Road Rash 3D / PoC

[VladR]

Thanks for the constructive feedback ! I knew it was possible to have a civilized discussion about this

 

- "floating in air" : this is a result of no shadow in the bitmap/sprite of the bike

- perspective of the road needs some serious tweaking. I don't like the way it disappears in the distance, and the repeat factor does not manifest itself very much in distance either (for whatever reason - the most likely being that there is just too few pixels for the distant texels of the road). This may need some hack

 

I was watching the video on YT and it appears to me that the bike's vertical position on screen is directly dependant on the slope of the hill ? Am I right or can you actually make the bike go further into the distance, hence appearing higher/lower on screen ?

[Rowsdower70]

Very cool work, Vlad.   You've certainly nailed the Bike/Rider graphic wonderfully, and the background looks good too when its still.  

I know very little about what you're doing, but I'm enjoying learning about it and seeing updates!

[VladR]

Oh, the graphics were supplied by the PlaysWithWolves artist, that's not something I can take credit for. I merely coded the engine to display them.

[VladR]

Honestly, you do not really need 10 people for a simple game like this.

 

Sure, it would help, if for example, there was another guy coding the audio library in parallel, or someone engaged in Blitter experimenting (to figure out in full detail how it works and behaves). But those are one-off items. once you get them up&running, it is done for all environments.

 

At this point, I am entirely confident, one part-time / evening coder is all that is needed for the engine / code portion of the game.

 

If I was working on this fulltime, there would be way more features implemented - day/night cycle, weather, game modes, shadows,...

 

Now, of course, we are not going for a full game here with 15 bikes/10 environments. But once the engine is up&running, it does not really care if the textures being imported are from desert/ice/city/jungle environment. It's mere data at that point that just has to be loaded off some medium (be it cart or CD).

Think of it like each environment being stored in different directory on the CD, and each having the same file structure (just different bitmaps inside).

 

By that I meant to say, that a single artist could indeed create by himself multiple environments, as there is really no difference from the 3D engine standpoint.

 

Hell, with the texture library that I have amassed over last decade, I could come up with skyboxes/building/road textures just by myself for multiple environments

 

The 2D artwork, not so much - someone with artistic/drawing skills has to fire photoshop and draw it. Or create the 3D scene in 3dsmax/Maya and do few renderes.

[Bakerman]

Thanks for the constructive feedback ! I knew it was possible to have a civilized discussion about this

 

- "floating in air" : this is a result of no shadow in the bitmap/sprite of the bike

- perspective of the road needs some serious tweaking. I don't like the way it disappears in the distance, and the repeat factor does not manifest itself very much in distance either (for whatever reason - the most likely being that there is just too few pixels for the distant texels of the road). This may need some hack

 

I was watching the video on YT and it appears to me that the bike's vertical position on screen is directly dependant on the slope of the hill ? Am I right or can you actually make the bike go further into the distance, hence appearing higher/lower on screen ?

If you are referring to 3DO Road Rash, then I believe the player bike stays in the same place on the screen when touching the road, and only goes up or down when jumping off a hill. The A.I. character bikes are scaled sprites as they pass the player character and drive off into the distance or vice versa. 

 

As to the "flying in air" thing i was referring too, yes, a ground shadow would help, but I think it's more that the roadway lanes are too small for the size of the bike, so it gives the illusion that the bike is off the ground and the lanes are smaller down below. I thought that just changing the Angle/perspective of the road would fix this, but maybe the road just needs to be wider with wider/bigger lanes? for example, with standard size lanes, a car should fit in them with room to spare on either side of the car in between the white/yellow road lines, a bigger vehicle like a semi-truck would nearly take up the entire lane with no room to spare on either side, and with motorcycles you should be able to fit 2-3 side-by-side in one lane, where as in your PoC, the bike takes up as much room in the lane as you would expect one car to take, so it makes the road either look too small, or, far below the bike and the bike "looks" like it's way above the road. The scale of bike vs. roadway is wrong. i thought initially this was a perspective problem, maybe it's just a size/scale problem.

[VladR]

Great catch ! Yes, you are correct. The scale of the road is obviously wrong. I merely imported the texture, not paying attention as to whether it is 2 or 4 lanes, but did not yet play around with matching the texel density between buildings and the road, which applies to bike too.

 

Duly noted into the To Do List

 

Thanks !

[VladR]

I thought that just changing the Angle/perspective of the road would fix this

I didn't get much chance to do coding this week yet, but I'm hoping I will find some time tonight.

 

The perspective of the road and the texture repeat need some adjustment - there's 'too litlle' of the road, into the distance (e.g. not too many stripes), right now (if that formulation makes any sense).

 

It's not as easy as changing few constants though, as I gotta revisit the perspective algorithm and its inner loops workings. I want to give it a try tonight.

[AlamoAtari]

It's amazing what can be accomplished by just a few enthusiastic people. Whatever was going on the Voldemort site was definitely rediculous. i will have to keep checking this out. It's cool to see how things progress with programming. To me it's like taking apart a watch movement to see how it works.

[A31Chris]

I will post a side by side of the 3do Road Rash screenshots and VladRs work so he can have some good scale to work with this weekend.

[Bakerman]

Great catch ! Yes, you are correct. The scale of the road is obviously wrong. I merely imported the texture, not paying attention as to whether it is 2 or 4 lanes, but did not yet play around with matching the texel density between buildings and the road, which applies to bike too.

 

Duly noted into the To Do List

 

Thanks !

Thanks for the props, but I can't say it's a great catch, it looked pretty obvious to me, and I think even you would have realized it sooner or later.

[A31Chris]

Here is a side by side of the 3do Road Rash and VladR's work for comparison.

[VladR]

As mentioned last time, I was out of state last weekend, so this weekend was the first (since last time I worked on this), that I got some time to continue working on this.

 

- I found out why the strafing of the road did not really work 2 weeks ago and was glitching - it was a HW bug, not code bug. Feature that is supposed to work according to jag docs, but does not, really. Took me over a day to come up with two additional algorithms to address that bug, but it is what it is.

- I reworked the road perspective, so there is now much higher / better sense of perspective into the distance (though, far from ideal, of course)

- I implemented a speed-up / speed-down (not sync'ed with speed of buildings yet, unfortunately - so they move the same speed as of now)

 

- Since last time the total effort was 3.5 days, and I did about 1.5 days since last time (far from whole weekend, but some progress nonetheless), the current running total is 5 days.

- There are two new glitches.The HW bug workaround algorithm is only 80% finished, so there are glitches at the screen edge. I masked the big one on the right with huge black triangle, and there is a little one on the left (unmasked).
 

Here is the video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQfZf2XCfv4&feature=youtu.be