Here’s some footage of a car driving around in the Shiva game engine, using the ‘raycast wheels’ approach. I have found that this gives much nicer results than the demo car that comes with Shiva, which treats wheels as constrained spheres. The problem with modelling wheels as spheres rotating on one axis is that this [...]
Archive for the ‘Darkwind’ Category
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Darkwind Developer Interview 2012
October 26th, 2012 
sam Back in June one of the Darkwind players, Groovelle, collated a bunch of questions from the players and we did an interview. I was kinda waiting for him to format/edit/sanitise/legalise it but he appears to have disappeared for a while, so I figured I’d edit it myself. So here it is…. the text is all [...]
New Lands, Darkwind-style
April 19th, 2012 sam There has been a very encouraging upswing in creative contributions from Darkwind players recently. Two or three people have been producing really nice new racetracks and wilderness maps, and a particularly well written fiction set in 2060′s Evan is underway. When it’s ready, I’d like to add this fiction to the ‘official’ stories, which currently [...]
Evan Reds
February 4th, 2012 sam Here’s a poster my friend Brian put together with my encouragement last year. There’s some subtle and somewhat biting ideas behind this about post-apocalyptic neo-communism, or something. But I can’t remember what they were.. must be the whiskey. We had a laugh making it anyway. In case you don’t know, the Evan Reds are a [...]
RPS ‘Apocalypse Boutique’ Darkwind Interview
November 20th, 2011 sam Here’s a big, wide-ranging (but mostly Darkwind-related) interview with me just published on Rock Paper Shotgun.. thanks to Nicholas for making the contact: The MMOnitor: Darkwind – War on Wheels
Darkwind: Scavenger is live!
September 8th, 2011 sam Darkwind: Scavenger is now live and available to all subscribers! In case you have been living in Vault 101 and don’t know what Scavenger is all about, here’s a quick run-down: 1. Subscribers can create a Scavenger gang in addition to their regular gang. You switch between the two from your ‘My Gang’ page. You [...]
Darkwind to Return to its Post-Apocalyptic Roots via ‘Darkwind: Scavenger’
July 22nd, 2011 sam Darkwind: Scavenger will be a new (optional) way of playing Darkwind. This will operate as a ‘hardcore’ mode as well as operating as a kind of ‘test server’ for new ideas. THE BASICS Players can run both a normal gang and scavenger gang. There will be an option on the website to switch from controlling [...]
Seriously, why aren’t you playing Darkwind yet?
June 28th, 2011 sam An impressively in-depth review of Darkwind was just written up by one of the admins at Video Game Geek: http://videogamegeek.com/article/7010722
Pathfinding just like those clever humans..
June 18th, 2011 sam This paper discusses the use of empirical cost-surfaces derived from substantial amounts of player-traced movements in Darkwind, for the purposes of improving A* pathfinding by AI vehicles. My core ideas are that (i) there are a number of subtle factors related to both effectiveness and aesthetic value, which definine optimal routes around the terrains, and [...]
Chainsaws, Mr. Redfern!
May 15th, 2011 sam This has to go down as one of the ‘good moments’ in my Darkwind odyssey.. Here’s the background: A few weeks ago, after much discussion, the Rules Council (RC) and I decided to downgrade the effectiveness of the ‘sniper’ specialism for heavy weapons. This was an attempt to rebalance the over-powerful car cannon and similar [...]
