Moonrats - Gen2 Racer WIP

[planetX]

[SolarPortal]

[planetX]

[planetX]

Another thing: I'd like to setup a master race scene where the entire level is spawned by script depending on the settings from the menu scene, instead of having 15 different scenes, one for each track... is that too crazy?

The only problem I see is the Skybox, as I'm not sure if it's possible to change it in runtime. I'm thinking on making my own skybox with a shadeless cube, but don't know how to setup a shadeless material. Any advice would be great.

Thanks!

[planetX]

Ok, making my own skybox with a mesh didn't work very well... but I've seen that tere are several skyboxes in the Game Objects folder, how can I make a preset from a Skybox?

[SolarPortal]

[planetX]

[SolarPortal]

[planetX]

[planetX]

Q) How can I start/stop the AI cars?

[SolarPortal]

[planetX]

[SolarPortal]

i shall re-read this tomorrow and give you a response then Thank you for your patience

[planetX]

[planetX]

So here's a video showing the race tracker working, now the standing number on top is giving real results.

It's blinking for a while between two numbers, due to two cars being in the same waypoint. I think it can be solved giving the higher position to the car which crossed first the same waypoint.

I'm also having some issues with the waypoints collision when there are many cars. I sometimes don't get the collision value and I'm starting to think that maybe it's not working if two cars collide with a waypoint at the same time.

[SolarPortal]

Nice and glad it was so simple

As for the flickering between the 2 numbers, you could get around this by polling less frequently, e.g. on a timer with 100ms between each poll rather than each frame

[planetX]

[SolarPortal]

Nice! yeah, saw the standing, looked like it was 1 out on the tracking..
Like the end panel and the car following the track, starting to look like a propa racing game!
Keep it up.

p.s. still working on the GUI side, just waiting till the weekend to try and do the rendering of it again to make it more performance friendly.

We have also had the go ahead from Noesis GUI that we can integrate it into the engine which is a more powerful GUI system than librocket, but its only free if your annual income is less than 100k euro a year. However, we will be maintaining Librocket as skyline's defacto default gui system. Just thought you would like to know

[planetX]

[SolarPortal]

glad to see your reaction to it is positive! It will be a while before its integrated, but yeah, it is far more powerful and we are looking forward to seeing what it can do in skyline and of course, with your superb GUI skills, it should be second to none!

[SolarPortal]

Just wanted to inform you that the rendering of the GUI has sped up 2 fold on my build now. Since the stage 01 grass is completed, i decided to give this a quick go again and found right away that when the GUI geometry needs to be recompiled, the buffer being locked to input the new vertex set for the GUI element was using a read / write access mode rather than just discarding and reuploading the full buffer of 4 verts lol..

I tested the performance and on my CPU i went from 48fps to 93-98fps. Not to shabby for only 2 words in code being changed lol

We shall continue to take a look into this tonight and see if any more can be pulled out of it quickly

[planetX]

Hi Solar,

I don't understand anything of the technical stuff but sounds great. I also have some projects with hundreds of spawned GUI elements, in case you need to do more tests. Thanks btw for having a look at this, as always.

[SolarPortal]

ok, even more boost
i am now getting ~130fps since i removed some extra pipeline cloggage.. skip the jargon haha
Its now much smoother and the performance impact on the level now is simply the calls to setText and the GUI needing to recreate the required elements, smoothing this out so thing only update every other frame, or update ones on this frame and some on the next will then see thi near 200fps i reckon

There isnt much more i can pull out of the rendering, there are some tricks that can be employed, but they require full rewrites.
At least it isnt 35-50 now haha

[planetX]

Excellent!

That boost is what the level needs to run with particles, as they were causing a big slowdown as well.

Keep the good work!