I pushed an interim version today to the current testers, I'm not happy with how the handling feels on the narrower roads any more so I need to tweak that a little more! (Its far too sensitive for the digital pad)
As promised a hands on with the game pad on the iPod. Enjoy! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel
Nice video! I like the game pad, may have to invest... Hey I just tried 2 stages of Spain on the update... Looks much better now. It's gonna take me some time to get a grasp of the new handling... I also tried out tilt, my initial impression is it need to be more sensitive, but that may just be that I need to adjust to it... Not a criticism at all, just my quick observation. Will play more later and leave any other imps. Great stuff, cheers
Thanks! New handling -> Don't spend too long getting familiar as its changed again All I have done is open up the steering a bit more, but it makes it unplayable really at speed. Tilt I haven't balanced (excuse the pun) at all yet, the main thing is that the accelerometers are all hooked up! Ste.
New Beta Any chance you could direct me to the controller you have, it will be worth the investment, seems as I donÂ’t like pressing the screen. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=iphone+controller I feel a lot more confident to brake and turn before a corner, even with the brake bias rearwards. Unlike before when I tried to accomplish most of my braking in a straight line before the corner, with the handbrake working well in courses with tight hairpins (like Finland). IÂ’ve turned all the graphics down as much as they can go, as a low FPS made it more of a task of prediction, rather than gameplay. With all the graphics down low, I am aware of a shorted detail distance and pixelation (as expected), IÂ’m assuming this is just an isolated case, or just a lack in Hardware with the iPhone 5S though.
Really like Finland, doesn't feel to tight, just about right For me anyway. I'm not real fast there though #. Gonna take a few runs to find pace,...also, love the sun and the thunderstorm. Noticed that Spain has no thunderstorm now... So far all the changes and development are excellent in my opinion
I went for this one (Mad Catz C.t.r.l.i): http://www.amazon.co.uk/video-games/dp/B00NSGA1K2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441197260&sr=8-1&keywords=mad+catz+ctrli I believe there is also a micro one if you want a slightly smaller one. I keep going backwards and forwards with the handling, I want it to be responsive but controllable, the problem with the current build is that although it turns in a lot, its easy to get out of shape on the narrow roads. So I've toned it down a bit to make the controls less twitchy, but try to keep the balance of the car, once the next build comes it will be nice to know what you prefer! On an iPhone5S you should be able to run with just medium reflections and it should run ok? I'd keep the detail (bottom one) up to high as a minimum otherwise the textures get a bit horrible looking.
Yeah I like Finland, in fact making it nice and narrow has really made me go back to the handling some more! The good thing with this game is that all the artwork is procedural, so I can change things by changing a number (I only added thunder to Spain to start with to see how it performed on peoples devices, it belongs more in Finland and the UK though!) I finally allocated some time to go through and create some nice textures for Spain to make it less cartoony, shame it was after the Pocket Gamer preview!
Hi Stephen,thanks for the beta invite! Had some time to check it out now and here are my impressions: first,everything worked (including those lovely popup ads ),no crashes etc on Air 2 with iOS 8.3. There is (obviously) room for improvements but i can imagine most of it is already"on your list". here we go, 1.the ipad gets VERY warm after a few minutes of playing. 2.a lot of translation (german) mistakes (or not translated at all). suggestions/requests: 1.since this build has no MFI support it's hard for me to tell if Finland is too tight or not (i just suck at playing racing sims on a touch screen).I think it's ok as it is.But the first thing that comes to my mind when i think about a finland rally is this:TREES.And a LOT of them I know this is has something to do with the power of idevices but since you have graphic settings (which is AWESOME) maybe you could add some more details for high end devices like the air 2?I'm playing at all settings maxed out with a resolution of 65-70% and it plays at buttersmooth 60fps. I would gladly give up some resolution for more details Maybe you can lower the details on the trees itself to place more of them?i assume nobody has time to count the polygones on the trees while you try to survive the track but you will always notice the"big picture"besides the track.Actually it seems spain has even some more trees? 2.that leads to the next point:i played finland first and then spain and i think the lighting (and environment) is a little too similar.It would help to put more"sun"into spain i guess.I think a little more"orange/yellow/red"lighting would do the trick if you know what i mean 3.having different button layout (or size) is great but it's still uncomfortable on the ipad.They are too close to the bottom to hold the pad relaxed.Best would be if you can also move the buttons to your taste. 4.Of course it's more important to have real damage instead of just cosmetic but i would love to see some cosmetic damage as well.I mean that's something that Colin McRae had on the first playstation (not to mention the ios version) and it looked great maybe something for advanced graphic settings as well? 5.the copilot is a little hard to understand and it would be great to have (green/yellow/red) "warning signs"as well for the corners.Not everybody plays with sound on all the time. 6.the "white"reflection on water looks a little unnatural for my taste,see pic. 7.the (far)backgrounds are very muddy and low poly (same pic).Maybe it's an idea to place some 2D"skyboxes" here and there instead of using 3D? so,that's it for now.Can't wait to try it with a controller,the cars have already a nice feel (enough"weight"etc) and some really nice visuals (shadows and reflections on cars,the thunderstorm).Keep up the good work!
i just downloaded Colin again for comparisons sake and it surely looks (60fps) and plays great.But maaaan...why oh why no controller support? Anyway,just took a picture from the first track,first corner and there is immediately this beautiful skybox.That's what i meant. Also the trees have much less details but they look good enough if you just pass by. This are just suggestions of course,i'm already in love with your game How many countries do you plan for the final release?
Great feedback! I have answers for all (not necessarily ones you want to hear for some of them unfortunately) I've just been playing football and I'm knackered, I'll reply in the morning before work! Excellent stuff though! (and yes pretty much everything you mention is on a list already!) Thanks!
OK so here goes, as i said before this is all good stuff, but there are a few reasons I can't do some stuff (not to mention that I'm filling the job of programmer/artist/designer on this game!). Glad you are enjoying it! The engine is multi threaded, and heavy on the GPU. it is always utilising 2 cores whilst playing (one for rendering and one for the main updates). The GPU is stressed because it is rendering a full realtime cubemap (6 renders of the scene, one in each direction), it is also then rendering 2 more versions of the scene to generate the shadow map, and then finally the main scene with all the effects on top (including bloom). Unfortunately this goes to show how when you start to stress it out it gets hot, it happens with a few of my other games too. It's basically doing ALOT of work, it could look visually even better but I'm not really an artist, it took long enough for me to poly reduce the cars and texture them up after buying the source models! Dare i compare to Colin, graphically there is no comparison (apart from things in the distance, which is more needed art work to make it look good). If you dont want it to get hot, set reflections to medium as it'll stop the extra 6 renders, I'm not actually sure i've seen an iOS game with full realtime reflections before? Its all put through Google translate, once I have all the strings for the game finished I'll get them done properly! It should work with MFI . As for trees, yes I want more too. The whole game is generated procedurally, I have a track generator which basically automatically generates everything, including the trees. Because of this approach I cannot get away with creating levels which have all the trees baked into the geometry as they would take up far too much memory and time (as it would be needed for each track). So it works by using instances (which are still batched up efficiently, but do take their toll on the GPU). Mobile devices are also notoriously bad for using transparent polygons, in fact so much so Apple even advice against it if possible (that comes from the PowerVR chip makers), trees have lots of them, the more I use the more it costs, in fact you can see the cost when it slows down due to rendering lots of dust particles! Again after playing Colin its amazing how little stuff their is in the environment and how wide the tracks are, you don't get that feeling of driving fast through trees at all. If each level was hand crafted then its easy to put stuff in places that look a bit "plain" in the distance because you know where on the track these places exist, in fact some games i've worked on the track is designed with sharp corners so they act as a "cut" off to the environment, so you don't have to worry about drawing masses of trees etc etc in the distance, as the corner would mask it. On the PC it runs at like 1000fps with ALL the trees visible (no popping) and I can turn it into a full forest, just shows how far Mobile GPUS still have to come. That said I have some ideas how to deal with this IF i get time! Agreed! I can probably add some more stuff to raise and lower them too. This is purely down to time, I want to do it, I have the ability to do it (including flappy doors and panels) BUT i would need to sit down in Maya and break up all the cars so they have more detail behind the panels, and even inside the car. Time which I dont have at the minute I have these in and they are currently off, I'll make it an option This only happens at distance I'll have to see what the shader is doing, but its probably the fact the texture mipmaps out too early even though I'm setting a bias to avoid this) Again agreed, I would need to sit down and spent more time art wise on this, there may be something I can do with the generated terrain to make it look better too, I have to be careful though because we are at the limits of the RAM on the lowest device (iPad mini) unfortunately so would need to spend some time having it only available on the higher end platforms! One thing is clear, on the iPads and tablets, the distance is more noticable. It looks much better on the smaller devices (phones).
Yeah the distant sky box is nice, however the entire game close to the player is really plain, not to mention how wide the track and run off is! They also use just a polygon running along the track which is flat to show the trees, which I really wanted to avoid as it looks like an old theatre stage!
On the tree front, I should be able to double them easily, I just need to be careful to make the lower platforms behave! This is 2x the amount trees, Haven't tested on a device yet but it does look better. It doesn't have many extra draw calls just lots more alpha polygons to render which cost as outlined above. I'll see how they perform later on and if they seem OK I'll just scale down for lower plats.
wow,thanks a lot for all the technical inside and the effort you put into this.Much appreciated! To sum it up,most of my wishes are more a time thing other than it's not possible at all.So,there is hope that some stuff could show up even later as an update if it's not going to make it into the release candidate haha...well put I know exactly what you mean but besides stopping the car and having a closer look they still just work (especially the skybox) good enough to me (because of the high res somewhat photorealistic texture on the trees).But yeah,they look funny from close up. I always loved Rally games not only because the pure racing but i also deeply enjoyed them as a sightseeing tour through the nature of different countries,so that explains why i might notice the stuff besides the track or in the background more than others How many rally countries do you have in your pocket?
I think you have hit the nail on the head there, at the end of the day this is just something I've been working on in my spare time with the hope it may take off and be successful (the tech has taken along time!), with the emphasis on it competing with other AAA "large" studios! The more content the better and yes some stuff will be added to no doubt Again its down to time really, so far I have finished 3 different styles (Spain/Finland and Sweden). I aim to add UK (foggy, rainy rolling hills), and then TBH whatever else makes it look different (Possibly mexico, argentina). Got any requests as really I can add what ever you want within reason I played with the trees above at lunch and boy does it feel faster! Not only that, it does disguise the "muddy" distant hills. I'm also thinking of a custom layer per track, where i can "manually" place some stuff in places I know look a bit "dodgy". I also want to add better start and finish sections/banners. The water I can also sort out given time. I guess my plan really is to finish the tracks off first, then get the game flow in, then get it all translated and then polish up!
Remember also that there are Rally Cross modes (wider tracks racing against AI), And Skill games (stuff like pulling a trailer without the contents falling out, roadworks etc etc). All with unique tracks (using the same country styles though).
well,besides the rallies you have on your list (btw,you could add more countries as IAP!) i would also say something more"exotic"with a bit of a jungle flair maybe?While i'm playing Colin right now it reminds me that i always liked australia because of the mix between more tight stages with a lot of jungle (i know it's not REALLY jungle but..well...comparable) and wide open country stages.I don't know much about rallies in argentina or mexico but maybe it sounds a bit too similar to spain? (off course not THAT much work for you then,i get that ). also,i always loved mountain rallies like monte carlo (or the Hill Climbing in Dirt.That's a US track) a lot.I guess that's directly related to their"sightseeing"feel (you can look far into the country).Dunno if this could work here.But for a more or less pure mountain rally you don't need many trees and could put more things into the background. But i get what you said about the feel of speed when having trees arround the track. Anyway,to make it short:i guess something with a more exotic flair (like australia) would round up the whole picture quite well. ooh,regarding colin....how about some....well.....dirt on the cars after you are racing for some time.i LOVE that...but yeah...sorry
