Over the weekend I took some time to start replacing some of the placeholder graphics for the base Dirchie and Cadillac models. You can see in the screenshot that I’ve still got some smoothing groups to sort out (the outline shading is a bit corrupted on the engines) and the texture res is a bit high (the leopard skin aliases pretty bad).

This is the start of a 6 month push to finish it, time to knuckle down!

With getting up extra early today I finally managed to find some time to sit down for a session with 3DS Max 2010.

This is the result, obviously not textured yet, this is going to replace the place holder Dirchie head in Dirchie Kart. It’s a lot closer to the original concept in my head.

Feels good to finally start replacing the crappy placeholder art… plenty more to go.

Here’s some in game shots of the complete Rim It track, I’m pretty happy with it seeing it’s my first attempt, best of all it has set a strong visual style for the rest of the tracks. It’s quite fun to play, fast and furious, chaotic slidey action.

Unfortunately the AI can’t quite handle the slippery track, they still finish but aren’t very competitive, I might have to add a fiction coefficient element to their algorithm so they rubber band to the best line a little more.

I’m going to try a make a track a week, might be a tough schedule to keep but I’ll give it a crack.

Here’s a progress shot of the Rim It track model, it’s more Sarlacc pit and less anus now, perhaps too much… it’s a fine balance.

It’s early days yet but I started roughing out the first original track for Dirchie Kart this afternoon, it’s a slippery circular track called “Rim It”.  That pouting thing in the middle is going to get teeth and tentacles like the Sarlacc, so people don’t confuse it for something else.

I need to develop a more cartoony style for my texturing, it’s been a while since I’ve done any 3D modeling so I’m sure it’ll all some back to me soon enough.

Without realising it I spent most of the weekend working on Dirchie Kart, Thursday and Friday afternoons were short but fruitful code sessions on my new “Ghost racer based best racing line state machine AI”.

Yesterday was spent tuning the AI into the game and today was mostly garbage collection optimisations on the XBox 360 version, seems when I fixed my memory leak problem I created a garbage collection one instead.

The new opponents are surprisingly robust and challenging… probably too challenging for anyone new to the game (Something I’ll have to work on). They can’t use weapons yet, that’s another kettle of fish I’ll deal with later, for now I’m going nut out some more game-play by blowing the crap out these poor defenseless versions.

I’ve got some fire back in my belly for this project, it was lacking for a while there… stay tuned for some alpha test code soon.

I achieved one more step along the path to Dirchie AI nirvana this afternoon by implementing a time trial mode with a recorded ghost of your last best lap.

I was having all sorts of trouble getting the ghost to sync with the lap time, he was always a bit faster than you even if you beat his lap time. The solution was to put the game back into fixed time step mode (so your update method always runs at 60fps).

Good ole Shawny Hargreaves has a great article explaining how XNA handles it.

What does the ghost have to do with the AI? I’m planning on using the best ghost data as the optimum racing line for the AI drivers. How exactly I do this… I don’t know…. yet.

Inspired by the dodgie movie Death Race which I watch on the flight back the other week, I’ve re-jiggered the mechanics in the game.

Each kart has a health meter (the hearts for now) separate to the coins, once the health reaches 1 the boost is disabled on the kart. Oh there’s a smoke emitter hooked up to the health as well (The red Dirchie is damaged in the pic below). I’m about to implement a pit lane for each track which will re-charge the health and supply ammo.

You’ll also notice the skid marks are much nicer now, I’ve integrated them into the track texture better using a multi texturing technique.

For the first time in quite a while I sat down with my Wacom table and knocked out some art.

She’s only line work and blocked in colour so far but I think she’s looking pretty good.

One day she’ll star on your "My Games" menu on the Xbox 360… I can’t wait to see that!

I’m sure I saw a tumbleweed roll across this blog the other day… here’s a 1 minute sketch of a Bad Ass Dirchie head, I’m eventually going to model up a series of heads for people to choose from for their in game character.

At this point it’s only going to be heads, as a one man team I don’t have the resources to build to many in-game assets.

Pretty soon I’ve gotta give the sounds the once over, at the moment Dirchie Kart is a very quiet place, I’m thinking I’ll just record a heap of place holders of me making the sounds into the mic and adding them to the code.

Hopefully I’ll find someone that would like to replace them with proper sounds, if anyone knows of someone can they let me know?