as a separate download from the demo sounds like a good idea, the songs did add 200mb onto the file size so that would help keep download sizes reduced as much as possible, thanks for the suggestion!
Sure go ahead, once the game is in more of a "complete" state I'm going to be adding the project to IndieDB, but if you want to do anything before that then feel free!
Nothing special, but I thought anyone interested in programming might be interested to see what I've got for the physics so far. Here's a link to the ship physics code for those who might want to dive into it, it's messy and requires a bunch of other classes to be present to function, but you can see what's going on behind the physics with this. Anyone else who codes will probably want to stab me after seeing it, especially how I handle turning input right now (I really need to rework it so it works better with analog steering).
That aside, over the next few days I am going to start work on a new track. It will be much harder then the current track. I am also working on the menu slowly in the background, give it a few more test builds and the game will have a functioning menu where you can select one of the two available tracks that will be there and the speed class you want to race in. After that I'll start working on weapons and get all the main gameplay features in, then I can work on the AI and make them work for races then we'll be looking at a much more complete game.