Isle of Maniax

[jonnection]

New video showing much improved physics. I spent a lot of time finetuning acceleration, gear torque and centripetal forces. You can see the force "bars" on top of the display... those are for debugging only.

It is possible to not run off all the time, I had difficulty driving because I was looking through the camera lens.

My beta testers enjoyed the game but told me there should be road signs about corners ahead... will be implemented soon.

Time attack version of the game will probably be released in coming weeks, it is actually beginning to be a pretty reasonable game.

If you want to hear the sounds properly, USE HEADPHONES.

[jonnection]

Testing my Jpak-packing algorithm with some start-up screens. Its a run-length encoding algorithm that allows both packed and unpacked data in the image. The motorcycle is a full screen at 360 bytes (normally 504 bytes). Not great but better than no packing at all.

This is screen capture from Simbuino emulator. About 17,800 bytes flash used, and around 1700 bytes of ram used.

Now, time to start on the opponents and roadside objects.

[erico]

I wonder, what do you think about the bike ramping when the road makes a strong slope?
I think about that because I see something of a Road Rash in it.

[jonnection]

Just for fun... music is Super Hang-On "Outride a crisis" by Sega Sound Team.

[arickert]

Hi there,

I just saw this kind of racing game! Looks really fantastic!
Any news about this in the last two weeks?
Hope to see some release soon

Andreas

[Myndale]

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this one myself. It's really quite amazing how good a job you've done with the graphics so far, this genre is difficult enough to do well in 4 colors let alone 2, and that's before the 84x48 resolution!

[rodot]

[Zoglu]

Impressive work given the hardware it's running on
Can't wait to play your game !

[jonnection]

Thanks for the interest.

Work is going on all the time. As I have mentioned before, this game uses my own graphics and game libraries. So I'm creating the library and the game at the same time, and that's why it appears nothing is going on...

My last addition to my library was RLE packing I mentioned in the Lunar Lander thread. For that I had to develop a bmp->jpak converter as well as the renderer on the Gamebuino.

At the moment I am working on sound synthesis. I managed to fake the PWM sound on a PC with IMHO quite convincing results. This means I can develop sounds directly on the PC = better SFX and serious effort at music. I just got a first prototype of a GUI synthesizer up and running. It will have 2 oscillators with 3 mixing modes, 5 waveforms, volume and pitch envelopes. I have tested on my fakebuino, it is able to handle almost all these features WHILE it is running the Isle of Maniacs game.

Edit: explanation about the reason behind sound synthesis. What I am trying to create is proper game music without needing to use samples. The gamebuino doesnt have enough memory for sample based music, and a square wave sounds always a bit like a beep. With parametric oscillators I hope to make for example convincing drums with minimal memory use.

Edit2: I was wondering why the PC sim sounded so different from the Fakebuino. The engine sound uses a sample + triangle wave. By accident the other oscillator was set to saw wave when I compiled the PC simulator version. I'll make another video later on with more detail on the sounds.

[MegaPikaKeroro]

I don't speak "programmer" but you are basically creating the game and the tools to make the game?
LOL, you are so pro.
I would like to make something too.
need to wait for Christmas vacation to start with something.
Anyway keep working, this game remember me a lot of the old mobile phone game: fluent and cool.