School's Out! - WIP Track

[kiwi]

Thread closed, because the track is not WIP anymore.
Go to the new thread

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Hello Re-Volters!

For the ones who did not check Discord's #track channel, I want to give also here in this forum some informations about my upcoming track, which will be called School's Out!.

The last day of school is over. What about using the local high school for some cool RC car races? Driving through the classrooms, the gym, the outdoor sports field, as well the sourrounding neighborhood. This track is meant to be an ultimate tribute to the game we all love. Highly influenced by custom stock-like gems like PetroVolt or Quake!, the track is also using well-known parts from Toys in the Hood and Supermarket.

Hardcore AI made by Whitedoom!
About 100.000 polygons packed in a 1500 meter long raceline!
A lot of Re-Volt themed eastereggs to find!

The track is about 99% done, and I'm fine-adjusting and testing things at the moment.

Here some in-game-screenshots:

The starting area...



Last day at the Phippen-Harrison High School!



Yay, the last day of school is over!



The Gym: Home of the local High School Basketball-Team - the sensational Angry Pangas!



Who is recognising this part of the track?



Even parts of the classical Supermarket tracks will be included!



That is how it looks below the streets of Toys in the Hood 1!



Thanks a lot Alexander, for giving me the chance re-using your wonderfull Skatepark F20 assets!



Next week I will try to post a video of the full raceline here in this thread.

The track will be released in the next few weeks, in a RVZ near you. So stay tuned!

Happy 20th Anniversary, Re-Volt!

Kiwi

[607]

:D

[kiwi]

As promised, here are two videos with some in-game footage from School's Out!.

First, a Time Trial lap on the normal version of the track, using SNW35.



Second, a 1-lap Singleplayer race with Harvester, on the Reverse version of the track.



The track is now about 99,5 % done. I'm fine adjusting small things together with my Beta-testers at the moment. Also, the AI-nodes which will be done by Whitedoom are still completly missing in this version of the track. The AI you can see in the second video are some very basic ones, so don't worry about the mistakes they are making. This will be solved in the final version for sure.

[Pyves]

I like how you're reusing elements from other popular tracks, including the stock ones. It looks fun to race. I'm somewhat surprised by the cloudy/gloomy atmosphere. When I read the title, I was expecting something very sunny and warm, with sprinklers and a lot of light. As in "the summer holidays are finally here"!

[kiwi]

Yes, the gloomy sky was something I was not sure since the beginning of the project. It's an adjusted sky from Toytanic 2. Personally I liked the contrast between the dark sky and the bright streets and so on. Such situations can happen also in real, if there is a storm coming soon. For me such situations are summer as well, cause they are quite common where I live.

However, I did a small survey in Discord.

5 People preferred a complete sunny blue sky
12 People preferred a little bit toned-down blue, with some small clouds
13 People preferred exactly the sky as you can see on the screenshots (gloomy)

So I decided the following: There will be a difference between the normal version and the reversed version of the track. The normal version will have the toned-down blue sky, and the R-version will have the gloomy sky. I also added some other things in the R-version, which will give you even more this "storm is coming" feeling. You can hear a thunder growling in the back, and sometimes there is already lightning. As a bonus, the pickup-placement is done in a way, so the race will have much more chaos, than at the normal version...

[kiwi]

Gotolei made same awesome shading for School's Out!. Look at the tree shadows on the streets for example...Wow! Thank you so much, Gotolei. I also have a new video for you. At this 2-lap Singleplayer Race with Adeon, you can see the AI made by Whitedoom in action.



And here are two screenshots, where you can see the shading:





The track is 100% finished from my side. At the moment I'm only waiting for Whitedoom and LM to finish the R-version AI-nodes and Cam-nodes. I hope I can release the track end of January, latest first week of February.

[ZipperZbieracz]

That is stunning! I haven't seen shadows like that before, it's taking RVGL to the limits. It could be only better with shadows moving together with the leaves, but obviously trees and bushes are stationary. This track will surely be a new experience to drive around, a new experience in a 20 year old game.

[URV]

In theory, it would be possible to have the leaves move around, both the actual leaves and their shadows (custom model animation + texture animation). That might end up being a monumental effort if done manually though, so I'd only leave that for a future update when we've got a way to automate it.

Of course, animated shadows like those wouldn't actually be shown on the cars, but it'd probably still be worth it just for the visuals. I assume not all of the shadows have their own shadowboxes anyway, since it would be quite a bit of effort to include them all.

Either way, agreed, it looks stunning! I hope these kind of shadows are going to become the norm, honestly.

[kiwi]

By the way. This kind of shadows - or let’s say the technic how they are made - have also 2 or 3 major downsides.

1) The shadows are textures. And this textures are mapped on translucent polygons placed slightly above the „real“ tracks surface. This means, an aweful lot of translucent polygons have to be rendered. The legacy (non-shader) renderer from RVGL can‘t handle this amount, which ends in graphical glitches (ugly flickering). However, the shader renderer is RVGL standard since some time, but there are still some players around who have shaders not activated. I really hope, that less and less people will race with the legacy renderer in the future. Nowadays tracks are often made for the shader renderer in mind, and it‘s really a pain to always have take care also for people who don‘t use it, as it limits the possibilities and mean a lot lot lot of extra work and testing needed.

2) The technic as described above also have another downside: Using the shockwave-weapon at a area where the shadows are, produce a strange effect. The reason for this is, that the shockwave deform the polygons on it‘s way. As the shadows are located on polygons very slightly above the real tracks surface, both polygons will be deformed, and collide/overlap. Watch the video at my above post, and you can see the result in the last lap, last corner. (Around minute 4:50)

3) The amount of polygons generally increase by using this technic. Before the shading was done, School‘s Out! had about 90.000 polys, now it‘s around 110.000. This is no problem if the track is optimized well (using ViziBoxes and WorldCut for example), but it can lead to low fps at low-end hardware.

[Gotolei]

[Not mentioned in this thread yet, but it's been released on RVZ now]

There's actually a tradeoff between things wrt the shockwave: if the shadow mesh matches up with the base mesh, then the shadows get pulled around just the same and the shockwave effect doesn't have any artifacts. At places like the lawns, where the mesh isn't planar at all and couldn't be optimized, the shockwave appears just fine. But at places where it has been optimized, like the skate park and some of the brick walls, it's visible because the shadow mesh has less definition than the mesh below. So it can either be many more shadow polygons added (I think I optimized the shadows down to about 30% of what they originally were, as planar areas allowed) or the shockwave artifact. As mentioned elsewhere, though, fixing the shockwave would mean starting the whole shadowing process nearly from the beginning again.

One thing I'd be curious about for the future is how to merge the base texture and the shadows together, and remap whole islands of mesh to just have the the shadows drawn directly on. That'd technically be workable because we have more texture slots available nowadays and each can go up to 8192x, but then again that'd mean a number of huge images (turns out, pure black color that just changes on the alpha layer compresses down quite well, but full-color stuff not as much).

And yeah, it's maybe possible to have the leaves in the trees move around now that we have animated objects, but having the shadows on the ground actually move would be a massive pain in the neck and the amount of texanim data would probably be huge as well.

The track as a whole turned out quite well! I always have a hard time with the construction site exit of the sewer because it was designed to be a braking zone instead of a flat-out transition area, the u-turn in the market area duct is darker than I'd personally like, and the jump from the sidewalk to the supermarket is rather awkward, but other than that I'd have to pretty much nitpick to find problems with it.

[Huki]

From the readme:

+ In the gym area it can happen, that the car shadow dissapears for a short period of time. The reason for this error is unknown.

This can happen when the collision poly goes too much under the world poly. I reported a similar issue in Spa-Volt 1.

***

The boat here has no collision. It's possible for the car to fall through it before being auto-respawned. I feel that it breaks immersion.



I just remembered: I'm guessing RVGL doesn't support collision for the Boat object? If this is the case, I'll look into it. If there are any other objects that can use collision but currently do not support them, let me know.

***

Last note, I dislike the use of auto-respawning. I'd prefer the existence of natural barricades to prevent cars from venturing out of the explorable world. For me this is a crucial difference between stock tracks and customs, because it's extremely rare to find auto-respawns in stock tracks.

[ZipperZbieracz]

The sign's legs do not meet the ground here.


The ladder here has an entire collision wall, only the bars should have collision not the area between them.


Not sure if it's a glitch or not, but often the car gets slightly bumped (= tilted in the air) at the edge of that ramp. In most of cases that causes landing on 4 wheels, but rarely it can cause a more random landing. This could be looked at whether there is some unintended face or an edge at the tip of the ramp.

[ZipperZbieracz]

More finds, some of them could be fixed, some maybe not if they are very far away from the racing line.

I haven't noticed Stingox and L!lmexican graffitis anywhere so far.


Is this shadow correct? Maybe the sun shines from a different angle than in Nhood1 then it means it is correct.


Panga here has no collision, some player could get rocketed/shockwaved into it and fly through it.


The interiors of the trolleys have no collision, some player could get unlucky and should get stuck inside them, now he would go through them.


The fence near the WD graffiti has no collision.


The interior of the truck near the WD graffiti has no collision.


The fence and the bush near the WD graffiti has no collision, the other 2 fences with bushes (near the main racing line) have collision.


Only the pole has collision, the basketball net and board have none.


I'd de-merge the 2 white-red bars here, it is visible they are artificially merged together. Pushing them a bit apart would be fine.


Posted this earlier, but I think this is important: the fence around the skateboard part is a plain hitbox, rather than only the bars. If someone gets through the fence he'she shouldn't, the person would just have to press repo.


The construction machines here lack hitboxes-collision, these 2 are not close to the racing line.



Posted this earlier, but I think this is important for racing-wise and immersion and cohesion: the water hoses and their collision should match. The collision is way higher than the hoses themselves. Everywhere around and on the "outside football field". Will be much better this way, if the collision would fit the size of the hose – the car could sometimes get barely across it, right now it is a high, rather impassable wall.

[kiwi]

Thanks to everyone for your reports so far.

I will consider as much as possible for the planned update, which will also include the Reverse version.

The boat here has no collision. It's possible for the car to fall through it before being auto-respawned. I feel that it breaks immersion. I just remembered: I'm guessing RVGL doesn't support collision for the Boat object? If this is the case, I'll look into it. If there are any other objects that can use collision but currently do not support them, let me know.

Yes Huki, the boat1 and boat2 objects does not support ncp collision. It would be great to see ncp support for this objects someday. If I provide the ncps for the boat objects now, I didn't have to update the track later, as soon you've implemented this feature, right?

Also the planet objects does not have collisions, but with the customized objects animation feature, this is no longer a problem.

Is this shadow correct? Maybe the sun shines from a different angle than in Nhood1 then it means it is correct.

Yes, the sun is coming from a different side than at Hood1. I think the shadows should be correct everywhere, but if you spot anything, please tell me.

Posted this earlier, but I think this is important: the fence around the skateboard part is a plain hitbox, rather than only the bars. If someone gets through the fence he'she shouldn't, the person would just have to press repo.

Hmm, I had implemented this already, but it seems it got lost somehow. Will definitly implement this again. Thanks for the notification.

Posted this earlier, but I think this is important for racing-wise and immersion and cohesion: the water hoses and their collision should match. The collision is way higher than the hoses themselves. Everywhere around and on the "outside football field". Will be much better this way, if the collision would fit the size of the hose – the car could sometimes get barely across it, right now it is a high, rather impassable wall.

I thought a lot about this, and I will think about it once more. I think I will do it the way you described. I implemented the "wall" collisions, to get rid of the collision issues I got when driving above the hose.

Nearly all your other comments was related to things which was intended. I removed a lot of NCP collisions at areas where no car normally will go. Yes, if using the training mode and exploring the track, this is an issue, but while a normal race it isn't. However, I will think about this once more. I think I will remove a lot of repo-boxes in the update, and also will add more collisions, so the track can be investigated better. The immersion will be better then, I hope. (This also goes to the things Huki commented on).

[ZipperZbieracz]

Also not only the boat doesn't have the collision, the blue cans do not have collision as well.

[kiwi]

The blue cans are boat objects I've reused, to get them shaking.

In the Makeitgood Objects Mode it looks like this...

[Huki]

I noticed a visibox glitch from this angle:



***

Panga here has no collision, some player could get rocketed/shockwaved into it and fly through it.

Also, the panga's hind legs can intersect with the platform below, so it should be heightened a bit.

[ZipperZbieracz]

A small thing that maybe could be improved, maybe not regarding the AI in the stairs inside school part:

I've seen some AI cars driving with 2 wheels on the stairs and with 2 wheel above the ramp, what causes them to flip over. Maybe something could be done to remedy this, splitting the ai paths or something to make the AI avoid driving over the edges of the stairs and the ramp.

In this spot here, maybe the same about the equivalent spot on the right side.

[Alex]

I'm very happy me insulting my friend cliact made it in through the Skatepark F20 assets. It's ok though because he deserves it. Certainly not the first or last time I insulted him in texture files.

[ZipperZbieracz]

The bottom of the trash bin has either no texture, or it is pureblack = transparent. It clearly has collision though.

[ZipperZbieracz]

Posting a major issue: the ramp at it's left part extends from the floor, thus cars trying to get onto it will crash.

[kiwi]

Thank you for all this new reports. I got the Reverse-nodes from Whitedoom today, so I hope I can release the updated version of the track later this weekend. If anybody find anything else, now it's the last chance to tell it to me. Thanks all!

[kiwi]

Here is a video of the work in progress R-version of the track.



I will release the update tomorrow, which will include a lot of bugfixes and other small adjustments.

[javildesign]

If anybody find anything else, now it's the last chance to tell it to me. Thanks all!

Hope it's not too late, but found some weird collision on the laying trashcan.
https://imgur.com/a/tBflAiZ

[607]

Thanks for not sticking to the 15MB limit in the end, by having players download the music track from elsewhere!
I was afraid you wouldn't be able to add in the missing collisions and might even have to remove more, because of being against the RVZ file size limit and getting a longer music track.