Speed4k

[Alan_W]

Achieve 10 laps in the best possible time, whilst avoiding the other innocent road users.

Play Speed4k

Controls:
- Move Player:    Cursor Keys
- Start Game:     Enter Key

Notes:
- 2GHz or better processor recommended for best framerate.
- Tested on Windows, Mac OSX & Linux  (Thanks to arne for the linux testing)

[kevglass]

Wow! New technology level in 4k achieved!

Brilliant! Brialliant! Brillaint!

Kev

PS. Hard to control tho

[darkprophet]

as brummies would say : "tha' is well nice"

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[kappa]

damn the tech on this game is on another level 

if only it had a motor bike as the vehicle you drive it'd be a road rash clone

[arne]

How did you manage to put that into 4K

Great Game !!

- Only tested on Windows so far

works on Linux, too.

Arne

[f.l.x]

really impresive! congrats

ran pretty smooth in a 1.3ghz athlon 

[Alan_W]

How did you manage to put that into 4K

With great difficulty.  It's been over 4k all weekend.  Fortunately it's now scraping in.

works on Linux, too.

Thanks for testing.  I just need to fire up my Mac now.

if only it had a motor bike as the vehicle you drive it'd be a road rash clone

I see what you mean.  However getting the bikes to lean over realistically on corners would be challenging

PS. Hard to control tho

   

[swpalmer]

Wow.

My game is still at 4400 bytes and it's very lame by comparison. 

[nonnus29]

Wow, wow, wow  .

I can't even begin to imagine how your rendering that terrain.  This is very well done.

This contest is only...  4 days old?  It's going to be a good year for the 4k  .

Oh, and this runs fine on my 866 p3.

[jbanes]

Is anyone else having control problems? I try to steer, but the car keeps understeering. I can't find any way to take a sharp curve without going right off the road. Even driving on a straight road is a challenge.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Alan_W]

Is anyone else having control problems? I try to steer, but the car keeps understeering. I can't find any way to take a sharp curve without going right off the road. Even driving on a straight road is a challenge.

The steering is tricky.  I tried to give it realistic dynamics, it doesn't really work well with the cursor keys.
I'll have to work on it some more.  However, if you brake before the corner, you get less understeer.

[Alan_W]

I can't even begin to imagine how your rendering that terrain.  This is very well done.

The terain rendering is sort of fake voxels.  Rather than full 3D raycasting,  I'm doing 2D raycasting, checking the ray against a procedural heightmap at intervals inversely proportional to the distance from the viewer.

Alan

[Markus_Persson]

Suh...weet!!

Very very nice. =D

[Morre]

THAT IS NOT 4k!

Well, I'm sure it is, I haven't checked, but HOW ON EARTH DID YOU DO THAT?!

So awesome. Amazing. Splendid.

I love it! High-tech!

[oNyx]

Amazing tech.

[CaptainJester]

Great job.

[woogley]

unbelievable!

[JoC]

Very nice, had no problem playing it on my mac at work. 

[c_lilian]

Hi, well done !... but the invisible cars are hard to avoid (Mac os 10.3, latest 1.4.2 jre) !!!

Lilian

[Alan_W]

Hi, well done !... but the invisible cars are hard to avoid (Mac os 10.3, latest 1.4.2 jre) !!!

Lilian

Sorry to hear that the invisible cars have joined the invisible monsters.  The cars are visible with OS 10.4, JRE 1.4.2, it there must be something subtle.  Can you see the Lap times at the top of the screen?  I used slightly different code for that.
Thanks

The car image copying code.  This just checks the transparency bits. They ought to be set as the carImage is TYPE_INT_ARGB.

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if ((carData[img][src] & 0xff000000) != 0){  zBuffer[dst] = lz;  screenData[dst] = carData[img][src]; }

The time/last lap/best lap/lap display code. This ignores the transparency bits and maps black to transparent.  I could do that for the cars too, since they don't have any black:

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col = scoreData[xx+SCREENWIDTH*yy]; if ((col & 0xffffff) != 0)  screenData[xx+SCREENWIDTH*(20+yy)] = col;

[c_lilian]

Yes I can see the 4 top label headers...

sorry to bother you with all these mac issues... I should test on my win xp box !

Lilian

[Alan_W]

New Version:

- Lap counter fixed
- Spurious pixels on overlay fixed
- Invisible Car on OS X 10.3 possibly fixed
- Steering improved - but may need more work
- Window resized to make room for 'Java Application Window' when webstarted

Edit:  The original steering control concept increased the rate of turn the longer you held the left/right cursor keys down.  Thus just dabbing the keys gave small corrections, whilst a long press gave a bigger turn.  All steering stopped on key up.  This didn't give enough steering control on the bends.

Currently the steering sensitivity is varied with velocity, decreasing with speed.  However mid-range speeds are tricky.  I need high sensitivity to give a small turning radius to get round the hairpin turns, yet this is too sensitive really for fine maneouvring.

Maybe I need a composite of the two?  It's ridiculous.  Steering should be the easy part, but is proving awkward.  I'll get there eventually

[Rick]

Great game Alan. What did you do to compensate for the webstart window, did you just leave some extra space.

[Alan_W]

Great game Alan. What did you do to compensate for the webstart window, did you just leave some extra space.

I'm using:

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// Create Window         setIconImage(carImage[1]);         setResizable(false);         show();         setSize(SCREENWIDTH, SCREENHEIGHT +             getHeight()-getContentPane().getHeight());         show();

It might be possible to improve on this though

/Edit: ...and I'm painting on getContentPane().getGraphics().   If you don't mind clipping the bottom of the window, this might be sufficient without the resizing stuff.

[Alan_W]

Update:
- Added Speedometer
- Updated steering

[f.l.x]

Steer is fine now.

man, this is a masterpiece in 4k

[c_lilian]

cars always missing on mac... sorry

Lilian

[jojoh]

WOW!!!

Only a few days into the competition and already some amazing games entered. Amazing look and I really like the feeling that you are going absolutely flat out!!! One interesting thing I noticed is that when you get closer to a tree, it grows on the screen as you would expect, but when you get really close, it shrinks down (and dies)...

I think gameplay score might be hurting quite a bit from only left turn track  But quite impressive what you have squeezed in already!

[Morre]

This just keeps getting better! Good work on speedometer, or whavetever it's called. Oh, and the steering works much better now

[Alan_W]

One interesting thing I noticed is that when you get closer to a tree, it grows on the screen as you would expect, but when you get really close, it shrinks down (and dies)

I added that effect to avoid attempting to draw infinitely large trees as you pass through them.  An alternative would be to implement collision detection for the trees, but this would take a few more bytes, which are in short supply.

I think gameplay score might be hurting quite a bit from only left turn track.

The track is generated from an ellipse equation.  It is possible to make much more interesting tracks with more complex equations, but the catch is that it must be easy to convert from cartesian to polar coordinates and back really easily.  The bottom line is that I can easily do a much more wiggly track, but can't easily compute the positions of the computer controlled cars on the track.    It might be possible to do something with a linear combination of several ellipses.  Certainly worth a try

/Edit: Nope - A linear combination of two ellipses is just another ellipse.

Alan