Formula V status update

Although we have been regularly tweeting about the work being done on our game, it has been a while since we have posted here. Time to do it!

A lot has improved since the last WIP demo. In addition to things already reported about like several spoons of visual sugar (TVs, drones, crash animations, trail particles, bullet time and full screen support), there are quite a bit of things that have changed during the last month.

AI difficulty

The game now supports 10 different difficulty levels. They are selectable before each race. For now, the difficulty only affects the way the AI handles corners.

The easier difficulty levels handle corners by braking enough to be able to stay at the center of the track as much as possible:

On the other extreme, the harder difficulty approaches corners as fast as possible:

No artificial speed reduction or increment is applied to make the AI easier or harder. And no form of rubber banding is coded. We hope to be able to keep it this way unless balancing the game gets too complicated once more tracks are added to it.

Race classes

There are now four race classes to select from plus an unlockable one. They set the top speed of the racers.

• Junior League   (345 Km/h)
• Formula A           (375 Km/h)
• Formula B           (405 Km/h)
• Formula V           (430 Km/h)
• Experimental    (? Km/h, Unlockable)

For comparison, the previous demo has only one top speed at 230 Km/h. 

Following are a few examples of the different speed levels.

Junior League class:

* Preorder to get access to the Mouser Cursor racer! (Exclusive to the Virtual Boy) ;-)

Formula V class:

Experimental class:

New AI behavior

While adding difficulty levels we noticed that the way the AI was implemented was not working well enough to support them. That first implementation used steering behaviors to drive the AI around the track. With steering behaviors, the AI set a target and applied a force towards it. Then, the racer's direction was simply synchronized with its body's velocity. This made the AI to work differently than the player's racer. The AI had no constraint on the amount of rotation required to point to the desired target while the player's racer has first to rotate towards it at a fixed speed. Therefore, the AI had unlimited rotation speed.

That gave an unfair advantage to the AI and made it behave very differently. So, we rebuilt the AI to make it physically work as the player's racer. So, it now has the same speed constraint as the player when rotating and it can only apply a forward force. This has, among others, the effect of making the AI to drift around the corners like the player's racer.

Getting the AI to move was the easy part; making it to handle the curves, not so much. It took us a while to figure out how to account for the different top speeds, acceleration rates, masses, friction coefficients and steering attributes among the racers while approaching the corners to make all the racers to go around the track, while at the same time avoiding other racers, without crashing against the walls all the time. But it seems that we have nailed it.

Not only did this change enabled us to more easily balance the difficulty levels and to have more than one top speed available, but it also brought a massive performance improvement, making the game to run almost flawlessly on hardware even with all racers on screen at once.

Time trial ghost

Another feature that we wanted to include for a long time was a ghost of your best lap during time trials to race against, since we have big, global plans for it. Finally, we have implemented a local ghost that will require SRAM support.

New rotations

After testing affine rotations for the racers, we decided to increase the number of pre-rendered frames to have smoother rotations. Previously, the sprites for the racers had 16 frames each; now, they have 64 frames.

Here is a comparison of the old rotations:

With the new ones:

New racers

Since we now support 7 AI opponents during races, it just made sense to have 8 different racer models. So, we have implemented 2 more, which you can spot in this post's feature image. Their appearance is not final yet, but apart from that, they're fully working.

New title screen

We plan to have "pilot data" information on the title screen to personalize every single CIB copy of Formula V. Buyers will find their name, portrait and some stats on the title screen of their personal copy. These will be burned into the ROM. The nickname, which will be shown in best time tables, can be changed. 

That is all for now! We plan to have soon a new WIP demo for our Beta Testers. In the mean time, take a look at a couple of full races with the new settings in our Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIJ4GWiFUyA 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi0Rxa-VCSw 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCne21uFij_Z4oPh4sDvVtmA