Ballistic NG - Wipeout fan project

[bigsnake]

I've been taking it slow the past week, going to step it back up again. I've just been working on a remake of a Gare d'Europa since 2-3 people suggested it for physics testing, there's a screenshot below. As for copyright, what I'm looking to do is have the game check for the contents of the Wipeout 2097 CD so you need to ideally have obtained a legal copy of Wipeout 2097 before you are able to use this. This track remake, and the game contents check so you can play on the track, will be in the next version of the game.

[JABBERJAW]

Sweet

[Temet]

I've seen the vids, this is awesome.
You'll have to check for all versions of Wipeout 2097/XL, don't how you do that

[TheXTR09]

As for copyright, what I'm looking to do is have the game check for the contents of the Wipeout 2097 CD so you need to ideally have obtained a legal copy of Wipeout 2097 before you are able to use this.

Er...Does that mean I need a Wipeout2097.iso to play this? I have no idea what this mean.

[bigsnake]

You'll need just the track files, it looks like the files are exactly the same across the board so there shouldn't be any issues. There's going to be a readme with the game that explains what to do so that should hopefully address any confusion.

[Temet]

I've seen your last vids, that's huge man
Can't wait to try this.

Sorry I can't comment on your vids, I've always refused to create a Google+ account just to comment youtube videos.

[bigsnake]

Regarding a release date, I'm looking to have a more unoptimized version (in terms of the track rendering) out tomorrow. I just finished making a tool to move the start line on the track (you probably noticed on my videos that the start line was straight after the jump) and tomorrow I'm going to make this 2097 data verifier. After that's finished and it works I will then release it

[Temet]

I'm moving to a new flat this week, so I probably won't be able to try it... but be sure I'll do it as soon as I can
WO2097 is my favorite one, and I like Gare d'Europa

[bigsnake]

Alpha 0.03
Download: https://github.com/bigsnake09/Ballis...Alpha.0.03.zip

As expected this version has Gare d'Europa and an attempt a fully replicating Wipeout 2097's physics. I think the camera needs a lot of work still, but I feel like the ship handling is going in a good direction, let me know what you think and how you think it can be improved though.

I included a readme that tells you how to setup Wipeout tracks for the game to read it, if you don't setup the tracks correctly then you'll get an error message when you start the game.

The next version of the game will be Alpha 0.03_2, for this I want to make the ship feel better to pilot and fix all the rough edges with the physics, which obviously includes many of the wall collision bugs.

[Temet]

Ok, tried it yesterday evening.
Here are some things I noticed :
- It looks more power consuming, my core i7 with GT650m seems to be at max with normal and 1280x720. For comparison, SSGX using also Unity didn't gave me issues;
- Cannot go into the OPTIONS screen, the game freezes when I hit ESC;
- Way to hard not too go out the track, maybe the walls need to be higher;
- The repawn can be in the wrong direction;
- The HUD is now at the good scale ... so the weapon+power indicator is really disturbing to see the track (it disturbs me in lots of Wipeouts);
- The ship can bounce really (too) high when hitting a wall;
- The last jump is too long, I often was too short;
- I flew though a wall and didn't respawed, I had to stop the game (it didn't freeze, the time counter was still increasing).


Of course, I always point out what I think need a correction
Otherwise, the shape of the track is OK.
I think I would remove the speed pad before the first "up and down" because it takes you out of the track.
The second "up and down" is also really hard not to get out of the track, don't know what you can do... put the tunnel a little longer?

This are my thoughts mate

Don't take all the remarks as negative, I like what you're doing, I just want to help to improve

[bigsnake]

Thanks a bunch for the feedback, I got some more feedback from someone else so I will get straight to fixing everything when I get home from college tonight

[Temet]

Dude, I don't know how you can do all this so quick, that's impressive o_O

[bigsnake]

I have way too much free time

I've just been optimizing the track, without realtime reflections on the ship there's a relatively big improvement. I still need to split up the track floor and wall into segments so the entire track is being rendered at once, but that will be done by the time I release a new version.

I'm going to move that speed pad at the top of that hill down so you can still use it but it doesn't punish you by making you fly off the track, the same goes for those two speed pads just before the U-bend in the warmly lit station (or what I would assume would have been a station before an AG track was built there). Talking of speed pads I have also fixed a small issue with them. When you hit a speed pad you have a timer that starts to decrease which determines how long the boost lasts for, originally when you hit a pad it set this timer to the max value no matter what. This made multiple speed pads useless because you only had a max boost timer when hovering over them. What I'm doing now is increasing that timer which each pad you hit, this means that two speed pads will now result in a longer boost, it's a very subtle difference but it will be more apparent in a race against other ships.

[TheXTR09]

Great Scott, d'Europe looks great! It'd to be hell making the cityscape look decent.

On speed pads, they're different in the Originals compared to the later installments. What they do is just increase top speed by 10% on each pad, but have a very slow decay time, which means the "boost" last longer. It makes multiple speed pads useful, especially on tracks like Firestar. It's almost works like a performance boost, so to say KERS.

[amplificated]

Not sure if it's because I'm running it off a low end HDD (I personally don't think that should be the issue), but I still get fairly large "skips" when the game is changing music as well.

[bigsnake]

That's a known issue that I will get round to fixing at some point, it's caused by the song being loaded into memory. I'm going to look into streaming the music instead of loading it all at once, that will also allow for custom music and reduced memory consumption (depending on the currently loaded song).

[Meg.A.Byte]

When bigsnake released a video with new team called G-Tek, I knew I have to make a little description for my Hyperion team as well.

HYPERION

Country - Iceland
Established - 2047
CEO - Derek Wright

Icelandic Anti-Gravity research was founded in mid 40' after Icelandic great revolution in 2043.
It was caused by merging with Greenland in 2036, where 5 years later natural resources (rare
metals) were found. Thanks to those events Iceland has appeared among other wealthier states.
Therefore with help of FEISAR, they found their own Anti-gravity research (partially supported
by their own natural resources autonomy). Two years after AG research was found, they
established an official AG racing team, which participated in nearby AGRC.

Speed - 8
Acceleration - 6
Handling - 7
Aerodynamics - 8
Shield - 3

3rd generation ship

[bigsnake]

Nice! Although Hyperion is obviously supposed to be for the Wipeout universe, there will have to be a different story for BallisticNG, I wouldn't worry about that until there's a story going on though.

Alpha 0.03a
Download: https://github.com/bigsnake09/Ballis...lpha.0.03a.zip
There's nothing too special about this release (hence why it's a sub update to Alpha 0.03). I've re-enabled the pause menu (it has been disabled for 2 releases, didn't even realize), made some more changes to the classic Wipeout camera, re-introduced the modern camera with some changes and added my own ship model. There's also a few optimizations and a new bloom post processing effect.

Since there's now 2 ships in the game, I will be making the menu where you can select ships from quite soon.

[pichuscute]

Nice! Although Hyperion is obviously supposed to be for the Wipeout universe, there will have to be a different story for BallisticNG, I wouldn't worry about that until there's a story going on though.

Alpha 0.03a
Download: https://github.com/bigsnake09/Ballis...lpha.0.03a.zip
There's nothing too special about this release (hence why it's a sub update to Alpha 0.03). I've re-enabled the pause menu (it has been disabled for 2 releases, didn't even realize), made some more changes to the classic Wipeout camera, re-introduced the modern camera with some changes and added my own ship model. There's also a few optimizations and a new bloom post processing effect.

Since there's now 2 ships in the game, I will be making the menu where you can select ships from quite soon.

Is there any way to play without having physical playstation copies of the original games? The readme mentions normal tracks, but the game won't boot anything up.

[bigsnake]

Just create a file called TRACK.WAD in the directory mentioned in the readme file for now, since the game isn't exposed much I haven't worried about checking if the file is a valid Wipeout file just yet. If you don't already know, you can create the file by just saving a new file from notepad and making sure to change the file type from .txt to any file.

I wrote the readme for future versions of the game which will have a menu to select tracks from, Alpha 0.03 only has the remake of Gare d'Europa in. My next release will have an original track in so you won't need a copy of Wipeout to play it.