Ballistic NG - Wipeout fan project

[bigsnake]

This should have been one of the first things I did, but the game now has proper race. The AI isn't really to up for the task just yet, but so far in terms of testing everything is going good. Weapons are going to be setup soon too, just want to make the AI better at navigating the track first.

The arcade gamemode will be unlocked on the next build, hopefully with some weapons too!

[vincoof]

Looks sweeter every day. I like the Wip3out-themed gauges :)

[il_mago_di_Doz]

This is just too good to be true, I really hope you'll develop a huge, original, ag racing game after your experience with Ballistic NG.

[bigsnake]

Looks sweeter every day. I like the Wip3out-themed gauges :)

Thanks! This new HUD has had a lot of positive feedback compared to the previous one

More progress on racing, today I've got a few pickups setup and working. AI can use them too, you'll see hell of a lot of mines in this video:

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

These are all the meaningful values that are given to a ship for anyone who is interested:
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

There are a lot more, but those are the settings that effect the ship the most.

I think Mass (how much an impact or weapon slows you down) and Aerodynamics are also pretty important, and I think health should be expanded upon too.

Health/Energy could be split into Shield Conductivity, Shield Output and Shield Tension. Shield Conductivity being how quickly the shields can be restored from Pit Lanes, Energy Drains and E-Paks, Shield Output being just how much health you actually have, and Shield Deflection being how much damage that you actually take from energy weapons (an additional stat, Armor Tension, would determine how much damage you take from projectile and explosive weapons, and from physical impacts)

Aerodynamics could be divided into Stability, meaning how well you can control yourself into the air, Streamlining, which would effect how quickly you Accelerate, Lift being how long you can stay in the air without losing speed, etc. There would also have to be a stat for Braking Force, which could determine how effective a single ship's airbrakes are at helping it steer.

Firepower could also potentially be divided into Damage, Disruption and Deceleration; Disruption being how effective your weapons are at causing a ship to change direction or to shake, Deceleration being how much they slow a ship, and Damage being how much they damage a ship. Again, Mass would counteract Deceleration and Disruption, though heavy ships will usually have the worst handling.

[Thane Corrigan]

That is a heck of a lot of stats to adjust. I would imagine in the background there are currently a few of those stats constant for all teams.

As for the extensive ship physics proposal... Once again this is emulating the PS1 style wipeout. That might be overcomplicating things a little.

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

Well, Aerodynamics was an actual stat in WipEout 2097/64, and Mass was an actual stat in the original WipEout. Auricom and Qirex were the two heaviest ships in the original WipEout, and Pir-Hana had the most Aerodynamic ship in 2097.

[Ace3000]

Health/Energy could be split into Shield Conductivity, Shield Output and Shield Tension. Shield Conductivity being how quickly the shields can be restored from Pit Lanes, Energy Drains and E-Paks, Shield Output being just how much health you actually have, and Shield Deflection being how much damage that you actually take from energy weapons (an additional stat, Armor Tension, would determine how much damage you take from projectile and explosive weapons, and from physical impacts)

Aerodynamics could be divided into Stability, meaning how well you can control yourself into the air, Streamlining, which would effect how quickly you Accelerate, Lift being how long you can stay in the air without losing speed, etc. There would also have to be a stat for Braking Force, which could determine how effective a single ship's airbrakes are at helping it steer.

Firepower could also potentially be divided into Damage, Disruption and Deceleration; Disruption being how effective your weapons are at causing a ship to change direction or to shake, Deceleration being how much they slow a ship, and Damage being how much they damage a ship. Again, Mass would counteract Deceleration and Disruption, though heavy ships will usually have the worst handling.

Not even WipEout HD had that many stats, so why would a game that's emulating the PS1 have that many?

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

Those are all supposed to be behind-the-scenes, and my suggestions for most of them can be taken for a pile of salt. I am serious about having a Mass stat and an Aerodynamics stat, though...

[Thane Corrigan]

Amaroq... I'm sorry, but you're probably overthinking it still.

Simulating shields is able to be done with a single variable and a few constants.
These are arbitrary numbers, but assuming a weapon shot is of consistent damage, a shield of 120 will be more resilient than a shield of 80 in defending against it.
The difference on screen is only caused by the fact the game shows shield as a value of 0-100% for all teams.
If shield recharge is based on this 0-100%, and not the true shield values, then shield recharge rate can be a global constant, since each 1% shield is different between each team.

Impact recovery can be easily handled solely by slowing forward motion to a crawl for a few moments, and relying on each team's Thrust value to get them back to speed. And the aerodynamic effects on the Thrust are largely unnecessary.

You'll find that a lot of seemingly unrelated effects can be simulated using fewer values. A lot of what you're suggesting just seems to sound a lot like an homage to Fusion, which this isn't.

I will say this though. Mass would be great.
Lighter quicker teams could be knocked off course by a massive hunk of metal that isn't as nimble.
But that's an entirely new issue in terms of balancing.

[mdhay]

[...]Aerodynamics could be divided into Stability, meaning how well you can control yourself into the air, Streamlining, which would effect how quickly you Accelerate, Lift being how long you can stay in the air without losing speed, etc. There would also have to be a stat for Braking Force, which could determine how effective a single ship's airbrakes are at helping it steer[...]

Half of this is redundant, and the other half is shown by a ship's design and handling statistic. Don't get me wrong- if you had to pick and choose parts in a similar fashion to Armored Core or similar, it might work, but that is definitely not this game.

[bigsnake]

I think Mass (how much an impact or weapon slows you down) and Aerodynamics are also pretty important, and I think health should be expanded upon too.

Health/Energy could be split into Shield Conductivity, Shield Output and Shield Tension. Shield Conductivity being how quickly the shields can be restored from Pit Lanes, Energy Drains and E-Paks, Shield Output being just how much health you actually have, and Shield Deflection being how much damage that you actually take from energy weapons (an additional stat, Armor Tension, would determine how much damage you take from projectile and explosive weapons, and from physical impacts)

Aerodynamics could be divided into Stability, meaning how well you can control yourself into the air, Streamlining, which would effect how quickly you Accelerate, Lift being how long you can stay in the air without losing speed, etc. There would also have to be a stat for Braking Force, which could determine how effective a single ship's airbrakes are at helping it steer.

Firepower could also potentially be divided into Damage, Disruption and Deceleration; Disruption being how effective your weapons are at causing a ship to change direction or to shake, Deceleration being how much they slow a ship, and Damage being how much they damage a ship. Again, Mass would counteract Deceleration and Disruption, though heavy ships will usually have the worst handling.

Like everyone else is saying, there is no need for loads of settings for a stat that can be controlled with one variable. It could work in certain games, but BnG is not one of them. Right now shields work on a damage multiplier and the max shield all ships have is 100, ship damage multipliers range from 0.5 to 1 at the moment. Aerodynamics by definition is controlled by the majority of the ship settings and as for firepower, a non constant value isn't currently implemented but it will be a damage multiplier much like the shields.

That is a heck of a lot of stats to adjust. I would imagine in the background there are currently a few of those stats constant for all teams.

Yeah the airbrake, hover, gravity and slip settings (with an exception for nexus which needs a bit more falloff because it's drifty) are the same across all teams, it's by design but having those exposed to edit makes it easier to make changes to them without having to go into code to change it The hover rebound stats will be changed in the future though, I'm using convex mesh colliders for the ships and the varying sizes of the ships can stop the ship from bottoming out because the ship collides with the floor before the hovering detects the ship is close enough to the floor, I also can't just make it bottom out when the ship collides with the floor otherwise the ship would bounce around all over the place. Nexus and Scorpio are good ships to see the difference with.

[Thane Corrigan]

Ah, that's quite a dilemma! I suppose the widely varying designs for the ships made the sizes all inconsistent? That's a bummer for the collision detection.

Definitely don't want to mess around with the gravity too much though
Some jumps may seem a little floaty, but that's how it was back in the day.

[Hybrid Divide]

I really like the new HUD!

[bigsnake]

Ah, that's quite a dilemma! I suppose the widely varying designs for the ships made the sizes all inconsistent? That's a bummer for the collision detection.

Definitely don't want to mess around with the gravity too much though
Some jumps may seem a little floaty, but that's how it was back in the day.

Yeah, the inconsistencies in the shape of the ships is what causes it. I'm thinking it's worth having just a box for collision that's the same on all ships which only collides with the floor, then the current collision meshes don't collide with the floor. That will keep the bottoming out consistent while still allowing me to utilize the more precise representation of the ship the convex mesh provides (for instance the checkpoint lasers can be obscured by ships).

And yeah I don't think gravity will be changing from this point on, I feel like it's good as it is now. The idea is that while the ship should bounce around on complex track sections, it should feel like you're gliding.

I really like the new HUD!

Thanks! Nice to see more and more people are liking the new design

[Oryx Crake]

I also like the general HUD design though I found it a bit hard to see the weapon icons. maybe colour-coding or, more pronounced graphics for the designs would help? shapewise it's nifty!

[bigsnake]

The weapon icons can be a bit hard to see with some teams. They were originally designed to be blue and they still are so the coloring applied through the HUD doesn't work as intended. Mdhay is currently working on new weapon icons though, what he's shown so far already make a lot more sense then what I've made. In terms of how the weapon icons work, I'm most likely going to add a second diamond inside of the current one that changes color depending on the type of pickup you have.

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

I think weapon icons should flash briefly when you pick one up. Just enough to get the player's attention, but then it will stop.

[bigsnake]

The past few days I've been working on getting all sorts of things working, one of the things is allowing Wipeout ships to be read and loaded into the game. Like previously mentioned this will require the original files, the option on the menu will simply not show if you don't because well, there's nothing to load. There will be a readme included with the game telling you what you need to do for BnG to load the ships.



Big thanks to Aybe for this as he let me use his PRM and CMP loading classes from WXX Rebirth, I was going to implement this much earlier on but I kept putting it off to focus on original content first. Also in that video is a track Xpand has been working on, it's a remake of the unfinished track from XL!

[TheXTR09]

Just like everyone else, I came here to stop by and say nice HUD bruh. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I felt like I've done nothing to this game. Is voice acting available? Might as well record voices for an lispy, Asian G-Tek coach or a Yorkshire-like Tenrai official. :^)

EXTRA: I'm always open to play-test releases any time.