Topic: AGS Kart

[Sinsin]

Good work man. how bad does 20 fps look ? is it not going to be possible to tighten these pixels ?
Kweepas 3rd tech demo was what I was working with originally so I wont send the Zip as you already have it


Will this help at all??

[Monsieur OUXX]

This is for Steve McCrea :
1. I don't get the point of your code from May 5th. It runs exactly at the same FPS rate as the April 26th version, but it's completely blocky, whereas the other one was smooth.
2. Did you notice that the sprites transformation routine doesn't seem to match the track transformation routine? The barrels don't rotate the same way as the track when the player turns -- sometimes you can see a barrel floating over the ground and "crossing the road" when you turn.

[Kweepa]

This is for Steve McCrea :
1. I don't get the point of your code from May 5th. It runs exactly at the same FPS rate as the April 26th version, but it's completely blocky, whereas the other one was smooth.

As I said in PM, I forgot to switch it back to high detail. The pixels are 6x1 instead of 3x1 - it runs much faster on my laptop that way. If it's the same speed on your machine, it's probably because it's hitting the 40FPS limit.

2. Did you notice that the sprites transformation routine doesn't seem to match the track transformation routine? The barrels don't rotate the same way as the track when the player turns -- sometimes you can see a barrel floating over the ground and "crossing the road" when you turn.

I didn't see anything that drastic, but I did notice a little bit of drift. Two possibilities are that I messed up the baseline calculation, or that I messed up the horizontal rescale. I won't have a lot of time to investigate this weekend unfortunately.

[Monsieur OUXX]

If it's the same speed on your machine, it's probably because it's hitting the 40FPS limit.

It was. After increasing it to SetGameSpeed(70) I saw a very high increase in the FPS.

I didn't see anything that drastic, but I did notice a little bit of drift. Two possibilities are that I messed up the baseline calculation, or that I messed up the horizontal rescale. I won't have a lot of time to investigate this weekend unfortunately.

Well the drift is more visible in some situations than in other. It's really an issue with distant objects, when you turn.
Before you wrote this I started suspecting the baseline calculation, because when I don't display the sprites but only a dot, they look like they float above at some distance above the ground. However I can't see the issue. You used a 4.0 factor, the same as the camera height.
It could also be caused by the fact that the accuracy loss occurring in the track-rendering routine does not match the one occurring when you calculate the sprites coordinates. The former is long and based on cumulative steps, the later is a one-shot calculation with maximum accuracy.
I'd like to try calculating the sprites coordinates with exactly the same algorithm as the track's, to see what happens.

[Monsieur OUXX]

On a different subject:
All AGS Kart contributors, see my latest post here : http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=33448.msg617692#msg617692
It's going to be very important for code speed.

[Sinsin]

I never even realized that the graphics were so different between the second and third examples.   

I just tested the track that I made with the second example and its much smoother .. than the third   how strange! 

[Monsieur OUXX]

I just tested the track that I made with the second example and its much smoother .. than the third   how strange!

Sinsin : there are 2 independent resolution settings, that must not be confused:
1) The scale of the track sprite. BUT only using a larger image is not enough to increase the resolution on the ground -- because you also need to adjust the scale (in other words: "for our elephant, how many meters represent one pixel of the track map?"). This is done very easily by changing the value "100.0" in the calculation d = 100.0*cam_h/y;
2) The accuracy of the track rendering onto the screen, when it comes to transforming coordinates from the track space to the screen space. This is done by using the buttons in the demo I'm uploading here. You can vary the vertical and horizontal rendering accuracies independently.


small demo http://shutupload.com/dl/c0ae9e4516d5/

This is based on McCrea's demo from the 5th of May. I've just done a few changes. I think I broke something because the perspective is weird when you turn the kart around, but I'll fix it soon. as it is now, you can play with the veritcal and horizontal detail.

[Peder Johnsen+]

This is still alive right?

[Sinsin]

I must apologise for the complete lack of Comms on this one folks my internet went down and it has taken ages to get sorted. This project is still alive as Monsiuer has already put quite alot of time into it already but I must stress . I am no coder and am completely baffled by the script. I can design tracks etc but Scripting is a no go for me  Does anyone feel as tho they can take the reins here?

PS Marvelous work Monsieur

[Snake]

I was wondering what happened to this :/

I'm still up for some track designs. Or at least until I figure out I'm no good at it

[dantelechunk]

Gotta keep this alive. Mainly because I would like to do the music for it

[selmiak]

any chance to revive this idea?

[Sinsin]

I was really hoping that it would stay alive but we run aground somewhere.
Top of it was I could not work out the coding, but If someone was to code the thing I can create tracks for it (there is a list of about 6 people who can create the tracks if still interested)
Dantelechunk is also a fantastic musician who was really interested too.

Mr Kweepa constructed the initial demo build and it worked fine. all this project needs is a dedicated team who will finish it. 

[DoorKnobHandle]

We run aground somewhere? Well, we had 9 pages of engaged discussion and quite a bit of productivity, until you, out of nowhere, put the lid on it and - all of the sudden - it wasn't supposed to be a swarm effort anymore:

This game is no longer to be considered a swarm.

Plenty of people were interested and I too would have really loved to contribute more (despite my frustration at people not understanding just how much of an additional difficulty actual multiplayer is haha) - I think you really screwed up there when you closed it off after the swarm got started on it (no offense, happens to the best of us). I have very little time these days but if this project was to rise again I certainly could try and help out. Still love the project idea!

[Calin Leafshade]

I had a play with this today and I reckon its basically impossible to get decent quality mode 7 like graphics using AGS script. It's simply too slow.

Steve's version is all fancy and that but it looks fairly dreadful really. The number of shortcuts he had to take to get it to run at a reasonable speed makes it basically unplayable. If you compare the quality of Steve's version to something like wacky wheels then it's fairly obvious that its not going to fly.

I had more success in Lua (I reckon Lua is probably an order of magnitude faster than ags script) but there is still a huge bottleneck in selecting colours from the source texture because the drawing surface functions are so slow. This could possibly be alleviated by dumping the image to an array on load but I never tried.

Good luck guys, I hope you prove me wrong.

[Crimson Wizard]

I may not know something (actually a lot) about this project, but why don't you make a plugin?

If I understand correctly, main idea is to draw a "rotated" bitmap?
Might be adding some functionality to the engine might help (in perspective)?

[Oldschool_Wolf]

I love the idea, I very nearly started a side scrolling racing game in Game Maker (BLASPHEMY!).

Similar to flash games such as Cyclomaniacs and the like. It was going to have guest characters from the RoN series, but it ended up being another RAM Ghost like the other 50 or so game maker projects clogging up my hard drive. Made a few sprites though.

                                   

x1 x2 x3 x4

VRROOOM! VRROOOM!

[Jaffles]

Haha, I remember seeing this when I was but a lurker. It's a really cool idea, and I wish I could offer more than my support, but it's far above my coding skills. I'd be happy to help in whatever way I can if the project gets going again: track design, beta testing, art, whatever's useful.

[icey games]

Why not make 2 games, one that controls the menus and everything and then when you want to play a level it would open up the other game and pass a bit of data over. The stages and everything can be in game 2. If they wont all fit cause the designs are different then maybe we can have total of 4 race games and the 1 menu game. This would make it less complicated to make I guess, I don't know how the whole code be hind the game works. But that seems work able. It doesn't seem like one game alone is stable enough to hold everything so why not just split it up?

[Ryan Timothy]

Why not make 2 games, one that controls the menus and everything and then when you want to play a level it would open up the other game and pass a bit of data over. [..] It doesn't seem like one game alone is stable enough to hold everything so why not just split it up?

I don't understand the point - and why it would be worth the effort for something that can easily be in one game?