WXX-Rebirth : a modern engine for Wipeout 3 Special Edition !

**aybe** · 28th June 2016, 10:37 PM

I started playing with WO shortly after it's been in stores I guess around Sept. '95, then WOXL followed and is too my favorite esp. the music ! The Prodigy music was simply insane, it never gets old

For WO3 actually I haven't played until it around 2006 IIRC when I bought a new PSX and I was simply amazed by its look. However now I can hardly cope with Rapier class, let alone Phantom class ... it's just too fast

Not sure if you have access to this thread http://www.wipeoutzone.com/forum/sho...mages-allowed) (I think one needs at least N posts or something), the whole history of the reverse engineering of WO3 I did is in there, and it started in April. I did start the previous project with WO/WOXL exactly a year before, so this one is about 3 months old.

For a timeline I would love to say tomorrow

but I really have no idea but ASAP !

Here's a rough list of top-priority things:

- hovering/jumps: mostly done except that tracks like SampaRun are problematic and this is likely to need a refined approach; it is really hard at the same time to try play WO3 properly and try understand the inner logic of it

- finish track collisions -> shouldn't be very long

- levels/scenery -> low-level stuff figured out, high-level stuff needs manual work (checkpoints, booster/pads: not found in game data and therefore I have to run through each track and write down section/face) -> not complex but very repetitive and long

- animations -> shouldn't be very long as there is a dozen by track, instantiation by code has been figured out (in fact with Unity when you step out a bit from their intended path you are on your own, in my case 95% of stuff is done by code rather the mouse, a way (officially) not supported by Unity) of course I do profit of Unity facilities by it's not like when one imports models but OTOH there are advantages with code: my scene is not littered with a billion things placed manually

Now when I have these things which I consider essential to qualify the project as a honest 'preview', the cake topping should be addressed:

- audio/video : will be quick, all low level stuff is written: VAG, WAV, looping, extraction etc ... in fact it was not a matter of simply getting PCM or frames, Unity should be able to consume them, i.e. videos must be OGV and so on

- the installer : mostly done, basically one will simply insert his WO3SE CD and it will take care of the rest, extracting videos manually is not the faint-hearted and I don't actually expect an end-user to do this.

- AI/multi-player : will have to be done, no previous experience about it but there is significant info out there and I might even get help from BnG crew

- interface/navigation : not particularly complex but there are a couple of things I need prepare before

- shadow/lighting issues : in fact they have 'baked' them in the textures and therefore applying Unity standard shader simply looks worse, this is likely to happen when topping the topping ,i.e. when the game is done and could be modded or whatever (we're not there yet)

To sum it up / TL;DR:

Pretty much all the low-level stuff is done, high-level remains for the game internals but as a well as for the Unity side.

Actually as time passes on, I spend a more and more significant time on the research part and not that much as one would think on coding, i.e. how can this be done efficiently, would it work and is this really what I need ? On the Internet 99% of stuff is crap when you do a search about game programming/Unity/books, beside people here that helped out for physics and stuff I rely on my own approach but this takes time (but in the end it is reliable).

Another thing is testing, whenever I make changes I have to test and there are 22 tracks, I do not run through all but a few like Sampa Run and Prototype 3 as these have tight tunnels and unless I get an approximative WO experience I'm not happy.

So progress in this project is like a roller-coaster !

To make you salivate a bit

So many things are ready but I'm simply not pushing them because they need to be optimized, i.e. the scenery loading takes almost 10 seconds on its own because nothing is merged for debugging purposes, if I have say to run the project 100 times a day it equals to ~20 minutes lost in waiting. Add to this the Alt-Tab I have to do everytime I go back to Unity and wait for it to pick the changes (a few more seconds), you quickly end up in lots of time lost by waiting.

But don't worry, I think I'll soon reach the summit of the coaster and gain a huge speed boost downhill (until next uphill

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Thread: WXX-Rebirth : a modern engine for Wipeout 3 Special Edition !

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