Dilemma
Now here's a dilemma, I've been tinkering with the car's physics again as I've noticed a few annoying traits have popped up since my radical overhaul of the cars settings. One thing that was bugging me was the cars tendency to tip backwards during flight (the car being front engined, you'd expect the car to sink from the front as gravity took over) - but no, usually it just gave the player a view of the sky and that was about it. A bit useless whilst you're flying through the air at 180mph looking for where you're going to land...
So I spent some time trying to 'engineer' weight into the car by tweaking it's center of mass and then hoping that would give the desired effect. It didn't.
Moving the center of mass forwards in the car made the back a lot lighter, which resulted in some horrible steering characteristics. Not good. Back to the middle pesky center of mass..
And then I was stuck with a car that really liked looking at the sky.
I decided to put it all on hold and go and make a new track
"Track 3" as it's currently entitled is the Sega-Arcade "HARD" track. Although at present it's not all that hard. (there's a particularly difficult S bend section that is good, but otherwise there's no real problems) - that is until I added the jumps..
As you can see in the video, the track is an extremely early prototype. It doesn't have track sides, the track surface isn't detailed, and there's tree's growing through the track. Sure usual indie developers probably wouldn't put out a video of such shoddy quality, but hey, I'm not really an indie developer, just a guy making a game...
Back to my point..
I came up with the idea of Active Aero trim, activated only when in the air, the player can use the WASD keys to alter the pitch and roll (I'm toying with adding yaw in there too, but it might be a bit much!) - this is basically for advanced players who want to be able to 'tweak' their cars position during flight.
The balance here was to ensure that the player couldn't do any really silly moves in the air. No double summersaults in Stunt Car Online thank you very much. (Although believe me, I've been trying) - the key was to ensure the 'weight' felt right. And I think I've pretty much got it spot on.
Which brings me to my dilemma, is this stepping too far out of the realms of reality?? Does it detract from it being a pure racing game experience? or is it okay? - does it create a split between advanced players who can use it and people who just don't have the ambidextrous abilities to control four axis movements at once?
I think I'm falling on the side of leaving it. Certainly while I'm flying around the track, it doesn't feel like it's giving me much of advantage, but it's helping me stick my landings much more often and gives me at least some chance of landing a poor take off..
Oh, and before I go, please pop over to my Blog sometime as I've been working on the template (it's not finished, but hey, read above, probably shouldn't show this too early either) - but it's a sneak preview of the "page that will become www.stuntcaronline.com" very soon. (when the game is released)
Once again, thanks for the positive comments and feedback, it really does help me keep motivated! - Please please help me and continue to spread the word. Thanks.
I'll have to say no to the Active Aero trim, unless the car had thrusters at the sides that explain that capability. But that is too crazy for me :P
Good job as always pal!