Univerb Gaming Studios

Back with more updates. It’s clear that responses / following is low because not too many people really understand the point of AVS.

To break it down AVS (Advanced Vehicle Simulator) is exactly that : a simulator. Not in the sense of a matlab simulation but in the sense that people who are serious about flying use Flightsims – those who know their onions when it comes to automotive vehicle technology and enjoy motor racing – use racing simulators.

In opening with this statement understand that the work the past weekend was to develop a mechanism for evaluating and the simulation of a camshaft.

Digest that. We’re talking the simulation of air velocity over valve faces both intake and exhaust side coupled with the tensile loading of valve springs and other forms of inertia robbing components.

In the end I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to do just that – simulate a camshaft, the upgrading of one, the changing of valves and springs (and more) and the effect it has on power production / performance as compared to the real world.

All of this effort is for what? Simply put – you guys – the guys that enjoy realistic simulators and the challenge of setting up a vehicle correctly for your chosen discipline.

This hints to the seriousness of AVS as a whole but there is much more I purposefully leave out which will be revealed much later in development – it’s definitely worth the wait.

Very exciting update this. I’ve been hard at work on the physics side of things again and thanks to a developer friend in Italy managed to get my clutch system working properly. I have the pleasure of introducing Adam properly – he’s an artist I’ve outsourced all the asset work to and enjoying the work produced to date.

Heres two screenshot, one from Adam demoing the initial drag strip we’ve been working on and another from my side with a teaser in game shot (excuse the scaling) – just to test the track out

It’s here, the official domain name for the AVS project is up and running.

Master DB has been updated to V1.73, gameplay / rule system development in progress currently

http://www.advancedvehiclesimulator.com/

Updates updates updates! Registration / Login to the master server done.

Picked up a bug on the gearbox code – this has since been fixed. A lot of the time has now beein spent exclusively on DB design. It’s the foundation of the rest to come and I’ve got to nail this as best as possible first time around (mysql has some silly bugs – at time of writing – when it comes to renaming foreign key columns and things later down the line).

Great news – I’ve commissioned an artist to work with me to bring quality assets into the title. More on this soon!

I’m back with another exciting update! Basic benchmark testing of the accuracy of in game performance to that of real life deviated by a small margine of 0.5%

There comes a time when you have to consider leaving optimization alone in order to make further progress in other aspects of the simulator / game. After all it is virtual and not too many people are going to cry if your ET is off by .1 of a second down the quarter.

There is still much to do however and one topic I’m going to research a bit more into is “faking” the sense of speed in computer games (alternatives to motion blur). I’ve begun work already on new camera code to help acheive a sense of increasing speed within AVS but it’s only going to help so much before I’ll have to look at other avenues.

I haven’t dismissed a good sound manager, but this will be the icing on top of the cake – also one of the toughest to get right if you don’t have access to vehicles in order to record multichannel over a few predefined tests.

Unfortunately I am at a point where a lot has been done but not much to facilitate the bringing of things together. I’m talking things like better room management and level loading. I think the best way to approach this is at the beginning starting with a re-eval of my current database structure and engineering it to fit the ideas behind the project. When this is completed it’s time to let the database drive my train of thought to get things done.

So where’s my video you might be asking? Good question – can anyone recommend a great mac application for doing so?. I don’t have a proper level yet and borrowing from a few assets – so don’t expect too much in the 3d art department (or menu) because it’s really at it’s infancy.

What a weekend! First off a huge thank you to Xyber over at http://www.sagamedev.com/ for the alpha testing help.

I spent some time on porting all the old code which was client / server based to that of Photon Cloud (multiple clients connecting to master server). Some of the old logic is still broken (lap timing systems, grid positional setup and spawn management) but as a whole a great move in the right direction with enough working code to test network performance / connectivity issues.

Xyber and I jammed for about 40 mins over the net, myself on a 3G connection sitting in Jozi, Xyber using a 1mbps line down in Cape Town – performance and experience from his side could be summed up as “Great work so far – didn’t notice as much lag as I expected” – considering a racing titles updates are far more regular/critical than say an RPG where lag sometimes goes unnoticed.

I think I’m on the right track network side

After this session I spent a large amount of time on gearbox code fixing a bug related to automatic shifting (downshifting) and fixed the then broken GUI. Worked on the physics aspect of the sim Saturday. It’s clear that I’ve got a lot more work ahead as i’m not entirely happy with the power production model I’ve implimented.

The initial chat console is done – featuring initial command sets for things like runtime debugging, profiling and other items during the testing phase. The command portion of the chat console might be removed closer to final delivery – unless I can think up worthwhile commands the average player might want access to (to bypass menu system, quickly disconnect etc.)

Last but not least, work has started on the benchmarking aspect of the sim – there’s a bug in the accuracy of data in terms of real life units and performance real world versus the virtual. I’m yet to work out the kinks here and the setting up some unit tests around this will help – actually Forza franchise did this (benchmark tracks / code) as part of their own testing and performance indexing / matching vehicles to specific classes.

Alright – that’s about it for now. Till next time (which I promise – will be soon)

What a crazy night. I spent a bit of time looking at Photon as another alternative to my current netcode (Thanks Leslie) and things are looking promising. I like the simplistic approach to lobby management it provides but the thought of ripping out my old code and fixing things up is daunting at this stage.

To take a break away from thinking about that pain too much I decided to inflict more – loaded up blender. Anyone using the latest version 2.62 for Mac? Must say – I prefered the old interface and can’t find all of my old windows (Background images assigned to planes were moved, SPACE bar seems to bring up some find bar and you type what you want to add to the scene now where it was previously a menu which I prefered… ah there are a few things I’m having trouble finding).

It also reminded me of how much you forget when you don’t work in a specific application for a long time, all the old shortcuts (and blender relies heavily on them) and the different workflow it offers (compared to 3ds) make for an interesting re-learn.

Luckily the manual is there to help me out! http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/

The whole reason for loading up blender to play around again is so I can go about developing my own benchmark tracks. Artists are scarce now a days (good ones that will work for free )

Apart from that, I’ll look at the netcode again – it really does look like a bit of a re-write – I’ll reverse engineer the current code back to single player only and take it from there – borrowing bits of old code where possible.

This is for the better as it performs very well and cuts out a lot of the work I’d have had to still do (Lobby management, connectivity issues like firewalls etc.). Meanwhile I’ll continue on the physics and AI tweaking on the old code base – merging with the netcode impl. at a later date.

This project isn’t dead!

I’ve been so damn busy that the project had to take a bit of a backseat. Time is going to free up soon and I’ll be hard at work starting a video demo for you guys – before I can get this done however – I require some additional help in the sense of assets and 3d work.

Naturally this is an unfunded indie project and the work contributed would have to be for the better good of the end game and for fun. If the title peaks the interest of an investor / publisher – there could be remuneration but don’t get your hopes up. Do this for the reason I do – fun.

Anyway, if anyone is interested please email me on info.at.univerbstudios.dot.co.dot.za

Please attach some example work of the following: Traffic cone (easy), Overhead road signage (medium), Bridge without road ie: outer scaffholding (now we’re talking).

Cheers.

Making headway on the feature set. After meeting up with Herman and discussing the scope of my project it became very clear that I’ll need to taper functionality somewhat.

Exactly what will be in release #1 is not cast in stone just yet – the main goal would be to get some of you guys into closed alpha testing – to feedback on various aspects of the physics, sound and graphics – Beta is far off but let’s start somewhere.

So what awesome updates do I have on progress so far? Well AI is getting better, whether or not they make it into the game is unkown for now but as an update, they are learning a bit more – yes – they are actually learning 

To put things into perspective, originally AI had a hard time maintaining a good average of around 60kph around the twisty course. I’m up to about 110kph now. There is something satisfying about seeing progress like this – even if the bots aren’t truly human and require much input on which to base their decisions. ( wait – we do that too. )

In terms of rule system – not done yet, currently laps are infinite without a proper goal. These mini rulesets will be implimented as soon as I get a gap. Honestly – I’ve been fleshing out something far more important. Performance.

Previously average FPS was around 33 on my very slow dev machine ( I code like this on purpose… frustrating – but you get to see the bottlenecks very quickly ). Adding AI dropped this ( still needs investigation ).

I’ve now got the FPS up to a stable 65 – 68 on average with detail setting cranked high. That’s full anisotropic filtering, full detailed textures, lighting and 4x anti-aliasing running at 1440×900 on a slow AMD64, 256mb X1950 PRO and 1gb system memory. It’s alright I think

Don’t get too happy though ( or me ) – I’ve got a lot of scenery work to carry out and that number might be affected badly – let’s see. Keeping those polycounts as low as I can without making things look terrible.

It’s with much happiness (because it was a headache to find a suitable solution) that I share some great news with our followers. Basic implimentation of the networking layer is in and working!

I’ve managed to get LAN play on the go but not without hassle and would appreciate some comments from readers with a bit more experience on this topic. Testing carried out last night around 21:20 across two of my machines connected wireless-G. First tests reveal a bit of what can only be put down to ”lag” – something I’ve seen all too many times while playing Forza 3 online.

I’ve built in interpolation between clients on a basic level for just these sorts of situations but didn’t expect to have lag over local wireless connection. There again, dataspeeds are not near as much as wired connections.

Can anyone share their experience with lag in games over wireless lan (G standard) versus wired connections at home? In the end I don’t want to be chasing optimisations where they aren’t needed – if this is real lag and the norm, I can start focussing on other aspects of AVS 2.0