Hey everyone! Below are Refract's Workshop Picks for the week. Congrats to those that made the cut! Check out each level on the Imgur page, or subscribe right from Distance's main menu.
Full album: Distance Workshop Highlight (Week 2)
- The First Journey (by PPPaul)
- Derelict Hyperspace Junction (by Skirmisher)
- Harsh Contrast (by Caprice)
- Reflective Racing Distance Destruction Disco (by Krispy)
- Midnight City (by Darnoc703)
Quick Development Update
While I'm at it I figured I'd do a quick development update. As many of you know we've been attempting to move to Unity 5 as the next step in development. Up until now we've been using Unity 4, and moving to 5 is actually a pretty big jump due to fundamental changes made in graphics and physics.
On the graphics end we've gotten really close to getting synced up with the current build, but the physics have not been so cooperative. The new wheel collider Unity 5 provides isn't functional for us at all, so we're looking into alternative methods.
(While testing Unity 5 we've found some pretty glorious bugs)
Jason has also been making great progress with random track generation. It's been fun to see what algorithms result in optimal checkpoint distance or how many sharply banked turns you can pack into a short track. It's a massive project so I wouldn't expect anything in a build soon, but we'll keep you up to date.
Over the weekend I pushed myself to finally find a way to support custom music in Distance. After hitting my head against a wall for several months, I finally made a breakthrough.
Watch: First test of audio analysis + custom music
Since our audio engine (Wwise) doesn't support MP3 importing or audio analysis by default I had to hack through the lower level code to get it integrated. Now that it's finally functional I'm onto the fun part, improving the sync between custom music and the in-game visuals.
Watch: An improved car screen visualizer
Custom music is not currently available in a released build but I hope to ship v1 in the upcoming experimental build. We obviously still have a ways to go with Unity 5, but it's likely we'll wait until we can ship a Unity 5 build for our next update.
As always be sure to follow @torcht on Twitter for more frequent developer updates, and thanks for all of the great feedback on Distance during the past week. Now go download those community tracks!