Zero Gear - an indie multiplayer kart racing game

ok, I have to test our little beta signup page - go grab some beta keys: http://%7boption%7d

let me know if you get a key ok and it works, etc.

All the keys we put in there for now have been taken, we will add more next week!

did you check your spam folder? Or did it tell you it was out of keys?

the cool dudes over at http://%7boption%7d are doing the music for the game, in their honor I made a duck bill accessory that will be in the next build:

[Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/461612/hyperduck.jpg]

Beta signups are live! Go here: http://myzerogear.com/beta/invite.php

Quote from Nysuatro

Are here other people who use windows 7 . The installer wlaywas stops while installing

We have seen this happen to a few other people, do you mean the installer when you first launch the game? On some peoples configurations the visual studio redist is behaving badly. We are trying to track it down.

Quote from Pericolos0

I played this for about 2 hours yesterday, damn fun and it's really hard to quit playing! Lag seems to be a problem though, the game felt fine when I had a friend in stockholm here start a server, but playing on other ones i always had some noticeable lag. Maybe it would be nice if the player gets a warning about lag when he joins a server too far away? I was also confused about what the best server was to join, the server rank numbers were in random order so I never knew if 6 or 1 was the best =), took a few tries to figure that out.Overall the racing feels pretty nice, but it can get damn hard to control the carts though! As soon as I hit something, it always took me ages to get back on the track. And it can be very frustrating, if there is only like half a second of lag happening you often find yourself hitting a wall or falling of a cliff.

But still, damn fun! There seems to be quite a bit of tweaking left but it's getting there =).

Yea, those seem to be the 2 biggest criticisms we are collecting so far. For the lag one, we can't actually make the game handle large latencies any better, but we do need to make it more obvious what the latencies are when you are joining a server like you say. In the next update that ranking will be sorted properly, and we have added country codes so that you can see what country the server is in. There is also being able to see your ping by hitting tab and there is an indicator in the lower right hand corner of your ping. The entire time we thought we were going to be able to list ping times like is traditional in the server browser, but since we switched to steams lobby system (same as in l4d) we don't have access to that information. The lobby system is great because it does nat-punchthrough and makes it super simple to host a game - but you can't figure out the actual ping to a server until you do that nat-puncthrough when connecting so we can't list them in the browser. The only information we get with the list of servers is the order, which is supposed to be from closest to farthest away by geographic location. We are just now talking about once in game having some kind of warning like you mention when we detect a ridiculous amount of latency.

About the controls, many people say it feels too floaty - and I think this also has to do with people playing on high latency games and not realizing it. We are working on some tweaks to the physics right now to make the karts have a little more weight and fly around a little less.

Hopefully those things will streamline the game for the majority of people. Still, I think those are mostly things we can either fix or make satisfactory - so I guess we are in good shape!

hmm, I don't think it is a win 7 issue - we are all running win 7 and have tested it pretty throughly.

If you could post the problem here: http://www.nimblebit.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=20 then our programmer will be sure to try and figure it out

yea, race times is an oft-requested thing that I don't think would be very hard to add