Ballistic NG - Wipeout fan project

[dreadofmondays]

Barracuda? For Christmas?
There's only one glitch on textures. Behind the starting line billboards there's a texture dump, and somehow a picture of a tree is there too. Iunno, I just like checking out for Easter eggs.

Yeah, i had a lot of space left over and realised i needed trees, and the tree texture was just so huge it takes up that much texture space just by itself

[bigsnake]

Hey everyone, more news!

I've just been taking a bit of a break from development but I'm now back. Dreadofmondays is working on branding and UI designs, those will no doubt be shared at some point soon. I'm currently working on improving the physics and optimizing the game further. Wall collisions have been a bit of a gray area for a while, if you haven't been able to slide over them then you've been lucky. I've fixed that which makes scraping walls a lot less risky and I'm soon going to be working on the hovering to fix a few issues with bottoming out (such as small impacts chucking your ship into the air). Since people have also complained, the next version of the game is going to have a draw distance slider so you're not stuck with a low draw distance if you don't want it.

The main focus for the next version of the game is to polish what already exists, add actual racing, start adding weapons, add more tracks and allow custom ships. There could possibly be the start of implementing the track editor into the game too (it's currently a separate thing). A release date is not being mentioned yet because I just don't know when it will be ready, but a rough deadline I want to meet is within the next 3 months. There might be a small release before then just to introduce the ship editor, we'll see though.

[Varsh]

Just given it a crack and I'm loving the handling already. A slight tighten up but otherwise a really good base you have going. Superb stuff! I haven't played Wipeout in ages so it took a little getting used to the controls again but otherwise it felt almost like I was playing 2097 all over again.

[dreadofmondays]

Made this and proud of it B)
brand_coloured.jpg

[Meg.A.Byte]

@dreadofmondays
I love the style, this is piece of true graphic designer

[bigsnake]

Reporting in just so there isn't a large space of time between now and the next thing.

Right now I'm working on a 3D menu, ship editor and track editor. The 3D menu will take a while because I'm having to program a system that can generate everything in realtime as up to now the menus have all been pre-made using the tools Unity provides which is very tedious if you want to create complicated interfaces. The ship editor already exists but needs to be moved over to the open source version of the project and it's the same story with the track editor but I'm re-creating it from scratch. I created a repository for the track editor, it's really bare bones stuff at the moment but I'll be updating it regularly.

[il_mago_di_Doz]

Hi bigsnake, I wanted to say that I am impressed with your work.
May I ask you if you've ever considered developing an ag racing game as a full-time job? I mean with you and a team of other developers doing it for a living.
I would definitely buy a polished game with the physics engines and the ideas you're developing.
Anyway keep it up with the good work!

[bigsnake]

I definitely have, getting into gamedev full time is my future goal and being able to work on an AG racer in a team would be amazing! There's still a lot of potential with AG racers since it's such a niche genre that not many people have messed around with trying new ideas.

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

Has there been any progress on the CRT emulation code? I'd love to see it, if so.

[il_mago_di_Doz]

I definitely have, getting into gamedev full time is my future goal and being able to work on an AG racer in a team would be amazing! There's still a lot of potential with AG racers since it's such a niche genre that not many people have messed around with trying new ideas.

I'm really glad to hear that!
I wish you all the best

[bigsnake]

Has there been any progress on the CRT emulation code? I'd love to see it, if so.

I haven't worked on it yet, it's something I'm going to implement in the future since it will require a bit of work to get it to function.

I'm really glad to hear that!
I wish you all the best

Thanks!

I've just released a new version of the game, it's only minor but it fixes a few problems and there's some changes to the physics to make the ships more responsive and tighter. You can download it here and I've also updated the released thread.

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

I haven't worked on it yet, it's something I'm going to implement in the future since it will require a bit of work to get it to function.

Alright. I'll look forward to it! The HLSL MAME code is open-source, but I haven't seen anybody try to get the shaders working on modern games, since the whole point of MAME is for use in emulated Arcade games. As such, I do expect it to take a long time to implement.

But I'm thinking... You could probably use things like Scanlines on the in-game stuff, and "Vector" effects on the HUD and menus? Maybe not the Pincushion (curve) effect, though.

[mdhay]

I've been working on a HUD design for Bigsnake. Right now it's exclusively the tachometer and shield gauge, but I'd like to get throughts from people watching this thread. https://imgur.com/ECM3u6e

[JFthebestJan]

@mdhay: awesome HUD, knight rider style xD i like it

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

It looks very reminescent of LCARS. I love it! It's just begging to have a portion that doubles as a music visualizer.

[mdhay]

It's just begging to have a portion that doubles as a music visualizer.

I'm going to ignore why this was coloured almost the same colour as the body background and skip to saying that no, this is not a good idea.

There is no way that an interface, dynamic or not, would benefit from such a thing. A pilot of an AG craft needs to know about turbine RPM and airspeed more than whether is bangin' toonz aren't dank enough. Not only that, but it's infoxiation; in a racing game this is asking for trouble.

[Ace3000]

Listen to this man, he's majoring in game design

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

I'm going to ignore why this was coloured almost the same colour as the body background and skip to saying that no, this is not a good idea.

There is no way that an interface, dynamic or not, would benefit from such a thing. A pilot of an AG craft needs to know about turbine RPM and airspeed more than whether is bangin' toonz aren't dank enough. Not only that, but it's infoxiation; in a racing game this is asking for trouble.

It was a joke, which is why I colored it different.

[il_mago_di_Doz]

I've been working on a HUD design for Bigsnake. Right now it's exclusively the tachometer and shield gauge, but I'd like to get throughts from people watching this thread. https://imgur.com/ECM3u6e

They're both great, but I prefer the one on the right.
The one on the left has the "Km/h" sign too big: it doesn't contain any information, so it should be written much smaller imho.
It also has that void space under itself that seems a little weird, like if something's missing.

[mdhay]

It was a joke, which is why I colored it different.

Jokes need to be seen to be funny; colouring that almost pure white was going to get in the way of that. Redundant, either way, because there's nothing to suggest it's a joke other than your saying it is after being told it was a bad idea. Given your suggestion of mouse steering, I'm assuming you just don't know what you're talking about and don't like it when nobody falls for it.


Thanks for the feedback, Mago. We've been talking behind the scenes about the HUD long before it was posted, and were leaning towards the one on the right! If In had taken the screenshot from the BNG file instead of my uni work, I would have been able to show you some changes I made!

The void space is actually for the weapon icons when those were made, in an attempt to have a HUD that was completely at the bottom. But that said, it'd look better reversed. Sadly it gets tedious to fix in Photoshop, and In could not be bothered!