zaphod

lol, at least he has a very clear vision of how things should be.

been working on an informational site to go up on myzerogear.com like this bic? ;p

ahh, I see what you mean now

thanks Mojo and Thrik!

that sounds like an awesome render to make once we have a signifigant number of characters, a whole shot of a bunch of them together at once - something you could study for a while picking out all the unique things everyone is sporting. Thanks Thrik!

bst cannon EVAR

I recently stumbled across this article which pretty much sums up my argument for what developers need to do in order to rise above piracy: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/ ... an_fre.php it's basically about things that artists can provide that cannot be included in a torrent or burned to a dvd. some great elements in the article, it's not too long and worth a read.

put together some screenshots: also, I have done a couple of wallpaper renders for a few of the characters we have so far: 4:3 resoultions: 1024x768,1280x800,1600x1200 widescreen: 1280x800,1440x900,1680x1050,1920x1200,2560x1600 4:3 resoultions: 1024x768,1280x800,1600x1200 widescreen: 1280x800,1440x900,1680x1050,1920x1200,2560x1600 4:3 resoultions: 1024x768,1280x800,1600x1200 widescreen: 1280x800,1440x900,1680x1050,1920x1200,2560x1600 I was thinking about using the wallpapers as main menu backgrounds, similar to what tf2 does - thoughts? Could randomly switch them out or allow people to pick thier favorite (following the customization theme) OOOOOH or the coolest I think would be to have the background without the kart and rider and render the kart and rider in 3d, so your little customized guy is there to greet you when you log in like in WoW. And you could still pick the background. *new awesome main menu plan* so I just copied and pasted my main menu idea to brian and he naturally took it to the next level. So if we are going to be totally awesome and have time to do this here is the main menu plan: "background like I was talking about, with your character standing next to your kart - and they will have idle animations and do funny things if you sit there too long. Also, we will blend the animations so that they are always looking at your cursor as you move it around, and if you move it onto their face / body they will freak out and swat at it.

Thanks Acu! I think instead of scaling all the karts and players, to change the scale we would just shrink the tracks ( if we wanted the karts to appear bigger )

I think there will be lots of fun modes in addition to vanilla racing, we are putting all the gameplay rules in lua which we are considering opening up inside the map format for people to customize, so I think we could have battle modes, demolition derby, soccer with a big physics ball, etc. I know what you are talking about Acumen, the farther away you get from the karts the tinier they look, it's a real challenge finding the right balance between track size and kart size, many times what looks pleasing visually turns out to be way to small when you actually try and drive on it. We will be adjusting the camera and track sizes as we get more comfortable with playing the game ans seeing what works and what doesn't. I think you are right that we could move the camera a bit closer to the backs of the karts to be closer to something like this: http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/4211/image1gn9.jpg if you look at other screenshots from kart games though you can see similar sizes and the karts start to look tiny really fast as they get farther away: http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/artic ... 551680.jpg http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/artic ... 557711.jpg http://wiimedia.ign.com/wii/image/artic ... 554711.jpg I'm sure it's something we will have to tweak a few times over.

we are planning on adding more effects to everything certainly, but if there is something specific you can remember from another game that worked really well we are all ears. We want to do little touches like particles coming off the wheels depending on the surface you are on, the camera pulling back just a little the faster you go, and of course skidding / sliding. We were thinking of increasing the fov and doing some motion blur once we get our boosting mechanic in there too.

yea, course

:megaman: :megaman: :megaman: MEGA-UPDATE :megaman: :megaman: :megaman: we had our lan party playtest last night, it went really well! Brian has been working a ton of hours getting the networking portion of our game far along enough to have our first Zero Gear play test, which we hosted at a LAN party this weekend. It seemed to be a great success and everyone seemed to have a great time driving around their characters even if we didn't have any real race rules in place yet. I was able to grab a lot of footage and I pieced together a little video, click the image below: Here are a few action photos of the Zero Gear party in progress, it was great to see people having fun!

SHHHHH!!!

ahahaha I just pictured these huge pinchers gripping the steering wheel, that would be the most awesome thing I have ever seen! this is a great idea too, I will try and throw something together when I have the time ( been very busy! ) ok, I was up late last night making a new character poster Robo Viking will pillage his way into your heart <3 small rez medium rez large rez

It's a neat idea, his head would not be very lizard shaped though, and his eyes would have to be close together at the front like everyone elses instead of towards the sides of his head. Brian got some of the rest of his network prediction smoothing code in last night and we were driving around with 3 people, the physics of the karts for the most part looks really smooth and awesome. There is still plenty of work to be done but I think we are off to a great start! I'm excited to make the video this weekend and show you guys!

thats a good idea too! You guys should help me with more ideas for characters . . . there is a limitation in that they have to be humanoid, and the have to be able to share the same basic body and head shape so that all the customization bits work across them all. It would be cool to do a ghost that is white and transparent and it looks like his gloves and accessories are floating on him

last time, I did not receive any cake, and I was told . . .

yea, his lower body is kinda screwed up when he is in the sitting position, I'm starting to think I should have modeled and posed them sitting to start with instead of standing. I am sharing a skeleton with all the characters though so I think it's something I can fix for all characters down the road. Luckily, you can't ever really see the bottom half of the characters when they are in the karts. Lets see whats on my list for the near future . . . finish polishing a little playground test map for the multiplayer test LAN this weekend (loop-de-loop!) adjust new character model to play nice with all the accessories (his eyes stick through everything!) write down the footage I need from the LAN to do some of the shots I want for the video investigate rendering a new character poster using robot ( would be neat to do one of every character ) start thinking about putting something placeholder at http://myzerogear.com start new character? ( skeleton I think! )

I use http://www.xnormal.net/ to create AO maps, it's ace!

all the colors are customizable

set up the color layer stuff this morning and got him all set up in-engine

basic texture, still deciding how I want to divide up the coloring customization areas. On to rigging!

unwrapped and AO bake base texture painting time

working on next character