[game] 3D Rally Racing.... 4 years in the making?!

For those that haven't unlocked all the levels and want to see the the other levels:
YouTube Video canbe found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqwkpDLCbwE

As for the steering, I think it's a matter of choice, some racing games require you to slow down for cornering and we went with the decision of making the game harder rather than easier. We might make the desert (first level) a little easier though.

Music had to be mildly repetitive as it takes the majority of file space. Bigger longer track would have affected download and processing.

I thank everyone for their compliments and percypea will attempt to figure out the bugs some of you are experiencing.

Thanks again.
-

you could do the music exterenally with javascript functions called from flash this way non of your background music adds to file size, you can also stream the music this way, so no wait time for it either.

Thanks to all who've tested the game and left feedback, I shall try to answer you all i order, those i miss, i apologise. I am norty :(

renderhjs and phreax

Thanks for the comments, much appreciated. Steering does indeed take some getting used to, I think (and hope) though, as mesmerize does, that its more down to individual tastes. The ford focus car actually handles nicer than the toyota and you can take corners sharper, so maybe give that a try? :)

Cimmerian

Thanks for your fan club :) I'm not quite sure if it was my engine with hills you are thinking of, I did do a v crude test with hill like terrain, but the hill was kind of always there and didn't move as you turned/drove. The road just went over it. I know Andre Michelle did a much more complex one at one stage with hills, which really did hit the processor, so it may be that you're thinking of. However, to answer your question. I defiantly think AS3 will provide the speed to make a rally game with a true 3D terrain. Hills and valleys etc. It may not use a version of this engine though, but using something like Papervision3d, I'm sure it wont be long until we see flash games that knock the socks of this one in terms graphics.

As for your bitmapData vs imported bitmaps. You are absolutely correct. Flash can rotate and scale imported bitmaps with better performance than bitmapData. However..... there is no rotation of bitmaps going on in this engine :) The engine is basically just a cut down and edited version of Fred Heintz mode 7 engine found here. Rather than attaching 100's of bitmaps and then moving/rotating/scaling them under a mask. Fred uses the flash 8 'beginBitmapFill' feature, and draws each 'strip' every frame with lineTo commands, using the Matrix objects to adjust what part of the bitmap is drawn. Its actually very clever stuff and far more complicated than the masked strips I previously used, which is why I'm very grateful to Fred for letting us use his engine as the basis to the game.

Now you could say that I should try importing a bitmap, rather than generating one by code to use as the fill. But, the only way you can actually use a bitmapFill, is to first make the bitmap a bitmapData object. So even if i had the imported bitmap in the library, it would have had to have been converted to a bitmapData object prior to being used.

walnoot and ajmacdad

Very sorry about the locking up at 100% (almacdad what spec computer are you testing on). Basically, the way the tracks are generated, is that a large ground bitmap is created initially at 2880x2880 pixels with the repeating sand texture on (at least for the desert level). Then a new temporary transparent bitmap approx 2700x2700 is created and to that, the actual track is drawn. When it gets to 100%, it has finished drawing to that temporary bitmap, so then it has to be overlayed onto the larger ground bitmap.

Prior to this though, a couple of glow filters are applied to the temporary bitmap, which give the shadow and highlight effects around the edge of the track. My guess is that its these 2 glow filters, and consequently the merging of 2 bitmaps that must take close to 40MB of ram each, that cause the locking. In which case there is nothing much that can be done :(

However, I am a little norty, as on top of the above happening. While the 100% is still on screen, I then initialise the ramp, rocks and large cacti objects, along drawing the 40 cacti shadows directly to that large Ground bitmap too.

I shall have an attempt of taking those latter bits of code, and making them run in separate frames. That may stop the 100% locking, or at least make it not so long.

Squize
Bonjourno, yep has definitely been along time since our email chatting. Glad its worth the wait :) Am not quite sure what areas of the presentation are best to give some love to, so I shall pretend I didn't read that part of your post. Other wise i may cry. :)

bomesar, mr malee, hooligan2001, EvilKris, Sietjp and Orkahm52

thanks for your nice comments :)

YaiEf, BlinkOK and charie_says

Unfortunately, as fast as the new mode7 effect is. There was actually quite a noticeable performance improvement by simple sticking an over powering HUD over the track. Basically, if we were to remove the movieclip with HUD in it, we'd see that its almost as if the ground is masked out exactly where the HUD would be. This is because the strips of road there are only drawn to the edges of the HUD and not all the way across the screen. Tis a cheap and norty way to maximise frames per second, but I fear it will have to stay. I may do a test though and just double check that the performance is still greatly effected. As it would have been early in development that I decided that its best to stick the HUD there, and I may found the percentage difference now with everything else going on, may be worth substituting for a better field of view.

Pointless

Yep, I'm afraid as mesmerize has said, the music unfortunately has to be fairly repetivie, other wise the games swf size would balloon. It would have been nice to have done some sort of mixer in flash that simple chose drum loops and instruement samples, and made small audio files into what sounds like a much more full length sound track. But that would have eaten into the much needed processing power.

Everfornever

Yep, Director could definitely create a much better graphically game that flash. Tis simply a case that the client wanted a flash game, and obviously flash has its benefits in terms of a wider audience, and smaller install for those who somehow dont yet have the flash player :)

In terms of the audio. The ultimate idea of the game is that we give for free to anyone and everyone who wants it on their site, as that will obviously promote the clients gamersenterprise.com site as much as possible. Therefore the game had to be all included inside one single swf for ease of distributing. External audio would be a no no :(

Ok, I think thats everyone. Sorry again if I missed replying to you.

Finally, as mesmorize has already posted. There's now a youtube video showing clips from all 5 tracks. So for those currently without the time to unlock the later levels, I reccommend checking out. In my opinion, the desert level is definitely the least graphically impressive of the levels :)

Thanks again

Pea

Great work!!! Honestly I have just played for a very little time but Iam totally impressed. :)

Excellent work.

Many renders to the cars makes it look great. Fastest mode 7 I have seen (was smooth on my 2.2 ghz).
Wow, you have a ramp and the car jump, don't think I've seen this in mode 7 before in Flash.
Loads fast too.
I only wish you had a rotating map of the track layout (unless I missed button to turn it on) :)
I cannot wait to see the snow and rain effects.
Oh, and you even have a tv style view at the end. Brilliant stuff.

Looks amazing :D

When you get past the first level the graphics really start to just get better and better, great work.

Ive been following all the engines and I also made a couple of games based on them and now the result after all those demos is just awsome

Congratulations !!!

Mmm the game takes far too long to pre-process levels... what's it doing when it's generating the map? Is it anything that could be done just once, with the results being saved in the swf?

Hi Vengeance MX, having the maps process just once per swf refresh (and done in the background without the user noticing) was indeed a hope of mine.

However, due to the uncompressed nature of bitmapData objects, a single 2880x2880 image uses about 30 - 40MB of ram. So to be having all 5 tracks in memory (including the temp ones while they are generating) will eat into between 150 - 200MB of ram, not including everything else going on. And that simply wasnt acceptable unfortunatly :(

Thanks to the previous posters for your comments :)

P

Definatly worth the wait. Great game.

Much as I don't want to be nengative, some problems:

- The music gets really repetitive - the music especially is in your face right from the start. Yeah sure you can turn it off... but I'm lazy :P The sound effects are good - although I could barely hear them over the music.

- The speedo and times thing in the bottom right seemed more of a hinderance than help, blocking half your view round a corner. But that might be just me, as it doesn't neccesaraly stop you racing as well.


Other than that... great job! The original engine was one of the first things I saw when I started Flash, and I'm glad it's been put to good use.

This is phenomal example of 3d Car game. Now with the added HP of Flash 9, is it possilbe to do flight simulator level games? I would love to see a StarFox reborn in Flash 9 :)

John Say,
saydesign.com

advanced game innovation

Very Nice work Percy ! I do agree with some of the comments about the presentation - but only because i'd like to see your work presented under the brightest side :) but that's a very solid, and fun, game you have so far !

Thanks all :)

Re. the presentation, is it the game interface itself (menu etc) you're referring too that could do with some polishing, or the 3drallyracing.com website itself. As the latter tis out of my hands, but i believe is being overhaulled and worked upon as we speak (type) :)

P

The site, and the in-game use of graphics - buttons, windows, etc ...and yes, the website could use some love as well :)

For exemple, take the title screen
- the flags and speedometer graphic is a nice idea, I think it could even be more proeminent, and maybe treated differently
- the background is supposed to have a gritty texture, but JPG compression blurs it all - i'd go with a crips gif, to bring the grittyness back in the texture
- The menu elements : what's the point to take a "dirty font" and have a clean halo around it ? font here is the only treatment - I beleive a little more could be done to "design" those principal menu elements
- Buttons are the worst : common, that's a game, not a website :) - is it a very good idea to use the characters < and > for back and forward ? same thing, don't rely on the font only, expand on design of those buttons :) - they also lack an Over state
- While gritiness seems to be a theme in the whole interface, windows and selection over state, in the track selection are very minimal ( clean shape, glow for the Over state ... )
- Some images are aliased while it could be otherwise ( the speedometer niddle, for exemple don't seem to have any specific treatment - it could be vectorial )

Etc ... :) I sorry if I sound negative, I like the game a lot, but since you were asking for more precise feedback ...

to illustrate my point about "grittiness" and using elements that are "styled" according to the concept, I uploaded a concept I did for an Off-road website few years ago : http://www.luxgames.net/FK/PROJECTS.jpg ...

It's very, very hardcore ( the client wanted hardcore ) but that might give you some ideas ... you can PM me if you want to see more of it

Hi Lux,

Tis ok, i've had a little cry following your post and am a bit better now :)

I must say though, your comments are all very very.... correct :)

A friend of mine actually designed the menu and title screens for me, so i've probably done him a dis service importing them as jpgs opposed to gifs and slapping the menu text over them. Admittedly I have just done a test of the title screen as a gif instead of jpg, and unless the colours are reduced drastically (which admittedly in itself adds to the gritty feel), the file size is more than double that of the jpeg versions. Though in the scale of things, I guess its not an awful lot compared to the 2.3MB of the game.

The games speedo and 3 buttons on that are purely my evil doing, and looking at them now after your comments i do fully agree with you that the buttons could have been done much better :)

As for the aliasing of images, part of the problem is the game has to run in low quality for performance. so even though the speedo dial is a png (rather than vector), you still get the norty aliasing due to the low quality.

Thanks though for your comments, I'm not too sure if the any suggestions will make it into this game (primarily as the client wants to launch properly asap) but shall definately take heed in future versions.

Thanks again

Pea

Ha ha, lux, I think that by giving the pointers you do, you actually give a lot of credit to the game, as you actually spend time trying to give some valuable feedback :) I'm sure Percy agrees!

For those that didn't see the video or played through the other levels, you really should watch it! I think the rain and the snow level are truly amazing! Of course the forest level is up there as well :D It's games like these, that make me want to work more, learn more and do it faster :D

yep forest level sure looks amazing,- as well the water reflections in some levels. PercyPea you should have added some screenshots from each level in the first post that would give you even more attention as you already have right now.

This engine's looking incredible! The YouTube video left me in awe, you've got some amazing effects in the game. I dig the headlights and reflections.

I think it's unfortunate that the HUD has to be like that for technical reasons because it was really killing it for me while I was playing. :(

Given the "flash" in later stages, I think the first stage could use some dust effects. As if you even needed to show off anymore, heh heh.

I am inspired!