[WIP] Stunt Playground *beta 3 released!!

Vectrex · Post by **Vectrex** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 7:08 am

if you made your little editor spit out the xode or odf format then it'd be a great generic ogre tool!
I like the look of this game and hope that building your own stunt arena's will be part of the actual game

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 9:02 am

I'll have to look into the xode / odf formats a bit... since I'm using xml for my own format, it shouldn't be too tough to add another exporter function for those formats...

I need to add a few more features to the tool to make it realy useful though... but I agree, it would make a nice tool I think for users of any physics language with Ogre...

I'll think about releasing it as an improved stand-alone tool after I'm done with this game.

and yes, the game will allow you to build your own arenas... that's actually the main focus of the game. of course, it will come with a few pre-designed arenas that you can load up to play instantly, but the real point of the game is arranging the jumps and props yourself, and then driving around, trying whatever you can think of

I've been spending a lot of time working on the object placement system, and I think it's going to be really impressive... sort of like the way you can manipulate items in Half Life 2... all controlled by physics.

once I get it a little more tuned, I'll post a video of how it looks placing items.

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 1:57 pm

here's the video I mentioned... it's showing the early stages of the object-placement system in action.

yes, it's still very "wobbly", but I think I'm on the right track. you can see that objects can be placed dynamically, in a sort of quasi-half life 2 way

I'll try to remove as much "wobble" as I can before I release the game!!

http://walaber.com/stunt/sp2.avi

Post by **nfz** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 5:19 pm

Looking mighty fine.

SpannerMan · Post by **SpannerMan** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 7:00 pm

Crickey Walaber, that looks great! Looks like youve put a lot of work into that already, and apart from the slight wobbling you mention it all seems really smooth.

PeterNewman · Post by **PeterNewman** » Sun Feb 20, 2005 11:56 pm

That does look very good. I like how you had the directional pointer normal type thingies showing your directional acceleration?

Looking good!

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 2:18 pm

the white lines you can see in the video are a temp debug output of the spring forces I'm applying on the body.. the entire placement system is built on these invisible springs. the lines won't be in the final version of course.

here's an updated video by the way, the "wobble" had been greatly reduced

UPDATED PLACEMENT VIDEO - 3MB Divx .avi

p.s. don't mind the framerate, it's because of the stencil shadows + fraps all running on my notebook

Post by **DWORD** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 2:24 pm

This looks really cool, I'm really looking forward trying to this game.

With regards to the wobbling, I'm wondering why you use springs instead of applying a torque to the body. I beleive that would remove the spring feedback wobbling.

Post by **sinbad** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 3:04 pm

I think this looks really cool. I like the wobbling somehow, makes it feel more tactile.

Post by **temas** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 5:39 pm

I get a special feeling when I watch you rip apart the track. Seems to harken back to lincoln log days

bana · Post by **bana** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 12:46 am

Wait, which one's the game, the editor or the stunt car driving

Excellent work there Walaber, I can't wait to play some myself. .

SpannerMan · Post by **SpannerMan** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 8:38 pm

I agree, placing the ramps and obstacles is like a game in itself, it looks awesome

Bren · Post by **Bren** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 11:40 pm

When do we get to see a movie of you jumping and crashing a car?!

BTW This reminds me of the stunt arena portion of Stuntman -- the best part of an otherwise excrutiating game!

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 7:19 am

I really liked Stuntman for the PS2, and I also agree the stunt arena was one of the best parts. the idea for this game came heavily from that actually

unfortunately I don't think I'll have car damage, but otherwise the physics should make for a fun game

as for a video with a car... I haven't yet implemented the cars into the game... although I have the basic car code all worked out and running in a seperate test program. plus if I put cars in too soon, I'll lose a lot of time to "play testing", driving the cars around. it's a problem when you're making a game that you personally want to play

I like the wobbling somehow, makes it feel more tactile

speaking of playing around. the other day I made a big stack of crates in the editor, and then grabbed the bottom crate, and tried picking up the whole stack. it was amazingly realistic, you could balance the stack like a circus performer, by simply moving the bottom crate around!

Post by **Kencho** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 10:33 am

You could release that as a separate game just for fun

:lol:

DarkBrute · Post by **DarkBrute** » Wed Feb 23, 2005 7:43 pm

Man, how do you do it? How do you build the tools, or make the game run, or the physics. God, I wish I could do that.

50/10 Excelent.

Suggestions:
Try to add like a hyper boost feature, where for a limited time you would go twice as fast.

Also, if possible, make like a city level with buildings and other cars. Me and my friend loved just zooming around and pushing cars off bridges, and jumping on trucks in Midnight Run or whatever that car game was called.

But overall, it is a suberb game.

max621 · Post by **max621** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 9:05 am

That looks great

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:17 am

thanks for the comments everyone! I'm currently working on lots of models / textures for the game, hopefully I will have some more to show soon!

DarkBrute - thanks for the compliments. the physics are from the Newton Game Dynamics SDK , a free physics engine. I've also created a simple library to integrate the physics with Ogre, which I'm using for this game.

I would love to make a giant city level, but I simply don't have the time, because I want to use this project as a "portfolio project", and I don't want to spend years completing it

DarkBrute · Post by **DarkBrute** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 6:44 pm

So you've been programming for like 5 years right?

Man, I can't even get the pre-compiled SDK for OGRE to work on my VS .NET 2003.

I ALWAYS get errors, but back to your game. It is amazing and I can't wait to play it.

P.S. How many lines of code do you currently have (comments included)?

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:52 am

when you first get started, it can be confusing what errors mean what... it's usually problems with linking, etc. also with Ogre, always make sure you're setting the project settings to "Multithread DLL" or "Multithread Debug DLL".

here's a quick screenshot showing all of the props I have built so far, as placed by my editor (click for larger screenshot)

obviously I need to get off my butt and start texturing

monster · Post by **monster** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 3:57 am

Ooooh, that looks cool!

I quite like the untextured look. Gives it a kind of old skool or cartoony look. Works quite well with the textured ground too. I think if the props were left like that but the vehicles were textured very simply then that'd look good.

But obviously it's entirely up to you. Whatever you do I'm sure it'll be great, as all your stuff is!

Keep up the good work.

[edit]I've just noticed that one of the ramps has a little "kicker" on the corner of it, that looks like fun![/edit]

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 4:04 am

I actually kind of like the "cartoony" look as well... but as I'm hoping this project will become a "portfolio" of my work, I definately need to texture the objects!

I spent most of the weekend working on the project, and got quite a few textures started, and also finally added in the basic vehicle to the engine. I can now spawn a vehicle and drive around to test out my layouts whenever I want. still needs a lot of tweaking (and the scale is a bit off), but it's looking good

the only problem is the big drop in framerate when you add lots of props (because of the realtime shadows)... I'll probably have to switch to texture shadows to keep the framerate manageable.

Bren · Post by **Bren** » Mon Feb 28, 2005 8:06 pm

This is why programmers should never be art directors!

They look cool, yeah, but they'd look cooler textured.

walaber · Post by **walaber** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 3:50 am

I'm very close to releasing the first demo for beta testing now... just a few more things to clean up, and I think it'll be helpful to get everyone's comments on the game so far.

I was a little worried about the framerate, until I remembered that I've been compiling and running in debug mode

spline · Post by **spline** » Wed Mar 02, 2005 11:09 pm

Nice work Walaber that look great
is there any chance you could release a VS6 version of OgreNewt
i would be very greafull