[WIP] tracKtion
This isn't nearly as far progressed as most of the stuff posted here, but we're working on a futuristic hover-craft racing game for phones and tablets made in Unity.
Here is what we currently have, which is more a prototype than anything at this stage:
(the blurryness and stuttering in the video can be attributed to youtube and my video recording program :-/)
The track texture will very likely need to change quite a bit. Generally I've been playing it on a phone or in the small Unity editor window. I tried playing it fullscreen for the first time yesterday on a 27" and the horizontal lines freak my eyes out to the point where it is nauseating.
Besides all the obvious stuff, we want to have:
Here is what we currently have, which is more a prototype than anything at this stage:
(the blurryness and stuttering in the video can be attributed to youtube and my video recording program :-/)
The track texture will very likely need to change quite a bit. Generally I've been playing it on a phone or in the small Unity editor window. I tried playing it fullscreen for the first time yesterday on a 27" and the horizontal lines freak my eyes out to the point where it is nauseating.
Besides all the obvious stuff, we want to have:
- Simple track builder so anyone can make tracks, and upload them for anyone to play. This will likely only be available in the tablet version because of screen space, however the track you make will work on all platforms. The tracks are build out of snap-able track pieces that all fit nicely together. The track in this build was built with those pieces as it will be in the final.
- Semi-multiplayer. To avoid the complexity of real-time multiplayer we're going to have ghost cars stored on a leaderboard service, and you race against those. So before each track you can see a list of people who have done it, and you can race against their ghost car. Global leaderboards will be shared across platforms.
- Low-memory device support. It currently runs locked at 59FPS on a Lumia 620. And at 65FPS (it appears locked?) on the crappy R500 kalahari gobii Android phone. This is likely going to get a lot harder to maintain once we add more stuff, but we're trying to learn how to do stuff the "right" way as we go.
Comments
I'm impressed at the size of the level you can fit into a mobile game. Just out of curiosity, does the scale of the objects in the game matter? Did you have to make the hovercraft physically small in the game world, or is it irrelevant to the Unity engine?
I doubt that the "scale" of something matters - whether "a thing" is 1 units or 10 units, what takes up memory are polycount, textues, re-using of models or not, etc.
I'm utterly not understanding how your variable gravity is able to work so smoothly, I tried something to that effect and it was difficult to get a smooth transition, does it align itself to a face that it collides with, or is it a series of zones/triggers that set the gravity? Or... some other voodoo magic?
TL;DR: I'm sure someone much smarter will answer your question :D
Any chance of a basic playable, even if it's via web build?
@electrov, the track in the gifs/video is just loaded in as a single scene and was made in the Unity editor. However the plan is to just save serialized positions of each track piece prefab for any given track and place them at runtime. I'll probably start working on that over the weekend. One thing that I'm really not sure about is how to do lighting for that though. Currently we can just lightmap the whole scene. But once we're placing pieces at runtime that won't work. And we can't afford dynamic lights because of mobile. I think the best thing to do will be to do a lightmap with no shadows and use that.
Lighting is weird, and a lot of things are still broken obviously.
@wogan Good idea!
Either way, a solid start. The loop-de-loops and flip jumps are really slick, and it's great that you've made it work well on mobile. I can see this playing well on phones and tablets. Looking forward to seeing how you extend it. :D
One of these days the track builder will work :)
The loop the loops and half pipe feels very natural, straight out of trackmania. I felt hitting the sides was a bit unforgiving, flipping you around at any speed above a crawl.
The only thing I can see thats missing are turbo speed booster sections of track! The long open jump at the end was a bit lacklustre without that nice turbo boost I'm used to having in trackmania.
Very good job so far though, will be keen to see where this goes!