One Track, One car- "Cygnus Car Engine"
Community Forums/Showcase/One Track, One car- "Cygnus Car Engine"
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| Hi all! I said a long time ago that I would try to get you a playable version of "Cygnus Car Engine". Well, we packaged one up for you quite some time ago, but never got to post it. Many thanks to Evak, this guy is seriously tallented. Everything you see visually (Apart from just one thing which I think you will all guess- the in-game HUD font) has been modeled by him. Evak and myself have spent the last year and a bit finalising the graphics and physics, and a short while before completion, this is what it was. A single Track, Single car playable demo. Since this was designed for use in an Arcade Booth, control settings and options are set in an Ini file. The default keyboard controls have been tweaked to give best performance too. This demo has MP code which may trigger the firewall. MP itself is not functional however, and the MultiPlayer option selects an easier handling mode for driving instead. Also, if you find it struggles (It needs a 32mb graphics card to run in 16-bit mode.) Evak left the lightmap in the Levels folder, remove it and it should run a little better. Enjoy, and tell me what you think! http://damientsturdy.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/RacerM.zip      |
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| you can use 1-9 and CTRL+ 1-9 to change cameras or which car you are looking at. The engine uses very close to 32mb of Vram, which was a self imposed limit so it would run on my old system, the lightmap is HUGE, so if you get graphics glitches, you can remove it and still enjoy the engine, which is a hell of a lot of fun with some stonking good AI for a racing game. If you have a fast PC you can have 12 cars racing at once (settings in the .ini file) which can be quite fun. |
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| cool. :) |
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| I have been waiting years for this!!! It is as good as i expected. Congratulations. Very Solid, Very Stable, Very Fun. it is more arcade than my engine, but i see it is really great. Good work. P.D: From what i know... most vga cards can use two-textures at the same time... so the lightmap should not be a big performance-hit... (oh well, you are talking about memory usage...) |
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| cool demo! the rear view mirror rendered a little slow though.... |
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| you can set the rear view mirror to something more to your liking. The current setup is so it will run on lower spec systems. in the .ini file the current default is: MirrorFPS=20 ;Frame Update of the mirror. To chamge the number of cars, change: Cars=6 I recall that we had 12 cars running quite happily on our better systems. |
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| EK, the FMC videos used up almost 5gb of bandwidth over the weekend, so I had to disable the demo and what have you for the minute. |
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| error 404 - link dead..any alternative? |
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| Dead link ????? |
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| LINK! poop! |
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| Dargh! 5GB? Where the hell did that come from!? :D I'm uploading to a new space as we speak. [edit] I uploaded to my own webspace. Link updated! |
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| Very impressive. I get a lot of flashing textures. Predominantly the road for approx. 5-10 seconds just after passing the pits area for some reason. And the cars seem to have a flashing muddy/gritty texture to them on my system. Roadside is just grey, no grass or mud. Everything runs nice and smooth apart from that though. Good to see something that will run on a lower spec system after what seems a plethora of demos that require a lot more power for just 2D stuff. |
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| Hmm, Did you try removing the lightmap texture? We left that accessable since it did take a lot of memory and might take you over your Vram limit. :-) Good to hear it runs smooth though, specially on a 700mhz system! :-) [edit] Thanks Kurix! |
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| I thought I had removed the lightmap. Turns out I deleted it from the zip .. oops. lol Without it the track and grass are fine. Still getting a flickering "grainy" texture on the car, and now the pit buildings and the banner over the track are white/grey with flickering "dots". |
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| This is cool Cygnus, well done. I finally get to see what you've been doing for so long! Plays nicely. Got around 330FPS so no problems even with my old Radeon 9800XT (256MB RAM). I look forward to seeing it more complete! I nearly bought an MX5 once, but the missus says, "No, you are not buying a 2 door sports car, where will the kids go?" and I said "well they can stay in the Peugeot 106" and she said "No" and I said "OK, 4 door it is then", and bought an Impreza. Now there's a challenge, program in 4 wheel drive and drifting! |
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| Now there's a challenge, program in 4 wheel drive and drifting! If you want to drive a 4WD Impreza, I only have to send you a CDT file- It's already supported :) Drifting is possible but tricky to pull off. If you do it right you can use it best around the first corner of the track. get your speed up :) It's not perfect though. I was dreaming when I said it worked properly. Thanks for the comments, and glad you all like it! [edit] Best bet to remove glitches: If you still get errors, Change the INI to 16 bit (I don't know if it's set at 32 or 16 at the moment!) |
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| This works pretty good. The controls feel a little 'twitchy' sometimes but other than that I like it - love the Gran Turismo style cameras. Only thing I would like to see, is more detail on the cars. They look very basic. |
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| ahhh, this i've just gotta try out... thx Cyg for giving us a taste... @ GFK... the cars look just like Mazda Miatas... exactly like Miatas... this may cause a problem if Cyg plans to release it... or he might approach Mazda advertising types with a proposal for promo funding as part of an agreement, and make a lil money on it... either way though, this might bear looking at... ok... lemme download this baby and have a lil fun :) --Mike |
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| The cars were designed to spec, they are indeed Miatas :-) If we were to release a comercial product with it we would of course get permission or just use other, custom designed cars. Just so you know we are aware :D GFK, Glad you like! The cars seem a bit plain because we needed to keep the Vram usage down. We really wanted to up the detail all over! |
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| Sounds cool you can do the 4 wheel drift. I can too, for real, it's pretty good fun on wet roundabouts or in icey car parks. |
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| I get an 'invalid page fault' error as soon as I double click the exe. :( |
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| I get an 'invalid page fault' error as soon as I double click the exe. :( Interesting. I've not programmed that error and it's not in any lib's ive used, so it must be molebox. Sorry B10p, not sure there's much I can do here! Can you try redownloading? |
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| Yeah, it's the standard windows error message you get when a prog crashes. I re-booted and tried again, but still get the error. I'll try re-downloading and give it another try. :) [edit]Still get the error. :( The following error log file gets dumped - not sure if it's any help: RACE.EXE-up.txt __SEH__ 0xc0000005 at 0x1023233c CS :0x0000016F SS :0x00000177 DS :0x00000177 ES :0x00000177 FS :0x00004FD7 GS :0x00000000 EAX:0x00000000 EDX:0xBFFC9490 ECX:0xFFFFFFFF ESP:0x0062F644 EBP:0x0062F648 EIP:0x1023233C ESI:0x0074F997 EDI:0x0000000A -- backtrace -- 0x1023233c:[RACE.EXE]:(006:0000033c) 0x1023d9df:[RACE.EXE]:(006:0000b9df) 0x10237360:[RACE.EXE]:(006:00005360) 0x10237449:[RACE.EXE]:(006:00005449) 0x1023ec0a:[RACE.EXE]:(006:0000cc0a) 0x1009fbee:[RACE.EXE]:(001:0009ebee) 0x100a96ae:[RACE.EXE]:(001:000a86ae) 0x100a952e:[RACE.EXE]:(001:000a852e) 0x100a9780:[RACE.EXE]:(001:000a8780) 0x1009b7ae:[RACE.EXE]:(001:0009a7ae) 0x100014e7:[RACE.EXE]:(001:000004e7) 0x102334a5:[RACE.EXE]:(006:000014a5) 0xbff8b412:[KERNEL32.DLL]:(002:00012412) 0xbff89dd5:[KERNEL32.DLL]:(002:00010dd5) ... opss, broken by SEH --stack-- 0x0062f644: 0x0074f893 0x0062f69c 0x1023d9df 0x0000000a 0x0062f654: 0x0000005c 0x0074f893 0x0074f997 0xbff741f7 0x0062f664: 0xbffc9490 0xbff7cdf9 0xbffc9490 0x006826f8 0x0062f674: 0x00000100 0x00000001 0x0062f688 0x00000000 0x0062f684: 0x0062f708 0xbffa1d67 0x00000024 0x00000002 0x0062f694: 0x10237166 0xfff78e97 0x0062f718 0x10237360 0x0062f6a4: 0x0000000a 0x006826f8 0x00000100 0x00000001 0x0062f6b4: 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 Anyone else got this working on win98SE? |
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| Molebox has known problems with win98 IIRC. Looking at the backtrace to Kernel32, it looks like a file access did it (I'm assuming thats what part of the racer accessed Kernel32.) which also points at Molebox. Sorry Big10p :( |
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| Needs more bloom(Cheeky grin) but other than that a very solid game. Tried a multi car version ages back, dunno why you didn't release that one? No visibles bugs etc from what I can recall. |
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| There was a *huge* bug back then, it was generally sluggish, buggy, mostly half completed, and of course, I had no decent models. |
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| Bugger. I was looking fowrard to having a thrash around on this, too. It looks really good. :) |
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| Those 9mb FMC vids got downloaded over 530 times 18 18 hours (nearly 400 from the Ogre Forums). That's where the Bandwidth went, I just have free webhosting with 5GB per month so... Reason that there's a MX5 in is that I sometimes race them, and know people from thunderhill raceway that run the performance driving school there, plus from Laguna Seca which is the Mazda Track here on the West Coast. Also there are 10,000 MX5's that take part in motorsports around the US, and a huge enthusiast market, plus I know alot of vendors of aftermarket performance parts and mazda encourage the enthusiast community quite a lot. Having talked to a few people, there is a fair of getting the actual car in the game. |
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| Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! This is really great!!! How much is it? How much for the code and the graphics and stuff? I want to play with it. |
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| Woah! Looks like it's popular!!! I hope they're not going to charge you? :) |
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| Puki buys everything (except Easter Bonus), he must be rich. If I released the Easter Bonus source or artwork he'd probably buy that though ;-). |
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| Impressive! Ran very smoothly here, but I wasn't impressed with that low resolution so changed it to 1280 X 1024 32bit colour and mirror update to 30FPS - much better! It ran about 120FPS on my ATI Radeon 9800Pro at those settings - about 2 to 3 times that on standard settings. The sound as you corner needs to be toned down though - sounds as if you're on harsh glass paper or something! I know it's an early beta but if you don't keep-up with the cars at the beginning (or get rammed off the track) the other cars don't seem to make mistakes and you drive around the track on your own - something to remember for the final version. |
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| Nice work cygnus, 111fps here. Got some decal flickering when in the gravel and sometimes it was untextured. Also got the flashing track after the pitlane. AI seems pretty good though ... well, it had me licked. Steering is a tiny bit twitchy but I'm sure you can sort that. Great stuff! Stevie |
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| StevieG, same as i've said, the flickering is likely a low Vram thing :D The thing here is that the AI code only has the same inputs as a human player- 4 arrows, and a handbreak, the Ai code manipulates them, the AI doesn't cheat, however, the build we put together here I believe had a bug where the AI would speed up a little faster than the player. That might be what you're seeing, i'm unsure :) The othe cars do make mistakes, quite often (I had to make them push just a little *too* hard so they would spin off when attempting to get past cars and such), but it's this acceleration that may keep them in front. Puki: £6,500 for the code. Deal? |
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| Mmm, I was think he meant £2,000.00. Must have been a typo. |
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| 330fps+ on a x850xt-pe @ 1280x1024x16. I had flickering at low res as well! Great stuff. - Mirror updates too slow - You should make some kind of small loading bar / transition animation when you enter a race or exit back to menu |
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| Heh, okay- We had a "loading" screen but replaced it with a Screenshot function. you get flickering? :( What flickering are you getting? an X850XT isn't likely to be running out of Vram with this.... Mirror updates can be tweaked in the Ini file. They were setup for minimal impact on performance. |
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| Walls, fences etc. But at 1280 everything looks great and works, so I don't care. Cat. 6.4 |
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| Hehe, pretty cool stuff :o) Nice one. Pretty good car physics you got going there! |
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| @ Cygnus woot. this is really amazing! a great game. runs very smooth on my computer too. really nice graphics, good car-physics and good performance. are you planning to release this one commercially at some time? you said "If you want to drive a 4WD Impreza, I only have to send you a CDT file- It's already supported :)" can you send it to me? |
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| are you planning to release this one commercially at some time? It is an old project that reached our design specifications a while back. Cygnus Car Engine AKA "Fun Racer" might be re-designed a bit later on using Max. It was great fun to work with Evak on this one, working around problems in the early release of ODE using Vorderman's great ODE wrapper (This build *still* uses this! Thanks Vorderman!). I have a lot of fond memories with this, and I hope to continue it past it's present state using BlitzMax. It looks like there's a great 3D module about the corner for it too :-) As for the Impreza, The Impreza model I have Is not made by me- In fact, I have no idea who made it. (PsychicParrot, was it you or did you get it from someone else? :) ) I may put up an archive later for those who would like to play with the old Impreza model in game. |
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| http://danjeruz.servegame.com/cpu.zip Car patch for those who wanted to drive the Subaru. The model isn't ours, I just gave it some data so it could be driven in the engine. The MX5 really is the best model. :) At least this pack gives you two cars in race. |
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| very very nice! good use of large texture for shadows i will have to try that idea, some of the camera views go into a spin and dont stop if you keep changing direction but love the game! Pete |
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| As for the Impreza, The Impreza model I have Is not made by me- In fact, I have no idea who made it. Can you post a picture - I've a feeling I made it, but I might be wrong. |
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| Email sent didly sent sent sent |
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| been away from blitz for quite a while - but its good to come back and be this impressed. Very good - changed rez to 1280 x 1024 and it ran at bout 130fps - nice. i'm interested in the techniques you have used - is the track just 1 big mesh? Please follow this through to completion - great game shaping up there. MikeT |
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| Hehe, thanks Mike. This project has got as far as it can, it pushed Blitz to its hardest. Techniques? sure. The track itself is many meshes built in Max by Evak, using the B3D pipeline, Fantastic bit of work :) The collision mesh is a low-poly proxy mesh built from the basic parts of the visiible mesh, It's split into several pieces. and of course we used ODE for physics, using Vorderman's original ODE wrapper :) Anything else you'd like to know? :) |
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| It's a shame you won't be finishing it. I.e. title screen, more tracks, lap times recorded, and finished advertising boards etc. as this is a cool game. |
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| No title screen? It's an arcade game the titlescreen is the menu :D I'm not letting this one die though, Just going to tackle it with newer technology in Max. It'll take a while to get back at it though :-) Also, this is modular, so on the occasion when I get bored, there's every chance i'll chuck a new car in. Lap times recorded? Yeah. I coded that but the way the waypoint system worked they weren't totally accurate, so I never put them on screen. The Advertising boards *where* completed. We were using this as a tech demo for many people, and changed the ad's to say "Ad goes here!" :) As it goes, I'm sure you all know, you need to move forward to progress. As cool as this is, everyone who has had interest in it has wanted some sort of multi-platform, speed improvement, things like that. It really is as optimised as i'm going to get it now though, but i'm happy if I hear people with 800mhz machines are able to play it!! In the end, I'm capable of more now, better products, more realistic handling, better design and better code. *WHEN* I get back to a racing game (not "if"), I'll make it totally "Kick-ass" :) |
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| Cool, yeah I should twigged about the title screen. Anyway good luck with future racers, it's certainly not a genre I'd be brave enough to attempt :-) |
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| Finally had chance to take a look at this, it's outstanding stuff Cygnus! Evak has done a fantastic job too, I wish I had tracks like that for my racer :) The demo worked well (default settings), nice smooth framerate. Some feedback about the handling, the cars feel too light and they oversteer badly on the default settings. I know how hard that is to get right though and you've done a great job with it so far. It even has support for force feedback! Did you use the force feedback DLL by Nordvall? |
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| Indeed I did. Great work by Nordvall too. An awesome little lib :) As for the handling, Yeah it's hard to get right. It's been tested thoroughly by Evak who knows what one handles like, and the oversteer was intentional. Thanks for the comment. Glad you like! |
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| Hey Cygnus, is this FF Lib free and if you where can I get it? |
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| Wait a minute - if this is now a dead project, why not just sell the thing? Not exclusively - just to everyone that will pay for it - a nominal amount that most people would pay. |
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| Hey Cygnus, is this FF Lib free and if you where can I get it? Nope, but its damn cheap: http://www.blitzbasic.com/toolbox/toolbox.php?tool=81 Puki- Because the Spec for this particular racer only required if have one track and one car, (I even removed cars to do that). There's not much more to it. And by the sounds of above, there's a few compatibility problems not related to low v-ram, which I never knew about until I posted this thread. |
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| I think we will redo the racer properly later in a engine thats easier to optimize with. we tried to get the game to work within 32mb of Vram, and on lower spec computers, which meant using few textures and surfaces to get better performance on older puters like my 5 year old backup system. Think we need a break from racing games, but the passion is still there to give it another go, and this will make a nice free demo to promote our company and web site later on :) |
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| Is this available to buy as a project (code and all media) yet? |
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| This like Mario Kart in any way? |
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| No. More like Gran Turismo. |
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| Hm....I didn't like it. I couldn't catch up with the other cars because my handling was so crazy. |
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| there are two handling styles, We turned of MP and so MP will give you different handling than SP. One of them was much easier than the other. |
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| I think we will redo the racer properly later in a engine thats easier to optimize with. we tried to get the game to work within 32mb of Vram, and on lower spec computers, which meant using few textures and surfaces to get better performance on older puters like my 5 year old backup system. I'm waiting for the announcement that you've managed to achieve what you were attempting to now that DXTC texture compression has been implemented in Blitz. Is such an announcement forthcoming? :o) |
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| No. More like Gran Turismo. Yeah, maybe PGR 3-style, then again, to have something like that Gotham TV setup to watch online races or tournaments, that would be awesome... Then again, I don't think that Blitz can handle the stuff that Microsoft did for PGR 3, tho. |
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| Bloomin eck Puki, you wen't and resurrected an old thread again... @ LineOf7s, Blitz is still limited in other areas. We substituded alot of quality to avoid shortcomings of blitz, DXTC was just one. The B3D art pipeline is pretty nice but still limited. I think Evak discovered Ofusion/Ogre and it was not unlike moving from a 256-colour VGA card to a 32-bit XGA, 3D hardware-accellerated Geforce 7800. Ok, so I exadurated a little there, but still! :) Ogre gives us more features and DX9, and it works quite nicely in BMax thanks to SOW. I haven't touched B3D for quite some time now thanks to it. With this racer we may upgrade the texture quality but it's not decided yet (We don't have a lot of time to spare). I would much rather move the project over to a faster language, a faster render engine and a faster physics engine, and make a *totally* kick-ass racer :) Maybe even show the Xbox360 and it's PGR3 who's the daddy. (Again, maybe not, but who knows.... ;) ) @Puki: I'm afraid not, especially at the price range you were hoping for. :) |
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| Aaah. Oh well. Thanks Cyg, for such a complete answer. :o) Great-looking racer still, btw. |
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| Glad you like it. It wouldn't look this good without Evak's hard work though! Like I say, we may still up the texture quality a bit. There's more juice to squeeze now :) |
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| Ah, so "Evak" has his own version to sell? |
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| puki: Why do you keep buying everything up, or do you just talk about it? Do you have money to burn or something or is there a "masterplan"? |
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| Hmm, puki is somewhat getting me curious now. However, doesn't stop this from being the next Forza Motorsport. |
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| Ram, Download it and try it. Whats the worst that could happen? |
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| You got it... Might as well have a notebook racing game out of this. EDIT: Okay, just d/led it, and you're right. However, after playing a few laps, I was hoping you'd have a better drifting scale, guess this isn't exactly Ridge Racer, I understand, but at least have some cooler effects in your next version, such as super drifting... Just a suggestion. |
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| I spent ages telling myself drifting was possible in this engine... but its difficult. You can drift around the first corner if you hit it fast enough though ;) [edit] I remember Ridge Racer 1. yuck ;) Yeah I will try my hardest to get a better drifting model in. For now accelerate down the hill past the start, steer sharply into the corner and enjoy the drift, if you can get it to work ;) |
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| flickering...sounds like mipmapping is disabled..this will be more noticeable in lower res.. - if you dont think you can use mipmapping cuz of memory consumption, store your textures as dds files .. i think the newest update to b3d now supports dds files... worst case, supply alternate lowres textures.. 256x256 or 128x128...for use in lowres display modes.. anyhoO..looks great. |
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| I use anistropic filtering in the racer. it is possible people may be having a problem with this. As for this, Defoc8, it's old now. As i've said above, we *may* get time to convert them to DDS, but I haven't worked on the racer itself since end of last year now. DDS support should just require me to recompile the racer though. |
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| dss? when did that happen, i didnt hear anyone say anything about texture compression being added ? |
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| last week Mark added DDS compressed textures. in 16bit the racer barely works in 32mv of vram and uses a large 2048x2048 lightmap for the entire scene. If its a Vram issue, I left the lightmap unmoleboxed so you can delete it. I think we will end up doing the racer in Blitzmax with Sow next since everything is almost there in SOW now. We have gamepad input, ODE or Newton physics, the offusion 3dsmax exporter that supports Ogres renderer and materials 100% We just need a few more of the more exotic newton functions wrapped so we can really go to town :) I think we would still want to make it more of a fun racer than a serious simulator though. There are too many sims already out there like live for speed, forza, or Gran tourismo. |
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| Yeah, can't wait to see that Test Drive: Unlimited influence in there with a cop or two chasing you down the road... |
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| Defoc, most of the textures are 256x256, the large lightmap and modulate2X may be the problem on some really old cards. A lot of the level is textured with a 16x16 colour chart, including the car, which has a 32x32 environment map to give it a slightly cell shaded but slightly dynamic lighting and shadow appearance. We wanted the game to run on 1ghz Geforce 2 or 3. |
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| I would like to keep the racer sort of real, like this one, but not simulated. I would like to give the user a feel of the car they are driving- proper drifting, etc, that's easy to handle yet realistic- I bought Outrun the other week for my PSP and i am massively unimpressed with it. I felt the racer actually gave you a sense of the vehicle you were driving, after a few plays you got used to it and could tell when you were about to flip out etc, and could correct it in time. I would love to do all this again. |
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| hehe, I tried outrun when it came out for the xbox and was really disappointed. I'd really like to have some realistic drifting if possible where you steer out and then back into the corner and the back starts to slide out. At that point if its working right you should be able to control it with the throttle. That might be a bit much, but something where you can opposite lock a bit and use the throttle in the right place to straighten up would be pretty wicked. We would need chris to add some more newton functions, assuming they work it has some pretty impressive things to play with :) |
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| Hmm... Well, when new driving games come onto the market, like Gran Turismo HD or Forza Motorsport 2, or Excite Truck, then you can see where the next generation of driving games'll take you, then you can try building off of that. |
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