Rendercode Games has released the new Xbox LIVE Indie game Racedrome City:
The latest chapter in the Racedrome saga raises the bar with improved handling, physics, and visuals. Enjoy high-speed urban racing against strong AI, or challenge up to 8 players online. Also included is local multiplayer, global scoreboards, rewind function, and more!
Here is the trailer:
Racedrome City uses DigitalRune Physics to simulate the vehicles. More specifically, …
A while ago we have blogged about our car physics implementation (see Car Physics for 3D Games). Today we release an alternative implementation:
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Recently I made some improvements to the character controller in DigitalRune Physics. I became aware of some issues while reading the article “Jump To It” (Game Developer Magazine, issue 11/2008, pp. 38). It turns out that the jumping mechanic can be improved.
The KinematicCharacterController can be used to control the movement of a player character. The character controller handles moving, sliding along obstacles, walking slopes, stepping over obstacles, … and jumping. (Reminder: If you have an Indie or Standard license of DigitalRune Physics, you can download the source code of the character controllers from the Downloads page. See “Additional Downloads”.)
Jumping works fine in most cases. That is, …
Manually creating good ragdolls in code can be tough. This blog post takes you on a hands-on ragdoll creation journey and provides several tips.
We have made several improvements to our 3D character controller, which we want to discuss in this post. (Reminder: A character controller is the game module that computes the movement of a player character, including walking, jumping, climbing, etc.)
Following video shows the new character controllers in action. (The code is included in the DigitalRune Physics Bundle).
We have recently added 3D vehicle physics to our DigitalRune Physics library. In this post we will explain how the car physics works, so that you can either create your own car physics, or you can understand and tune the car physics that comes with our libraries.
Let’s have a look at what we want to achieve. Following Vehicle Sample is an XNA example project that is included in the DigitalRune Physics Bundle:
The .NET Framework 4 contains the Task Parallel Library (TPL). It introduces the concept of tasks. Tasks represent asynchronous operations that can be executed concurrently. Developers no longer have to manage threads or thread pool work items directly. The library provides a higher-level API for writing multi-threaded application or games. The only negative thing we can say about the TPL is that it is not supported on the .NET Compact Framework and is therefore not available on the Xbox 360 (or the WP7).
When we added multithreading support for our libraries, we looked for an easy-to-use, cross-platform threading library. After evaluating a lot of solutions we found the ParallelTasks library on CodePlex. The library is a lightweight replacement for the TPL. It offers all relevant features such as …
We are Windows Phone 7 owners, have a 3D game physics library, and play Dungeons & Dragons… That leaves us no choice: We have to make a D20 dice app for the phone!
Here is an early work-in-progress video:
The phone’s accelerometer can be used to shake the dice. This short clip is from an early stage. With the current build, the dice do not leave the viewport anymore and can be dragged or pushed with the finger.
We plan to release the core source code for all DigitalRune Physics customers as free bonus sample after we have released the app.
Initially we planned to release a service release including minor bugfixes this week. But we had to postpone the release because we have to wait for an update of a third party library which we use internally.
The next release will be a minor update including bugfixes and new features.
Here is another Windows Phone 7 physics example: It shows a few bodies and a 3d ragdoll. Tilt or shake the phone to move the bodies.
Windows Phone 7 is awesome! – This blog post shows DigitalRune Physics on a real Windows Phone 7 in action. The full sample source code can be downloaded at the end of the posting.
Following video shows the sample running on a Samsung Omnia 7 (a great WP7 device!):
Besides DigitalRune Physics we have been working on DigitalRune Graphics for several month now. I thought it would be nice to use a few graphics effects of DigitalRune Graphics to make our physics demos more interesting. – And here is the result: A short video testing screen space ambient occlusion, an atmospheric scattering skydome and god rays in a simple XNA physics demo. (Implementation details follow after the video.)
Fine, we have found a way to implement Continuous Collision Detection (CCD), but how do we integrate this into our game physics library?
This article explains how to use CCD in game physics; especially a technique called motion clamping that is used in DigitalRune Physics and possible pitfalls you could come across when you use game physics with CCD.
A collection of the most useful blog articles can be found here:
Article Collection (on Documentation page)
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