So, what's the big deal?

Heyho,

I think I should clean with up the bad taste of BlitzMax that I might have left with my last entry. (BlitzMax is good!) Here are a few screenshot of working racetracks of the old version:

First there is the Stadium:

A bright sky and many cheering fans create a peaceful but tense atmosphere, while the track itself looks easy and yet it is hard to decide wether to speed up or to slow down for a turn. Mixing these things together the Stadium creates a appropriate setting for exciting neck-and-neck races.


Next we have the Cave of the Cystals:

Over thousands of years the mighty force of the elements has formed this series of caves all linked together by openings in the walls. As variant as the elements, the four main chambers differ in appereance: It starts in a calm long region, which is filled with illuminating crystals. Heading on we enter a part of boiling rock in a lake of lava: The Cave of Fire. As we ascend the road we again drive through the Earth Cave. On the right and left we can see the cave from above and by following this ledge we arrive in the Cave of Water. It is filled with formidable stalactites and stalagmites some of them fused over eons of growth. There still is the river that slowly carved out the form of this cave. Crossing the river by using the bridge, we enter the tremendous Dome of Wind. Wirling down the track that is held by massive stone columns we finaly reach the Earth Cave again, thus comleting the circle. And sometimes, when there are no races held in the cave, and no one else is around, you can still here it: There is magic in this place.

The World of Magnon

Those tracks above are quite appropriate for a racing game and they will be playable in Magnon as well, but now there are new possibilities. In Magnon you are able to bend the laws of physics. By doing so, it opens a whole lot of new possibilities regarding the design of tracks. Up turns down and right gets wrong, all the same, doesn't matter, here we go:

These tracks do not represent final ones, the final version may vary, blah blah, but you get the idea: Magnon's  gonna screw around with your mind a little, or maybe a little more, depending on what track you will choose.

So, that's the difference.

Basically.

greetings

The Grand Reopening

So where to start?

At the beginning I think.

This Blog is about a game project of mine.
(For those who read the old worklog back at blitzforum.de, they can skip the intruduction by clicking here.)


So, what is this game all about? Basically it is a racing-game. I am working on this project for some months now and it is, no it was, in a very solid close-to-final form. But the Minib3d engine which I was using with BlitzMax is still in development and has some bugs that could not be corrected, yet. It is a good engine, though! Go to www.blitzbasic.com for more information about Blitz. So after a while I decided I wanted to finish this game anyway and started to work on a conversion to C++ with Irrlicht3D. The new version is still in a very early stage but it got some improvements that the basic version lacked.
But first, some more screenshots of the "old" version:

The Menu

Car-Editor

Map-Editor

That was the old version. For those who skipped the part above: I am moving to Irrlicht3D because of some unfixble issuses with Minib3d and the with the 3d audioengine.

This, of course brings disadvantages. For example I have to rewrite the whole code that is about 10k lines (game and mapeditor). However I would not do this unless there were advantages (apart from the minib3d errors). First Irrlicht is quite "old" so it is a very stable and well tested engine. Second the Blitzversion sometimes produces some errors on linux systems, which Irrlicht should not. Third, it is C++! This is good for a coder like me, because no restraints like in basic cause me to produce dirty code. And last but not least I have more control of the guts of the engine because of it's massive api documentation.

Thanks to that I was already able to make one major improvement to the new driving system.This makes it possible to create the weirdest streets. This and some other improvements are planned for the future.

Finnally a screenshot of the new version:

Skybox from www.3delyvisions.com








Bye