[ alpha ] - Flash Racer Tech Demo!

[Ray Beez]

Constant 24/25 fps
2.0 ghz, 1gb ram
Flash player 8 in IE
------------------

Nice. But too slow. Actually, try bumping the FPS to 30 or 40 and see how that goes? Just that might improve the slow gameplay enough (unless you have everything timer based? Then it wouldn't make a difference).

Right now too slow = too easy. Bumping up the speed a bit would require faster reflexes and increase fun factor a bit.

If you can't speed it up, then maybe narrow the roads a bit.

PS: Is this made in Flash 8? Would be interesting if you turned on dropshadow on the cars.

[jonmack]

Continued thanks for the input. We are jotting these ideas down on our TODO list!

I was wondering what tile engine you currently use and how advanced you made the steering behaviour of the car

Tom wrote the tile-engine. It's just standard gotoAndStop stuff, with a nifty "3 layers in 1" kind of thing. Each tile contains 2 textures and a mask, so we can make hundreds of unique tile shapes with a couple o' textures and about 40-ish mask shapes. That's what the collisions/surfaces go off too. There's been some entries in the blog with example code and whatnot if anyone's interested ( before christmas. )

As for the physics - it's not quite as advanced as weight transfer, but pretty much everything else other than manual gears. Got side-slip ratios and slip angles and all that jazz. We wanted to be able to throw the car round the corner and slide round. Some people have commented that it's a bit too slippy, so it'll be a case of tweaking the constants to get it to feel right. But it's more fun sliding round corners! And if you've ever watched rally cars, they do slide a fair bit.

try bumping the FPS to 30 or 40 and see how that goes?

I did actual test that on my computer (AMD 2600+), but it caps out at around 25 for me, so we thought it best to keep it at 25 for now. At the moment it's just no where near optimised, but it would be nice to get the frame rate a little higher. And no, it's all frame-based right now, which is somewhat limiting for physics, but it's all a learning exercise for us, so it may change

PS: Is this made in Flash 8? Would be interesting if you turned on dropshadow on the cars.

Actually this is all in AS1.0 aimed at flash player 6, which is a challenge all in itself! Maybe one day we'll do a sequel/re-write in AS2.0 to unlock all those juicy good bits, who knows