ONS-SwissRace - race in the Swiss mountains

[maurice]

Hello everyone, I've just discovered UnWheel. I made a 'racing' map which is a pure ONS, not knowing how to code for racing. Would this be of any interest? Please let me know if I'm not posting in the right place or if you don't want this kind of stuff here.

Big picture

Church and waterfall

Working windmills

Download (7Mb)

Thanks in advance for any comments

 

[ProjectX]

The more community maps the better! Just hope you don't put me out of a job.

Unwheel mapping's quite easy. you've got your map already s all you have to do now is add the playerstarts (I copy and paste a coordinating pair UWStartSpot and Playerstart from Citytrack into my map and then duplicate) and the UWCheckpoint volumes (you have to open unwheel.u in the actor browser) and any Out of bounds volumes you may need. However you could improve the level a few ways:

I'd do something with the lighting, if you've got zoneinfo lighting or ambient lighting it should be a very deep blue with no higher than 16 brightness IMO. You just don't have any shadows. Track looks cool though. And increase the scale of the windmills and other buildings, at least twice the size, and the church should be about 3-4 times the size. do those windmill blades rotate? Cos if they did that would 0wn.

Poss. some mountain fog or some low-lying cloud layer or something that would let you use a small amount of distance fog (I'd say a pastel bluey colour with at the max draw distance at least 12000 and the minimum something like 5000). That'd boost FPS and add a bit of atmosphere.

The direct mixture of flourishing grass (bright green) The hard rock (Deep brown) and the bright snow (white) makes a colour contrast that looks a bit cartooney. I suggest making sure the grass is a darker colour and doesn't appear right near the snow, also add some supports to the track to hold it up and that's be perfect.

 

[UltraNew-B]

Nice start !! The track looks odd "hovering" in mid air though, maybe bring the terrain up to the road level where possible.

 

[ProjectX]

Nice start !! The track looks odd "hovering" in mid air though, maybe bring the terrain up to the road level where possible.

I did notice that uphill before the waterfall is far too steep, even the race cars wouldn't get up it.

I loved the music though! no really! It had that annoying, yet catchy quality, while being in themed and being completely horrible which gave me fond ( or more to the point, not quite so fond) memories of Disney Land Paris *shudders as he thinks of "It's a small world after all" * Those demons, those demons.

and maybe dimming the lights a tad would help, I was getting glare off of the grass.

 

[maurice]

Wow, well thank you all for the encouraging feedback.

@ProjectX: The lighting is a skybox with 5 sunlights - a single sunlight casts shadows that are too harsh, there are plenty of shadows, they just aren't so evident in the screenies. There's no ambient lighting, I was told you should never use it. The scale of the windmills and church is correct with respect to players and vehicles, they just look small because of the maps size - it's 48'000uu square and the road tarmac is 1'000uu wide. The uphill before the waterfall is too steep? A scorp drives up it fine. Are your vehicles more touchy? I get yellow scorching too but when I turn the light down it all gets a bit dull. This accounts for the cartooney look maybe. Perhaps it's because I've looked at it too long! Oh and yes, the windmills rotate...

@Ultranew-B: Yes, I've been toying with either 1/ Adding support pillars or 2/ bringing the terrain up. The problem with 2/ is that in many places it's impossible because the track crosses over itself often.

Could I suggest you spectate a 16-Godlike-bot match and give your opinions after watching awhile? I'd be interested in your framerates, I've got a really mean rig and I still only get 25-35fps. Maybe your distance fog would improve this?

Thanks again

 

[ProjectX]

Could I suggest you spectate a 16-Godlike-bot match and give your opinions after watching awhile? I'd be interested in your framerates, I've got a really mean rig and I still only get 25-35fps. Maybe your distance fog would improve this?

If you were to convert this to UnWheel you would need to add distance fog. UnWheel uses KVehicle not SVehicle. KVehicle requires physics calculations from the car body and each wheel to decide where to go. SVehicle uses animations. We may later switch to SVehicles if we have time, however at the moment we don't have time. Therefore each extra car rendered slows the game down quite a bit.

Unwheel vehicles are at least 1.5 times the size of the scorpion and therefore you'd only get 2 cars side by side on the track at once (and at corners this might be pretty tight) and therefore the buildings would have to be resized.

May I suggest lowering the brightness of the "lesser" suns (i.e. the suns that aren't actually sunshine but are reflectedlike that you get naturally. That way you get a bearable light level while also getting realistic shadows. I played the map and it is quite fun, although there is no collision for the trees.

 

[maurice]

I understand your comments now that I know the cars are bigger. If I rescale the entire map (meshes and terrain) will I have to re-do all my navigation points or does everything scale with the terrain?

Do I actually want/need and pathing/bots for UnWheel?

The trees originally were solid, but I changed them to semisolid because bots were getting stuck in them and some testers hated not being able to walk through them.

I will add distance fog and adjust the lighting.

Thanks again for your suggestions !

 

[ProjectX]

Well bots is the next (and an imminent release too) release so it would be a good idea to path it when the next release is out. Although as of now UnWheel uses a different pathing system.

 

[Smokin]

You might have some problems using that map in Unwheel as your track mesh needs collision hulls and a track like that would most likely have problems with importing the collision hulls. You will have to wait until they move over to Svechiles and then you can make tracks with curved hills and curved corners and also texture your road properly.

 

[maurice]

Ah-ha. Track sections with collision hulls don't work, the scorps 'stick' when they drive over the joints in the track, so I'm using only vertex collision. If I read you right, KVehicles won't work with vertex collision?

"Texture my road properly"? It's a lovely texture that I made myself, a photo of real tarmac >;-)

Thanks for the info

 

[ProjectX]

Ah-ha. Track sections with collision hulls don't work, the scorps 'stick' when they drive over the joints in the track, so I'm using only vertex collision. If I read you right, KVehicles won't work with vertex collision?

"Texture my road properly"? It's a lovely texture that I made myself, a photo of real tarmac >;-)

Thanks for the info

Actually KVehicles would work with the track, provided he used a less steep track and he set bSimpleKarmaCollision to false (sometimes however it needs to be set to true) of course you never know until you try.

 

[Smokin]

That bSimpleharmaCollision setting is what has fixed my track collision problem, thanx ProjectX

 

[ProjectX]

That bSimpleharmaCollision setting is what has fixed my track collision problem, thanx ProjectX

Oh good. At least I got that one right lol. Glad to help