Friday...

It's friday... a regular friday... but looking at the calendar, it looks like it's not that regular, because it's... Friday the 13th! And for the occasion I am playing with the NES game with the same name based on the Friday the 13th franchise.

I had the game as a kid. I found it scary. I have never beaten this game. I didn't even beat Jason once. I had no idea, what to do. But I did my research. Also, since that, I tried the game several times on emulator. So I got more familiar with it.

It's a really bad game... hey, no, it's not! Actually it's a pretty good and complex game. It needs patience, some research and many trials and errors. But it's beatable and fun, if you know what to do.

Try #1

DAY 1
DAY 2
DAY 3

MISSION STATUS: FAILURE
Last survivor: Debbie 


Try #2

DAY 1
DAY 2
DAY 3

MISSION STATUS: FAILURE
Last survivor: Paul
I just gave up after many not mentioned try. I watched the first movie instead...


Retrying the game 1 month later...

Moments of frustration! What the hell am I supposed to do?!

Oh dear...

Just started to continue my racing game project. Finally I found some great setups for wheel colliders. Even without coding, it worked pretty well, but using some codes to dynamically edit the friction values of the wheel colliders could do some wonderful things. BUT!

Everything went way too nicely. Dark clouds gathered over my head... It was the calm before storm... After happily playing with the car and break some record lap times I decided to use the fake anti-aliasing script. It doesn't work in the editor for some reason. I mean the reason is that v-sync doesn't work, so it can't run with fixed 60 FPS. So I decided to build a webplayer version. It has been started. The great work. My creature... my child... my new experiment... I was so excited!

After some long second... it was born! I had to check it out. I started to run the webplayer build locally and... something went wrong! What happened to it?! Why did that happened?! WHY?!

It was horrible. A horrible, distorted creature. Two wheels were missing. No, not just that. Even its chassis wasn't there. How could it happen? Calm down... calm down... I told myself.

Let's go back to Unity editor. Nothing can be wrong, right? It must be a problem with the web player build. I was sure about it. I had similar problem back then, when in the editor, everything was perfect, but in the WebPlayer build something was wrong. Something was wrong... something was wrong! Even in the editor! I... I was confused... I am confused! It was working perfectly before!

I saw errors. Failures. I don't know why? What happened, what changed. I tried different things to fix it, but I don't really know, what's the problem?

!CompareApproximately (SqrMagnitude (q), 1.0F)
UnityEngine.Quaternion:Euler(Single, Single, Single)

transform.rotation assign attempt for 'WheelFR' is not valid. Input rotation is { NaN, NaN, NaN, NaN }.
UnityEngine.Transform:set_rotation(Quaternion)

What? Why?! It's at the two wheels. But I didn't change a thing at the coding part and they use the same code. So what's the difference? What don't they work as the other wheels? Oh, anyway, all the wheels and the chassis are at place. So it's different than the webplayer build. But the result is still the same.

Other error, when WheelColliders reach the road.

transform.position assign attempt for 'GenericCar' is not valid. Input position is { NaN, NaN, NaN }.

Not A Number... REALLY?! WHY! I read about that division by 0 can cause this, but I don't do that. As far as I know. Where the errors point, there is no division. Can it be because of a glitch in Unity 4.6 beta? I updated to the latest beta and it still doesn't work... *sigh*

I am confused. The creature I created is a failure. It's not complete. It's abnormal. It's an anomaly... What am I supposed to do?!

Cheapest anti-aliasing ever!

Did you play Gran Turismo on PSP? If yes, you may know, that games uses a very simple, efficient, and acceptable quality anti-aliasing method. What does it do exactly? It moves the camera in every second frame one pixel right and up. That's it!

Papercraft quest begins! Making Ferrari F14T!

I want to try out something different. I was always interested in origami and other papery things. I did a lot of Origami in my childhood which was fun. Now I want to make some papercraft! Combining my 3ds max knowledge I want to turn a 3d model into a tangible product. I never did something before. I mean I neved did papercraft before, just origami.

I started to work on my model and I started to study the program called Pepakura Designer. It's a program that can turn 3d models to papercraft templates. Very effective and easy to use. But I have no idea, what kind of paper will I need, how to glue the parts, how to print the parts on a stronger paper. Hopefully, I'll get help. Until that, let's see the model. Here is the current progress (the modelling is almost finished):

F14T - the beginning. Looks like a wierd vacuum cleaner... or a fly's head... fly's head? Really?

In Pepakura Designer

Finally, tyre texture!

Accuracy won't be perfect. I don't have perfect, good resolution reference images, and most of them are photos with perspective distortion, they are not 2D blueprints.

Double dilemma! Realism or fun? More details or simpler graphics?

As the title says. Double dilemma. What should I do? Make a game which is closer to realistic in term of physics or make it simpler but easier to play. Also what about the graphics? I tried out different approaches for making it nice and cartoonish, but which method is the best? Let's find it out!

New physics test!

Physics are getting better and better, but it's still very far from my expectations. I still think my tests were successful, however I'll probably rewrite the code that controls traction. As you can see in the video, the traction is low at low speeds and the car slips easily, but I need more slip. Actually it's pretty stable even when I push the pedal to the metal. A real world car like this would spin immediately in this situation from standing position.

Back from holiday...

I am back from a great holiday, it's time to get back to work on the project... and some other things. But let's talk about the project only. I have a car, a track in progress and a playable private apk file with configurable touch and tilt controls.

What should I improve? Well, the physics are pretty simple now, I need to program the tyre physics into a way more realistic one. Well, by realistic I mean still arcade, but more believable. Once I made burnouts, but it was poorly programmed, I need to upgrade it. It'll be good on a mobile device. Tapping the accelerator will be a good way to keep the car stable without spinning out in a slow corner. Maybe I'll use animation curves for setting up the tyre friction for different situations. Also I am thinking to make an indicatior that shows how much the pedals are pressed over the touch area. So the player could "feel" the pedals more. Of course it would be optional, but a helpful thing.

Maybe I won't release more public webplayer demo, because the controls are not really good of keyboard. Or if I will, I have to program a better keyboard control with speed sensitive turning like rFactor has.

That's all for today, I am planning to make a great progress in the following week.

Working on the background...

I don't usually share only one picture, but when I do, it shows some improvement in graphics.

Hand-drawn background just made overall look better.