G'day Rat Racers, and welcome to the weekly report!
Things have been a little slow since the last update dropped, so I'd like to use this weekly report to reflect on why races in the game are only one lap and future plans for multi-lap race courses.
If all you want to know is about the future online mode, feel free to skip to the bottom of the report. Without further ado...
You may or may not be already asking; why does this game only have a single lap per race? The answer is actually a rather old codepath in the game. Enter the game's original method of procedurally generating race courses:
As you can see, this was wildly different to the current game build; tracks were generated using 5 types of segments, with the segments going all the way up into the sky to avoid overlapping each other. These tracks were one continuous road as a result which meant the game could only realistically support one lap.
This legacy system however wasn't working for the Volcanic region very well and didn't work for Beach at all; the original concept for Volcanic called for racing inside the volcano through an archway in the side rather than around the edge of the top and this system struggled to keep the track segments from clipping into the Volcano's sides. Beach was self-explanatory; I've never seen a shoreline rise out of the water like these tracks did! I did attempt to allow track segment overlap but this made the track layout incredibly confusing to traverse if it got too long.
To solve all of these issues and some playability issues with the old procgen, I rebuilt the track generation to use splines instead, with mesh extrusion and some rather confusing math doing a lot of the heavy lifting to turn a cyclic spline into a race course. Pictured below is Desert from the release version of Rattus Velocitas:
This allowed both Volcanic and Beach to actually work well as race courses vs the old approach, but another possibility arose with the introduction of cyclic tracks; multiple laps. In a future update, I'm planning on giving race courses a truly random length, with said length deciding the lap count as an additional layer of track variety!
Finally, a pretty common question from the very small audience of this game; "where's the online mode?"
And I can finally announce that it's being worked on! Lobbies already work but a lot more work is required before the game's able to run online races correctly. In addition, I will be taking a unique approach to online play's accessibility that will allow proper game preservation, if ever someone wanted to preserve this game. More about that and other aspects of online play's implementation in a future weekly report.
And that's this week wrapped up.
Happy Rat Racing!