Meltdown Interactive Media is proud to present our upcoming title, Monster Truck Racing Arenas.
This will be an arcade game with a few simulation elements thrown in.
There will be 7 tracks and over 40 upgrades you can purchase between races to upgrade your vehicle.
Online multiplayer will be implemented via uLink.
Check out our graphics overhaul, we are completely re-doing the tracks and environments!
We re-wrote the Unity Car Tutorial in C# as a code base then heavily modified it to suit our needs.
For the AI we used the UnitySteer libraries and of course have modified that a bit as well.
Hehe the orange truck is the ‘Meltdown’ truck .
I thought it would be nice in the gameplay video to see the vehicle recovery and what happens if you don’t play nicely
Personally I would add more dust/dirt effects. The track looks so muddy, yet everything seems really clean. Also possible an effect after jumping? Just to increase the feeling of realness for the car. That said it already seems pretty good. There are so many unity made games where the characters dont feel “real” because they lack animation, the speed is off in relation to the animation speed, and so on. Just one thing can ruin the impression. This on the other hand has a good, real feel to it.
Thanks for the feedback. I will admit, the video does hide much of the mud/dust effects. On the mud terrain in the video, I have a bit of dust (not much in mud), and lots of chunky mud particles, although the video does mask them somehwat. But I will take your suggestion to heart and add even a bit more. What do you mean an effect after jumping? Like a splash of some sort?
Yep. For example a gigant creature becomes more believable if theres dust and noises whenever it stomps on the ground. To a certain degree its the same for your vehicles after jumping. It really doesnt have to be much, just some dust/dirt/water flying up, so you go"hell yeah, nice jump!".
IDK, I think it’s fine. It’s hard to say what someone playing the game would expect. I played Microsoft’s Monster Truck madness when it came out and I can’t even remember if it kicked up dirt or not. If you watch this video, the treads get covered with dirt after awhile and yes, they do kick up a little dirt when they land, but not a whole lot.
I didn’t take note of what multiplayer solution is being implemented until MooseMouse brought it up - and the fact that I’m researching multiplayer solutions today, but why did you choose Photon over uLink?
The issue that I’m concerned about in my racing game is player-player collision physics, and I don’t quite understand what multiplayer solution best addresses the issue given the trade-offs. The impression I got from several different sources, is from a feature perspective, uLink is the way to go because it is fully authoritative and very robust, where as other solutions are not. And then I read this ‘Why you’ll love uLink’ PDF and think, “Gee, do I really have much of a choice?”
I’ve spent the last 5 hours doing tutorials and research on uLink.
What’s great is the CEO responds to any of my emails in minutes!
uLink right now is looking like a much more polished product over Photon.
It is more diverse and seems more powerful.
The big letdown for me with Photon is their ‘cloud’ hosting only has servers in the Netherlands. That means people elsewhere in the world will have high latency. Whereas uLink has partnered with game-hosting.eu to effectively use their cloud which is really everywhere in the world and they have serious hardware. So as it stands uLink is the way to go. Thanks lockbox for mentioning it
Same here. Been checking out the tutorials, documentation and different products MuchDifferent offers for like the last 4 hours…
Funny enough, I’m using Photon Cloud as well atm, but I might make the switch. Sometimes its hard to tell if a company is just fancy website, nothing really behind it or if there’s real quality. Well, so far all the opinions, the documentation and the API (OMG yes!), really seem to suggest that they indeed deliver what they promise. Also note that they are a non-profit organization that doesn’t rub it in your face. You gotta appreciate that.
Slightly less offtopic: Note that with uLink you could run for example serverside physics, since uLink can run headless instances of your game. I can think of some nice ways to make use of physics in a game like yours - Although that might turn it more into a funracer
