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Work in Progress / Car Battle Type Action Game work started up

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PeteyM5
15
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Joined: 26th Feb 2009
Location: Buffalo NY USA
Posted: 17th Jun 2012 01:55
First here are some earlier screen shots from my project.






You can see the roads and bridges over a terrain. I created a scripting system that places where curves start, how sharp they are.






I put this project away some time ago because I was busy working. Now that I am unemployed I did some work on it. Some of the scene elements are standing in for now. Tweaking the media and programming is an ongoing work in progress. I have to look at some of those fancy water animations techniques.

This game is based upon an old 8-bit game called Autodual, which had an MS-DOS version, Commodore 64 version, Atari 8-Bit (800XL) version. Think there were Amiga & Atari ST versions. The graphics were quit primitive by todays standards. Keep in mind it was before Amiga, VGA, and 3D acceleration. It was cross platform and game play was almost the same on the different systems. What I am doing is moving the basic Role Playing elements over into a modern 3D environment.

I tweaked the Roads on Terrain subroutine to test the ability to intersect roads to each other. It can also do curves on a bridge. I added edge of map tunnels that when you enter, the game will pause while you move to the next map. Decided to do it that way because doing the entire region with multiple large cities would be problematic.

If you are familiar with the original game, it has you going between buildings to build up your vehicle. You go to an assembly plant to build your car, go to an Arena and compete, a garage for maintenance, and an AADA where you can earn money by making deliveries to buildings in other cities. There were other places doing functions.

AutoWarriors is going to be a variant and include buildings doing different things. For example I am going to have gas stations, city halls, and used car lots. Doing some of these things to avoid copyright conflict from the original game since it will be costly to obtain the rights from a card game which is also serving the basis for this game.

I would like to bounce ideals off of other creative people on this forum and see if I can fine tune my game. Still looking for helpers, programming, modeling, etc. But that is strictly voluntary at this point. I can share some of the subroutines, pretty sure a few can make use of "roads on terrain" and "bridges"

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Daniel wright 2311
User Banned
Posted: 17th Jun 2012 02:08
This is real slow on my 3 gig memory pc,I even have a extra gig on my video card,so am not shure why,I cant even drive,so mabey this is not implmented yet,but at any rate,it looks good.

my signature keeps being erased by a mod So this is my new signature.
PeteyM5
15
Years of Service
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Joined: 26th Feb 2009
Location: Buffalo NY USA
Posted: 17th Jun 2012 02:25
The driving requires a Joystick. You can explore the scenery with cursor keys before touching the Joystick. This was to help me debug and tweak stuff.

I recently added the fences which are simple meshes perpendicular to the ground. They also follow the contours of the landscape. Been trying to figure out why its running slow and what is gobbling up CPU time. It may be coming from the animated water that is using a matrix so waves can be animate. I may revert back to a simpler flat water since water be only be briefly visible as your cross bridges.
Pincho Paxton
21
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Joined: 8th Dec 2002
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Posted: 17th Jun 2012 02:59 Edited at: 17th Jun 2012 03:01
Well you have made a good start. The screen update is a bit jerky during turning. I'm not sure if that's because the frame rate has dropped, or because you have programmed a jerky scroll. The car physics need improving with skidding. Of course you have just started so ideas are probably just ready to go in. I'm working on a Wipeout game, I need low poly roads with banks. So did you make your roads just 1 plain per section, or more?

PeteyM5
15
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Joined: 26th Feb 2009
Location: Buffalo NY USA
Posted: 17th Jun 2012 03:23 Edited at: 17th Jun 2012 03:23
The Roads, Bridges, Fences, and Forest Lines are done with Memblocks and plotting the vertexes based upon the ground height. I would say there are two planes in each section that are not perfect rectangles. There is also a slight crown in the road. It is harder to do some 3D elements ahead of time with an external modeling program like Milkshape. I did look at the ideal of painting the road on a terrain, and dividing the terrain into tiles. Any of those did what I needed.

I am trying Dark Imposters on the distant background objects to boost frame rate. You probably see objects going to a low resolution out in the distance.
PeteyM5
15
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Joined: 26th Feb 2009
Location: Buffalo NY USA
Posted: 5th Jul 2012 10:57
I cleaned up the code a little and now have a major improvement in frame rate. I did something with management of the memblock total sizes exactly to what they need to be before converting them to a scene object. When I started this project a few years ago, I asked for some help on here and really got bashed by the community. They said I cannot be making team requests and offering in profit sharing. Now I have some of the programming completed and have a working concept of what I want, maybe some can work with me in tweaking this thing right now. I could use some help in the car control physics. This game is more of a urban car battle game over a racing game so it does not have to be 100% racing physics.

There are multiple areas I have to work on in this game like the scene elements, driving physics, user input, etc. If I intend to make this game to what I imagine, it will take over a year to complete everything and why I did ask for help. I do look through demos and samples and have to see what it takes to incorporate that stuff into this game. If something is too CPU and GPU intensive and will slow down frame rate, I probably won't use it.

I know I can do some water and window reflective effects, but I can only do one thing at a time here.

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PeteyM5
15
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Joined: 26th Feb 2009
Location: Buffalo NY USA
Posted: 4th Aug 2012 00:53
Bump

I put this to the side while I work on a few other game projects. Something that goes on with my game projects is that I know I am very good at the core programming and database layout. I know I can do all the graphics programming, media, models, effects, etc. but that is something that drags down.

I would not mind find a team of two or three programmers who can help tweak the graphics and media sections while I stay focus on the procedures, logic, debugging, etc.

I cannot say how profitable something like this can be, but will share if it goes that far. However, having it take a long time to develop is what is standing in the way.

I did two retro games for the Atari 8-Bit computers (800XL) that were sold for profit and do have faith well written PC games can be profitable. I may do a third one soon, but taking a break from that to focus on my PC game projects.

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