uRacer: The King Of The Drift (now on GitHub!)

[dud3z]

Hi guys!
I've been slowly working on uRacer on and off, at night, after my daily work, for slightly more than a year.

It just started as an Android project, targeting tablets and smartphones, but then i liked the idea of a desktop version so much that i decided to target the PC first
If you are curious about the initial Android prototype, i uploaded a video on YouTube back then.

Here instead is my latest dev build running on my desktop: despite running at 60fps, there is some stutter in the video at times because i had to encode it at 30fps for a better playing on YouTube: also the audio i had to mux it apart, so there could be some minor delay issues



The idea is to have a single-player mode for practicing the tracks and racing against yourself, and a multi-player mode for racing against other players' replays.

After choosing the track, your vehicle choice will determine the class of racers that you'll race against to: faster cars are more difficult to drive and requires the track to be memorized first. (unsure, still thinking about it)

The player performing the track in less time wins, but not only that: the more time you *drift*, the more time you *earn*: you can then consume it by activating the *time dilation mode* at any point in your race, to slow down time and perform minor adjustments to your car's trajectory.

Multiplayer mode is similar, but your replays are being sync'd automatically at the end of each lap, then the player rank is updated accordingly.

I'm thinking about the server-side architecture and the mechanisms: since i want it to be simple and scalable i'll have to at least try implement a couple of ideas and see how they perform. Code maintenance is a must and Python+WSGI looks like a pretty cool thing to experiment with, but i'll see because Node.js looks like a good candidate too, so if anyone has experience with something similar please let me know your impressions as well!

It currently lacks music, and only collisions and tire squealings are present as of now, and the tire sounds alone is quite boring, so please bear with me

Anyway, please tell me what you think and, most especially, what's your thoughts about its chances!

<edited for more info>
Here's what i'm using for development:

• Java, GLES2 with libgdx, the awesome game library!
• libgdx's Box2d wrapper for physics
• box2dlights for lightmapping (+my patch , discussion)
• my open source libgdx's post-processing library plus some unreleased patches and shaders (sure you can use this library in your projects as well!)

Simple level
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ivW6Q5ml8Ds?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/ivW6Q5ml8Ds?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Simple level (night mode)
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/TnZqGbWmv6s?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/TnZqGbWmv6s?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Overlap level (night mode)
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/75rHkQaSwjw?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/75rHkQaSwjw?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Overlap level (+crt emulation, ugly due to YT compression)
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/mJ3Infpvjlk?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/mJ3Infpvjlk?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

[Mac70]

Wow! It looks really nice! Will there be any upgrades/progressing system?

[davedes]

Wow, one of the more polished indie projects I've seen recently on JGO.

Can you talk about your engine? Are you using pure LWJGL? Or LibGDX? Or something else? Are you also the artist/modeler?

And how are you achieving your motion blur effect?

Good stuff.

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

[dud3z]

Wow! It looks really nice! Will there be any upgrades/progressing system?

This is something i'm thinking about: one of my latest ideas was that you can basically practice each and every track on your own, you must be eligible to play against others in more tracks. Eligibility should came in some form, ie. time-dilation usage, collisions, perfect lap, and so on.. i'm wrapping my head around this right now

[dud3z]

Wow, one of the more polished indie projects I've seen recently on JGO.

Can you talk about your engine? Are you using pure LWJGL? Or LibGDX? Or something else? Are you also the artist/modeler?

And how are you achieving your motion blur effect?

Good stuff.

Thank you for your kind words: yeah it's a one-man show kinda thing, here is why it's taking me much time to finish it, but fortunately i've a very good friend of mine doing the graphics, and he's soo good: i only bought the tree 3d models sometime during last year.

I'm using libgdx, and the blur is a radial blur, it comes out straight from my open-source libgdx's post-processing library, you can use it too!

[deathpat]

the videos look very good !
I hope to see a playable demo soon

[dud3z]

the videos look very good !
I hope to see a playable demo soon

Yes, i should be able to release some playable demo, hopefully in the first quarter, but you know how hobby coding is, you just can't know if you'll have time in your hands :/

[dud3z]

Sorry for necrobumping this, i know this is a very old post, but you may be interested to know that this project is now open source for all to fork and hack away!

https://github.com/manuelbua/uracer-kotd