Blender Tron Light Cycle game

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
1

Hi,
I haven`t posted here anything for a while.

This is a Tron Light Cycle game I am working on for a week or so.
Tron: Legacy premiere is on Dec 17th so I thought I should try my skills to remake this classic arcade game. Visual inspiration comes from the original Tron (1982) movie. You can watch the Light Cycle scene here in HD:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuALQcuaCTo

In few days of development I realized that scabootssca has already made a tron game
so I used it as a base for my game, though I changed and coded some stuff myself :smiley: and i am not a good coder. I will have to redo everything at some point anyways…

game does not have any textures (maybe except for text font) and no light sources. it has fake stencil shadows for the whole scene. i am trying to keep the framerate as high as possible (currently around 400fps in blender 2.49 in FullHD resolution). To add some eyecandy I put a fast and brand new light bloom shader.

I have to work a little more on some game mechanics and the game will be ready to go out for field testing.

some screenshots from work in progress game:

wip gameplay video:

blend is coming soon.

Attachments

lc.jpg711Ă—433 90.8 KB

1 Like
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Welcome back Master Martinsh! Is good to see you work on a game, since you contributed so much for the community.
The game looks very clean and flashy so far (I’m a TRON’s fan as well) well, compared to the 1982 graphics…
Any ways, would like to see how it develops, and the blend later on of course!
Keep it up!

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Finnaly THE GOD OF BLENDER is making a game…and maybe you will share that AMAZING bloom filter…but only if you want! anyway! NICE GRAPHICS.

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very cool!

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game does not have any textures (maybe except for text font) and no light sources.

:eek:

Very nice first impressions. :slight_smile:

Do you mind telling how you got the wireframe of the red structure in the background to show? I’m guessing it’s a custom shader?

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You can do that with a simple Wire option on your material! Now you have to model it in a way the wireframe looks the way you want!

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You can do that with a simple Wire option on your material! Now you have to model it in a way the wireframe looks the way you want!
Now i feel stupid.:o

The wires look great with that bloom. :slight_smile:

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a quick gameplay video (should be watched in 720p):

and a screenshot:
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/1714/warpg.jpg

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Woohoo! looks tasty…

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Very nice! I love that start up. ALso, you might want to make turning less jerky.

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You wouldn’t know this if you haven’t seen the original TRON but the lite cycles are supposed to turn jerky like that. Basically they turn a perfect right angle instantly. Sorta of like they are racing on a grid :wink:

Anyways, nice work so far! I’m a huge TRON fan and I’m glad to see something that’s actually accurate to the original movie. The light cycles look perfect! :smiley: The only thing I would bother to mention is that the light trail comming out behind them is supposed to curve up when it comes out of the back rather than come straight out.

Like this!

Edit: Oh ya, also that’d be really cool to have a top down view where its just colored lines like the “light cycle arcade” in the original movie. You could either have it as a certain view you could switch into or have it up in one of the corners as a sort of mini map. Or you could just not do it at all :wink: Just a suggestion :smiley:

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Wow - that looks just like GLTron (etc) from the Linux repositories, which are supposed to be pretty faithful remakes. Awesome work. How did you go about making the trails?

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Looking good Martinsh.

Not often you see a game with better graphics than the movie :stuck_out_tongue: (meaning the original that is)

Would you briefly be able to describe how the trail effect is achieved?

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Hey, nice job, martinsh. I particularly like the light cycle spawning animation. I might know of a way to make more efficient light trails (if you aren’t already doing this). Rather than spawning a new light trail object every unit that stretches over a unit, for example, you could try creating a new light trail object that stretches to the back of the light cycle. When you turn, it creates a new trial object to stretch - this would significantly reduce the number of trail objects necessary for each cycle, making it possible to have an absurd number of light cycles in the game (if so desired).

EDIT: Bah, that’s how you do trails already! Oh, well; looks like you’ve got this covered. Anyway, I put the gameplay video of this in my game development blog (I hope that was alright). See my signature for information.

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So, to make the trails, You create a object that looks like one of the trails, and then you use the stretch constraint to attach it to the back of the cycle. Then when you turn, the bike creates a new trail? How do you stop the old trail from following the bike still? And would it be possible to use the same sort of method for the bikes in Tron: Legacy? Because the movement of those bikes is much smoother. Do you have any ideas on how to do that? Those type of trails are something that has been baffling me for quite some time now.

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@The Dawisch
Thanks,
Yeah i am looking for a way to make that curved gradient of the trail.
At the moment the trail is coming from the middle of the bike.
And the overlay minimap is in my to-do list :slight_smile:

@Lancer
Yes, I am a huge fan of GLTron. I used to play it alot split-screen with my friends.

@AD-Edge
So the trails are made quite simple.
Each time the bike turns it adds a new trail object and scales it every frame by value of the speed of bike.
in the code it looks something like this:


trail = cont.actuators["addTrail"]
trail.instantAddObject()
trail = trail.objectLastCreated
trail.scaling += bikeSpeed

I also used Global coordinates instead of UV`s to avoid texture stretching.

@Joeman16
Thank you. Yeah it works almost like you described, but i like the idea of stretching it to the back of the bike, not the middle, I just need to add a offset value.

@Joe_Stevens
This trail method would not be really suitable for the smooth turning bikes as it is in Tron Legacy. In my opinion it should be a dense single mesh and then for each vertex you update its position with offset of time value.. or calculate the position of previous frame.. uhh i dont know. But there should be an old ribbons demo somewhere. I`ll have to think of something

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Hi, this is looking really cool!

I would love to know how you made the the spawning animation go from wire-frame to solid. Is it a shader? I got a similar effect by controlling the alpha of vertices, but it’s not as good as yours. it looks beutiful.

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I’ve got another question. Are the other players in that video AI? OR are those other people you where playing with?

Also, after some digging (Horay for the search tool) I’ve found a planar trails example. The thread is pretty old (http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=99047) I do have some questions about it though, but I don’t want to derail this thread, so I shall post the file, and the questions I have about it in the resources section. Hope that helps some of you! It’s certainly helped me!

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Finally the great GLSL God martinsh is here.
Awesome work man.

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Looks really great. I always love to see people making something awesome with blender GE. So many people complain that it can’t be done and they abandon any effort before they’ve really started.

Keep up the good work.^^