Skip to main content

Criterium: Game Mechanics

I'm considering game mechanics related to cycling.  First up is gearing: should the player control the gears, or should this be automatic?  Gearing would definitely give more realism, but might be clunky for the player.

A mechanic I definitely want to use is drafting.  I figure it's relatively easy to do this: draw a ray along the bike's velocity vector.  If it doesn't hit another bike in front within a certain distance (say, 2 meters) then apply a small aerodynamic friction force in the opposite direction of the velocity vector.  Did you know the drag coefficient of a bicycle + rider is about 0.9?

Finally, the user has to have some control over power the cyclist is expending.  I'll probably display some kind of heart rate counter as an indicator of effort, and possibly a stamina indicator that's proportional to lactic acid buildup.  This will keep the player from sprinting through the whole race!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lua-Style Coroutines in C++

Lua's implementation of coroutines is one of my all-time favorite features of the language. This (short) paper explains the whole reasoning behind the Lua's coroutine implementation and also a little about the history of coroutines. Sadly, coroutines are not supported out-of-the box by many modern languages, C++ included. Which brings me to the subject of this post: Lua-style coroutines in C++! For those who don't know (or were too lazy to read the paper!), Lua's coroutines support three basic operations: Create: Create a new coroutine object Resume: Run a coroutine until it yields or returns Yield: Suspend execution and return to the caller To implement these three operations, I'll use a great header file: ucontext.h. #include <vector> #include <ucontext.h> class Coroutine { public: typedef void (*Function)(void); Coroutine(Function function); void resume(); static void yield(); private: ucontext_t context_; std

Password Generator for Chrome

This week, I finally got fed up with typing in/managing passwords on a billion different sites. Since things like OpenID haven't really taken off, I decided to take matters into my own hands...and write a password generator extension for Google Chrome. There are actually a ton of such apps on the Chrome web store, but I'm paranoid about security, so I wrote my own and open-sourced it. By virtue of being open source, perhaps people will trust my version a bit more. Anyway, the extension is available here , and the source code is hosted at github . May all your online transactions be secure! UPDATE: Fixed github link.

Sparse Voxel Octrees

Terrain implementation for games is a subject with a lot of depth. At the surface, it's very easy to get rudimentary terrain working via a noise function and fixed triangle grid. As you add more features, though, the complexity builds quickly. Overhangs, caves Multiple materials Destructive terrain Collision detection Persistence Dynamic loading Regions, biomes Very large scale Smooth features Sharp features Dynamic level of detail Extremely long view distances In isolation, each of these features can make terrain difficult to implement. Taken together, it takes a lot of care and attention to make it all work. Minecraft is probably the canonical example for terrain generation in the last generation of games. In fact, I'd say Minecraft's terrain is the killer feature that makes the game so great. Minecraft does an excellent job at 1-8, but for a recent planetary renderer project I was working on, I really wanted 9-12 too. In a series of articles, I'm planning to break do