Flying

After a couple of days of trial and error, I've managed to get the basics of the engine working. Now any vehicle can manoeuvre mid-air!

It's far from perfect and lots of tweaking is required to get it to a satisfactory point such as car specs, weight, rotation speed etc. But as it stands, it's at a decent stage that I'm happy with.

1st Model Finished

UV Unwrapping & Texturing

Since my last post I've decided to continue re-creating the main vehicle of the game. Figured since I've got a foot-hold with the engine, I should really focus on the assets since theyre the most time consuming aspect.

Last time I posted about the car I had finished most of the modelling. I've had to recreate the car's engine because the original cylinder was skewed / squashed and didnt look right.
Now I have moved onto texturing it. The model is completely unwrapped, as I'm using symmetry I can allocate more UV real estate to better inprove quality. Here is the progress so far:

(Full model UVW map)

(Almost fully textured UVW map)

As you can see progress is being made! It takes a long time, constantly switching between Max and Photoshop to ensure things look OK. Once it's imported in-engine and has a reflective shader applied to it, it should look rather good.

 

Video: UI Progress

This video shows the progression of my project so far. The focus of this milestone is getting all the UI elements working (which they are bar a mileage guage). In the video you can see a side-by-side comparison of the two.

(Best viewed in fullscreen)

As you can see from the video, the speed, timer, minimap (minus current position) and coins all work exactly the same.

In relation to this video, see my previous post for a more indepth look at the animated coins: UI: Coins

Known Issues to work on:

• Camera tilting (lerp broken)
• Add Mileage coding and UI element
• Replace stock car

UI: Coins

Quick update:

Since the engine is working as far as a standard racing game goes, I wanted to put more effort into recreating the UI from the original game. Most of the UI is easily recreatable since a lot of it is just text, the most complex element is the rotating coins.

These are originally 64x64 and look very pixelated, I then upscaled them and this is the result:

The new sprites are 256x265, they look clean and will upscale nicely in HD resolutions. The only downside to these is that I couldn't find the original font used for the "2049". I have them saved as templates, so if i ever do come across a similar font I can easily change it.

The next step is to render the coin spinning and exporting the frames to either make a gif or just use the frames as an amination. Then finally, add it all in-game.

Project Progress #2

So this weekend, I decided to try and get a basic engine for me to build upon and start working on my remake.

After folllowing many tutorials on setting up vehicle physics and testing various engine packages. I found one that provides a pure basic car setup, with decent physics. From this I've managed to tweak the whole project to play and feel just how I want it to.

I even managed to setup a simple UI that mimics the original, but more on this down the line...

Next I need to import my custom vehicle I created from my previous posts and set that up. Once that drives how I want, I will then move on to the next stage of the project. Which is to get the flying working in-engine!

Then I can begin creating all the assets needed to build a complete track.

Stage Issues

Whilst trying to get a start on my final project, I've come across many obstacles and have realised just how large this project is going to be. Even though I limited myself to recreating just one official stage, the sheer scope of recreating it is a mammoth task.

Because I want to recreate the first track and stay truthful to it's original design, I have been ripping assets from my copy. This process is very tedious as the software only captures small sections at a time. On top of this any models acquired are usually contorted due to information being taking from the in-games camera perspective.

The first track has been split up into 10 sections, all of which need stitching together and fixing because each section become slightly distorted. But it serves as a great outline for me to recreate specific parts from.

The next step is to 'lift' the most basic aspects of the stage (such as the roads) and remodel them to remove unwanted rotations. After which I can then start to recreate everything from scratch, using the previously ripped model as a reference,