(SSGX Origins) Let's make a Wipeout game! This time for real!

[F.E.I.S.A.R]

I'll get a little fan wanky...

The Race Commission(or rather,the Belmondo Fondation)has decreed that (oval)Tracks for use on the Mach One speed class have to be more than 20 kilometres in length.

So yeah,if a turn has a to have a radius of about 1156m,so be it(though I wonder how I will add my troll corners).

[Oryx Crake]

after some trial and error with the alpha game I've come to the conclusion that the ships are a little fragile. or perhaps more accurately that because they are equally fragile across speed classes that what is a minor hit with the wall in venom and flash will take about 20 off of your health on rapier and phantom, simply because you can't get away from the wall quickly enough. I can easily finish a flash race but rapier is hard to complete, especially if you're using the boost. I can imagine a few ways to combat this issue, the most efficient if not the easiest one would probably be to have dynamic damage, as in a hit will deal more damage on venom and flash than on rapier and so on and so forth. or perhaps the simplest one just make the ships stronger.

I feel this is an issue we should address or at least talk about especially if we're going to have energy draining weapons and/or functions such as hyper boost or barrel rolls.

other than that I think the alpha looks and runs pretty great.

[zero3growlithe]

First: No sideshifts (YET)
Second: Can't tell difference between hard and weak wall hits from my actual scripts and energy drain is constant + it's fast because i've uploaded wrong version of game (i wrote that under download link X_X!) which is hard becouse of my preference... (you should be happy that it is not easy as piece of cake but possible to finish at this stage o development where there is no weapons yet)

[Xpand]

Hmm, I'm curious to see how you're going to make the sideshifts work. Probably by counting the elapsed time between two hits of the airbrake key? If the time is smaller than a set value then the ship will side-shift (apply a sideways force)... And then disable that for a few seconds so we can't sideshift two times in a row...

[Oryx Crake]

lol don't get me wrong zero I love what you've done so far it's got exactly the right feel and physics for my liking and I think for most of us die hard fans, and if I knew a damn about programming I'd present you with possible solutions or code but since I don't I'm reduced to "whining" ^^; my point though was that without many hours of practice I wont be finishing a rapier race let alone a phantom race. I mean I wont say I'm some sort of super talent at wipeout or racing games but if I find it hard to do then people without my 1000 plus hours of experience from wipeout games on all platforms will find it next to impossible.

Again don't get me wrong I love what you've done so far and for the shield all I would suggest is some tweaking, but if this is the hard version I've been playing then perhaps not even that.

keep up the good work in any case

[Rotational_aspect]

Sideshifts would be quite easy, like you say its a matter of timing. A bigger problem is adding the sideways force to the forward speed (as you are mixing vectors). I'm only a begginer at this stuff so it makes my head hurt a little!

Actually, this leads me onto my question to Zero- how have you managed to get your AI ships to bank into curves? At present I have a basic node seeking method that self rights, but I'm finding it very difficult to mix banking into this without it affecting the rest.

[dreadofmondays]

Dunno if there is already a post about this, but Tristans Inferior needs a bit of work. The main problem is that on Phantom you can skip through the walls. You can fix this with a seperate collision mesh to the world's visual mesh... this collide mesh will have much thicker walls then what is visible on screen. This should fix the skipping. There's also a bump that throws you off the track near the start of the river.
Other than that, I really am loving this! The ships are really nice and the death animation is great. Cassandra is looking really nice and I love the handling of the ship. Keep up the good work guys!

[Xpand]

Sideshifts would be quite easy, like you say its a matter of timing. A bigger problem is adding the sideways force to the forward speed (as you are mixing vectors). I'm only a begginer at this stuff so it makes my head hurt a little!

Actually, this leads me onto my question to Zero- how have you managed to get your AI ships to bank into curves? At present I have a basic node seeking method that self rights, but I'm finding it very difficult to mix banking into this without it affecting the rest.

Well velocity and force vectors don't actually interact since velocity derives from force (F=dp/dt (=) F=m(dv/dt) where dp is the infinitesimal variation of linear momentum and dv is the infinitesimal variation of linear velocity). What you can have is the forward thrust force interacting with the sideways force. Now I don't think that applying a sideways force on a forward moving object would be a problem. The software calculates the sum of the force vectors on its own and from there determines the aceleration (F=ma).

Don't mind all the maths... I just had to learn the nasty habit of prooving things mathematically... I'll just keep on modeling...

[zero3growlithe]

@dreadofmonkeys: FFFFFFUUUUU... well done in pointing this out yourself... (sorry i'm like this, it's normal) Glad you like death animation though

@Aspect: Well, making them bank wasn't hard, I'm just simulating Horizontal axis input and they do the same what player's ship do I know what will be hard though... in WOHD while ship is on a track like Moa Therma it has to allign its horizontal rotation to match track's "orientation" (?)... you know what i mean? This is not easy for me...
As for sideshift, side force is just a matter of writing 'rigidbody.AddRelativeForce (Vector3);' ^^

@Oryx: Okay, no worries, as i said above it's normal that i react harsh xd Especially on morning

EDIT: As for AI banking, they bank a little because side raycasts which are supposed to keep them in the middle of the track follow their rotation and it's not detecting what it's supposed to detect
btw. Who'll beat this record? xD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NkDhSipvM4

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

Mach 1 is 1224 km/h
But why stop at mach 1 or 2, why not mach 3 with red glowing ships from all the air friction? :P
I don't think we would be able to make a single turn without having the pilot collapsing over all the G force... An 80 kg pilot doing an average WO track turn at mach one would suffer a G force of about: F=m*a (=) Fc=m*ac (=) Fc=80*(340^2)/45 (The 45m is the radius of the turn) (=) Fc=... Let me get my calculator.... Fc=205511 N which is about 256.8 G... O.O
For an admissible G force (10 G) the turn radius of the Mach one track should be of about 1156 meters... Lol That would make a turn length of about 7263 meters... Sheesh! :D
Talk about a huge track. I guess it could be a speed-run test track, like the ones they use to test sports cars and stuff like that. But even so those are just like 15-20 km in length! Ahahahah

Mach 1 = 1225.05588 kph (761.2144327129563 mph (340.2933 m/s))
Mach 2 = 2450.11176 kph (1522.428865425913 mph (680.5866 m/s))

As for the G-Forces, the answer is easy: Artificial Gravity inside the cockpits, a seperate inner cabin and outer cabin (both moving independently), and inertial dampeners (supplied by Helios on behalf of the Triakis weapons corporation, back before they were considered illegal (this is the amature league).

@zero3growlithe Edit your post, click on 'Go Advanced', and click on 'disable smileys in post'. Then, use things such as this:
Happy :)
Sad :(
Mad >:(
Wink ;)
Crying :'(
Etcetra.

[Xpand]

Yeah when I need to know the actual values I search too... Don't know why I wrote 1224 km/h though...

[Amaroq Dricaldari]

With the in-cockpit enhancements, G-Forces should be reduced by 10%, maybe 40% if you factor in the Inertial Dampeners. Also, F-22 pilots where these things called G Suits. What they do is they reduce the G forces that the pilot feels significantly, without actually reducing the G forces themselves. I… think it works through pressure…

[docfo4r]

Hey I have an idea about tracks...

I played the free run demo where I can just drive around in the wilderness, so why not making one race track like this? Instead of driving on a road with barriers left and right, drive through the wilderness and of course the road is clearly visible on the ground but also trees, rocks, mountains etc. are placed in a way that you will know where to race.
Could be something like a bonus track to unlock or the final track in the career mode, what do you think?

I wish I could create this one on my own to show your my idea but I don't know how to create a track

[F.E.I.S.A.R]

Try drawing the 'map'
And is Xpand around? I'd like his input on my (2D) tracks

[docfo4r]

Alright, give me some days. I draw it

[Rotational_aspect]

Amaroq Dricaldari: all fast jet pilots have G-suits. They work because they keep blood from 'pooling' in the lower body during high G.

[Oryx Crake]

actually what happens with g-suits is that when they are exerted to a certain amount of g-force they inflate primarily at the bottom of the legs and then further up as the g-forces rise constricting blood vessels, essentially ensuring that blood doesn't disappear from the top half of the body thereby preventing such things as black outs and grey outs(it's not fool proof though and at certain levels of g-force they don't work very well as inflating any more would strangle the pilot, there by causing what they're supposed to be preventing, but pilots still need to control breathing and such in order to endure the massive pressure the body is exposed to..) they've been around in one form or another since the advent of super sonic flight.

@F.E.I: in any case. I looked at your sketches feisar they work for making a track and I could start modeling it since xpand is terribly busy with school, but it'll take a while and well I also have my own tracks to work on XD so don't expect very quick results ^^;

@doc: I've been playing with the idea of a track without laps, essentially a track sort of like a rally track, a course from point a to point b without passing the same place twice, it would have some open sections and such but I'd hesitate to put actual obstacles in the way as a game with this kind of speed and skill requirement kinda doesn't work very well with it. The obvious example would be wipeout fusion where those kinds of tracks were the most hated tracks in wipeout history (for reference, cubiss float 2-3 alca vexus... 2 I think) putting trees and rocks in the middle of the track pisses racers off but open sections and less than straight walls and such can work. problem is I think that with a game like wipeout or indeed SSGX racing lines are paramount and obstacle courses kinda get in the way of that as dodging trees and rocks is less about the perfect racing line than it is new features for the sake of new features... if you know what I mean. it's hard to explain what I'm trying to get across but I'd bet you that most of the established wipeout fans would dislike free standing obstacles in the middle of the track.

Also @Zero I've kinda gotten to a point with the basin park tracks where I wanna see if they work in the game before I go any further could I send you the tracks somehow and you could beta test them or put them into a demo and send it to me so we can work on debugging them? you know before I go ahead and texture anything that needs changing.

[docfo4r]

Yeah I know what you mean. Well, my intention was to place rocks, trees and whatever nature elements not in the way, but left and right so it will act like a barrier. Of course not as tight so it would replace a road side of a race track but to clearly see where the road is heading.
But I like your idea with the A to B race... Could be a new racing mode, something like "Navigator"...

[Xpand]

Docfo4r, is this what you want?
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[dreadofmondays]

That last screenshot is the sex.