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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The design of this website has been bugging me ever since I created OpenRacer. I’ve tweaked it endlessly ever since, and fell at each hurdle in disappointment. I’m sick of it. So I’ve pushed myself to the limit and devised something that would keep me happy for a long time to come.
Never mind the game, we’re one step ahead with a sophisticated website. My determination for a professional look is indescribable. It took 12 solid hours with 7 different designs, including the integration with a CMS. It may not look like a massive change, but this stuff takes lots of time, trust me. Everything is completely dynamic, and it is indefinitely expandable. A toast to web 2.0.
I have also devised a new logo. Here, have some wallpapers:
I only recently found out that someone had submitted a Digg about OpenRacer. It was titled: “New Linux game in progress”. Fair enough - but I’m not quite sure where they got that idea from. I have not included specific information about platform support anywhere. It could be a project for Windows; who knows?
Anyway, at the time of writing this post, it has had 61 Diggs. Not bad, but what happened to the traffic? Hundreds of people visited the website from Digg, and we’ve had a grand total of 2 new user registrations. What’s the problem? It puzzles me.
I was also disappointed with some of the comments: “I lol’d”, “It`s actually really bad”, “I’m going for the thumbs down today”, “I’ll stick to rFactor and GTR2 for my racing needs”. I’m not sure whether the latter was a compliment. What is wrong? It seems that in the age of next-gen gaming, expectations have soared. We’re a one man band that’s been going for a few months.
Until people realize the amount of blood and sweat I’ve put into this project, I’m tempted to throw it out of the window.
After months of development, the game finally looks good enough to screenshot. I have replaced the entire gallery with pictures of the application version. This is the first public “behind the scenes” showing of OpenRacer.
You can view the gallery here.
I have taken two screenshots of 1650×1050 to show the game in full detail:
I will be adding more shots soon, so keep checking back!
Dan.
I have re-published the old wiki from RaceRacer.org to the Open Racer wiki.
Some of the content of the wiki is a little outdated - mostly the shockwave development pages, but it has alot of useful and insightful information about the project and will serve us well as a starting point for alot of really good collaborated content.
There is alot of relevant information about unique aspects of the game such as the league system, and should be worth a read to anyone thinking of getting involved.
Please feel free to edit and expand on whats already there. If anyone would like to beautify the mainpage so its a bit easier and more fun to find what you need please do - my wiki styling skills are not very good!
A few weeks ago I started the development of Open Racer. While the website has fallen silent, I have been working on the first release of the game. I never intended to start it myself, but I had no other choice.
Version 0.01 of Open Racer will be released as soon as possible. There are no guarantees, but I am hoping to have it finished by the end of Christmas. Until then I may post a few screenshots and possibly some video of the latest build.
You may have also noticed the Release Logs page. This will contain all the changes I make to the game and will be updated as I make progress. The ‘todo’ is a list of features I would like to implement before the first release.
One of the major issues is the fact that the media folder contains the models and textures of every car and track. It is possible to lift anything out of the game. Unfortunately the 3D assets are NOT open source. I am hoping there is a way to generate custom file formats or encode existing files; this is essential if the game is to become popular.
Anyway, keep checking back - I will let you know how it is coming along in more detail later on. All I can do is assure you that it will be worth the wait.
