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

[zero3growlithe]

No, I've put Mach 1 on this track because I've made it very big (scale parameter) and phantom was a little too slow to enjoy

[Oryx Crake]

for debugging purposes I'm not generally speaking against having a high top speed, especially since the track has to work in zone as well. also I think it'll look faster once we get some textures on it but for now I tend to agree with zero that even mach 1 doesn't feel overly fast.

Also I've created a design document for basin park hill (I'll make one for basin park once we start debugging that one as well.) Basin Park Hill Design concerns

so I'd appreciate it if anyone who has any points would just put them into that document and I'll address the concerns in the model a.s.a.p. kthx

Also Zero should I flip all the normals so that you're seeing the back of them on the ground? O.o I mean I know almost nothing about how these things work, all I'm really doing is sculpting the envoirnment after all so I'm unsure of how these things work for the purposes of making them work in game.

[zero3growlithe]

Well, i don't know how to define 'normals' so a quick example should solve this: we have a simple poligon plane, in 3d modelling software you can see it from both sides, but in Unity (game engine) you'll see it only from one side which normals are pointing. heh
If possible detach track from green hills, if it isn't, i'll do it myself then, in Maya.

[docfo4r]

@Oryx: When I fell off the track, I sometimes got respawned next to the track, so I fell off again. Only boost accelerating while respawning brought me back onto the track. Should this issue also be in your document? I added it, but maybe it's a general problem. Feel free to delete the line if that's the case.

[zero3growlithe]

@Oryx: When I fell off the track, I sometimes got respawned next to the track, so I fell off again. Only boost accelerating while respawning brought me back onto the track. Should this issue also be in your document? I added it, but maybe it's a general problem. Feel free to delete the line if that's the case.

Because it's just a simple portable respawn script I've written in couple minutes... it won't be used in game.
btw. This track which was in barrel roll demo was my 'Delcor City' in progress and here's an update: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/phot...eat=directlink (it will be a night ride track)

[docfo4r]

Night ride through a city? Awesoooome!!!!!! I am looking for some nice lighting then, great to have such a track!
But I think you have to improve the section with that 3 jumps, it's pretty tricky actually and can't be mastered without using boost and/or barrel roll if I am correct.

[Xpand]

Looks good but I think you should add a subsurf modifier to the track to smooth the corners...

[docfo4r]

And I guess you will also replace the sky later on

[BrunoDG]

Thanks, Zero! I got them! I'll take a look at FullShipController and I'll check what i can do from here!

[zero3growlithe]

Some night photos of Delcor City: https://picasaweb.google.com/1060839...eat=directlink (texturing this track shouldn't be a problem as it will be dark in many places)
Note: There is maaaaany lights missing so it's a bit too dark right now
btw. Those are in-game screenshots

[docfo4r]

This is going to be an awesome track, zero. I love the sky! Can't wait to see the further progress. Oh but I hope you will add some lights to the windows buildings or rooftops aswell

[zero3growlithe]

@Xpand: I'm trying to figure out on how to make gravity work correctly in terms of physicsand i don't really know how in case of so called momentum (?) of ship after jumping of some jump... maybe some tips on how to do it :d I suck at physics cos it takes too much time to learn something and remember it, especially when it is boring for me xd

@Docfo4r: Yeah, it is supposed to be stuffed with lights when completed :)

[Xpand]

Ok, the momentum of an object is what defines the quantity of motion that object has. It's a vector, so it has magnitude and direction. It's expressed as p=m.v in which "m" is the mass of the object and "v" is the velocity of the object (also a vector). The relation of that with jumping is that the more momentum an object has the longer it jumps if it's launched from a ramp. So you can see that it's not only the magnitude of the velocity (speed) that counts. The mass of the ship also counts for the length of the jump, but not for the height.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum
You can relate the momentum to force through Newton's second law of motion with F=dp/dt, where the resultant force vector is the derivative of the momentum to time.

I just don't understand how you want to get gravity from this since the airborne time doesn't depend on the mass nor the horizontal speed.
I thought that Unity had an internal bullet physics engine with active gravity.

If what you need is the gravitic acceleration, then that's g=9.807 m/s^2

In another note you can also use the momentum to determinate collision dynamics:

dpsys=0 The variation of the system's momentum is zero ALWAYS (only if you DON'T have a variation in mass, which we do because ships burn fuel, but that makes things much more complicated).

Then if you have two ships colliding, the system's momentum will be

pinitial=pfinal (remember, always a vector)
Ship1 and ship2

p1i+p2i=p1f+p2f

m1.v1i+m2.v2i=m1.v1f+m2.v2f (velocity is a vector)
(v is velocity and m is mass)
This is for elastic collisions, which are the ones we want.
The problem is that I didn't consider drag here, so the ships would just bounce around the track's walls after they hit...

[zero3growlithe]

I thought that Unity had an internal bullet physics engine with active gravity.

Actually there is almost nothing left for unity's physics engine from me cos:
1. An body dropped in space with gravity turned on does not accelerate as it is supposed to, even if you increase its mass it will fall as fast as a body with smaller mass...
2. Everything happens as if it was in slow motion xd
3. It feels really unstable when body is moving high speed, collisions are really... strange and as you can sometimes notice colliders hit invisible corners on flat surfaces

If I wouldn't have modified it a little by applying forces myself then this physics and other stuff that is right now (well, my actual project state is much different than previous versions xd) would look like and it would feel like xd

Anyway, thanks for some lesson, I'll try to translate it somehow to Unity script... maybe I'll even rise my grade from physics a bit

[Xpand]

A body's mass doesn't affect the speed of fall. All objects under the same gravitational field experience the same acceleration, independent on the mass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C5_dOEyAfk

Actually, through Newton's second law of motion (Yep, Newton was a genius... His stuff fits almost everything):
F=m.a
P=m.a (where P is the weight and the only force acting on the body)
m.g=m.a (the masses cancel each other out)
g=a (the only acceleration the body is subjected to is the gravitic acceleration, the masses don't affect the variation of speed during the drop)

And that looks slow motion because you dropped the object from a big height. Try putting a cube 10 meters above a plane and see the time it takes to colide with the plane. According to my calculations it should take about 1.43 seconds. If at 100 meters: 4.52 seconds.
Don't forget when the ships jump they have a part of the thrust force going upwards, therefore it makes it fly a lot longer, depending if the force is too strong or too weak...

[Rotational_aspect]

In Blender, you can increase the accuracy of the physics engine, can something in Unity do this?

It may solve your problems as I suspect the object is moving faster than the engine can currently compute. The only drawback will be it will require more CPU time (not a problem for your i7!)

[docfo4r]

Cipher just had a great idea in the Wipeout HD Bling Brigade thread:

and yaeh, wipeout should actually take the photo when there's a photo finish

...I am wondering, would it be possible to program that for SSGX? So it would take and save a picture from a spectators view if there is, say less than half a second between the first and the second who finishes the race. And if you don't want that, you can uncheck that feature in the options menu, maybe...

[zero3growlithe]

@Docfo4r: Well, I've seen somewhere how i can take pictures and save them on disk in Unity so I think it would be possible

@Xpand: Ok, I know something about gravity but now I have this damn problem on how to make ship align itself to be parallel to track's surface cos my previous script was all about changing ship's transform using raycasts and that was very unstable and slow working I have something on mind but I need to know if it is possible to calculate direction from one rotation to another, for example: I have one object (object's position = ship position) which is always parallel to the track (still using rays cos using face normal which was under ship worked bad and I don't f****** know whyyyyyy!) and I have ship on which I want to apply torque force in direction which is headed to "center" of rotation... u know what I mean?

@Aspect: Yeah, I've posted a solution to this problem tens of pages back

[Xpand]

@zero3growlithe: Let me just finish my final test tomorrow (I still have exams, though) and I'll get back to you with that. For now I see no way around using raycasts to align the ship to the track's normal. You can probably add an invisible plane below the ship and make its normal always parallel to the track's face normal at that point.

[zero3growlithe]

Ok, take your time and pass those exams Hopefully I'll figure out something by myself xd