various Community development: Project DRIVE (working title)

[TDUZoqqer]

It will take a very long time to this game be finished, but im sure if is finished will be much better than TDU, gran Turismo and Forza... Good luck and have fun!

 

I doubt it will ever be "finished" at all, I will release a "playable" version, and update it further and further :) Thanks

[TDUZoqqer]

Hello fellow ducks, I started working on the non-mockup customization system. It is far away from being finished, but it's working really well already, eventhough it took me quite some time and nerves to figure out two bugs I had prior (which I fixed after I realized I had a wrong event trigger applied.. Well..)

 

 

That's what it looks like at the moment. It's globalized with a database, so it will work for every single car I add (in theory) without any complications or hour-long adjustments. :)

 

PS: I took the Mercedes G-Wagon as an example, as I have many parts done for it over time I can use for testing. I could have used the M3 aswell, but I don't have any customization done for it just yet.

[Eudemon]

It's looking good and coming along well. :cool:

 

Good to hear that the implementation seems to be fairly universal and therefore result in few problems. (that's the dream anyway!)

[africolombiano]

Wow TDUZoqqer!! I have been out of it for a bit, focusing on my studies but this project seems amazing. I have no modding or coding or any skills with PC's except playing games, but if I can help in any way...

[TDUZoqqer]

Wow TDUZoqqer!! I have been out of it for a bit, focusing on my studies but this project seems amazing. I have no modding or coding or any skills with PC's except playing games, but if I can help in any way...

 

Aww, thank you! Glad you like it! :) No problem in terms of not being able to help in this matter, it helps me already to know people are actually liking what I do, that gives me a lot of motivation.

 

And your post comes quite handy, as I got some updates.

 

In short - I f...ed up my physics. I don't know how this could happen or what is wrong, really, as it came out of nowhere. I changed my setup slightly (I will talk about it later in the post), which actually didn't change anything in the recieving of the values of the physics. Resetting didn't work aswell, so I'm quite lost here.

I investigated all my setup without results, as mainly it could be caused by many factors, aswell as not a single one.

In particular, my cars are now unstable, way slower and braking ONLY with the rear wheels which causes them all to slide away on braking, especially my G-Wagon mammouth likes to flip over now. No idea what's wrong. If anyone has an idea how to car physics, please let me know. Still gonna try to fix the issue, in case I will, I will post another update.

 

About the change of setup - it's all about wheels and database. I now have an extra database for the wheels, as later in progress there will be an option to change the wheels. It previously was setup so that the wheels are specially made for one car - in particular, the wheel database had values of grip values, if the wheel is turning by steering and affecting at handbrake, aswell as particular wheel bone names for the parent car. Now those values are in the car slot database itself, which makes it easy to just put different wheel meshes on. Gonna make a tire database later on, to change tires aswell. Eg, slicks which give more grip and so on.

Wheel sizes, and of it resulting tire width and aspect ratio are all read from a dropdown menue now. I have to setup individual aspect ratio sizes for the wall size manually yet, as the size for every single aspect ratio is different, and in case you doesnt know, the size is calculated by tire width/100*aspect ratio. I have aspect ratios from 15 to 95 and widths from 155 to 405 in the database, so calculating them individually will take quite some time for now. Oh well. Gonna do it later when I have more rims ingame I guess.

 

Also, ability to change rim colors is there now. It's not working in the paintshop yet, but it's setup and ready to be implemented ingame. So that's something.

Customizing menue is working neatly for the body shop now. It has all kind of extra tuning parts, aswell as extra parts for particular vehicles, eg. impact bars for the G-Wagon and stuff. Bodykits work too now, which removing and adding parts which do not work/work only with the kit. That's quite cool imo, because it took FOREVER to setup correctly.

 

All in all, works great yet. Only the physics are killing me. Might need to redo some stuff, as I really have no single idea how to car physics. Playing Forza all day to figure out how they solved some problems I have.

 

Also, have a basic idea how to rain shader, but nothing seems to work "good" as for now. I'm on it, still.

 

I will keep you updated as far as I have any news to show :)

 

EDIT: Oh, I've fixed it. Apparently my physics don't like the 23 inch Brabus wheels I put on my G-Wagon.

[insaneone]

Trial and error! I live by it. It is kind of annoying when you revert and the error is still there but in the end it's there because something changed, even if you forget about it. Glad you got it fixed, mate.

[TDUZoqqer]

Yeah exactly, trial and error is the key. Had to learn it the hard way lol

 

Anyway, as I 1) don't have much time to work on the game now, 2) i tend to make the easy stuff when I DO have time (wheels) and 3) wheels take forever to finish for the game (4 hours roughly, with rendering textures and uv mapping and stuff), I only got a little visual "update".

 

 

What you can't see here, the CSL slot has 3 different type of wheels ingame now, in particular Styling 67 18 inch (the one in the pic), 19 inch (the original "stock" wheels of the CSL / M3 Facelift) and the CSL wheels.

What can we take from this picture - the 18 inch 67ers look terrible on the CSL :D :D

 

Trynna make the plate shop or paint shop work in the near future from now. Stay tuned

 

EDIT: Oh, and the G-Wagon has 27 factory colors now. Oops.

[TDUZoqqer]

Hi! Another minor update. It's less engine-dependent though.

 

I am not really in the mood of programming at the moment, so I decied to take care of the modeling process a bit. Eventhough the Forza models are very good for player cars (same as various other games like CSR2, real racing and stuff), some cars - in particular the traffic cars - require a different treatment. Same as TDU, the traffic cars need to be very lowpoly (approximately TDU's player cars size) so they can spawn many times on the screen without making the game lag extremely. And also, the cars I am planing to put as traffic, mostly don't exist in other games, as those are mainly European market low-priced cars. Especially Berlin cars are quite unique sometimes. I already modeled my Mercedes O503 Citaro traffic bus aswell as the Opel Zafira C Tourer police car, and remodeled Forza's LOD2 Mercedes E63 AMG to be a E220cdi taxi. Now I wanted to take care of something I literally see every day I go outside my house.

 

 

Yes, this is a 2016 Smart car. And thanks to the car sharing company "Car2Go" those are literally everywhere here. And as I want to come close to the "real" Berlin traffic as much as possible, I couldn't miss those.

 

 

Also the decision of modeling the whole car by myself came also by the fact, that I could not find a single 3D model of the 2016 Smart. I mean sure, I could have used the "old" Smart car facelift model from Forza, but as Car2Go took them from the road in 2016, I think this was the better decision. And as it will be just a low poly asset, there is not much detailing needed on it. For instance, for the Opel Zafira police car I needed approximately two weeks from start to finish, I think with the size of the Smart it will take even less. So it's not a big deal of a work for something that "significant" like the picture of the real life traffic cars later. :)

 

I am just at day #2 of modeling, and already at the second detailing step. I work in 3 steps FYI - rough shape, overworked shape, detailed shape. The orange parts are step 2, whilest the blue ones are still step 1. Just 1-2 days left till step 3, so it basically is already almost done :D

[insaneone]

I just have a mental image of you taking pics of these things while a supercar and such drives by. :lol:

 

Good to see progress is still being made on this mate and I wonder if these traffic Smarts will be what the title becomes known for when it eventually arrives. :p

[TDUZoqqer]

I just have a mental image of you taking pics of these things while a supercar and such drives by. :lol:

 

Good to see progress is still being made on this mate and I wonder if these traffic Smarts will be what the title becomes known for when it eventually arrives. :p

 

Ahaha that's actually how it's going down. It was the same with the Opel Zafira Tourer, where I came to carspotting and told my mates to keep an eye open for Zafiras as I have to grab textures :lol: Smarts shouldn't be that hard to find either.

 

Oh yeah, people will know the game as "the racing game with the annoying smarts all over" :D

[Ryzza5]

Interesting thing about being in Germany is that your AI will have to be the best in the world to reflect what I hear about real life... so no pressure :p

 

Also got to handle the unrestricted autobahn sections. :cool:

[TDUZoqqer]

Interesting thing about being in Germany is that your AI will have to be the best in the world to reflect what I hear about real life... so no pressure :p

 

Also got to handle the unrestricted autobahn sections. :cool:

 

Oh crap you're right. I guess making India would be the easier AI solution :lol:

 

Funny thing is, it's easier to make the AI floor it than to make it control their speed. So be ready for smarts on v-max on autobahn! (140 km/h.. :D )

[mau92]

Nice progress Zoqqer! Looks like it's heading in the right way ;)

[DJoyTinnio]

Urrm, first of all, cool project. You said that the UE4 does not have the physics capability you would like to have. But is it enough for being as good as TDU 1, according to driving physics ? Because this would, at least for me, be all i need, löl . When i think about this here, i imagine a TDU 1 with the basic things that where missing, in it. Lightflares, rain + wipers, being able to leave the car or at least open the doors, for cool parking in freeride, but much more important, lighting details. You know, streetlamps, DIFFERENT light in the windows of buildings, orange cateyereflectors on the streets in tunnels or on the road at night. Streetside reflectors in the plancs sometimes. This also ads feeling of speed to the game. Better variaty in engine sound design. Correct reflections in the carpaint and everything, we know they are moving forward instead of backwards on the car, in the original TDU 1. Yeah all this is possible in the UE4. I would overhaul TDU1 if i would want to learn only, and want a game like TDU 1, like you said. I really would like to have a TDU 1 without the failiures, and better graphics, sounds, etc. instead of another game with other spots. I like that island :-q . And in TDU 2 everything is so cartoonish, plus the driving is worse than in TDU 1. For the sound, i think of a system, where single events are independent designable, like backfires, a keyrattle, or material moving sounds, insects that splash on the frontwindow etc. . There should be s seperate rev sounds system for when the neutral gear is put in, and the most important, for every gear a SPEEDBASED revsystem. Not a revhightsystem. You know, how does the car sound in 4th gear at 100km/h and how does it sound at 200 km/h, can be put in different then, not like in TDU1 one file for the same gear in a rev range. There the 1st gear sounds at lets say 6000 rpm the same like the 4th gear at 6000 rpm, and that is crap. If the 1st gear never reaches the speed like in 4th gear at same rpm, the sound will be different with a speedbased rev system. Of course this would be more work, by the factor of gears. 6 gears, six times more work. But it will be worth it, and i would WANT this more possibilities to do things. Tnx for reading :-q.

[TDUZoqqer]

Urrm, first of all, cool project. You said that the UE4 does not have the physics capability you would like to have. But is it enough for being as good as TDU 1, according to driving physics ? Because this would, at least for me, be all i need, löl .

 

At the moment I am learning physics, still. At the current state the physics is "driveable", but far from really "enjoyable" in the long term. I mean, I had fun driving around some minutes with the M3, but I am pretty sure it's due to my statisfaction of the progress, and that it's "working". I think the physics is yet far away from being "addictable". I am learning physics from a tutorial of a russian dude on Youtube, although he decied to sell his system on the marketplace, and that means sooner or later I will invest money into bying those. Spending money on the marketplace as a single developer is unavoidable for such a huge project like mine. So, yeah, the goal is to achive at least the physics level of TDU1, if not better. It won't be Assetto Corsa or Forza tho, please remember that.

 

When i think about this here, i imagine a TDU 1 with the basic things that where missing, in it.

 

That's the gameplan.

 

Lightflares

 

Depending on how it will fit to the rest of the looks of the game. Actually not needed, as the bloom post process effect will create lens flares and a glow around the headlights by itself.

 

rain + wipers

 

working on it, will be there.

 

being able to leave the car or at least open the doors for cool parking in freeride

 

Yes, that's possible. You can either read up my current state some posts before or watch the video. It's there already.

 

but much more important, lighting details. You know, streetlamps

 

Unavoidable. Will be there.

 

DIFFERENT light in the windows of buildings

 

Terms of details, will >hopefully< be there aswell. I just remember GTA4 and GTA5. I'm not on this development level yet, though. Environment will be taken on later.

 

orange cateyereflectors on the streets in tunnels or on the road at night.

 

Also had this idea, although I have no idea how to make reflectors properly. Eg. Forza H3 has those effects on signs and stuff. Need to figure it out, but it was planed to feature it aswell.

 

Streetside reflectors in the plancs sometimes.

 

Same as above.

 

[...]Better variaty in engine sound design.

 

Sounddesign isn't my cup of tea, I would love to have cool engine sounds too. At the moment I use sounds straight from Forza 4. M3 uses TDU's Wiesmann sound - it's the same engine. G65 uses a Bentley W12 sound which sounds "Okay" but nowhere near "cool". I am not a sound designer, I will give my best, though.

 

Correct reflections in the carpaint and everything, we know they are moving forward instead of backwards on the car, in the original TDU 1. Yeah all this is possible in the UE4.

 

Reflections is a tricky thing in games. I mean, I have screen space reflections in the game, although Unreal's reflections are meh. It reflects in a short distance, the more distance it have to reflect, the more GPU it uses. There are ways to improve it (same as dynamic AO), but this is very expensive. I am trying to keep the game as cheap as possible for the CPU/GPU. If you have a clue how to achive those results (without massive framedrops), please let me know, I appreciate any kind of help in this matter.

 

I would overhaul TDU1 if i would want to learn only, and want a game like TDU 1, like you said.

 

I am not a game dev by profession, I started with the project in autumn without any programming knowledge whatsoever. I am also learning. :)

 

I really would like to have a TDU 1 without the failiures, and better graphics, sounds, etc.

 

As mentioned before - that's the gameplan.

 

instead of another game with other spots. I like that island :-q.

 

The island is very dated IMO. Also, I like new environments in games. I would never buy Assassins Creed ever again if the world would be still played by Altaïr in the holy land since 2007 without any changes.

 

And in TDU 2 everything is so cartoonish, plus the driving is worse than in TDU 1.

 

Yep, TDU2 also didn't catch me.

 

For the sound, i think of a system, where single events are independent designable, like backfires, a keyrattle, or material moving sounds, insects that splash on the frontwindow etc. . There should be s seperate rev sounds system for when the neutral gear is put in, and the most important, for every gear a SPEEDBASED revsystem. Not a revhightsystem. You know, how does the car sound in 4th gear at 100km/h and how does it sound at 200 km/h, can be put in different then, not like in TDU1 one file for the same gear in a rev range. There the 1st gear sounds at lets say 6000 rpm the same like the 4th gear at 6000 rpm, and that is crap. If the 1st gear never reaches the speed like in 4th gear at same rpm, the sound will be different with a speedbased rev system. Of course this would be more work, by the factor of gears. 6 gears, six times more work. But it will be worth it, and i would WANT this more possibilities to do things.

 

Well, you record those sounds for every of the (yet) 30 cars I planed,including EB110, F50 and Porsche GT1, I will proudly work on this system :) Unfortunately some things I would also love to have are just impossible to achive, especially when you are working alone with a budged of +-0. :)

[DJoyTinnio]

Cool you answer so detailed. About the reflections on the car. I didn't mean better reflections in quality. I ment they should move correctly. I guess it eats up nearly same calculations moving wrong, then they would moving correctly :-q . If you drive forward, they shouls move backwards, like the surrounding does, when you drive through it. In TDU 1 the move in drivin direction, wich is a stoned view of reality. In cockpit view they move normal, like it should be. Maybe a modder thats more into the gamecode than me could just copy paste the movementcode from cockpit view to the 3rd person view codes. Like L3AN and Speeder. Sounds from youtube videos are not interesting ? You think of law problems using them in an own game ?

[TDUZoqqer]

Cool you answer so detailed.

 

You took your time to write your comment, so I will take mine to reply :)

 

About the reflections on the car. I didn't mean better reflections in quality. I ment they should move correctly. I guess it eats up nearly same calculations moving wrong, then they would moving correctly :-q .If you drive forward, they shouls move backwards, like the surrounding does, when you drive through it. In TDU 1 the move in drivin direction, wich is a stoned view of reality.

 

Ah, I see. Well, yeah that was most likely a Twilight II engine bug back in the days of TDU1. I don't have this problem in my game (I would say "yet", but it's very unlikely to happen, as everyone using unreal sooner or later comes in contact with reflections, so if that would be a bug, it would have been reported long ago already on the UE4 forums)

 

In cockpit view they move normal, like it should be. Maybe a modder thats more into the gamecode than me could just copy paste the movementcode from cockpit view to the 3rd person view codes. Like L3AN and Speeder.

 

Nobody has access to the source code. I wouldn't make my game here if that would be possible. :) Once the game is compiled, it's compiled. (unless you have Unity or Unreal, where there are even tutorials on how to unbake a game. Smh)

 

Sounds from youtube videos are not interesting ? You think of law problems using them in an own game ?

 

If I would be afraid of law problems, I wouldn't make the game in the first place. At least I can't remember BMW and Mercedes to give me licenses, neither Turn10, EA Games, or Atari I am using my assets from :lol: Not talking about 3ds Max and Substance painter even :D But as long I am not sharing it commercially in any way, I should be fine. Especially in our forum here.

 

No the point is, you need clean, like - very very clean - looping ques of EVERY SINGLE gear at any desired rev. Modders already struggle to find those for non-gear based sound ques. And even if you take this work for a car which is "less common", like the E46 M3 for instance, good luck finding those sounds for ultra rare unicorns. As already mentioned, the Porsche GT1 or the EB110 are incredibly difficult to find information for. I still have no proper torque curve for the GT1.

[TDUZoqqer]

Bump. Was quite busy over the last days so I couldn't spend as much time on the project as I wanted to. Nevertheless I felt free to test-render the Smart in its current state

 

 

I am at 4791 Verts / 4001 Polygons at the moment, which seems fine for me. Need to finish modeling headlights, window wipers and other minimal small details before unwrapping it and making textures. So I guess I will be somewhere at 5500 Verts / 5000 Polys at the end without wheels. Which is a bit heavier than I wanted it to be, but should be fine, really. My caveman-PC can handle GTA5 on maximum settings, so a bunch of smarts here and there shouldn't be a problem. :lol:

[insaneone]

I got no idea what you just said but you got nice pics and that's all I need to see. :)

[TDUZoqqer]

I got no idea what you just said but you got nice pics and that's all I need to see. :)

 

Thanks! Let me give you a crash-course here: Verts (short for Vertices, singular "Vertex") is basically a corner point of a polygon. A polygon is (in my case) a quad plane (or triangle, or in very rare occasions an N-gon, which has 5+ verteces. As every shape will be later converted to a triangular shape in the engine, the modeling process is not REALLY important, although you have to try to keep it quads to prevent wanky shapes). The position of the 4 vertices this polygon has (in X, Y and Z axis - left, front and up axis) determines the shape of the polygon. 5000 polygons is concidered "lowpoly" for a car. A Forza Lod0 car has +-120.000 polygons on the exterior. The more polygons the engine has to render, the heavier it will be for the GPU. As the smart is AI car, which will be spawned multiple times on the screen, it needs to be lowpoly, as 5 smarts with 5000 polygons are 25.000 polygons on the screen the engine has to render.

 

In short - the less polygons / vertices the AI car has, the better. Although you shouldn't make it too "lowpoly" as it will be looking bad and lacking details when you stand beside it on the screen and look at it.

 

 

Tris=triangles=triangular polygons

[Eudemon]

we can potentially build a game together (I am a programmer)

[TDUZoqqer]

That would be amazing, I appreciate any kind of help! :)

[TDUZoqqer]

Smart car modeling finished :) (fixing and tweaking if necessary not included)

 

 

Now it's time to unwrap this badboy and make it ready for substance painter. Textures will be finished there, also dirtmaps and livery. And after that it's ready to go into the engine :D

 

So I guess I will be somewhere at 5500 Verts / 5000 Polys at the end without wheels.

 

[TDUZoqqer]

Shot some texture today! :D @insaneone yes, it's exactly like you imagine it. In the first two shots there was a blue 991 GT3 touring beside I was taking pics of first, in the second a black GT4Lusso :P [IMG]https://abload.de/img/texturesyss8t.jpg[/IMG] Sorry for tripple post, for the next update I'll edit the post! :P And to answer your all question - yes, people gave me weird looks taking pics of smarts :D

[TDUZoqqer]

Hi guys! I don't know how long I was "gone", but I got some nice news.

 

As some of you might, some of you might not know, my PC broke down completely in beginning of June, and I could not get all the stuff together for a whole month, so I was PC-less for the time. Like, really. CPU, Mainboard, RAM and OS was replaced, later on my Hard drive died ASWELL, so I got an SSD now and everything works better than ever. Thank god. But for a whole month I was unable to do anything. Literally anything.

 

Good thing: I got Windows 10 now.

Another good thing: SSDs are QUICK AS HELL. OMG.

Bad thing: ZModeler doesn't work on Windows 10.

Another bad thing: I lost 16 GB of RAM due to change from DDR3 to DDR4.

 

Nontheless, due to my work on the game, a friend of mine got me into his team as a 3D artist for an app-project, which potentially can become veeery big.

 

But enough small talk, OFF TO THE REALLY GOOD NEWS:

 

I might have a first demo alpha-beta-whatever sneak peak of the game for you guys to test!

In fact, it's not more than a very progressed concept of what I planed for the game, but it is fully working and fully visible, and works very fine on Rassva's PC.

 

It's the whole customization menue I have planed. There are still some things to make and optimize, but as soon as I will bring it up to a nice level, I will give you guys out to test it for some days. I will aim somewhere mid-september for the demo, but it's possible that the date moves back and forth as I am not really sure how much time I will have for the stuff to finish.

 

Hope you are as excited as I am :) Finally something from me to show and for you to see. Independent Turboduck exclusive racing game concept. I am happy.

 

:)

 

Stay tuned!