Zero Gear - an indie multiplayer kart racing game

[zaphod]

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.

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!

[Nysuatro]

Yes, the installer. It worked on vista, but I formatted to windows 7 and now it freezes on the installation.

[zaphod]

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

[Nineaxis]

Game is pretty fun other than the lag issues. And using boost while in reverse is kind of fail.

[Pampers]

would be nice to have race times at the end of the races

[zaphod]

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

[Bic-B@ll]

yay, i got in. whe i al tabbed out and right clicked te item in the task bar to full screen it crashed. how do i fullscreen the game? making fullscreen = yes in the settings doesn do anything.

quick observations: mini map is crucial, i want to know which way the next turn is

it would be nice if the item boxes displayed whats inside, you wont notice until last second and some people might sway for another one or fight for the better item, you already have the icons made

there is no penalty for going off the track and cutting corners

[Pericolos0]

yay, i got in. whe i al tabbed out and right clicked te item in the task bar to full screen it crashed. how do i fullscreen the game? making fullscreen = yes in the settings doesn do anything.

You have to restart the game for some settings to take effect

quick observations: mini map is crucial, i want to know which way the next turn is

really? I thought the tracks were pretty easy to understand . Maybe it would be cool to see the locations of your opponents though!

there is no penalty for going off the track and cutting corners

the terrain is rougher and you go slower if you go off the track (not in all tracks i think though?)

[cincinnati]

is there a way to know who is in back of you and what they're doing (a mirror)? if not, i think one is sorely needed. would ramp up the strategy.

fun diversion into something that wouldn't normally interest me. really nice work so far.

[zaphod]

4 days after our beta went live we have a new update for everyone! Here is the changes:

1.0.1.0 Change Log

* Kart physics modified, the kart is much heavier now as well as other subtle tweaks

* Air steering is now only engaged by pressing the steer direction after leaving the ground

* Some maps updated to work better with new kart physics

* Camera adjustments, closer to kart, fixed distance, crosshair added to aim mode

* Ice cube will not ice the player who dropped it behind them when it obviously shouldn't

* Win score changed from 500 to 400 in Tag mode

* All players given springs in Target mode and bumpers removed until they are functional again

* Soccer ball/hockey puck larger and easier to hit

* Country code added to the server browser so you can see how close a server is to you

* Rank sorted correctly in the server browser now

* Setting added to enable the screen blur effect on boost as some players were reporting problems

* The game responds to input correctly after closing the settings or server GUI while in game

* The map change timer works correctly in the server settings GUI

* Map name and server name added to the player roster GUI

* Laps/Place GUI is now visible in spectator mode

* The goal GUI now tells the user which goal they need to shoot the ball/puck into

* The signal GUI will warn the user if they connect to a server with a very large ping

* Upon pressing the reset key, a GUI pops up to notify the user they will soon be reset

* GUI is now visible in Skate

* Newb loading screen key layout image simplified

* Music updated and Hyperduck accessory added (quack quack!!)

* Sound errors no longer print out to the log which seems to prevent the game from slowing down over time

* Bug in sound priority system fixed which should prevent more important sounds (music, engine noises, etc) from cutting out on some sound cards

* Fixed the "Failed to find receive data peer" bug that happened sometimes after exiting the game and starting it again quickly

Go check it out!

[Zyn]

Sweet. Saw invites are up again, downloading right now

[Lord Ned]

Couple quick crits before I go back and play some more:

Hard to figure out which team you're on in the Soccer gamemode... Maybe colored flags on the back of the cars?

I had something else but I forgot it so..

[zaphod]

yea, we hear that a lot. If you look at the top of the screen there is an outline around your team score and some text as to what goal to hit the ball into - but short of something on the character itself it seems like most people are not going to get it.

[zaphod]

here are a few gameplay videos I capped yesterday:

[Nineaxis]

Here's a quick Chute Shoot video: