My Games Design

Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released , with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation ( changelog ). Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift. A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release: Also recently updated is Irrlamb . Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its developm...

The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results. Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often. Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN: So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes. It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro. Code: #define SIMD_PI           btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029) #define SIMD_2_PI         btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI #define SIMD_HALF_PI      (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5)) #define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0)) #define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD  (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI) The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie. For the answer visit the thr...

Stunt Rally 2.4 ... talk about feature creep, but I am not complaining ;) See more pictures of the release here , and don't forget to give some feedback on our forums . Oh and you can now browse cars and tracks online.

I'm a big advocate of the phrase, "Release Early, Release Often." I think it is by far the best way to keep or gain community interest in a project. Of course, that simple phrase doesn't quite sum up what you actually must do - simply uploading a release and announcing it on your mailing list is unlikely to attract interest. For example, who knew about Lincity-NG 2.9beta in lieu of the intended Lincity-NG 3.0 ? Lincity-NG is in a bit of a mini-crisis. A victim of the shutdown of the Berlios developer services , all the web material is in a bit of a mess. Its home page is now on fedorahosted.org but still links back to the defunct Berlios page. There are entries on Google Code and Github that are up to date with the source, as well as an imported Sourceforge project * which is the only place you can currently find the beta , however all are unofficial / back up for now. (* Not to be confused with this redundant redundant project ) Another game project which suffer...

Obviously someone is having a hard time with the winter in the northern hemisphere right now: More awesome screenshots of Stunt Rally 2.2 here , and don't miss the details of the new version in the full change log . Last but not least, discuss it on our forums :)

My luck... I do the reluctant once in two weeks post to keep the blog alive, and almost the next day is an unexpected big new release of a cool game ;) Ahh well... Stunt Rally 2.1 seems to have ventured into even less realistic spheres now: Awesome alien worlds in Stunt Rally 2.1 A lot more (mostly more conventional) new screenshots can be seen here . All I need now is a nice unrealistically spongy arcade style vehicle handling, and I am happy :p

(Yes, that is a rather thin common ground to combine these two news in one post ;) ). Anyways, today there is one for the "FreeGamers", aka those that are looking for more or less playable games: There is a new release (2.0) of StuntRally , and I guess I can quote Twain here too: The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated! Because it looks like development was not only resumed after the earlier announcement of a project hold , but even increased in pace :) Anyways, here is a great video: And the other one is for "FreeGameDevs": And as they say: good things come to those that wait, and things are better late then never... so I am happy to also report about the Octaforge 0.2.0 beta1 release . This friendly fork of the Cube2 engine , brings an impressive list of new features on the table, and should once it becomes more "production ready" be a strong contender for the easiest to mod FPS engine out there!