PGDmC: 2-bit Racer

[chronozphere]

AI can be really tricky in these kinds of games. If you are using a 3d environment you will probably need to set out invisible waypoints or some other datastructure to "guide" the AI. This can take a lot of time to fine-tune.

And yes, making it a fun game is allways the hardest part. I've written two games in pascal and while they both worked great, they were still not well-balanced and still miss that replay value a good game needs.

Good luck (You'll need it)

[Ingemar]

I am soon ready to make another upload, with a whole bunch of fixes, but it would be really interesting to know if anmyone out there with a fairly modern Mac can run the game. Anyone?

[Ingemar]

I realized something unpleasant but important: The speed of my game was not limited by my timer but by my CPU. That means that other Macs can work very, very differently. In order to fix that, I fixed the worst bottleneck (Immediate Mode code). The whole game went VA-VA-VOOM and got totally unplayable - but really smooth. So now I have to re-tune the whole mess.

I knew all along that Immediate Mode wasn't an good idea, but the difference was bigger than expected.

[WILL]

Yeah one of the more important parts of making a game is the timing of your 'frames'. I'm not talking graphical frames per-say, but your game's running frames. Each update of your game objects and environment. This is key to a nice running game.

[Ingemar]

Yeah one of the more important parts of making a game is the timing of your 'frames'. I'm not talking graphical frames per-say, but your game's running frames. Each update of your game objects and environment. This is key to a nice running game.

That is certainly the case and I should have planned for it. There should always be a "dt". But the other way to do it, which was how I did it, is to lock the frame rate and work from that. Sadly I didn't notice that I got less than the planned fps. It wasn't exactly hard to see, 11 fps instead of 50, but you quickly get used to 11 fps.

But I will fix that now.

[Ingemar]

Phew, now it looks better, running at a steady 50 fps with decent response which should be fps independent. Now I can focus on improvements, tuning how much the AIs should cheat etc.

[Jimmy Valavanis]

Unfortunatelly I don't have a MAC to run your game, can you post a screenshot of the latest version??