Screenway - a racing game

[kolofsson]

Hello there. I finally started my first project. It is going to be a racing game. At the moment there is only one car that can be driven over a surface with no collisions. I made it using VS 2010 and SFML 2.0 snapshot. The VC 2010 dll's are included in the package, so it should run out of the box.

Link:

http://grebocin.com/upload/screenway08.zip

Controls:

steering - arrows
gear up - A
gear down - Z
toggle vsync - F1
zoom in - NUM+
zoom out - NUM-

List of changes:

rev 8 (2010-04-24) - added rev meter and a timer
rev 7 (2010-04-22) - added zooming

[Nexus]

Hi,
Your game doesn't work at me. I'm using Windows 7 (32 Bit). When I start the application, a white screen appears for one second, nothing more.

However, the provided image looks quite nice.

[pierreyoda]

Can we have screens please?
And what SFML version do you use?

[Ashenwraith]

It doesn't work here either.

It's probably because his texture is currently too large for your gfx cards.

[kolofsson]

Yes guys, the track is too large, and SFML supports only sprites as big as the largest texture your graphics card supports.

I have GeForce GTX 260, which supports textures up to 8192x8192, so the game works for me. I will try to find a way to make it work.

And, as I wrote, I am using SFML 2.0.

Most graphics cards support textures of 2048x2048, so if you crop the image montmelo.jpg to this size, the game should work.

[Ashenwraith]

Scaling your images in game is tricky to make them look good and best avoided in a simple game (there is a certain pattern of resolution created by evenly divided by 100).

The track looks too blurry, I wouldn't scale it.

The car should be scaled beforehand so it's smooth.

I would also try picking a car that doesn't look like it's covered in pebbles.

[kolofsson]

Scaling your images in game is tricky to make them look good and best avoided in a simple game (there is a certain pattern of resolution created by evenly divided by 100).

The track looks too blurry, I wouldn't scale it.

The car should be scaled beforehand so it's smooth.

I would also try picking a car that doesn't look like it's covered in pebbles.

Dear Ashenwraith

I only scaled the image to make the road big enough for the car, to test how it behaves.

The car is bigger, because later on i will add speed dependent zooming, like it was in GTA 1 (you drive slow, the car is bigger, you drive fast, you see more of the track).

Besides, if I enable anti-aliasing the quality will improve a lot.

And finally, the textures aren't what matters now. I only chose this track and this car, cause I didn't have to make them myself. When I work out the physics, I will take care of the graphic side

Any way, thanks for the input  

[Ashenwraith]

Anti-aliasing is not going to improve a 32bit png...

[kolofsson]

OK guys, I cut the image into pieces of 2048x2048. Hopefully, everyone will be able to run it now.

I also added zooming, NUM+ and NUM- are responsible for it.

http://grebocin.com/upload/screenway_r7.zip

I really hope it works now! However, now you can find these black lines between the tiles. I don't know why they appear, as the tiles are perfectly matched...

[Breakman79]

Have you tried disabling the bi-linear filtering on the background images?  It seems to be a very common issue that people have when first starting out.

image.SetSmooth(false)

[Ashenwraith]

1024x1024 is a much more standard size and if you want old gfx cards you should do 256x256

[pierreyoda]

I tried the game : very nice !  
I love the car's physic, with lot of inertia  

[kolofsson]

1024x1024 is a much more standard size and if you want old gfx cards you should do 256x256

um, so youre saying I should slice my track image into:

(6 500 * 2 400) / (256 * 256) = 238.037109

about 238 pieces? hmm... maybe you know some library that could load big images to memory and then extract only parts of the image, so I could feed the sf::Image::LoadFromMemory or LoadFromPixels.

this is complex stuff, I'm quite surprised that it isn't covered by the library.

Have you tried disabling the bi-linear filtering on the background images? It seems to be a very common issue that people have when first starting out.

image.SetSmooth(false)

yes, it worked! thank you! however, now the track does not look so nice when it is upscaled.

I tried the game : very nice !  
I love the car's physic, with lot of inertia  

thanks. Remember, this is just the first thing I decided is worth showing. It will see many improvements, like drifting for example.

[Ashenwraith]

um, so youre saying I should slice my track image into:

(6 500 * 2 400) / (256 * 256) = 238.037109

The extra is loaded with a bg color or transparency.

[dabo]

The game just closes when I try to start it; I can see the window showing up for a second. Perhaps it is because of my crappy integrated Intel graphics.

The images look great, was looking forward to trying it out.