 3D Art  2D Art  Games  Programming    |
I love the Wipeout series and felt compelled to make something inspired by it myself. I started developing a prototype with two worries in mind:
The physics. Vehicles must be able to travel at insane speeds and not tunnel through geometry.
Tracks. How to make tracks without spending too much time.
I'll let this video convey most of it.
The weird red lines show the collision shape. The physics runs in steps at an absurdly low tick-rate (10Hz IIRC), just to make sure tunneling does not occur.
Sorry! The camera is interpolated between physics steps on rendering, but the collision bodies are not, which makes it all very annoying to look at.
Normally, the physics runs at 240Hz because that is more responsive, and even less likely to tunnel.
Anyhow, it seems to work well. (Not shown in the video: me driving into walls and edges at weird angles over and over at very high speeds...)
Or the asset pipeline if you will. The big reason this project is shelfed.
The TLDR version is that I've not yet found a neat asset-pipeline/workflow that allows for quick iteration of track-design while maintaining the quality I want.
You see, I don't want the race-track to always be hovering above (or clipping) the ground, I want it completely merged with the rest of the world and not be obvious that these are completely different meshes.
We'll see where it ends up, if anywhere. I also had an idea for a "low-poly" more "polygon-based" racing game, sorta like Crash CTR or Mario Kart. That would be simpler, maybe I'll do that instead.
One of these days I will have to make my own fully-fledged 3D-Editor... This one is just a very basic track-editor I quickly wrote for research purposes. I solves the issues I have with Blenders curves, but, oh no, it doesn't really solve any of my pipeline problems.
Laters!