ZeroGear: A kart-racing game using Ogre

Post by **sinbad** » Sat Jan 26, 2008 6:34 pm

Looking great. When you're at the stage when you have some full-size 'finished' screenshots you want to show, there will be a place in the Featured Projects for you

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Sat Jan 26, 2008 8:09 pm

sinbad wrote:Looking great. When you're at the stage when you have some full-size 'finished' screenshots you want to show, there will be a place in the Featured Projects for you :)

:D
Very cool. We will definitely take you up on that when we have some more content.

Thanks for the comments everyone! It is hard to say if the speed is right (it feels about right when you are controlling it) until we get some more karts in there. And we will be fixing the head twitching before the next video. I was too tired a couple nights ago to fix that :(

Tinnus · Post by **Tinnus** » Sat Jan 26, 2008 10:33 pm

I also think it needs a bit more speed, and it seemed too easy to control

But maybe that's just you being used to testing :p Another thing that would be good, in my opinion, is increasing the size of the car just a little.

Other than that, it's great! Can't wait until it's finished so I can play it :p

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Sun Jan 27, 2008 2:14 am

Tinnus wrote:it seemed too easy to control :) But maybe that's just you being used to testing :p

Isn't that the point though? Make the kart easy to control so the player can concentrate on playing the game and not on keeping the car under their control? This isn't meant to be a realistic driver :)

Tinnus wrote: Other than that, it's great! Can't wait until it's finished so I can play it :p

You might be waiting a while to play it. This is in the pre-pre-Alpha stages.

frooze · Post by **frooze** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:58 am

I've been waiting forever for a good mario kart clone to appear on the PC that I can play with my friends. Right now there's the Kart Rider MMO, but it's just not the same feeling. This game looks promising!

mako · Post by **mako** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 8:07 pm

hey how many polys (at average) those cars have?
just curiosity.

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:43 pm

mako wrote:hey how many polys (at average) those cars have?

The one in the video is about 1800 polys. The others are about the same I would think.

mako · Post by **mako** » Thu Jan 31, 2008 2:49 pm

good cars!!!

theatrus · Post by **theatrus** » Thu Jan 31, 2008 10:51 pm

Great artwork on the track! I assume you're using a baked lightmap for it?

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Thu Jan 31, 2008 11:04 pm

theatrus wrote:I assume you're using a baked lightmap for it?

It is actually just vertex colored. We haven't decided for sure what we are going to do about lighting but I think vertex colors look pretty good overall for the map. We have stencil shadows on the karts now that looks pretty good.

theatrus · Post by **theatrus** » Thu Jan 31, 2008 11:22 pm

Murphy wrote:
theatrus wrote:I assume you're using a baked lightmap for it?
It is actually just vertex colored. We haven't decided for sure what we are going to do about lighting but I think vertex colors look pretty good overall for the map. We have stencil shadows on the karts now that looks pretty good.

Well you had me fooled at first, but now that you mention it I can see the lack of lightmaps. The look and feel of the map is great though

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 3:01 am

The main reason we are using vertex lighting at the moment is because it saves storing a bunch of light maps in memory, and it is cheap to render too. We are trying to keep the system requirements as lightweight as possible.

Post by **sinbad** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:11 pm

Yeah, vertex lighting can look fine so long as you can control the tesselation to give you the effect you want, and don't need to use mesh LOD (which would obviously cause lighting changes).

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:38 pm

My main background is as an environment artist, and I learned about vertex lighting levels on a game I worked on for the ps2. I am trying to shoot towards making sure that all the environments are low poly enough that all we will ever have to do is simply render it, without the aid of lod's or stuff like that. Keeping the environment pipeline that simple will go a long ways towards lightening my workload and will allow me to also be working on everything else that needs to get done art-wise.

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 3:07 am

Just put up a blog entry about using cubic environment mapping to simulate rim lighting:

http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/02/r ... athon.html

also includes some new screenshots / wallpapers

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Fri Feb 08, 2008 4:28 am

marshmonkey wrote:Just put up a blog entry about using cubic environment mapping to simulate rim lighting:

An innovative technique and a great write-up, kudos!

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Mon Feb 18, 2008 10:35 pm

started on a new character, I have to unwrap and texture it next.

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 7:24 pm

got some textures on him from the neck down. The blue and white parts will be customizable like we have shown in our customization video.

oddrose · Post by **oddrose** » Tue Feb 19, 2008 8:07 pm

I simply wanna make love to your artwork

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 12:57 am

spent some time on the head today

here are what the textures looks like

dudeabot · Post by **dudeabot** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 1:29 pm

wow you work fast with the modeling ad texturing, great job!

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Wed Feb 20, 2008 8:09 pm

I posted on the blog about our GUI system. It is related to MVC using C++, Navi, and Lua. It might be interesting to some people here...
http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/02/m ... i-ftw.html

day_armstrong · Post by **day_armstrong** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 11:17 pm

I visited your blog. Great job. The game is really cute. One thing though (may be I am wrong), something is a bit off. There is no shadow?!

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Thu Feb 21, 2008 11:56 pm

We get that comment a lot about the shadows. The problem is that we haven't yet modeled the Sun yet so without a Sun there are no shadows :(

haha, the next video we will have shadows for sure :)

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 4:27 am

made an extensive blog update about the character http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2008/02/r ... l-and.html
mostly just explaining the process that went into creating and animating it.

I also made a fun render of it posed in a little scene, I made it really high resolution so maybe I will find a place online to print me out a couple for fun.

small rez

medium rez

large rez