2DArraymessing around with the playdate again
getting some perspective
getting fancier!
i'm a chronic bayer-hater so i replaced the structured dithering with blue noise, and to me it looks a lot nicer. runs at full speed on the real device, too!
starting on player-controls
the camera is following behind a car...but you can't really tell because the car isn't rendered yet
starting to draw a car and some tire tracks (the car is temp-art for now)
a floor
this drops my fps to 40 (max possible on playdate is 50) but i'm hoping/assuming i can find more stuff to optimize. worst case, locking the game to 30fps seems like it would be OKAY, and maybe even the more sane choice for a handheld (to save on battery power)
the real ideal thing would be if you could pick between 30fps (power-saver mode) and 50fps (try-hard mode)
better floor (now with ambient occlusion!)
back up to "usually 50fps" on the device, sometimes dips down to around 47
working on a drifting mechanic
it needs more tuning but i'm absolutely stoked about it already
starting to draw a proper car - i did this first version in a really basic way so i thought it'd tank my performance, but it turns out it still stays at like 45+ fps on the device. not bad!
i'm very bad at lowpoly modeling so the car accidentally looks like an old-timey beater, but i think that's sorta funny so i'll probably try to keep that vibe
night sky - drops me to about 40fps on the device, but i think i can still find more room to optimize
would be nice to add some clouds or something...
adding some presentation at the start of the race, and some basic timer/scoring stuff
all hail lobster font, lobster font will lead us to salvation
made a fancier finish-line and now i'm gonna need to write my own triangle-rasterizer instead of relying on the playdate sdk's fillTriangle() helper - i'd like to get rasterized meshes to use the same dithering as the walls/floors/sky, and also i need the meshes to get occluded by walls
custom rasterizer which allows the finish-line banner to be occluded by walls
working on replay recording/playback - yes, the clip looks the same as the others in the thread, but it's a pretty good run since i was retrying the map. if you think "i see places where the racing line could have been improved" then the game is working, lol
replay data is quite small: stores keyframes containing a bitmask of user-input states (one byte), along with how many frames you held that state for (one byte). a "normal" 30 second replay tends to be around 200 bytes
unfortunately i doubt there'll be a way to do any online-sharing because of playdate limitations (i'm gonna try to get libcurl to work anyway though - i think they use it for OS features, they just don't expose any networking stuff in their sdk at this point)
racing the ghost of your fastest run
smarter sampling on the floor...
when it samples the floor tex, it raycasts the texelspace grid to see how many screen-pixels it'll step along the scanline before hitting the next texel, and it can reuse the latest sample until then - fewer samples, sharper result!
it also does some smooth LOD, where it starts using a bigger and bigger "screen-pixel steps per sample" ratio as pixels get farther away
(before/after)
added a realtime shadow for the player's car
it only works on the floor (not the walls) but that's probably okay-enough for me
kinda going off the deep end here but now the car can cast its shadow onto the walls
it's kind of a ridiculously subtle effect, but it ties the mesh-geo, the raycaster-geo, and the skybox together, so uhhh maybe that's something
starting to think about a title screen but i'm not really sure wut to do yet
but hey i have an easy way to make text into 3D meshes (thank you, blender!) so that seems like a sane place to start
now we're talking!
been pretty busy for a few days, so not much progress here - but i've started getting into a track editor
initially this is just for me to make some built-in tracks, but i might polish it to make it user-facing if i can figure out a comfy way for people to share their maps
i can now save tracks as files, and then load them - the ghost-car in this clip is included in the track data. the spiral track file (including that ghost's replay) is 161 bytes
zipping the file actually makes it larger (241 bytes) so i think i did good. lol
conveniently, i already wrote a playdate serializer for C, for that previous music-maker app
here's the code for serializing/deserializing a track and its replay. serialization and deserialization use these same functions (the Serializer has a flag to tell it whether it's reading or writing) - so there's no need for annoying/error-prone "near duplicate" routines for input/output
it supports ascii format (more legible) and binary format (smaller file)
mostly boring backend stuff lately, but here's a clip of a track i made on the playdate and then loaded in the desktop simulator app - it includes four replays to compete against (bronze, silver, gold, author), and it seems like i can afford to show them all at once!
reduced the framerate to 30fps since it still beats that on the device, but in doing so i instantly radicalized myself into one of those "30fps is literally unplayable" people, so now i guess i have to optimize for 40 instead
(30 is fine with me in other games, i'm just used to 50 in this one)
whelp turns out i can't figure out how to get it back to 40 (particularly with 4 ghosts active) but 30 actually looks fine on the device - the lower framerate is only noticeable to me when testing in the desktop simulator
something something magic playdate screen. good enough!
added a way to save your replay from the daily challenge, as a way to "chess by mail" against your friends without having to author a map first
also a nice idea from @fsouchu: ghost cars become opaque when you're not touching them
fuck it, all the ghost cars can cast shadows too
adding some obstacles for extra level-design options
nicer tire-tracks: old version was 2D lines, new version is mesh-based. the main reason i did this was to get them to be occluded by walls, but they also gained some width variation to make them look a bit messier/dirtier
making some campaign-mode tracks - each one has four replays to compete against (bronze/silver/gold/author)
you'll unlock the next track if you get at least the bronze (or silver?) medal. maybe the author-ghosts are only unlocked after you get gold on every track? not sure yet
trying a different style of wall rendering
"walls are just meshes" simplifies a lot of the code and adds lots of new possibilities, but it also adds a slew of new demands, both in terms of code (LOD, sorting, etc) and aesthetics/legibility. feels promising so far, though
added object-sorting to fix the "inside out" walls (check the right side of the screen in the previous clip to see that) - i haven't mixed the cars into that sorting pool yet, but i'll do that soon
gonna need to figure out some static-object culling to skip faraway stuff quickly...there are a lot of small wall-meshes in a full track
various adjustments and new things
(this dips a bit below 30fps on the device, but it feels like there's still a good amount of room for improvement)
some more visual improvements
this bug is the good kind of bad
new car model - the change is...more subtle than i was hoping for, but it's got little hubcaps and side-mirrors now
another upgrade to the car model, closer camera angle, plus new trees (which are lower-poly, so i can draw more of them)
working on a second environment
Gawain(DarkGriffin)
ellie
Donswelt@2DArray Nice. Do you plan to add more than one car? This one looks more sporty, while the older one had more of a classic feel.
@donnyglover I'd like to, yeah!
fsouchu
Metal Mutton 🤖🐏@2DArray can't go greener than that!
Paul Nicholas 
@2DArray Fir-tree-a Racing™ 🌲🏎️
😏
😏
@2DArray when I said car model was too small, that’s not the fix I expected 🤦♂️
@2DArray I love the pines. This is really coming together beautifully.
@2DArray this is reallly good but imho world scale is totally off 😝
@fsouchu it's true, lol - I think the highway barriers are the worst offender, they make the car look tiny! probably need to figure out a different wall type which isn't known to be so small, these ones needed to be inflated a lot for visibility reasons
@2DArray barriers are ok, I guess it’s more a balance between car size/tree size that’s off putting
@2DArray with wall shadows? 👌
@fsouchu for now, yeah!!
dunno if i'll be able to keep them...it really depends on how much i can optimize and resist the constant urge to add more-more-more other stuff. lol
@2DArray overscope idea: materialize the track in a texture, bake wall shadows in, write tire marks to said texture?
@fsouchu that's how the AO already works - but the texture is so very low-res that it's not useful for any high frequency details at the moment! (checker pattern is the tex resolution)
may change at some point but I don't think I can get away with too much, since the ground renderer takes big advantage of the low res (does a lot of "don't re-sample until the next texel" caching inside each screen-row)
@2DArray There are already so many difficult games on the Playdate so I would say bronze. This way it may still be easy to play yet hard to master.
Just a suggestion 🙂
@donnyglover yeah bronze is definitely feeling like the right move!
in general you can hit a bunch of walls and still beat the bronze times (my strategy for recording those was to mess up every turn at least a little, sometimes a lot) - so getting a campaign-complete screen for all-bronze seems like a good "first bus-stop which rolls credits" to me
@2DArray is the ‘grandpa’ car model really a match for the game? tbh I cannot connect endless drifting marks with a car that goes 0-100km/h in 5 minutes.
@fsouchu it's a fair question, lol
I still haven't updated the car since the first time I implemented it, knowing that I'd need to update/replace it eventually - and it's almost time for that now. I guess the tryhard option is to include multiple car models (with the same driving stats), so the default one looks like a race car but you can pick a jalopy if you think it's funny
@2DArray Nice! And I like the name.