Games GLX-Racing

GLX-Racing

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Introduction
This is my racing game project that I have been working on as a solo developer. The project has been in the works for a few years. The corner stone of the game is my own scratch-made car physics system which is inspired by NFS Underground and Gran Turismo 4. The system has been designed with the intention of achieving beliveable and semi-realistic car handling while still remaining easy to play even with a keyboard.

Current state
The game is at a stage where I am considering releasing a demo of it to public. However some polishing remains to be done still.

Currently it has

• 4 tracks with reverse versions of each.
• 10 very varying types of cars (as is evident in the video)
• Challenge mode with a tree-like challenge progression to unlock all the cars.
• Some pretty competitive Bots to race against.

Plans
Next step for me is to release a playable demo as soon as I feel I have managed to sand all the rough edges. Also I have been thinking about releasing the physics model to the asset store, but I will not promise anything at this stage.

Comments are more than welcome, seeing that this is the first time the project is presented to the public

 

I like the concept, i like the old school graphics i think is good to reach more players. Maybe you can improve the graphics while keeping the old school style, something like better uv textures, more shadows, etc...

 

Thanks for the feedback @impheris !

I have considered both baked in shadows and realtime shadows and experimented with them. However I have set myself some constraints regarding this game:

1) It should run on quite old computers.
2) The overall size of the game should fit on CD. (Retro thing )

I abandoned the idea of baked shadows as the lightmap files caused the game's space requirement increase too much. For the real time shadows I am still undecided. They do cause fairly considerable performance hit on older hardware, but then again I could make them toggleable on/off in the settings. I even managed to find shader that allows those transparent trees to cast realtime shadows without being 'cutout' shaders.

Howerver many older games (that served as my inspiration) forgo enviroment shadows all together and only have shadows for dynamic objects (Like Race07 or Driver 4).

 

You can add blob shadows on some cases, for example, the cars can have rectangle blob shadows, also the trees. For lightmaps o backed shadows, you can try with a "lightmap resolution" of 30 or 35 and a "max lightmap size" of 256. I'm making a low poly game, a city and i'm using those values and the lightmap is (for now) just 17mb. My point is, i like the retro style, is kind of different for a modern game but when i play rfactor i always feel like "if this game looked a little better"... Because your player can say "this game looks old school, but good" instead of "this game looks like an old game that aged badly" like everybody is saying about rFactor xD. I think is something about "refining" the old school thing, in any case, good luck, looks very interesting to try.

Edit: i forgot to say, you can also compress some textures and also you can make atlas uv maps and put some objects together to use just 1 texture, that is the ultimate technique xD

 

I get your point about the retro-graphics

Those lightmap sizes sound very acceptable. One thing I like about the baked shadows is that they result in softer shadows that look more realistic for such an overcast/cloudy atmosphere as my game has.

Thanks for the tips!

 

waiting for some demo ;P i'm fan of racing-sim games.

 

Perhaps there are ways to enhance the graphics while maintaining the retro aesthetic, for as by adding more shadows and better UV textures.

 

Wait... that is exactly what i said

 

I made some experiments with reflective shaders for the road. In these pictures the road has a slightly blurred version of the skybox texture as its cubemap. I really like the result in comparison to the old road material in the video. This somehow makes the environment more complete, and makes the road seem more 'integrated' to the scenery.

I also tested the game on some of my other computers and found out it is very much playable even on Athlon 2 Dualcore and Radeon HD5600 series. 4 GB of ram will also suffice just fine. The seems to require at least Windows 7 (Vista might work also, I havent tested), but sadly it won't even start on XP. .

 

totally agree, looks very good, i like it

Maybe the shader or the direct x version?

 

I think you're right (https://blog.unity.com/technology/deprecating-directx-9). I'll try switching the project to OpenGL for testing. The game currently uses Unity 2019.4.40f1 so DX9 was dropped ages ago.

On other news, I think I will be able to release a pre-release a demo version of the game in less than a month. I always manage to surprise myself with how much testing is required for ensuring good quality, but I think I have gotten the best of it now. As per usual, the hardest part will be coming up with a proper name for the game

 

Yep i was thinking the same, OpenGl can be the solution.

That sounds great for sure, i want to try it

Retro Racer, Xp Demon, Sim Racing Revolution, RaySim Revolution, Potato raysim. XD

 

Haha! I do think it should be something that denotes the certain unusualness of the game.

I was thinking about 'Slow Car Fast' originally but then I made some fast cars for the game as well so it won't do anymore

 

It took a little more than the month I estimated , but it's finally here:

A Demo version of the game is now available for download:
https://www.indiedb.com/games/glx-racing/downloads/glx-racing-demo

The game also now has a name: GLX-Racing

Announcement video:

 

this is brilliant, need an improvised rocket - booster system // and as for me also a fan of the make car into a flying - car stuff, or sort - of Back to the Future, not sure it makes sense . . .

also, it's very good graphics, it's very clear what it is, and it's a bit retro, not sure could also add an old tv - effect . . .

 

Thanks!

I might indeed add NOS-boost to the tuning-class cars but I'm not sure of it yet. As for flying cars, I don't think these cars have the aerodynamical qualities for it

 

( make them home - made convert-to-flight cars, trunk flips open, two rocket - engines, and then two surf - boards on rails under the cars for flying, that move also on rails . . . )

there are driving segments, and home - made flight car stuff, so it's car // air - plane simulator . . .



sort - of more home - made wings, and a rocket - engine thrown in the trunk, anyway it'd just be really cool, and fit the bit retro style, wings are two surf - boards, or ply-wood air wings, that move on chain - rail system, just a weird idea, almost similar to Back to the Future, or flying cars . . . .

 

Indie/ModDB servers seem to be... sleeping...

so I made the demo available on Itch.io as well:
https://coboltium.itch.io/glx-racing

 

A new car has been developed :

 

A new demo version has been released that features substantial improvements in comparison to the previous one:
Download from itch: https://coboltium.itch.io/glx-racing
Download from IndieDB: https://www.indiedb.com/games/glx-racing/downloads/glx-racing-demo-2

There is a changelog of the main changes in the IndieDB description and in the Itch.io devlog so I wont mess this post with the list. But there are many improvements to the car's physics and bot's ai. Also the new massive Light Tactical Vehicle is driveable.

 

Some new stuff has been made for GLX-Racing:

The latest achivement is the cockpit camera view system. This works in the traditional way of switching to a different 3d model when switching camera. The cockpit view features working dials for gauges and working sideview- and wingmirrors. They use the same render-texture system that the hud-based rearview mirror does, and the uv mapping of the mirror is altered based on where the mirror is situated in relation to the cars centerline. The mirror's can't actually show the car itself, which is the way mirrors work in most racing games I have played, so it'll do.

Whether or not this feature will be included in the actual release of the game is still debatable, since designing (can't just copy real cars) and modeling the interiors is quite time consuming, and the game already has 13 cars for which I would have to do the process for...

Also I have been working on two new tracks:

Orangutan Cove

A challenging public road based track with massive elevation changes set on an mountain island.





Kainuu Raceway

Fictional big race track that could be used to host large world-wide motorsport events but in Finland (and at a very unlikely region therein as well). (I think the game-world in GLX-Racing is becoming somewhat of an alternate-history scenario )








Couple of new features can be observed on the screenshots of the new tracks:

• Roadside textures are now made so that they blend more seamlessly with a transparent texture that is on a mesh that has been sort of 'overlaid' on the seam between road and terrain. The material used for this - albeit being a transparent shader - gets shaded by shadows and projectors. This required some trickery, but it is similar to the way for example Simbin's games have blended textures.
• Some grass on the trackside. The grass uses a custom dual-pass shader allowing for smooth edges with reasonably good depth sorting. Although it may seem like a stupid thing to do when no terrain's are used, the grass is made using Unity's terrain engine. I have a script that 'projects' the terrain onto the track mesh. I then paint the grass onto the terrain as per usual, but I hide the terrain mesh and disable it's collider. Here's why this seemingly strange system is not stupid in my opinion:
  • Since the terrain meshes and their colliders are disabled, impact on performance is negligible
  • There is no need for third party instancing solutions, thus simplifying things.
  • The stock grass systems performance is way, way better that placing grass by hand.
  • The workflow is very smooth once the terrain is set-up.
• The first screenshot still has old style fences, but I have devised a way to make fences so that the fence post and such remain vertical as opposed to tilting along up and down hills. This solution involves using shrinkwrap modifiers with vertex-group in Blender. I will post a image of this separately since this post is hitting the file-limiter.

 

Here is the picture of the more natural looking fences and guardrails I mentioned in the earlier post:

 

looks very cool man, are you using planar reflections for the mirrors?

 

Thanks!

The camera-system in the game attaches a backwards facing camera to the player's car (or any other car that the camera-system is following at the moment). This camera renders it's view to a render texture. This render texture is then mapped to a material which is applied to the mirror parts of the interior 3d model. The render texture is comparatively low resolution and the camera used to render it has very short draw distance to minimize performance impact.

So not planar reflections as such, but the concept is similar (if you think of the camera as a reflection probe of sorts...)

 

The mirror meshes are UV mapped to the render texture like this, to give the impression of mirrors position on the car: