Got some more tracks to show off this week! This week was mostly about the racer AI and the visuals of the tracks themselves, like different surface types, states, times etc.
Track Materials and Shader Spaghetti
For some good track visuals, I had to get down to the track materials and their accompanying modifiers like wetness, snow and other things related to them. In the image below, you can see
Turf - Top Left
Dirt - Top Right
Synthetic - Bottom
All with the snow modifier applied, though I'll probably give them a glowup later on when I have more time.
The spaghetti of a shader making it all possible is shown below, a bit convoluted and "spaghetti" looking, but works and looks wise good enough. Glad that I haven't forgotten how to make shaders in Unity!
Track States and Time of Day
Races would be boring if every race was a simple, dry, brightly lit daylight track with not much to differentiate one race from another, so I got to work on some track states and some visual fluff! I wouldn't say it's complete (its rather lacking at the moment, like some trees, background scenery and some seating for the viewers etc.), but I'll get to them soon™ enough!
Race Intro
A little fancy animation when a race is about to start, still WIP, I'll also add a race preview where it'll show the participants, track state, the ability to choose your racer's strategy etc.
Some other notable stuff about Racetracks
Elevation Support:
Tracks can now have elevation differences along its length! Though not as extreme as in the image. (I hope so...)
Elevation affects the racer's speed and stamina consumption, increasing/decreasing depending on whether its an uphill/downhill slope.
The Racer AI
Now that's one spicy topic to handle... Who would've predicted making an AI that has to "run" real time (pun intended), have a dozen instances, have skills to choose and activate, strategies and a whole world to observe and act upon AND not melt CPUs would turn out to be hard...
Anyways, I've gotten around to work on that side of things this week too! Its still rather primitive, but it's currently able to:
Manage its stamina
Try overtaking
Get rushed and make mistakes
Be cheeky and block others behind itself (Some evil stuff...)
Change lanes strategically
And use one of the 4 running strategies:
Leader
Runs as fast as possible and sets the pace of the race. Can cause others to exhaust their stamina quickly if too fast (Who wouldn't get a bit worried if they saw the lead take off...)With the downside of a high stamina drain
Pace Chaser
Always one step behind Leaders, will try to keep up with their pace, slightly more aggressive than Betweeners.Slightly less stamina drain than Leaders
Betweener
A milder version of Pace Chasers, slightly less stamina drain than Pace Chasers
Late Closer
Will stick to the back of the pack, waiting to strike until the last second to strike. They use their conserved stamina in the final lengths of the track for an explosive surge of speed. Has the lowest stamina drain of all other running strategies.
No runner will let the separation grow too large, as much as you may have the stamina to run, you won't be covering half a kilometer in mere seconds. Depending on the pace set by the Leaders, other racers will dynamically adjust their "effort" to keep up, directly tying into their stamina consumption per second.
Getting Sidetracked...
I got the Scenario system to work on Android! Again, not sure whether the demo will be available for Android, but we'll see how it goes. For now, most stuff (except editors and some graphical issues on blurred UI elements) work just fine on Android.