The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

wezu on 2016/03/07 12:38 of Gas and Grass

Time to sum up. As always some parts went fine and some not so.

The Good

Driving. I'm happy with that. It's fun to drive the car, it's easy to strategy and almost impossible to flip. There are sounds that change in volume and pitch as you change speed, crash, break or just go over bumps. The car also looks ok.

Rocket. You might be wondering what I'm talking about - there are no rockets in the game. The rocket I have in mind is the main character - I named her Rocket, but don't ask me why. She looks cool with a US flag bandana and red boots modeled after the boots Jake the Dog stole... and then there's the 'get out of the car via the window onto the roof's animation. I'm quite proud of that one. Use pview (shipped with panda3d sdk) to view the model and animal.

Grass. If I made the grass from individual objects I'd need 10 of them for every 1x1m square - the map is about 0.5x0.5km so that would be more objects then any modern $500 GPU can render. Without going technical I'll just say instancing, ping-pong texture buffers and dirty tricks are used to render the grass fast, animate it, cut in real-time and show it on the radar. But there's still room for improvement.

The Bad

Gameplay. There's none. The mechanism is there, but there's no goal, no win condition, nothing. As a game it's a epic fail.

Postprocess. I have shaders to make soft shadows, lens flares, heat distortion, bloom/glare and depth of field included but not used.

Character control. It's just bad. I don't wanna talk about it, wasted a whole day on it.

The Ugly