Latest NFS:XNA updates

I've been a bit quiet on the blog lately, but doing lots of work on Need For Speed.

Latest stuff:

• 7 cars
• 16 tracks
• Car dashboards
• Car/environment sounds
• Fence/grass/gravel collision detection
  

Got a bunch of little things to do, but the next big thing will be some kind of radial/motion blur.

Obligatory screenshots -

Car selection screen:


Vertigo Ridge track:


Burnt Sienna track:




Alpine open-road track:

Chase camera for fast-moving objects

Chase cameras are great for creating a feeling of realistic motion. For NFS, it means you can see the side of the car as you turn, and as the car accelerates and brakes it changes distance from the camera.

The problem with a fast moving game like this one, is that the chase camera can start to get too far behind the object at high speed.

Simply reducing the springiness doesn't work, as then the camera won't swing round the X-axis enough.

I've used the Chase Camera sample for my camera, and added an extra ZStiffness property. This controls how much the camera tries to keep up with the moving object.

You can download it here :)

I was way off the mark...

Damn. I got the wrong info from somewhere about dynamic audio and XNA - there is NO support for loading audio at runtime through XNA 3.

That was the main thing I've been looking forward to :(

Of course, if you don't care about running on the xbox, you can use any audio engine accessible from c# (fmod, wmp etc)