RR - Game Design

i guess what you need is a good map setup

you need 3 camera's one for the player view, one for the GUI and one for the skybox so you can fake stuff in the sky like large floating objects that would be impossible if added normally due to Z depth issues
( i learned that from mave)

When we talked about Mini-planets stuff... Mario Galaxi came to my mind, so I did a very bad sketch of a posssible circuit/concept.

Ooo, yea.  I like the craziness of it.  You have roads, but you don't even need to take them... that's my favorite part about the idea.  While other racing games are generic and linear, we'll have something more clever.

Dunno how point-based gravity integrates into the physic system of Unity, but I guess it can be possible. I'd start with a constant 0,-1,0 before we think about planetoids, worry about loops and vehicle downdraft.

You would have to roll your own system. Not too hard... simplest way to do it would be to have no gravity and do the physics manually.

Off the top of my head: use a sphere collider set as a Trigger (larger than the planet evidently) and make use of the Collider.OnTriggerStay event to apply a force each physics frame to all the cars within the sphere. The force would simply be scaled by the distance between the collider and centre of the sphere. You could either use "true" gravity math for accuracy or some kind of simple linear function (heck, I bet just scaling by the distance would work pretty well). Then drop in a planet-sized sphere collider set to be kinematic and the cars should just drive around easily.

-edit: Added diagram with crappy pseudocode

-edit: hehe, it works, I just protoyped it, very amusing!

I guess the physics part isnt the toughest, but when you start with AI and pathfinding for vehicles the ballgame might change. But I like the idea of having planets with ramps sending you off to other planets, so who knows what will happen when we get there.

what you need is a node system, large sphere colliders and you have to create some sort of link system to link them up with a drag and drop style
this will allow multiple paths for the AI and maybe a chance on some paths to determine which way a character will likely take

How close are we to actually having a fully functional racer anyway?

it depends, this is a write up on how to construct an arcade style racer

first you need the Pivot which is the characters position

Player (Pivot) (rigid body and sphere collider)

 >CameraAnchor (null object to snap/child camera too(important for cinematic and effects etc)

   (Camera pivot should unparent itself and smooth follow the character, simple parent the camera as desired)

 >MeshAnchor (null object, this is where you spawn the prefab of the car/character

   >>Mesh

     >>Collisions (null object to manage collisions)

     >>>Sphere (Character collision), Cube (car base), 4x Cylinder (wheels)

             (this could be in the player Pivot if all vehicles are the same generic shape/size etc)

  (end character prefab)
>TriggerFoot (cube used for detecting if on ground)

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 03 February 2013 - 01:45 AM.

Not too advanced really, but it quickly adds up.

I am curious to see who has begun the project? Has anyone started the root coding for these things? Or did i miss something from another thread?

At the moment, we're focused on having 3D things to play with before we enter the world of coding.  Diggy has started working on skyboxes (for some ungoddly reason) as well as a generic racer model, and I'm hoping we can dedicate some effort into coding the kart so we can have it fully functioning so we can branch from there.  But that's all hoping... I know Dig wants to get his other game finished before he starts dedicating more into RR, and Dukie is... doing something.  Important, maybe.  And that's all the coders we have, I think'y.

Not much direct coding being done right now. Concepts and basic 3d models is where we are currently at. Digi's been doing some google research for wheel simulations.

I'm sort of in a buzz these days with my new 100% job. Once I start getting that under control and some other paying freelance jobs I've promised to do, I'll be more active here. I do try to squeeze in a few minutes of talk now and then though.

for gravity for loops and roads, what if the cart had the collision sphere around it and it detected a terrain object (terrain or road/track), it would then shoot a rayast it and apply gravity in that direction, and for jumps, have a collision that tells the gravity that its a jump, using the collision is a reference point and then disable the gravity for 1 second so when its back on it pulls towards the closest track again

It sounds like that would work.  It also sounds like the math for that may be a bit tricky, but it sounds like you know whats up.

Would that work for different sized worlds in one map?

Edited by DIGI_Byte, 24 February 2013 - 09:08 PM.

Oh, yea.... I like that.