Ogre Forums

I can only say thanks again

Its a big motivation getting all these nice comments

wow! looking forward to the demo...

After teasing you with screenshots and videos during this week, we now have a slim version online that we'd love to share with you guys.
It's probably the same version we will be demonstrating at the GC next week.
Please take your time and download the package from here.
it's roughly 33 MB large.
In the package you'll find a readme.txt with all the information needed to access all functions found in Game.

The demo runs smoothly on a 3Ghz ATI 9800 512 MB RAM.
If it's running too slow you can switch DirectX 7 which uses fallback shaders.

I hope we can meet some of you ogres in Leipzig at the Academy Booth.
Hope you have a fun time playing.
PS:
Here's another video showing Stephans cool ragdoll-crashcar-physics.

WOW!!!! i just played it!! It looks incredible!

things i especially liked:
- the car and its physics
- the abandoned cars and their jointed dors
- graphics really look good
- the 3d sound
things i had problem with:
- control (is ok but the steering is kinda too quick for me, but what can i say, i never used a tomahowk before )
- camera is ok but i think one implementation is missing ( i know there is free camera but maybe would be better to have a back, large perspective camera to be able to drive and prepare in advance)

i got some questions too
- how much time and people took to get this done?
- are u using special implementations or algorithms or is pure OGRE (i see from time to time that meshes apear and dissapear regarding the camera distance to them - is this a newer ogre implementation or some algorithm u implement?)
- how did u manage to aproximate the terrain for physics ?(i see u didnt use trimeshes cause the physical terrain is not so detailed as the mesh is on) and maybe could tell how many static and dynamic objects u have in that scene!?

anyway, this is the best looking/complex ogre demo i have seen till now! GREAT JOB!

Wow, quick reply! hehe

I just wanted to go to bed...

Cool, that you liked it.

To answer your questions:

- We are five people in the team.
1 coder, that's me
Jens kortboyer - gfx
Marcel Schaika - gfx
Cornelius Hoelz - gfx
Felix Schulz - music

we started working on this about 4 months ago.

- Every frame I iterate through all props in the level and check the distance from the camera. If the distance is greater than that in the .prop file I call SceneNode::setVisible(false) else setVisible(true)

- The terrain is just a huge .mesh file. It's "dirttrack_collmesh.mesh".
The "dt01.mesh" - "dt42.mesh" are just chunks of the visible mesh.
We have seperated them to gain performance through the octree.
The physics mesh is actually the same as the viewmesh. The red lines you see when you press ctrl are just debug outputs of novodex and don't represent the actual collision mesh.

- we have 684 "props" in the scene, most of them are static and those that are not are put to sleep on level start.
they are stored in the "release/barreltest.map" file.

We are currently using Maya as our "level editor" ...could as well write the .map file yourself

After the GC I will code all neccessary tools to produce the final game (level editor, vehicle editor, props editor) and I will tear the old game code apart and rearrange it.

Again, thanks for trying the demo. We'll keep you up to date if something new happens.

bye,
Stephan

wow. played great, the car physics have really improved since the last release.

shooting things is really fun, and "feels right".

on my crappy card, I had no sky, but the rest of the graphics were impressive. I'm sure on a shader-capable card it looks even more beautiful.

I also noticed pop-up on meshes on the terrain, is that hard-wired, or does it change based on the user's framerate?

anyway, the graphics, sound, and physics are all top-notch! one of the best things I've ever seen with Ogre!!!

I wish I had majored in computer science in university, working on a project like this would have been really really fun!

Thanks Walaber!
You should get yourself one of those cheap 6600 cards!

The pop up is hardcoded, well kind of. in the .prop file (which is just an ogre::configfile) you can set the variable "OffDistance" for every prop. if it isn't there the mesh is drawn all the time. Making it dependant on the users framerate is a "good idea"(tm)

For the graphics... yeah we have some really talented artists in the team.
The physics... go, thank Novodex and the guy that did Nogredex for that
Sound... Felix did awesome work on the music and sounds. The explosions sounds are kinda "borrowed" ^^

The programmers task is, as always, glueing everything together...
I'm really not pleased with the result from a programmer's point of view but you can't see the source code, so that's ok.
But like i said, this was just a quick'n dirty hack for the Games Convention. After the "show" I will sit down and redesign my code.

wish I had majored in computer science in university, working on a project like this would have been really really fun!

Hm.. and I wonder If I will ever finish my 4th semester if it goes on like that! hehe
You don't have to have a degree in CS to do that. Don't you think Stunt playground is basically the same?

Wow!

This is the coolest and beautiest thing I've ever seen using Ogre! Thanks for sharing the demo. Sound, graphics, physics... everything, it all plays really nice together; it really has an overall high quality feel to it and is great fun, too.

It took you guys 4 months to build this

This is an incredible achievement, if you guys dont make it into the professional games industry I'll eat my Ogre mouse mat and take up gardening.

It runs really smooth here. Obviously with more time there is tweaking that can be done - I had a few problems getting stuck on objects, and sometimes when you hit objects or ramps you stop dead when it seems you really should be bouncing off. But these are small things, and Im really impressed by everything you guys have done in this time frame. Having a good programmer here and a good modeller there is one thing, but working as a team to successfully bring it all together is no easy task. Big respect

Specs:
- AMD XP 2800
- 512 mb Ram
- Radeon 9800 Pro

Lovely! Runs smoothly here (P4 2.5Ghz, FX5900). Two points:

- it does fail in DirectX9 debug mode, with an error that suggests you have a potentially invalid vertex format for some cards. Worth running it in debug mode with the directX debug runtime enabled to see what you can see.
- the readme says there are artefacts in GL, but here it runs fine in GL too.

Well done!

u know, i cannot help myself run the demo and play from time to time
(your implementation inspired me to implement some ODE explosion force to our engine which was quite easy to add but never thought about it)
as someone said before me, the atmosphere is great! its giving me a feeling that i'm there, on the track! (i think is close to realism somehow )

i see from time to time that meshes apear and dissapear regarding the camera distance to them - is this a newer ogre implementation or some algorithm u implement?

- Every frame I iterate through all props in the level and check the distance from the camera. If the distance is greater than that in the .prop file I call SceneNode::setVisible(false) else setVisible(true)

For info, in Dagon you can use MovableObject::setRenderingDistance to do this

WOW! Really impressive!
This beautiful game is rivalling most commercial releases!

I can't believe you programmed this is in only 4 months ..

You guys.....
It's so cool seeing you guys being all excited about our demo. It's what we were up to from the very beginning.
A lot of credit go out to sinbad and all those who developed the mighty ogre with him. Without you guys we'd have had a much tougher time creating Fragfist Dirttrack.
I just remember how we came across ogre in the first place.
At first we tried to work in RadonLabs' Nebula Device2 but we had a very hard time because of the poor docs available.
I talked with the academy's programming teacher, asking him what to do and he suggested this one open source engine right away... erm... what's it called?... sth with fantasy... ogre!
That evening I talked to Stephan on the phone and before I was able to mention the teachers suggestion he asked me if it was alright if he tried to work sth out in a free engine called ogre3D... and the rest is history. (damn i wanted to say that phrase for a long time )
We are looking forward to working in Dagon in the near future.

a cool game and it is really fun!

Though, I have got an exception as I tried to fire as often as I could. May be this should be fixed for GC.

heh, very cool game.

Just one thing... I jumped off the edge of the world, and it never recovered. Professors don't usually like that kind of thing.

I'm assuming this is being done for a grade. If it is, I give it an A+. You can tell him I said so!

Hi all, nice you enjoyed the demo.

I have a question:

@walaber:
I tested your physics editor for stunt playground.
It has the option to generate a convex hull for a mesh.
which method did you use? Is it integrated into newton?
I had a quick look at QuickHull3D. If you could help me
I would be very pleased.

MadHed - that functionality is part of Newton. you simply pass a vertex cloud, and it creates the smallest possible convex hull. you can see that my physics editor (Rigid Body Designer) exports an .xml file with a list of vertices that can be used to re-create the convex hull quickly, as they are only the vital vertices needed to make the hull, none of the "ignored" ones.

I'm sure Novodex provides similar functionality does it not?

thx walaber, for your quick reply.

Actually, Novodex doesn't provide a function for that.
(at least I couldn't find any)

For being a commercial physics engine, I think it's very basic and the whole thing seems to be very "Overhyped".

I might consider porting my code to "Gangsta" and see which library fits best.

thanks

Hey I might be wrong, but did you used pyogre to code this? how did you managed to get novodex running there?

Anyway, great job! although yes I would advice you to use another engine (tomakak or ode) so you can turn this into a commercial project since its showing a lot of promise.

Hey everyone,
The Games Convention is over and it was such a blast!
I heard that there were over 1 1/2 times as much vistors as last year, which is a huge success.
We had the chance to show Fragfist to very important people from the gaming industry and to a lot of gamers.

I was able to show Fragfist to the Creative Director of Rockstar Vienna Marin Gazzari during the GCDC (Games Convention Developer Conference) !!

We met the guys around Florian Stadlbauer from Deck 13 (Ankh) and had a very nice chat. They gave us a sneak peek into a playable version of Ankh, which looks really cool! Best regards from the whole Fragfist team

Another Ogre we met were two bros who worked on the famous and popular ParticleEditor. Cheers Guys

On Saturday we managed to meet Robert Clemens from Moonbyte/Replay Studios who is working on Crashday! We met at the Atari buisness booth were he actually demonstrated Crashday to media-guys.
He showed us the latest demo and trailer and it looks absolutely stunning ! And we had a nice talking.

Everyone was very supportive and motivating. We got a lot of very usefuly advices and critics on Fragfist. Thanks everyone

Another cool story:
The Academy booth was located right beneath the GC Forum, a big cinema where lectures were held and major studios/publishers present their latest technology/games. The Academy had about 2 time-slots per day for the students to demonstrate their projects ---> it was quite an important facility and the schedule was pretty tight.
The cool thing: a lecture dropped out so Fragfist stepped up!
We took over the Cinema and played Fragfist for about half an hour. We did some time trials and simply horsed around with the Tomahawk.
People were actually dropping in and watched us having fun with our game.
What a feeling!
We had a great time, far beyond our expectations towards conference and convention.

Did I mention the parties?? ^^
We'll post some pictures ASAP.

Glad to hear it went well guys, sounds like you all had a lot of fun!

Jens_K wrote: Another Ogre we met were two bros who worked on the famous and popular ParticleEditor. Cheers Guys

Aah you must have met mac, cool

Wow... that awesome - congrats and all

Freakin' AWESOME. I cannot believe it has come so far since the first demo I played not so long ago. I'm running it in 1280x1024 with 2xAA and it looks very pretty indeed.

Hack in some network code before you refactor!

Some very minor points..
- If you fire as many rockets as you can, it eventually crashes. All those rockets in the sky look cool though! I really like the way you've made them swing off randomly.
- You can get stuck on things when your front axel/suspension hits the object. A quick wiggle with the 'grabber' gets out of that though.
- Rocket aim needs to be a touch higher. Perhaps a mouse controlled turret is in order!

Right.. time to play some more. Thanks!

- Jelly.

Hi, back from the GC...

It was incredibly cool to meet all those developers at the Convention.
A really nice experience, seeing that they're just regular human beings as we are

We'll have a break until next week. Then it's time to take the demo to the next level.

First thing I will code are the editors, so development will be much quicker:

- A physics editor for props/vehicles
- A map editor

Both editors should have the option to click a button and test what you're working on ingame.

Then refactor the whole game. Wrap everything in classes, design the file formats, prepare for DAGON, optimize the shaders, ....

Also very important is a GUI. Back at the convention I came to the conclusion that a nice GUI makes a title look much more professional.

But before we start doing those things we will have a "meeting" and discuss the game concept one more time to make absolutely clear what we're heading for.

cyall guys