Hi there everyone! After almost 3 months with no news, I've finally added 2 events to the game: racing and FreeStyle, and lots of additions and improvements!
RACING
Racing is the regular type: get to finish line first, that's the only rule in this game. The other types of racing events will come very soon!
FREESTYLE
The FreeStyle event is very similar to monster truck events where the driver has 2 minutes to perform tricks and score points. Although 2 minutes is the standard time, you can set the event duration from 1 minute to how much you want. The FreeStyle event and arena are best enjoyed with the Monster Truck, but you are free to try it with any vehicle.
There are 8 types of tricks, and bonus points for performing 3 different types of tricks in the same event, and bonus for performing all the possible tricks in the same event!
The 2 minutes standard time has bronze, silver and gold scores so that you know how good you are.
Can you make a gold score?!
From a coding and organization structure point of view, the game now is ready to receive more events, so that the next updates bringing more events will come very soon!
CROWD
One of the big additions of this update is that the TrackMaster stadium is no more empty! An excited and noisy crowd is filling the arena. They will react to every trick you perform succesfully or every failure in FreeStyle events, and every hit and crash in racing events.
Of course you can set the crowd sound volume, and even the crowd amount in the stadium, in the OPTIONS MENU, since this last one affects performance.
MINIMAP
Another addition is a minimap:
VERTICAL OR HORIZONTAL SPLIT SCREEN
When playing in local multiplayer, you can now set the split screen separation to be vertical or horizontal. This affects 2 and 3 player split screen. The option is in the GRAPHICS section of the OPTIONS MENU.
VERTICAL SPLIT SCREEN
HORIZONTAL SPLIT SCREEN
PHYSICS FPS
An update that impacts gameplay and performance is the possibility to choose the physics FPS (frames per second) of the game. Since TrackMaster is a physics based game, just running physics calculations 60 times per second (the rate at which the computer updates the game graphics, that is, the rendering of the graphics), is just not enough. The original physics FPS of the game is 240. But since this may affect performance (the overal FPS of the game), you may want to change the physics FPS to 120, 90 or even 60. From my experience, at 90 FPS, the physics behaves almost like 240, with just minor differences that doesn't affect the overal gameplay. With 60 FPS, the physics behaves in different ways in a more perceptible way.
The physics FPS can be set in the OPTIONS MENU, in a specific PHYSICS section.
DEMOS UPDATED
The demos for Windows and Linux have been updated with the possibility to play a FreeStyle event, and a some races. Also, a demo for MAC computers is now available!
DISCORD SERVER
Last but not least: TrackMaster now have a Discord server! Come talk, share feedback, report bugs and show screenshots of your tricks!
https://discord.gg/PypEQQNBpA
And that's it for this major update! Since I'm happy with the overall structure of the game now, I really think I'll be able to release the next updates faster and always with new events!
CHANGELOG:
- Added: Events.
- Added New Event Type: Racing.
- Added New Event Type: FreeStyle.
- Added: Option for vertical or horizontal split screen, in the OPTIONS MENU. It affects 2 and 3 player split screen.
- Added: Mini map.
- Added: Stadium audience effects, like crowd, crowd sounds, an airship and big screens!
- Added: Crowd amount, in the OPTIONS MENU. It affects performance (frames per second). It’s possible to turn it off entirely.
- Added: Crowd sound effects volume, in the OPTIONS MENU.
- Added: Physics FPS (frames per second). Lower values increase overall performance of the game. Value of 90 or above results in almost no change for vehicle behavior. A value of 60 may result in weird vehicle behavior.
- Change: vehicles (including player) start the race in a random grid position.
- Fix: Crash sounds now work when the vehicle is in the air. Previously, it would only work with the vehicle grounded.
- Update: Demo (Windows and Linux) updated.
- Added: Demo (MAC).
- Known Issues: when making a FreeStyle event with the GryoMonster, flips are currently not being calculated correctly.
GAME PLAN
