Stunt Marble Racers 2

[Brainsaw]

I had that in mind when designing the system so it should be relatively easy to do. I am also thinking about an own minimal authentication system as seen in many games (Log in or use facebook or use google ...)

[Brainsaw]

Another preview: last week I started adding a feature where you can use custom textures for playing. On the WIP facebook page you can set a custom texture and once you authenticate in the game the texture is used while playing. Needs some more enhancements but can be downloaded from https://www.dustbin-online.de

@kklouzal: I'll make sure that the program doesn't hang up while the login is in progress

[kklouzal]

I like being able to put a custom texture on my balls :D
Something happened though because now I'm getting 6fps..

[Brainsaw]

6FPS .. it shouldn't be this way, I'll take a look.

Btw: just uploaded a new (silent) release .. now you can cancel the authentication . I hope that I find some time during the week to implement an authentication of my own.

[Brainsaw]

I have fixed the shadows in "Stunt Marble Racers 2". Now they look good on all tracks. New version available on https://www.dustbin-online.de/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLQf4Ie ... e=youtu.be

@kklouzal: got no idea why your framerate dropped like this. What hardware are you using?

[kklouzal]

Yes in the latest version now is 5fps lol
I had no issue previous to the update where you added custom textures for our balls :P
I have an i7 2.4ghz base clock with amd radeon hd 8700M and 10gb ram; not the best hardware in the world but it does quite well.
I haven't rebooted my machine in 12 days though so let me do that and see if it improves the situation.

[Brainsaw]

That's weird. I guess my about 6 year old i5 should be weaker. What you could do is try to view a ghost using the "online" function. As the physics simulation runs in it's own thread and has a self-written messaging queue this might be a reason. The ghost replay on the other hand is single-threaded.

[kklouzal]

All seems to be well after I rebooted my machine! Didn't mean to get you worried :)

[Brainsaw]

Nice to hear that it now works so I can go to bed and sleep well later on

[Brainsaw]

In the last couple of weeks I wasn't able to work on my game (too much daytime work / not enough motivation / my development PC broke), but now I have at least added a feature to the online functionality: you can at the moment authenticate using Facebook or Google. I think I'll add some more (Twitter, Microsoft, Instagram), just need to take a look at their APIs.

You can download the game from https://www.dustbin-online.de/
The login screen is located at https://www.dustbin-online.de/StuntMarbleRacers2/

And this is what the login screen looks like at the moment:

[denzelbro]

I got to play the game a few times and it was really nice. btw, I did read that you used XEffects for your shadows there so a bit of a side question if you wouldn't mind me asking. how did you get those working on a decent or larger scene since it only supports spotlight shadows or you have the scene scaled down really small?

[Brainsaw]

Hi, sorry for the delay (more on that later in this post ). Getting XEffects working wasn't a big issue. It worked out of the box. In fact the scenes are not that big. I use a single spotlight in the scenes and an individual position for the light depending on the scene. IIRC you can also use directional light but I'd need to take a look into XEffects again. I'm going to make the game open source in the near future so you could take a look.

In the last months I had some trouble which stopped development of the game (too much to do in my daytime work, my development computer broke, weather too good here in germany - it's a hobby after all). But now I am implementing a new game mode "Ghost Race", some sort of async multiplayer. One player races, the next player downloads the race and competes until all players have played, then a result is calculated. You can take a look at a video I just make for this feature on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7woUPLZYxM&t=1s.

The game is ready for download (but without the new feature) on https://www.dustbin-online.de.

[denzelbro]

no worries and thanks for the quick info Brainsaw. Are you using the recent version or an older one? I have trouble with xeffects shadows with terrains or at least a decent size level. looking forward to it.

[Brainsaw]

Now I added some UI in the ghostrace mode to show the player ranking during race - the next step will be some server-side implementation of the necessary features. Uploaded a video with the new feature (on the right) to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gfu_itnjuEk

@denzelbro: I am using Irrlicht 1.9, but for sure not the latest version. Got it running without major problems. But my levels are not that big and the shadow texture can be up to 8192x8192 to make it look nice.

[Brainsaw]

Hi, still work in progress but I finally have the client side of the Ghostrace feature finished and created a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NfQYlM ... e=youtu.be