Polysoup, a racetrack and a casual racing game...
by Benjamin Kaiser · 04/12/2008 (4:25 pm) · 8 comments
Hi and welcome to my first blog here. My name is Benjamin Kaiser and I work as CTO of a German based MMOG publisher. I've bought TGE around two years ago because I like to work with game engines, doing game programming and so on. It's one of my hobbies but till now I've only tried to find solutions for all the problems that comes with my project: A casual racing game like Mario Kart!
All the time I got some progress exept for one thing: The racetracks (not so important for a racing game. ;)!
I've tried a lot with DIFs as the racetracks which works quite fine, but I could only do flat racetracks without slopes and banking... not very interesting for the audience... also I've got some problems with the shadows of the vehicles on the tracks...
With the release of TGEA 1.7 everything changes. All the time I've missed only one feature to fullfil my dreams: Polysoup collision detection! This was the main reason why I've upgraded to TGEA last week (who needs shaders or better performance? ;-)) and I've startet directly with some testing on my racetracks. Here's the first result:
As you can see the track supports slopes, banking and also the shadows works fine! As you can see at the screenshot also the Framerate is quite nice with around 180 FPS!
So if you want to make a racing game and search for a solution to make tracks: Get TGEA now and fullfill your dreams! Here are a few tips from my experience:
- Create only the track himself as a DTS! Don't do it like on some other racing games where you create the whole track with all the environment directly! Create a DTS of the track and embed it in the normal Torque Terrain and add trackside objects like you would do it normaly in Torque. This will decrease the work of the Polysoup routine and keep your FPS high...
- Use lofting to create the track. You can find an easy tutorial where you can get nice results within minutes here: Click here!
Whatever, I will test more and more on this task in the next days and will keep you up to date in the next time on my casual racegame project!
Benjamin Kaiser
P.S.: Thanks Ben Garney for his implementation off the Polysoup Collision detection!
All the time I got some progress exept for one thing: The racetracks (not so important for a racing game. ;)!
I've tried a lot with DIFs as the racetracks which works quite fine, but I could only do flat racetracks without slopes and banking... not very interesting for the audience... also I've got some problems with the shadows of the vehicles on the tracks...
With the release of TGEA 1.7 everything changes. All the time I've missed only one feature to fullfil my dreams: Polysoup collision detection! This was the main reason why I've upgraded to TGEA last week (who needs shaders or better performance? ;-)) and I've startet directly with some testing on my racetracks. Here's the first result:
As you can see the track supports slopes, banking and also the shadows works fine! As you can see at the screenshot also the Framerate is quite nice with around 180 FPS!
So if you want to make a racing game and search for a solution to make tracks: Get TGEA now and fullfill your dreams! Here are a few tips from my experience:
- Create only the track himself as a DTS! Don't do it like on some other racing games where you create the whole track with all the environment directly! Create a DTS of the track and embed it in the normal Torque Terrain and add trackside objects like you would do it normaly in Torque. This will decrease the work of the Polysoup routine and keep your FPS high...
- Use lofting to create the track. You can find an easy tutorial where you can get nice results within minutes here: Click here!
Whatever, I will test more and more on this task in the next days and will keep you up to date in the next time on my casual racegame project!
Benjamin Kaiser
P.S.: Thanks Ben Garney for his implementation off the Polysoup Collision detection!
#2
www.garagegames.com/blogs/11127/10217
04/12/2008 (6:24 pm)
I did some experimentations awhile back using lightwave before the whole polysoup thing collision worked per polygon back then too... but was slow as heck to load up.www.garagegames.com/blogs/11127/10217
#3
04/13/2008 (5:47 am)
Cool tutorial, thanks for the link!
#4
04/13/2008 (1:57 pm)
mind me asking the polycount and size in torque of your track?>
#5
it's just a testtrack that I've made in around 30 minutes. ;-)
The Polycount is around 3500...
04/14/2008 (5:49 am)
Hi,it's just a testtrack that I've made in around 30 minutes. ;-)
The Polycount is around 3500...
#6
04/14/2008 (10:30 am)
I love the track dev link, too!
#7
04/15/2008 (2:00 pm)
Tutorial is truly great! After so many years of doing things one way, you tend to forget some of the other tools Max has, and how quickly they can do a job for you. Thanks for reminding me :) 
Torque 3D Owner Matt Huston
Atomic Banzai Games