Racing Game

Hi, I am totaly new to Blitz3D on the PC (having been using old Amiga BlitzBasic years ago, and Pure Basic more recently on the PC). I have moved to Blitz as I want to write something "fun" rather than the apps I have done in PureBasic and Blitz3D seemed like the best choice.

I want to do some sort of racing game. Now being reasonably good at 3D modeling I would like to design the track, scenery and cars in my modeler (which can export to 3DS files) and use them in the game, which I know should be possible.

My question is, is loading the track as an object and then basically gettin the cars to race over it a good idea? Or is there a better way of doing it? I do not want to be stuck with a simple track with corners, I would like to have hills and sloped bends in it if possible. I want the track walled in as well (which seems to be possible using collision detection from what I can see).

I would appreicate some thoughts (or examples of how to do things like this) so I can start heading the right direction as it where, rather than speed 2-3 weeks doing something to find it isn't going to work.

I am trying to decipher the "driver.bb" file at the moment to see what that can tell me about stickin one object to another. But would like more ideas and thoughts to get me started.

I hope noone minds me asking. But games are new to me, I have only programmed serious apps before so I really have no idea of what the best methods are for doing things!

Cheers.

Max

I would suggest breaking your track model into chunks, this way you can hide/show parts that you can and can't see. Otherwise you'll be trying to render the whole thing the whole time.

You'll often find in games programming that you will spend 2 or 3 weeks doing something that isn't going to work!

'driver.bb' is a good place to start for a racer - it's where I've started. I would worry more first about trying to get a realistic 'feel' for the car on the test terrain that comes with the sample. If you focus on the construction of the track at this point, you might be wasting your time.

Look at changing the code so it checks if the wheels are touching the ground, adding a 'slide' effect if you turn at high speed and so on. The tricky bit will be stopping the car from climbing vertically!

Next, if you are doing a 'laps'-based game, try to create a basic track mesh, with checkpoints/gates that will allow you to check the player is completing laps properly, and will also allow you to add timing to those checkpoints.

Then start to think about how to expand - adding computer players would be good. To do this, look into using 'Types' to represent the player car, and all the computer cars. This would also be good for a split-screen racing game or over a network.

THEN once you have a basic 'racing' game model, you can start to think about design issues such as how complex sections of track are, or what memory management / graphics issues you will run into. If you are looking for ultra-realism and very smooth turns and so on, undoubtedly you will need to split the mesh up to lower the rendering time.

Hope that helps, keep posting I'll try to help with anything.

The reason I asked about the tracks was twofold:

1) I have used DarkBAsic before and it enabled you to make simple maps that could be easily used for things like driving games and FPS's. I did not know if Blitz did this and if it was a better idea.

2) I have already modeled some tracks (some simple, some not so simple) which would be suitable for what I want. It would just be a case of exporting them as 3DS files and loading them into Blitz.

At the moment I just want to get an object & camera to move around the track. Things like slide effects, braking properly etc can come later on once I have a better understanding of the language and how to do things. If I can get one of my cars to drive over one of the tracks then I will at least know I am on the right line.

Thanks for all the ideas though, anything at this point is usefull as games programming is a totaly new area to me and something I want to do to give my head a break and chance to play :)

Max

Fair play.. well like I said in the other thread, check out ODE first, some powerful stuff there for car simulation.