Ground Effect F1

(please ignore fps, all 5 cars shown where running on 1 PC)

Game engine sample, no front end.

Game asks if you want to be host or client, enter 1 to host or 0 to connect to a host (then after enter IP).

Cursors to drive
Right Shift/Control to change gear
Hold gear down to reverse (needed when stationary on grass or sand)
F1..F4 Camera
F5 Reset (does not repair car)

To repair car stay in pit area (extended wide area on right along the start finish strait) until pit timer resets.

In multiplayer host may press
F9 to start a race (takes best lap so far to create grid)
---Note: Jump starting blows engine

In multiplayer client may press
F11 to reconnect to host if connection drops

And somewhere, F7 I think, allows you to view other cars.

Currently the framerate jitter correction is experimental and needs more testing but i've had trouble finding people to test with over the new year holidays. Over localhost there is no jitter with 4 clients.

~2kbps bandwidth per player.

If you would like to race me I might be catchable on msn. Use the address msn@... (this is not a valid email address).

Download: http://www.bansheestudios.com/ftp/1980F1.rar

When it's got controller support I might well download and have a go at it. In the meantime it looks like pretty good fun.

Can this be played in single player? I dont like connecting anywhere.

Yes, just "host" a game. It doesnt publish the IP#

For some reason the tyres rotate the wrong way?

"rotate the wrong way?" lol sure that's not just an effect as they are going so fast? ;-)

They spin backwards on the white/green (Williams) car.
The games not bad though for an early release.

+ Engine and gear sounds are nice.
+ Steerings good enough (a little stiff though)
- Can you increase the draw distance for the track?
- Shift/Ctrl are a little tricky. Any chance of A / Z alternative?
- The track is very angular. I also see purple lines at the joins. I understand this is an early game though.

A bit more practice and I'll link up for a multiplayer.
My nick will be Michael ShoeMaker or whatever his name is.

you come up with some nice stuff Becks... this is another one...

i like the gear shifting element... but the controls seem a lil awkward... i keep finding myself pulling the gearshift back toward me to go from first to second... like in a real car... and when downshifting, i naturally move the gearshift forward... maybe you can change the keys so that the forward one is a downshift... and so forth...

and i keep finding myself looking for a tach... :)

also, there's no way to 'see into a turn' before you are into it... the turns come up too quick for the controls...

maybe some road signs... or less tight turns... or something... there's very little peripheral cues, or for that matter, forward indications of a turn...

i know this is a basic test run though, so all this is good... the car does have a nice feel when you get it up to speed...

not bad at all...


hey... are you gonna go all the way with this one, or is this another bit of test code...

--Mike

I found it very difficult to actually get the car moving.... most of the time pressing up did nothing, regardless of what gear i was in, is there some trick to it?

Yes. If in reverse you need to kill the speed by pressing ARROW DOWN. Then, change to GEAR 1 (with RSHIFT) and ARROW UP to go.

Maybe there should be a separate reverse-only key since it is somewhat tricky to control the gear/brake/reverse procedure at the moment.

You probably had caught gear down and had a speed of -.000001 or something, if you are going backwards you must stop before going forwards and vice versa. Sorry if that caused confusion :/

Vorderman is right the tyres do spin the wrong way since I compiled the models into my own format, I noticed that myself, but still at least I got all the wheels themselves facing the right way eh lad ;)...

Draw distance could be increased, but your still very low to the ground whatever you do, I havn't really played with external views myself to see how far you can see as I only ever view outside to learn a track (race games are best played in the @#!*pit in my view) so maybe i'll tweak it.

The track is indeed angular, I used a really old tool to make it. I will write a more up to date version and make some better tracks.

I will eventually put custom controls/controllers in, it's not high on my list atm though - first I want to fix the internet play jitter.

@Red *blush* thank you. The track isn't decorated at all yet (and that model probably wont ever be as it's too low poly). It is quite hard to learn because at 14 corners and 2m05s lap it's a hard track to learn - but once you've picked up the track you'll find the blind bends and dodgy mid-corner braking quite the challenge ;). It's a hard track, and still catches me out and i've been playing it 3 days solidly whilst working on it... :)

ROFL! Point taken.... :)

Cool looking game - as mentioned by Red Ocktober, it does seem to be difficult to see the corners coming up, but I'm sure you can solve that with a track map or some distance marker board etc...

Impressive looking - but why would 5 cars slow the game
down so much? - complex physics? - other than this, i dont
really see how it could be slow...hmmm..
Anyway...no doubt you wil speed things up later.

Defoc: She had 5 clients running on same pc... so it's no wonder why it was running a bit slow...

Yes, 5 client applications, each running the physics of 5 cars and rendering their full display. It's a miracle it ran at 29fps on my heap of junk PC to be honest... That shows it's already pretty fast, infact it'll run on an archaic graphics card with a naff processor and still probably hit the forced 50fps cap. I decided to put a cap on btw, so that my dads 800Mhz laptop processor isnt running at 100% and so the battery lasts longer - and you want it faster !? :) ...

ok..sorry i misunderstood ;)

Once it's got controls I can make use of, I'll be able to download it and try it out across my lan of a few machines of varying ability and horsepower. I'd imagine that would show it in it's proper light.

Sorry, but to try it now would be to break one of my new years resolutions to myself, I'm sure you'll understand. ;O)

You'll just have to wait then ;). It plays fine over LAN at the moment, but i'm having some jitter problems over the internet because what i've done doesn't work too well when the latency times between packets varies too widely, fine over LAN, big problem over net.

I'm trying to resolve it atm, and that's no. 1 priority - but I went back to work today so have reduced time/energy :/

We could be testing that head to head over the net any time you like, but as you said I'll just have to wait. Happy enough to wait though! ;O)

Don't foreget to let us know when it does the controller stuff, I'd not want to miss it because then you'd think folks were not all that bothered, and that would be wrong in many ways!

Ah, this looks interesting.

I don't do multiplayer stuff though.

Still, email me the code and I'll knock up a proper single-player version.