OpenRacer

OpenRacer vs RaceRacer: Explained

Daniel — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 17:04:24 +0000

I can imagine many of you are confused as to which is which. Is this project called OpenRacer or RaceRacer, and what’s the difference?

The Wiki article below explains the link between the two, and the philosophy of how it all works:

OpenRacer vs RaceRacer

I have yet to complete the article, but it should give you a basic understanding of the relationship. You might also want to read the rest of the philosophies in the Wiki to be sure of what we are about.

Moved Hosting & Wiki Intergration

Daniel — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 11:43:19 +0000

Apologies for the downtime during the past couple of days. I have now moved hosting to a permanent location. Our previous host was quite limited, and had various problems with sessions etc. These issues have now been solved, and further work on the website can now continue. The forum and website templates are now completely separate, so you should notice a considerable speed difference.

In other news, the Wiki is now completely integrated with the forum. This means that anyone with an account can login and edit the Wiki. Although the spirit of a Wiki is to make it publicly editable, I feel it is unnecessary and will attract spam more than anything else. Currently only admins and contributors can edit content, but once it increases in popularity, I will open it up to all members.

I will also be updating the Wiki with content relating to the new application version. At the moment, most of the pages are geared towards the shockwave version. I have kept a backup of the old information encase Tom ever decides to continue.

The Easter holidays are now over, so unfortunately I won’t be able to make as much progress from now on. In the meantime I will be fixing bugs, cleaning code and improving functionality. Once I feel the game is in a reasonably playable state, I will head for a public alpha release.

First Material Script

Daniel — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:26:44 +0000

Finally, after hours of tweaking the material script of the Cobra, I have devised our most realistic combination yet. We’re still a very long way off what is actually possible, but as far as my limited knowledge goes, I’m very pleased with the results.

It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there. As I said, this is only the surface of what is possible. The material scripts for Ogre are very simple, but attach them to a shader script, and super realistic results can be achieved. We will be using CG; a high level shader language by NVidia which supports both DirectX and OpenGL. I’ll be investing in this book to help out with my knowledge.

Sky is Back! With HDR.

Daniel — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:10:54 +0000

The sky has not been working for quite some time, and I’ve been trying to figure it out for months. I have finally solved the problem, and as usual, it was completely obvious. For some reason, I had 2 camera initializations both connecting to the same scene node. One had no far clipping, while the other did. All it took was to delete one of the camera functions and set a far clipping distance of about 800 world units more than that set on the skydome. Hey presto! It worked.

Now that the sky is working, I had a play about with the HDR (High Dynamic Range) compositor I implemented a while back. Unfortunately it is graphics-hungry, and it has an effect on the physics stepper. Therefore it can be pretty slow because it applies the effect to the entire screen. But nevertheless, it’s good for taking screenshots.

Head over to the gallery for a peek.

Stress Testing

Daniel — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:09:33 +0000

Out of curiosity, I implemented a feature to duplicate cars. Therefore, you can have multiple cars on a track at any one time. In my quest to develop AI, they can even drive by themselves. (Cluelessly, in a completely random fashion.) Nevertheless, it works.

I was astonished to discover just how much stress OpenRacer can cope with. It managed to render 200 cars at once with a reasonable framerate. That’s over 1,000,000 polygons! It could do even more, but from then on it starts to get a lot slower.

Each car in OpenRacer consists of only 3000-5000 polygons. The cars in next-gen racing games are over 80k polygons each. If I imported a car of such detail into the game, it would make a phenominal difference. It won’t affect the framerate much, either!

Promising stuff. Check out the screenshot here.