I was thinking about making a short racing game in Blender for a senior project next year. I’m still confused/worried about some of the aspects of the game. I won’t actuallly start working on it until the summer, but I need to ask some questions ahead of time so I know what I’m getting myself into:
Car Physics
I’m still confused as to whether the car is just a single object, of if you actually apply a force to the wheels to power and steer the car.
Racing AI
This is what I’m most worried about- I’ve tried looking up the subject online, but I didn’t find much. As far as I see it, I can either have computer players go along a pre-determined path or use some kind of path-finding node system (both of which seem to eat up a lot of RAM). If I can’t get AI to work at all, I might change the style of the game to be more of a stunt racer (similar to Trackmainia, which doesn’t rely on opponents). I need to see if there’s a relativley easy wasy to program racing AI. I do have some basic Python experience if that helps.
Distributing
Once I finish the game, I’d like to export it as an .exe and let students download it from the school’s website. The problem is optimizing the game for lower end computers. The thing that worries me most are the texture modes- my computer supports GLSL, but the Multi-Texture mode just shows up really weird on my computer (Blender is really glitchy and annoying with my comp, I explain the full problem here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=208097) The download itself can be a big size if necessary, but the game has to be light enough to run on only 1 or 2GB of RAM.
Keeping the game low on Ram consumption means basically using less space - if you have BGM, make it shorter - it means less to load into ram. If you have sounds, do the same thing. For pictures, the smaller, the easier to load, and so on.
As for your computer’s display problem, try disabling anti-aliasing or perhaps posting a screenshot of the problem in particular.
saga: Thanks for the car physics tutorial. I’ll make sure to try it at some point and see what I come up with.
Joeman 16: Thanks for the tips. I’ve learned that in racing games, it only takes a minute or two to go the full three laps, so the music loop can be much shorter (and can have a faster tempo).
As for the GLSL vs. Multi-Texture, here’s what I’m talking about. The Multi-Texture mode looks exactly the same as texture face, and the normal map for water doesn’t show up correctly in those two modes. I disabled all of the graphic card settings to use the application settings instead, but no change.
EDIT: OK, nevermind- it seems that Multi Texture does show up when the game is running, but still no water map and everything’s fully lit. The Texture face mode still shows up without color.
Alright - the problem that you’re describing is just that Multitexture mode doesn’t have accessibility to advanced effects like GLSL shaders. In other words, normal maps or GLSL shaders won’t work. To assign textures to faces, you have to use the UV-texture, like you have with the water in the screenshot. Also, there’s no reason to use Texture Face mode, really - you should go with Multitexture mode (it’s more advanced, allowing for multiple textures on each face).
EDIT: For lighting, ensure that the ‘Light’ property is set for each face on the objects that you want to light. Also, make sure that materials just use a blank texture to see the UV-texture on the mesh with correct lighting.
