ZeroGear: A kart-racing game using Ogre

[Murphy]

The brain was my suggestion and is definitely the most weird. It is really fun to put hats and accessories on though! It is amazing how much character you can give a lumpy brain with those extras.

[marshmonkey]

here is an update of a map I have been working on, I am hoping we can create an entirely new stunt gameplay mode that will track rotations and such to identify barrel rolls, flips, airtime, etc. Kind of like tony hawk meets karts. My brother the iPhone dev is switching over to ZG to help us script stuff for the next few months so we will be jamming full speed on those kinds of things. Clicky for big.

[sinbad]

Looks like fun

[marshmonkey]

here is a quick video I made this weekend after we implemented the idea of being able to control the rotation of the kart once it is airborne. It only took a few hours to add and it adds a much greater feeling of control instead of just watching your kart tumble around a lot. Now you have more of a chance to orient yourself into a nice landing.

[spacegaier]

Cool ! I also think that this will improve the game feeling a lot. Much more freedom and control. Well done!

[AshMcConnell]

Hehe, looks great fun! I think it will add a lot to have control in the air. Keep up the good work guys, very impressive

[Noman]

Awesome vid! The only thing missing are some nasty falls

[marshmonkey]

I made a short video this morning showing off one of the weapon items we have had working in the game for a little bit, but have never fully shown off. Here is my little description of how the weapon works:

This is a short video showing a few clips of the LUVBOT weapon working in the game. Once released, the LUVBOT's programming takes over - seeking a player to love. Once he comes in contact with someone, he latches onto them in a Super Love Hug Hold™. Unfortunately due to a design flaw in LUVBOT's circuitry, LUVBOT's love capacitors begin to overload in a few seconds, leading to a large discharge of love energy.

[marshmonkey]

Here are a few clips from some playtesting of the race game mode that we had the other day. There are some new features in these clips, including mouse looking/aiming and hopping. The other major change to race mode has been our experimentation with awarding boost to the players, which has increased the fun factor by keeping players close enough together to use Zero Gear’s unique brand of close and personal physical weapons.

[janerwac13]

Hi, my question is where can i download this game and with witch program do make this awesome levels and cars\charactres

[spacegaier]

AFAIK, the game isn't released yet, so no download so far. Concerning the tools: Have a look at their development blog on their website. There was an entry on how marshmonkey creates the models.

[janerwac13]

Ok the model editor is Maya 8.5 but whats with the track\world editor

[calsmurf2904]

He uses Maya for everything, Maya is an model creator/editor so he just creates a kart model or an world model etc.

[marshmonkey]

those guys pretty much covered everything.

The game is not out yet, and all the assets are created as .mesh files and any scripting is designated by an xml file.

[marshmonkey]

We recently got the 12th and last map before release put into the game. It is a little hard to appreciate how many maps we have made over the last 2 years, so I decided to put them all together in one graphic for visualization.



on the game progress front, we are back to having closed private beta tests every week, and we hope to move to an open beta at the end on November.

[spookyboo]

Excellent

[marshmonkey]

new screenshots! A new trailer and an open beta are coming soon - I promise! (we are busting our asses on it)

I also re-vamped our game website: http://myzerogear.com

[yapdakilla]

awesomeness ! where do i sign up for the beta ??

[marshmonkey]

I will announce where when it opens, or you can hear about it for sure on our blog: http://nimblebit.com

[Ruud v A]

Lovely!

[marshmonkey]

a handful more screenshots from a ZG playtest / LAN party we had this weekend. The build is looking pretty good to open up soon, still a few usability things to implement / tweak and a couple of random hardware issues to sort out, but nothing incredibly major.

[TomCat]

Sorry in case I've overlooked something, but will ZeroGear come out for OS X from the start, not at all or at a later point in time?

[marshmonkey]

We don't have any other plans besides the PC at this point, we may port it to other platforms in the future though (just not sure yet).

[santiainen]

any progress?

[marshmonkey]

there is progress every day For example here is the change log to the build we completed last week:

1.0.0.8 Change Log
* Graphic driver crash due to wrong shadow texture pixel format fixed
* Spring weapon added
* New draft effect
* Player not assigned to soccer team bug fixed
* Dirt Circuit is now easier to navigate
* Weapon spawning is smoother
* Landing a jump with a kart is much easier now
* Added a delay after crossing the finish line so you can see the kart
go across
* Chat history is visible when typing a new message
* Karts will no longer appear behind the results GUI
* Fixed bug related to switching maps with bots in the server
* Fixed a memory leak in the network system
* Respawn timer in race is 1 second vs 3 seconds before
* More music added
* The server browser now filters out servers the wrong version
* The server browser shows map, player count, and rank for each server
* Updated to the Aug 09 DirectX SDK which will install when first
starting the game

However we found a behavior with the networking after we switched methods to allow for nat-punchthrough that we need to address before opening up the beta, it was causing extremely long delays in receiving some data which in some circumstances could make them game unplayable. We just need to remedy that (shouldn't take too long) and then we will be posting more beta keys.