Racing Demo

#1 i believe tim said they did, thats what the axel joint is for in the model... GREAT JOB! i drove it around for like an hour this morning... WOO!
ryan

#2 Well, the tire rotation is in code. The suspension and steering is animated in the .ms3d file, that's mainly so you can animate suspension & steering struts, etc.

I played a little multi-player car racing last evening with Mark, very cool :) The car mod doesn't normally show up on the master server query though, I need to fix the way the fps game searches for game types. I'll do that this evening and then we can do a little rally racing :)

If someone's interested in continueing with this, it wouldn't be hard to make a little game out of it. The basic things missings:

1. Some trigger code that can be used to control laps, and give the players points for completing a lap (must hit waypoints around lap, etc.)

2. A basic mission cycle: a short warm up period followed by a countdown, reset all the vehicles on the starting line, countdown again and go! This would include a fixed "mission" time, when the time is up the player with the most laps wins (could include partial lap waypoints so their aren't many ties). Then on to the next track.

3. Alternate mission type: the first to complete the lap wins, no time limit (or very long time limit).

4. Need some sounds: engine, tire squeal, hard/soft body impact.

5. Need at least one nice looking vehicle :)

6. Need some race tracks :)

#3 Don't need race tracks--make it Baja style :) Perfect for Torque terrains!!!

#4 Could be fun as a community project if the players could tune their own car and race that.

This way each player could go for fast/flipable or a more slow but steady car.

The task would be to balance everything just right.

Well just a thought.

// Clocks out

#5 well, at least i got the skeleton so all i need to make is the geometry and link it. coolest... thing... ever... although, controling with the mouse is kind of intuitive, but the kybd works just fine.
ryan

#6 Now, if someone just implemented tracked vehicles... I should try it myself (when I have enough time for programming...)

#7 You can use the wheeledvehicle to make tracked vehicles.
All tracked vehicle uses wheels inside the tracks.

Al you have to do is to make them all work, then link bones to the tracks and link the bones to the up/down movement/animation of the wheels. This will make the tracks follow the wheels.

Then make a UV animation of teh texture on teh tracks to match the rotating of the wheels.

Tada, working tracks :)

// Clocks out

#8 I thought of the same approach, but it has a few problems:
1) Most tracked vehicles have more than 8 wheels, which is the maximum for Torque, although I don't know how hard it is to change this limit
2) It's useless and resource-intensive to handle each wheel on its own, when it would suffice to handle each track on its own
3) Perhaps most importantly, tracked vehicles don't have turning wheels (except half-tracks), but instead turn by varying the speed of each track

#9 Well I got my little robot/tank guy converted over to the new wheeled vehicle type and he worked, with a few issues. First off, I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how to set up the hub/steering/spring joints. It looks like in Milkshape you have the hub joint and then the spring joint is the second joint in the bone and the steering joint is the third joint in the bone. I may be wrong about this, but I think this is what's needed. The hub joint is the only one that vertices get bound to, so I figure it's the one that needs to be rotated, but how I had it set up if I tried to rotate it it wouldn't work on the one plane, it had to be rotated on multiple planes. This was probably something I screwed up late at night. As a result, I decided to skip steering just to see if I could get it to work.

When I popped it into the game it worked just fine - moved forward, backward, wheels spinned, etc. The only problem I had was that it wasn't touching the ground and it "wobbled" too much to even go anywhere. It was like one of those "Weeble Wobble" toys. It would start at rest and whenever I would move it it would wobble incessantly. My guess is that it was wobbling in some sort of suspension simulation (like how a jeep will wobble) but it's out of whack.

I figure the reason that the wheels don't hit the ground has something to do with my model - I probably screwed it up somehow. I'll probably redo it tonight. As for the wobbling, not sure how to handle that one. It could be related to how the wheels are set up. Unlike the dummy car in the racing demo, my robot/tank has four long axle wheels in line, with the hub being in the center of each one.

I'll have to fiddle with it some tonght but does anyone have any insight into exactly how the joints/bones need to be set up in MilkShape?

Schnapple

#10 Has anyone tried making the new car design mountable ?

#11 erm, it can be mounted, its just that the racing mode creates a vehicle instead of a player for the gameconnectiong. check game.cs

#12 is flying working? I was wanting to try to dogfight.:-)

#13 Thanks Xavier - I remebr looking at the model in MS and not seeing any mount points. It must have been too late at night or something...

#14 kenneth, heh .. happens some times

#15 looking at the ms3d I dont see any mount points or animations? Do I have an older version ? (would be strange cuz I downloaded the latest head yesterday)

#16 I also thought it strange, it not having a mount point. Im sure all it needs is a mount joint and it would be all set, but INM (im no modeler)
ryan

#17 and it doesn't load any skins on my vehicle... but that could be my own fault as there were some changes made to our engine. Anyone able to have his own vehicle with skins?

#18 The example vehicle doesn't have a mount point because the racing mod doesn't mount players, it let's you control the vehicle directly. They're easy though, just add a "mount0" dummy node (or joint in MS).

#19 Tim, is this the correct commandline to start a server for the racing demo?

C:\dev\Torque_HEAD\torque\example\torqueDemo.exe -dedicated -mod racing -mission racing/data/missions/outback.mis

I managed to join server friday, and had a brief connect a while ago--is the problem at my end or is the master server having a prob?

#20 That looks right, assuming you have an outback mission :) The master server appears to be working for me, but since I run it on my home lan, there could be something going on. It's pretty easy to tell on your end though; the dedicated server will echo to the console when it recieves pings from the master. You can also tell from the client, just open up the console after running a server query.