Darkwind: Welcome to the 22nd Century

Darkwind: War on Wheels, the MMO I launched in 2007, has now reached the year 2100 in game. It’s 75 years after the solar apocalypse (see also this), and 65 years after the game itself started with our first racing/deathracing leagues.

In Darkwind, one week of real-world time is one month in-game. So every 12 weeks, a new year starts.. a new season in the deathracing and combat leagues, a new season in the squad combat leagues, another year in which road warriors in heavily armed 1970s musclecars continue to dominate the world.

We still have active players who have been there from the start, but the in-game heroes of that time are long gone: characters in Darkwind age and die – if they are lucky enough to survive to old age despite the harsh post-apocalyptic world. Darkwind was described by Rock Paper Shotgun as a ’boutique’ MMO: a small online game with a fiercely loyal player-base who stick around for years. If you’re looking for some uncompromising turn-based vehicular combat with a persistent world and perma-death, there really isn’t anything else.

Darkwind: Camp Wars

Over the last few months, I have been working on a whole new meta-game layer for Darkwind. An upturn in player numbers in Darkwind which started last year and continued to build into 2020, together with some careful prodding by my son Harry, convinced me to do this.

The new Camp Wars system operates on a hexgrid map, whereby competing player-run camps take control and fight over each hex. The hexes themselves offer valuable resources to the camps (water, food, scrap metal, etc.) and we’re also planning to add a bunch of themed ‘specials’ which will only appear in one place – e.g. controlling a hex with a mutant village in it will boost a camp’s chances of attracting mutant recruits.

The design behind this was instigated by Harry (who has played a lot of strategy and wargames over the years). He even put together an initial design proposal, and has helped in running meetings with the players and teasing out balancing issues.

Here’s the interactive map running (you can drag it around with the mouse, and use the wheel to zoom in and out).

We’ve started to see some big PvP battles happening, which is exciting (PvP is something which players have always avoided, to a large extent, perhaps because the game has perma-death). It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course – raise the stakes in a multiplayer game and there are bound to be fireworks. The players are a mature bunch though, so we’re ironing things out well (fingers crossed). We’ve put a bunch of risk mitigation systems in, as well as ratcheting up the possible profits to the right level that it’s hard to ignore them.

Camp Wars runs on a two-week cycle. In the first week, camps secretly deploy their forces to hexes under their control (for defence) or bordering on hexes they control (for attack). At the start of the second week, battles for contested hexes are scheduled, to be played within that week.

The best reason to fight is for resources. This system aims to add the motivation for PvP that Darkwind has lacked in the past.

Another key thing which this system aims to introduce is a proper route for newer players to get involved in camps. At first, they can assist the logistics and supply, and can use their vehicles and characters to assist a camp in battle. Later, they can become full members of camps, and finally can own their own camp – probably under the protection of a larger camp at first. We have designed a maximum cap on how much hardware any individual player can bring to a battle: this is specifically to promote cooperation and to make newer players valuable.

Darkwind marches towards Steam

I haven’t posted on here in too long, and it’s mostly because I have been very busy working on Darkwind again. The big news is that the game was greenlit in May, for release on Steam around the end of August.

Some of the main things I have been working on are:
– making the game ‘free to play’ with an in-game premium currency (‘Chromes’)
– overhaul of the lobby graphics
– integration of significant amount of functionality in the game client that was previously only available on the web site.

The last point is quite important, as we’ll hopefully get a big influx of new players from Steam, and the new player experience needs to be as good as it can. The split between 3D gameplay and web-based management has always been a bit awkward, so now you’ll be able to do core management of gang and vehicular assets from within the client, and complete management of squads – including set-up, travel, scouting, and multiplayer arrangement.

I have also been working again with Taskmasterpeace, one of the two guys who recorded all the excellent ‘sport commentator’ style vocals in the game. Task has been doing voice-overs for a series of tutorials I’m making about Darkwind.

Here’s a two-part tutorial on Deathracing:

Part 1: setting up

Part 2: playing the deathrace

Raycast Car

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 assumes rigid bodies for the wheels; actually, wheels are not rigid.

The basic idea with raycast cars is that you cast a ray from each wheel hub, and calculate the distance at which a surface is met (if at all). This defines the suspension’s extension, and then you simulate spring behaviour by applying increasingly strong forces as the suspension gets more compressed. There’s also some subtleties such as anti-roll and varying spring strength depending on whether its compressing or extending; but these are mostly tweaks applied to the core idea.

I also found that at high speed the default Shiva ‘spherical wheels’ car would suffer from occasional glitches and speed wobbles, rendering it fairly useless for most games. Sometimes it seemed to stagger sideways at high speed, presumably due to errors on the axis constraints allowing the spheres to role sideways. I assume these problems are caused by over-relying on the accuracy of the underlying physical simulation in order to obtain the required behaviour.

In the video clips shown here, the behaviour of the car in all ways other than spring response has been results-driven, i.e. the desired behaviour (skidding, drifting, tendency to roll, etc.) has been considered and this is used as a starting point for programming the calculations – rather than starting from an accurate physical simulation and expecting realistic/fun results as an emergent behaviour.

This represents very good progress towards what I’d like to have for a major new Darkwind project (Darkwind 2?) that I have started thinking about. Really the ineffective default Shiva car is what had stopped me considering this before now.

Last year I also wrote Musclecar Online. In this the car was entirely results-based, having no accurate underlying physical simulation from which the behaviour emerged. Musclecar Online is actually a 2D driving simulation with 3D models (hence, no hills or bridges) – and it was therefore entirely possible to define the behaviour I wanted first and then to write code to directly produce that behaviour.