Ballistic NG - Wipeout fan project

[Wanzer]

Would like to take back my input on wall bouncing.
From what I see, wall bouncing is actually not bad, it doesnt stop you too much neither throw you opposite of the track by itself.
Some collisions still rotate me 90° nose in opposite wall and what causing it is steering input during the collision.

For example, I am in the middle of the left hand turn, I am turning left and heavy ships drifts to the outside and touches right hand wall.
If I am still turning left during contact with the wall, ship will rotate much more violently in the direction I am turning.
If I let go of controls or turn in direction of the wall during contact, ship will stay on course after the bump.

Technically this can be beneficial, if you cant make a tight corner and hit the wall, this additional turning force will turn your ship harder and you wont stuck on this wall.
However, if this happens in a shallow corner, this additional force will be too much and will bounce you to the opposite wall.

[[APG] Darkmega.exe]

Can i get updated about glcore? (when it gets fixed by the unity team, obviously)

thanks in advance.

[Wanzer]

A suggestion for ship importer, it would be nice to have orthographic view and if controls included buttons for top, side, front, rear views, think 3D view in blender.
Plus option to mirror changes on each side since placement of contrails and engine flames is mostly symmetric.

[Wanzer]

Love new cockpit and 3d person cam, flying Tenrai feels now like flying a futuristic bike.
Also love course redesign and new course Macena Reef, reminds me of a course from rollcage II, shame we cant fly on walls and ceilings.

First bug report as well, Harpstone expert use leadeboard times of a regular harpstone.

Another bug I found, pictures disappeared somewhere from track selection screen.

[Wanzer]

Found a bug in ship importer, for some reason I can import ship named Turbobee.obj but wont see Turbobee.msh unless I turn on msh filter.
Sometimes cant turn off new fps counter, cant reproduce it at will though.
Was experimenting with something and for some reason very simple blender sphere brings my fps to a 2 frames, something to do with shading maybe?

Few suggestions as well.
Now, to save a ship settings you have to click on "save & close" in settings manager and then additionally on save button at the top left corner.
Its a bit misleading, since save & exit doesn't actually save your settings.

I think many modders would appreciate ability to adjust physics live in game without having to jump back and forth between ship importer and a course, constantly saving and re-loading.

I would like to see an option for "back-face culling" in game, I am having stable 75 fps at all times unless in splitscreen or for some odd reason on zephyr ridge where it still 75 but somehow very jerky, I think such option could bring some improvement.

Question to devs:
I am trying to make a ship that reacts instantly to steering input however, no matter how I set up turn speed, turn gain and turn falloff, there is still something else going on.
The ship doesnt turn instantly or stop turning after I let go of a stick.
How those values working? Are they interpolated, multiplied, percentage of a whole or something?
Are those values capped at some point, I think I went as high as 1000000 without it reverting back but without achieving desired result.
I managed to dig out some older post by Snake I think, where he talks about ship settings and what they do, it still applies right?

Max Speed - Maximum amount of force that is applied to the ship
Acceleration - How fast changes to the ship speed happen

These two values stay the same, having both of them is pretty much redundant at this point:
Power Gain - How fast the engine reaches maximum power
Power Falloff - How fast the engine losses power

Turn Speed - How fast the ship can turn
Turn Gain - How fast the ship starts turning
Turn Falloff - How fast the ship stops turning
Grip - How much drag is applied on the ships lateral axis
Slip Amount - How much the airbrakes reduce the grip
Slip Gain - How fast the airbrakes reduce the grip
Slip Falloff - How fast the ship recovers from airbrake slip

These are global across all ships:
Airbrake Speed - How fast the airbrakes rotate the ship
Airbrake Gain - How fast the airbrakes start rotating the ship
Airbrake Falloff - How fast the airbrakes stop rotating the ship
Airbrake Drag Multiplier - The percentage of the max speed using the airbrakes can slow the ship down
Airbrake Drag Gain - How fast the airbrakes slow the ship down
Airbrake Drag Falloff - How fast the ship recovers from airbrake drag

[bigsnake]

Found a bug in ship importer, for some reason I can import ship named Turbobee.obj but wont see Turbobee.msh unless I turn on msh filter.

The game only supports .obj, you should be able to see the file in the file browser but you won't be able to read it

Sometimes cant turn off new fps counter, cant reproduce it at will though.

I've fixed this, the issue was being caused by the performance counter being created everytime you went back to the menu.

Was experimenting with something and for some reason very simple blender sphere brings my fps to a 2 frames, something to do with shading maybe?

How many polys does it have? The only shading in the game is baked per-vertex lighting for the tracks, which would be applied at the polygon fill level so it basically has no impact on performance at all.

Few suggestions as well.
Now, to save a ship settings you have to click on "save & close" in settings manager and then additionally on save button at the top left corner.
Its a bit misleading, since save & exit doesn't actually save your settings.

I think many modders would appreciate ability to adjust physics live in game without having to jump back and forth between ship importer and a course, constantly saving and re-loading.

I can get behind that, having some sort of test track with real-time adjustable controls could be very useful!

Question to devs:
I am trying to make a ship that reacts instantly to steering input however, no matter how I set up turn speed, turn gain and turn falloff, there is still something else going on.
The ship doesnt turn instantly or stop turning after I let go of a stick.
How those values working? Are they interpolated, multiplied, percentage of a whole or something?
Are those values capped at some point, I think I went as high as 1000000 without it reverting back but without achieving desired result.

Steering uses linear interpolation with a normalized multiplier for the interpolation speed. If we look at steering of a range of -1 to 1, near the centre (0) the ship when starting to steering is much slower then it will be near -1/1 and will loose speed much quicker near the centre. The normalization causes the effect to scale with the gain/falloff so you can't have a ship that instantly starts and stops steering.

[Wanzer]

The game only supports .obj, you should be able to see the file in the file browser but you won't be able to read it
Sorry I meant to say shp, I can port obj and it will be converted to shp but for some reason I cant see shp unless I turn filters, sometimes I cant even see turbobee.obj and only see turbobee.mtl but, same model just named turbobe.obj works normally.
Weird stuff.

How many polys does it have? The only shading in the game is baked per-vertex lighting for the tracks
Totally forgot the game doesnt have anything above pre-vertex lightning, if it had I wouldnt have to bake occlusion to the texture myself.
Dont get the wrong idea I certainly like that it doesnt, simply because it offers some very unique possibilities for a modder when it comes to texturing.
As to the sphere, your usual blender sphere, 482 verts, 512 faces, 960 tris, 512 texture nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not even close to level of complexity of the ships i already ported in game so its not like my PC cant handle a ball.

having some sort of test track with real-time adjustable controls could be very useful!
Wanted to propose a test track as well but didnt wanted to come of as gibmedat especially its something I could do myself later having the track editor.
That said it would be good if controls could be used outside of a test track, simply because modders would adjust their ship using already existing ships on already existing tracks as comparison.
Well, if you decide to make a test track for modders a good feature would be large surface with some holographic pointers for orientation that will not interrupt testing process.

What about backface culling I remember Unity was having some problem with it, is it still not possible to use that option without visual bugs.

[Wanzer]

I have a few suggestions, nothing major but maybe you'll see something you like.

I think it would be nice to develop few sets of physics and gameplay mechanics from some later Wipeout games, easily switchable from the menu.
I am sure the moment the game will become open source again, there will be plethora of physics mods that might fragment online scene in already niche game.
I am talking MP and leaderboards mainly, current physics feels great but its trying to simulate W3O and later game provided many improvements.
People pick what they like best and official leaderboards and servers will see much thinner crowd.
Because of that I think it would be good to develop few set of physics and gameplay mechanics, players could use as a standardized solution among themselves in SP and online.

It feels like your ship top speed is the only AI difficulty scaling factor in arcade and championship modes, because of that game is often either too hard or too easy.
Some kind of a system based on performance points taking into consideration acceleration, max speed and steering capabilities of the ship would be better.
Another nice addition would be an option to create and save sets of ship you can chose to race against.
As well as ability to change difficulty level without going back to options menu, maybe difficulty select window on the "select speed class" screen (to avoid too much clicking).

I would like to see thrust analog input, with negcon you could hover throttle depending on how strong the button is pressed.
It was something used for starts mostly but for me it is more about accessory compatibility, I'd like to plug in my throttle quadrant and joystick and try to play with it but with thrust being digital its impossible, its kind of a gimmick but worth trying.

Wall bouncing and bottoming out could use a look over, currently ships are still too happy to bottom out on slightest bumps and contact with a wall on too many occasions rotates you 90°if you dont let got of a controls upon impact.

Is it possible to import cockpits in game at the moment? Asking because I cant really figure a way to do it.

Well thats all I can think of now, I also have to say at first this flat lightning seemed like a limitation but, the more I play with it the more I am amazed how much it can benefit a modder.
Since there is no dynamic lightning to illuminate every polygon, you can put whatever you want on texture and it will look exactly the same in game.
I am still experimenting with texture shading and painting and most of the time its another "You can do that!" moment, maybe it come from me still learning but the way I see it, this lack of dynamic lightning is actually a good thing.

[Wanzer]

Hate to be the one constantly posting but here it is
Leaderboards are not displaying correctly.

On the bright side, Cassandra looks awesome.

Another bug I found, for some reason many weapon pads just wont give me weapons anymore also, when I pick up this particular weapon
Announcer will not say its name and if I attempt to use it it will just disappear.

[PureSpeed7]

My thoughts: The game is amazing! It's great to see the wipeout spirit living on in this game. Though i have one suggestion. The Omnicom ship looks bad*ss but my one problem with it is that the Scorpio ship is basically a better version of it. Overall, its 30 stat points better, and the only advantages Omnicom has over it are 20 points in firepower and 15 points in grip. So that's just a user suggestion, i just want your thoughts on it. Keep up the good work!!

Edit:

Also, maybe Ballistic NG avatars??

[Wanzer]

I am starting to get afraid I'll get a missile up my thruster for posting here constantly however, after last patch W3O ships disappeared.
Please tell me they'll be ok and its just a bug.

[Xpand]

They started being read from the actual game files

[Wanzer]

Thanks for explanation xpand, found new ship import readme and it all become clear.

However, the ships are mirrored, most noticeable with Assegai which has cockpit on the wrong side and Feisar and Goteki 45 have signs mirrored, also, is it me or the handling changed a bit.
Could you share list of handling characteristics of W3O crafts you guys developed?

[aybe]

Missile launched

Be patient, this feature is only a few hours old.

Whatever might be wrong with my library, bigsnake will get in touch and I will look at it.

(a rough guess is that we're simply using different directions for axes)

[bigsnake]

The flipping issue is entirely my issue, the problem is that when the game read the .obj files the ships were flipped on the X axis. This is not a problem when reading the files through WXX's libraries and I had forgotten to remove the flip

Going to have a new update out tomorrow that fixes this, in this update will also be a new ship settings list that you can toggle by pressing F1 twice. It displays the majority of stats for the current ship, as well as some realtime information too.

[Wanzer]

Missile launched

My thrusters are ready

Be patient, this feature is only a few hours old.

No need to tell me to be patient, I know fully well how long it takes and I think at present pace the game developing amazingly fast as it is.

@snake yay for check stats feature.
Please consdier this suggestion I made earlier, currently matching contrails is a bit of a chore, not to mention once grab point disappear behind the ship its all blind clicking to get that one again.

A suggestion for ship importer, it would be nice to have orthographic view and if controls included buttons for top, side, front, rear views, think 3D view in blender.
Plus option to mirror changes on each side since placement of contrails and engine flames is mostly symmetric.

[Wanzer]

First issue got solved with another patch, however, I lost all my medals, unlocked ships and signs above says enter name.

Also, did we get some kind of texture filter in the last two updates?
Asking because noticed some Hi Res skins got hit hard, Hyperion HD for example, some other HD skins are blurred too much, in some cases texture seams now have white outlines, Nerd Coopas ships got somewhat blurred, not much tho (generally all lowres styling textures got some sort of a blur which kinda change low texture looks) other ships got sort of texture shimmering when moving or even white outlines. and bilboards are now having something over them that looks like a bicubic filter in an emulator.

[bigsnake]

A friend of mine has just had that issue with the game messing up his profile, I haven't been able to recreate the issue though so I'll need to see if others have the issues to try and determine what the issue could be.
Edit: This could have been caused if you ran the game before the hotfix that fixed a major screw up in Unity's build process where all the game's resources were missing. If so, go to your userdata folder and open up LastUser.txt then enter the exact name of the profile you were using (this will be your steam name ).

Nothing has been changed with texture filtering, the game has been updated to run on Unity 5.4 but that wouldn't cause anything of the likes. Everything on my end here looks correct, both inside the Unity editor and in the built game.

[Wanzer]

Thanks bigsnake, that fixed the issue with my missing profile, as to the texture filtering issue.
If you say nothing changed then your probably right and I must be going senile although I could have sworn those ships looked better couple of days ago shp1 shp2 I have no idea what the heck happened.
I might have misremembered how billboards looked but I am certain ship skin was much clearer and I didnt had those white outlines and white texture seams.

Few other things you might look at.
Leaderboards look like this
Loading sign twitches trying to center as more dots appear (although its something you probably already working on )

Apart from that, I am very much liking new Aciknovae with big cat, I am very surprised how well you guys captured W3O spirit, Aciknovae, Luna, Cassandra feel like courses straight from W3O, with cassandra having this awesome feel to it, every lap I cant help but regret its so short, especially on zen.

[aybe]

BnG greatly improved since last time I gave it a try (~3 weeks)

Good job !