Racer Prealpha3

[James Legg]

Racer prealpha 3 has been released.

Major changes:
* New tracks and a new track theme
* Track and track theme improvements
* Boosters
* Faster cars with better handling
* Track editor improvements
* Build system improvements (use libtool, support older FTGL
versions)

Tarball Available from Sourceforge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/racer/files/Source%20code/racer-0.0.320.tar.gz/download
md5sum: f84498492f0c3a61f520bef08e7a4c9f
sha1sum: a8ad7409889187b4e3ca8c3c13c6ef98f744c326

It has also been tagged in the racer subversion repository, so you can
get it with this command:
svn co https://racer.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/racer/tags/prealpha3
(or use trunk revision 320).

[Charles Goodwin]

I've been playing it, it's really good so far.  Only a few tweaks and features away from being a really stand out game.

There are some things which can be a bit frustrating.  Given the shape of the ships and the physics, touching the side is really harsh.  It steers the ship into the wall, slowing it down dramatically, making it very tough to get away from the wall.

A solution to this might be to wrap the ships in some kind of shield so that it just bounces off the wall (with some slowdown).

I also noticed that, now you made the ships a bit closer to the track, when going over parts of the track which bend up or down, the ship bobbles a bit due to interactions with the track surface.

 - C

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[James Legg]

On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 14:56 +0100, Charles Goodwin wrote:
> I've been playing it, it's really good so far. Only a few tweaks and
> features away from being a really stand out game.

Thanks!

> There are some things which can be a bit frustrating. Given the shape
> of the ships and the physics, touching the side is really harsh. It
> steers the ship into the wall, slowing it down dramatically, making it
> very tough to get away from the wall.

I tried adding something either side of the cars' noses to their
collision shapes. It helps when scraping the wall on the outside of a
corner, since the car faces down the track instead of the wall, which
makes it is easier to pull away. Also in more collisions the car will
just bounce away from the wall completely.

However it does make the 90 degree corners more difficult. Previously if
you got your car's nose around the corner you could turn the car so the
wider back end didn't collide. Now an invisible part of the car collides
with the corner when you think there is enough space for the nose.

I'll keep this change since it makes it less frustrating in general.

Some of the track themes have corners in the wall collision shapes,
which you can catch the car on. I think I should make the walls smoother
so scraping them doesn't randomly (and therefore unfairly) knock the car
away.

>
> I also noticed that, now you made the ships a bit closer to the track,
> when going over parts of the track which bend up or down, the ship
> bobbles a bit due to interactions with the track surface.

I'll look in to it.

-James