ZeroGear: A kart-racing game using Ogre

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Sat Feb 23, 2008 5:33 am

It's been incredibly fascinating watching your character modeling work progress over time. Your latest blog was quite informative-- sorta gives me the inspiration to try making my own models. Thanks for sharing your gorgeous art with us.

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 1:52 am

starting to make some progress on a new character:

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 9:17 pm

unwrapped and AO bake base

texture painting time

Post by **Assaf Raman** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 9:55 pm

The screenshot reminds me of this article:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Kirk-2007-RTA/

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:00 am

basic texture, still deciding how I want to divide up the coloring customization areas. On to rigging!

CaseyB · Post by **CaseyB** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:19 am

marshmonkey wrote:basic texture, still deciding how I want to divide up the coloring customization areas.

How do you do that? With some sort of mask?

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:38 am

CaseyB wrote:
marshmonkey wrote:basic texture, still deciding how I want to divide up the coloring customization areas.
How do you do that? With some sort of mask?

We "tag" any texture unit in a material with a color name. We then have a small function that will iterate through any entity, look to see if that entity has a texture with a specified tag and modify the color operation to use the new color in the texture.

See: http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2007/12/c ... video.html
And: http://nimblebit.blogspot.com/2007/12/i ... color.html

CaseyB · Post by **CaseyB** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 7:19 am

Cool! Thanks for the links!

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 9:37 pm

set up the color layer stuff this morning and got him all set up in-engine

chmod · Post by **chmod** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:39 pm

Hehe, the Iron Man one looks great.

Kerion · Post by **Kerion** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:41 pm

Wow, more awesome work from you guys. I'm really enjoying watching your project come along, so please keep up the updates

Nauk · Post by **Nauk** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:10 am

totally awesome style

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 8:06 pm

ok, I was up late last night making a new character poster

Robo Viking will pillage his way into your heart <3

small rez

medium rez

large rez

Aiursrage2k · Post by **Aiursrage2k** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 10:18 pm

Frutidia looks great!

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 10:51 pm

Kick-ass~!!

MikeWhite · Post by **MikeWhite** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 10:30 am

Very impressive!

marshmonkey · Post by **marshmonkey** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 3:28 am

we had our lan party playtest last night, it went really well!

Brian has been working a ton of hours getting the networking portion of our game far along enough to have our first Zero Gear play test, which we hosted at a LAN party this weekend. It seemed to be a great success and everyone seemed to have a great time driving around their characters even if we didn't have any real race rules in place yet. I was able to grab a lot of footage and I pieced together a little video, click the image below:

Here are a few action photos of the Zero Gear party in progress, it was great to see people having fun!

Post by **Jabberwocky** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:09 am

That really looks like fantastic fun.

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:26 am

Jabberwocky wrote:That really looks like fantastic fun. :D

It was! But it was also really hard to get everyone coordinated to get some of those shots.

Me: "Everyone line up next to me, I am the one with the pink cowboy hat."
Somebody else: "There are 3 people with a pink cowboy hat!"

But after about 2 hours we got all the shots we wanted. lol

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 5:44 pm

Haha, it's more like battle-kart than racing (rofl, I love how the physics make it so easy to send a kart flying into the air). And there are so many cool kart customizations to choose from, wow!

The gameplay looks rockin', yall obviously had a ton of fun (heh, I hope there's gonna be a deathmatch mode). I'm excited to see that yall got creative with some of the tracks (the loop-de-loop and the flying-ramp-of-death). The racing itself looks pretty smooth now; the physics feel like the karts are sorta dinky, which fits with the overall design IMO.

Murphy: congratulations on getting ZeroGear networked, I know it wasn't a simple feat. Monkey: I just can't get over how absolutely gorgeous your work is @_@. To both: awesome awesome awesome, yall kick so many asses-- every time I hear from yall, I'm blown away (today was no exception!). Good work, good luck, and thanks for sharing!

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 6:18 pm

ajs15822 wrote:I hope there's gonna be a deathmatch mode

We plan to have a open platform to add/mod game modes and maps. We are definitely concentrating on the racing mode but we will have a lot of other things (and hopefully a lot of user created content on top of that).

ajs15822 wrote:I'm excited to see that yall got creative with some of the tracks (the loop-de-loop and the flying-ramp-of-death)

The track with the loops and ramps is more of a test map. I was really happy to see the loop-de-loop work so well, Bullet FTW!

ajs15822 wrote:The racing itself looks pretty smooth now; the physics feel like the karts are sorta dinky, which fits with the overall design IMO.

They might be a bit dinky. We plan to have a lot of play testing soon enough to tweak that kind of stuff.

ajs15822 wrote:congratulations on getting ZeroGear networked, I know it wasn't a simple feat.

Thanks! I had planned from the beginning to support networking so it wasn't a horrible affair. I did most of the major networking code over one weekend (about 25 hours in all) and fixed bugs/added features over the next couple of weeks.

VictorMoran · Post by **VictorMoran** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:02 pm

wow, this looks very polish, and fun.

lf3thn4d · Post by **lf3thn4d** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 8:54 pm

Wow. Impressive!

How did you get bullet networked? From my understanding, snapping bullet rigidbody in place requires some sort of clearing of contact points cache. That sounds freakingly expensive to do it like 20 times a frame

. Besides, doing that makes things very non-deterministic I think. (All theory here. Haven't really tried out yet.)

Does zero gear has replay system as well?

Toby · Post by **Toby** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:08 pm

great works indeed. My team and I are implementing network part of our game and is not easy. A shoot racing game in multiplayer mode.

Your graphic style is coherent. How many graphist work on this project? It is a very difficult task to uniformize all artworks, design.

Murphy · Post by **Murphy** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:39 pm

lf3thn4d wrote:How did you get bullet networked? From my understanding, snapping bullet rigidbody in place requires some sort of clearing of contact points cache. That sounds freakingly expensive to do it like 20 times a frame :shock:. Besides, doing that makes things very non-deterministic I think
Does zero gear has replay system as well? :P

It is a lot more simple then all that. All of the physics are simulated server side. I then send physics updates (position + orientation) out at a regular tick rate (20 times a second, but that is tweakable). The client then gets this update and I use EPIC to smooth out the position on the client side. There is a bit more to it but that is the general idea.

We should be able to support a replay system. Right now it should be entirely deterministic. This will take some testing in the future.

Toby wrote:How many graphist work on this project?

Right now the team consists of me (programmer) and marsh (artist).