Mud madness dirt cross car racing game

Hey everyone!

Congrats to the winners of the Burnin Rubber contest! Good job!

Last couple of weeks I’ve been working on the Mud Madness Dirt Cross Car Race game.

I did some optimizing off the tracks, made some small menu changes and animations.

But now I’m going to show you some of the menu backgrounds I made.

I started with making a nice setup for my menu background. Used one of our tracks, placed some cars in it and played with the camera a bit 'till I got the view I wanted.

Then I made a print screen of the viewport in 3Ds max and placed it as my background of the menu. 

You have all seen this in my last blog post. This is how it looked like:

Step 1

After I made the environment a bit smoother, I rendered the diffuse map without the cars first.

I need those separated in the photoshop file.

Step 2

After that I placed a direct light and renderd the shadows, then I rendered it with a skylight, then an ambient occlusion map.

After some work in Photoshop, I got this as a result:

 

Step 3

Now it was time to start rendering the cars. First I made the cars a bit smoother.

I decided to render the front car as first, then the cars in the back. And just like the environment I rendered the diffuse map first, then a render with a skylight and an ambient occlusion map.

After some work in photoshop I got this result:

 

Step 4

Now it was time to add everything in one photoshop file and add some dirt spats, mud, etc. So it would feel like an action shot and not a fancy rendered background.

 

Final!

That’s all for now!

Hails,

Eugène

Mockup using loft

Hi there!

First I want to tell you that our new car crash game Traffic Slam 3 has been released! It is free to play, so check it out and have fun :)! It was a fun project to work on, I also learned a few new things here and there during development.

Of course we haven't been sitting around eating sandwiches with chees on top.. No.. we have started a new project and I've been working on the mockup environment to be used in the alpha version. It is a bit of a unique project compared to our usual games we make. Such as a racing or a shooter game. It is a more 'move from point a to point b' kind of game, which I like.

I want to show you a quick trick on how I made the mockup. The level is a kind of 'path' from the start location towards the end. The 'path' is the main part of the environment, everything is built around it. I made a spline using the shape tools in 3dsmax. Then I used a compound object called 'Loft', to generate the main path mesh from the spline. 

Loft also has the ability to auto generate UV coordinates which is very nice. When generating a mesh from the spline you have to tell the loft modifier what kind of mesh 'slice' or mesh 'shape' you want to use. I made it way wider than the road would be most of the time. Then I deleted moest of the widest parts again, except for the places where I wanted them to be. 

Next to the ground mesh of the mockup I also worked on the placement of some of the assets we want the level to have. And made one part of the level more detailed, to give ourselves an idea of what it could look like in the final stages.

Thats it for now! Until next time,

Joep

Mud Racing Madness

Hi guys!

A new update for one of our upcoming releases!

One of our race games! And no not BR5!

Our mud racer! The game is making lots of progress the last couple of weeks.

Most of the art is almost finished but the finishing touch is still missing. So we are very busy with finalizing my code and tweak/improve the texture. And of course most important, the performance.

We are trying to get the best out of Flash 3d and the last week it was very challenging for myself to improve my code. A nice project to keep myself busy for a week:) 

We need to know on what environment type we are driving, driving on different types of environment means different settings. In water we need more drag, on oil it needs to be uncontrollable. So the detection of different types of environments is very important since it changes your car behavior. In the beginning we just had those 2, but later on we got more. So the system had to be improved! There are several ways to do this but I choose to check on mesh names

Easy way and quick way:) since we already know we have collision with the ground.. The only thing we need to do is slice the ground in more parts.

When we know the type of ground we can give the car a new set of properties. Those settings can be like  drag, speed limiter, sound, particles, etc..

So since I'm working on this part of improvement, my brother Eugene is improving the tracks that were created. Mostly to slice the parts and duplicate so we can use those for our physics system.

I'm not going into details but it's easier for flash that those models will have less triangles.

Everyone good luck with the BR5 contest!!

One last image:)

Greeting, Michael

BURNIN' RUBBER 5 CONTEST

See this image?

Will these guys reward you with a special BR5 prize?

It's hidden somewhere in Burnin' Rubber 4.

1. Go find it and make a screenshot.

2. Post your screenshot on the Xform Facebook page. Post it BEFORE friday February 8 of this year.

3. Our panel of judges will pick a winner.

4. The winner will get a special reward in BURNIN RUBBER 5!!!


HINT:


Search everywhere...

So, what are you waiting for?

Go, go... GO!!!

Play Burnin' Rubber 4 now: http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/burnin-rubber-4.jsp

This one's for the fans!

For all those fans that are yearning for the release of Burnin' Rubber 5:
Don't worry! We did NOT stop the development.

In fact, the guys here are still working on it, like crazy.
And I can tell you: the game is going to be great! But great is just not good enough for this final episode in our trilogy. BR5 simply needs to be epic! And more.
So that's why we're still busy with tweaking.
And tweaking.
And some more tweaking.
And balancing.
And adding special content.

But in the meantime we will arrange something special for you.
Something that did never ever happened before in the Burnin' Rubber history...

Xform proudly presents: 

THE BIG BURNIN' RUBBER CONTEST!!!














A contest for the biggest BR5 fans.
A contest in which you can win an epic price.

We will SOON reveal the rules, how to participate and the price you can win!
Sounds awesome? It is!

So please keep checking our Facebook fanpage for more info: https://www.facebook.com/Xform

Cheers,
Shirley

Trick trails

Dear readers,

First of all we're happy to inform you that Traffic Slam 3 has just been released! You can play it here. I really enjoyed working on Traffic Slam 3 and think it's absolutely a worthy successor of Traffic Slam 2.

In the meantime I've been working on a snowboard game, which is nearing completion. In this game you'll be going through the city and completing challenges. Some challenges are completed by getting a certain score, others by doing certain kind of tricks. With every kind of trick you score points. Needless to say, doing tricks is the main goal of the game. As such, tricks should look cool and be fun to do. Besides making the animations cool, we've also added trails when doing tricks. The trails are added to the hands and the board and only show when a trick is being done. An example is shown below:

Player doing a trick with trails showing the movement of the board and hands.

So how do we create these trails? The trail is a mesh (a strip of triangles) that is updated each frame: whenever the object that the trail is following moves the trail is updated. It generates new vertices on the position where the followed object is now and updates old vertices (setting vertex colors for a fading trail and eventually removing them). It is also important that the generated trail does not create its vertices on one plane but rather banks with the followed object as can be seen below:

A trial is made out of a mesh as shown by the blue lines.

And of course for any kind of feature you create, you should ask yourself: could it be useful in future games as well? If so: can the feature be made generic (to a certain extent and without using too much time) so that parameters can be tweaked. For the trails the answer is yes: trails are pretty common in games. Parameters for the trail can be the trail width, fade speed, color, etc.

-- Stijn

Who's the boss?

A few weeks back we playtested one of our games currently in development, although the game already is pretty awesome we felt it didn't end good. It was ok but not the awesome ending you expect from an awesome epic game :). That's why we sat around the table with a few beers and discussed how it should end. After the vodka bottles, we ended up with lots of crazy ideas and, finally picked one....the craziest one of course! I don't want to spoil it for you and give away too much details about the boss, but I can tell you it's a huge vehicle which the player has to enter and work it's way to the top.

We needed to test this idea as soon as possible before creating the final art and realizing it wasn't such a good idea after all. I quickly blocked out a prototype of the boss in 3ds Max, imported it into an existing level. Once in the game, it's much easier for instance to determine the objects scale and internal tunnel and room sizes.



Mockup of the boss

Once that was done, it was time to think about how split the whole thing up into boss 'building blocks'. In the image above, you can see two building blocks: a tunnel-segment and a door. When I was satisfied with that, I created an initial version of the texture. First collected some style reference though! It's imperative that you unwrap all segments first before copying them. That's what I'm doing now. When that's done, I can weld them all together and do some final modeling and texturing of stuff I can't do with the building blocks. Then we test it some more, and then we can do the lighting for the whole thing!

Building blocks

Lucky for me, I have 2 other guys working on some other neat stuff going on in the boss fight (can't tell too much about it right now ;)). Awesome!!!

Matt