I began to work on this game in late June, and here's where I started off.
I decided to base the art style and mechanics of the game off of Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64, but while still keeping it original. [I'm not a big fan of Mario Kart. Four words- "Rubber-band AI" and "blue shell". Enough said.]
I started by modeling a quick kart and setting it up with Blender's Vehicle Wrapper. I modified the code so you can press 'z' in conjunction with the arrow keys to turn more sharply [in order to compensate for the lack of analog control]. After some slight tweaking, it worked great on the flat plane I set up.
And then I modeled a quick track for it.
There was an immediate problem- the physics were just awful. Because track was now banked, the kart would bounce around uncontrollably- no consistency whatsoever. Heck, it could even ride alongside the walls [SpiderKart?- could make for a neat game mechanic, but that's for another time.]
Thanks to the guys at the BlenderArtists forums, I got something manageable. The main fixes were:
-Adding a couple levels of subsurf to the track to smooth it out
[Or create a higher-poly invisible road mesh to calculate physics]
-Increase world gravity [to compensate for inaccurate scale]
-In the Vehicle Wrapper, increase suspension stiffness and lower tire grip
-Increase rotation dampening in the physics settings
-Add an orientation constraint [logic brick] to prevent kart from flipping over
-Capped velocity to determine top speed. [Also lowered max speed when driving in grass, sand, etc.]
These greatly helped to make the kart drivable. Next was to start creating levels and start one of the hardest aspects of the game- racing artificial intelligence.
No comments:
Post a Comment