Car Jockey 1.0 Beta Released

This is a complete rewrite and major polish up of Glimmer Gridlock, which has taken about two weeks of fulltime work.

If you did't see the previous version, it's a very simple concept. Slide the cars around so that you can get the white car to the exit on the right hand side of the screen. 40 levels, getting more and more difficult as you go, and believe me some of the later levels will take some seriously hard thinking, but they are all possible.



DOWNLOAD HERE! ( 2.5MB )

DX8 is required.

Please post specs and the contents of the game.log file if you're reporting any problems. F1 displays FPS, but I can't imagine something this basic is going to cause FPS problems anywhere. Most modern machines are probably gonna max out at 999FPS. If it's not smooth, try enabling VSync, but in my experience, enabling VSync made it much LESS smooth so it's off by default. Depending on the results of the beta, I might even disable that option altogether, but it may be useful for some setups, so it's there for now. Any tearing, or glitches, any audio problems, I need to know about those.

I'm not going to redesign all the graphics or make it into something it's not.. it was only ever going to be a four week project, and that's about how long it's taken with all my other personal and work commitments. So I'm mainly interested in bugs, glitches, anything like that which needs to be resolved. Any showstoppers. I *MIGHT* consider changing the longer car graphics, but I've yet to find anything else which looks good and fits with the concept when viewed top-down like this. I tried trucks and buses but they look out of place and don't really belong in a car park anyway.

No immediate plans for a Mac version ( sorry ) because I'm using a couple of things which would be difficult to port. Mainly the particle system, and use of compressed textures.

Looks nice, how about using "trucks" or a "limo" for the longer cars?

well done!

I like this! Totally useless at it the first level, then it sort of clicked - you have to think about it more than I first anticipated. Very smooth, no tearing even with vsync off, FPS 999.

But I still hate those bits of coal (plants) around the pavement - make then bigger, like a smaller version of the greenery on the walls. Also, when you complete a level the white car seems to have a problem knowing when it has to move through the tunnel - collision or logic problem?

hey wow, you've totally improved this!

Thanks guys.


I tried a truck, but it looked out of place with the cars. I found a great looking limousine model I could use too, but it looks exactly the same as my extended cars :/


Heh, yeah I forgot about my bits of coal. I'll see if I can do something about that. Since it means a re-render, I may see if I can do something about the repetitive texture tiling on the ground at the same time.


I'm guessing you had the sound volume quite low? It starts up the engine as soon as you put the car in place, but there is a pause before it starts moving so that it fits in properly with the sound. With the sound turned off, it will seem like a pause, I guess, but with the sound on/up it makes perfect sense. Hopefully anyway.

Yeah and I forgot about my other point about the road tiling. ;-)



Ah I see - I think you need to double the sound volume here, because the music tends to drown out the initial car sound effect.

or fade the music? Fades can work quite nicely.

quite a transformation :) Looking really really good :)

Maybe make the GUI panel a roof tile texture to make it consistent with the scene?

That's a good idea. I'll try a volume boost on the sample itself, and if that distorts it, I'll just fiddle with the default volume settings so that it's more audible by default. Perhaps up the sound effects volume a bit and lower the music volume a bit.


Fade the music down while the car sound plays and then fade it back up again? That's a neat solution. I'll look into that.


I tried quite a variety of textures and couldn't get anything else which looked good. I do agree that it's currently inconsistent, and I would like it to match a little better, but I can't find anything that I like the look of really. Will have another go before it goes final though. Worked ok on Win98, I take it? No video or audio problems?

Yeah, I was just thinking of a fairly subtle roof tile effect, so as not to swamp the GUI buttons. I appreciate finding the right effect is difficult, though. :)

Er, sorry to report I've had a few probs. First time crashed with a standard windows error message; second time it worked OK but I got a weird mouse pointer while the game was initializing; third time I got the same weird cursor but the game completely locked my system and I had to reboot. I don't think bmax likes win98, much. :(

Ah well, not to worry. Thanks for the report. It does look as though it's BlitzMax itself which doesn't like Win98, doesn't it? I'd always assumed it was Max2d specifically, but since I'm not using Max2d, it can't very well be.

Gabriel: My stuff runs on Big10p's machine, there was originally a win98 sound problem, but this got semi-fixed recently. If you are not using Max2D are you using that wrapper you made?

Yes, it's using Haaf's Game Engine. Haaf's Game Engine has no problems with Win98 though, so unless Big10P doesn't have DX8 installed or DX8 compatible drivers for everything, it won't be that.

how strange. I guess you need other Win98 testers. I think Yoxola has WinME if you wanna try and get him to test...

I'm really not that bothered, to be honest. Even if it's every single Win98 machine, it's a tiny percentage of the userbase and it's not financially sensible to spend a great deal of time making it work on 1% more machines when it was just a two week project.

And I don't plan on making any more 2d games in BlitzMax any time soon either, so it wouldn't help me there either. It seems to run well on laptops, which are a siseable casual market these days, and that's good enough for me.

I have DirectX 9.0c installed. I only ever seem to get problems with bmax apps/games.

Gabriel, I seem to remember your first demo you released worked fine. I only seem to be having problems now you're using an installer. Are you using Molebox, at all?

I absolutely understand you not wanting to waste any more time on it. However, I thought win98 users could be as high as 10% still...

No, I'm not. It's probably Software Passport which doesn't agree with you. In fact, it's probably BlitzMax and Software Passport combined, since BlitzMax interferes with Software Passport's operation in ways that B3D never did.


Not for me. 3% of my visitors use Win98 and WinME combined. I get twice as many Mac visitors as I get Win98 users, and I've got nothing of interest to Mac users.

Anyway, if it's what I think it is ( and I'm pretty sure it is ) then I either have to disable copy protection or rewrite in another language, and those are both going to lose me more money than I could possibly gain from the 3% of users who *might* have problems. I doubt it's all Win98 and WinME users anyway.