Forum ‹ Showroom ‹ MetaTruck - An Isometric Racing Game

[LunarRaid]

Hey Guys,

I currently have extremely rudimentary multiplayer in the game I am working on, MetaTruck. It's pretty much just a proof of concept demo and is missing a lot of features (like physics, for one). I will be rewriting the server code shortly for a better multiplayer experience, but you can check out the latest build at http://www.lunarraid.com/metatruck.

[Oliver]

Hey,

Looks cool. The multiplayer seems to work fine. The thing i noticed the most is that turning always happens at the same rotation speed regardless of my current momentum and that the car can only drive in something like 30 different angles, which gives a weird feel when you're driving it.

the 30 angle thing is totally fine, the original GTA games also did this, but with fewer angles, so i think whats throwing me off is that the car is only rendered in those angles. It would be cool if rotation was 100% smooth, even if the car still only dives in X angles.

The always constant rotation speed is probably a bigger issue; For me, it would be more fun if you couldn't turn as fast when you're driving fast...

Best,
Oliver

[LunarRaid]

Hey Oliver, thanks for the input.

The rotation handling is part of physics, which have not been implemented yet. I did attempt for the moment to match the server to the client for rotation handling, but for some reason unknown to me the client seems to run the simulation faster than the server, which produces the rotation and momentum mismatch you refer to. I have yet to solve this one; as far as I know I am using virtually identical code with the same provided input values running at almost identical timesteps, yet the sim still runs slower on the server. I would expect for latency to cause the server to be a couple of ticks behind the client, but still running at the same speed. The momentum/rotation issue would suggest otherwise.

Perhaps when I do my server rewrite I will figure out the bug. Right now I am using delayed interpolation with the server sending out all position updates, but it doesn't feel right. I'm going to attempt a client-server lockstep simulation with timestamps and see if that provides a nicer feel. I'll keep this thread updated with my progress.

[-Mani]

Hey,

aweeesome game!
Even now it is really enjoyable!

You're probably the first one who made a isometric-flash-multiplayer-racegame.

I see physics are missing, and other stuff too, but this will get very good soon! I know it

You should make it like crash nitro kart, with powerups and weapons to kick your enemies out of the race.
that would be really epic.

just my opinion.

keep it up.
best regards!

[Vania]

I like the isometric terrain a lot.
How do you make isometric mountains?

[LunarRaid]

Hey there Vania, glad you like it.

For MetaTruck, I use the Pushbutton Engine. To get the isometric terrain, I wrote a custom rendering component for the engine of my own design. I have a routine that determines what tiles need to be drawn every frame, and draws those tiles to a bitmapData. The tiles themselves are initially created using graphics.drawTriangles and isometric math. Getting it to look right was several months of frustration, as I had almost no idea what I was doing at the time, and took several revisions.

[default0]

Hey, just driven some rounds until I got used to that hacky way of controlling your MetaTruck... I would suggest making turnspeed a lot slower and implement drifting around or sth like that to get around the curves.
Also, after a few turns (3 or 4, when I finally got used to controls a little) my MetaTruck would stop driving and only allow me to turn, which makes me guess that your serverside code failed or something like that.

As I opened two clients, they both got out of sync, so you better enable position updates for clients to re-sync

Otherwise I must say, you got a fairly nice engine.

Best regards