Kartex racing game News

Kartex pre-alpha available now! [click me!]

Extra info: This is now the official thread of Kartex on the jmonkey forums.

New screen-shots!

It’s been a while, right?!

But it sure doesn’t have a PREVIEW button. :wink:

Here are a couple of screenshots before I take my winter break!

Feel free to give me all the feedback you have. This is the JMonkey forum after all =D.

Sicne you want some ideas:

As a suggestion, I would play around a bit with a smoke particle emmiter at the exhaust, migt look quite nice.
Eg more smoke when hard accelearting and sutff like that.

Also you might want to take alook into the skim values of the vehiclewheels, for sounds and trails :slight_smile:

Not sure what of them work and what not :wink:

@EmpirePhoenix Yes, I have added the smoke before to the exhaust. It just never makes an appearance on the screen shots because I’m constantly moving around and improving the game’s art asset. I’ll be adding that in the version leading to the release.

About the skim values, could you elaborate on that? Right now I have enough free time that I can implement anything I want. If you tell me about it and I like the idea, I’ll sure implement it.

To me what the pictures miss the most is any kind of lighting. A lot of games suffer from this. This can make the carts look like they are floating above the ground and the background hills look like they are cardboard cutouts.

If you are trying to avoid real Lighting.j3md then you might consider at least baking some vertex color shading into the terrain. Also, you could copy the “drop shadow” stuff from Monkey Trap. It renders shadows as geometry, basically. A bounding box that intersects the depth buffer and darkens everything inside. It can work with existing geometry just by setting them as shadow casters though often times it requires some tweaking. (In Monkey Trap, I give some objects a separate Box mesh that is invisible and use that as the shadow caster.)

If not then no big deal. There are many cool games with totally horrible lighting.

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@Pixelapp said: @EmpirePhoenix Yes, I have added the smoke before to the exhaust. It just never makes an appearance on the screen shots because I'm constantly moving around and improving the game's art asset. I'll be adding that in the version leading to the release.

About the skim values, could you elaborate on that? Right now I have enough free time that I can implement anything I want. If you tell me about it and I like the idea, I’ll sure implement it.

(i meant to write skid)

Here i have this copied from the vehiclewheel class-as it explains it better than i can-, you can get wheelobject that by calling vehicle.getWheel(wheelid)

/**

  • returns how much the wheel skids on the ground (for skid sounds/smoke etc.)<br>
  • 0.0 = wheels are sliding, 1.0 = wheels have traction.
    */

@pspeed If the game has bad lighting it is because I’m bad at lighting scenes. It would be cool to read a jmonkey tutorial about good lighting.

Also, your game screenshots have amazing lighting, I wish I could do something like you do in your game screenshots. If you could instruct me about anything that can improve my lighting, that would be great.

Right now I would watch youtube videos about lighting a scene and then bake the lighting onto the textures. But again, if you could advise me on anything, I would appreciate it.

@EmpirePhoenix Thanks, I’m totally using that.

If you use the lighting material,

You could try using a lower intensity ambient light, and add a directional light additionally.
This requires modes with proper normals however.

What might also work, add a small blackish quad as a dropshadow below the kart.
Aka black blurry something

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Edit:

I checked on the Lighting.j3md and got my answers. I’ll play around and tweak things. Hopefully it will have better lighting pretty soon.

@Empire Phoenix said: What might also work, add a small blackish quad as a dropshadow below the kart. Aka black blurry something

This is essentially what the drop shadow stuff does in Monkey Trap only it uses a box instead of a quad and uses depth to render. That way it even renders on non-flat terrain. It can also partially shadow the bottom of what it is being cast from.