Formula V status update

Hey everyone! It is time for another recap of the progress made to our game since the last update. Here we go...

Most of the progress during the last few weeks has focused on polishing things up by fixing little mistakes or bugs and by adding track detail to enrich the visual experience while playing the game.

Following are some of those details.

New screens

Besides selecting racers it seems important to have a track selection screen. And although we still don't have more tracks to show it was still worth to implement the functionality that will allow players to do so. In the track selection screen, besides the obvious choice of track, a couple of race parameters can be fine tuned to tailor the race experience to your preferences, like the number of laps and a few more.

We also have had the time to implement a proper credits screen where we can record and thank every single person that has been involved in one way or another in the development of Formula V.

Race intro panning

Following in the footsteps of modern racing games, we wanted to introduce each track in such a way that some of the finer details, which may be hard to notice while racing, can be appreciated and help the player to immerse in the atmosphere of the race.

Flying lap in time trials

In the same vein as the introduction panning for races, we tried to follow what modern games do with regards to time trial by implementing a flying lap to go right into the action instead of having to waste time with a warm up lap that starts from the grid. Not only does this make for a more pleasant experience the first time that you enter time trial, but it also helps to reduce the downtime when you make a costly mistake early during the lap, by putting you back quickly for the next try without having to complete the current one. The flying lap is even more useful in such situations now that we have implemented a quick button combination to restart it without having to go into the pause menu.

Side track detail

What would be a racing game without some attractive side details? Well, not very attractive, indeed. Although we already had a beautifully detailed (and animated) stereoscopic background in place, more interesting side track detail was still missing. During this time, we have been able to add some of that in the form of animated stands, more background elements and bigger realtime TV screens.

Time of day

OK, this is the big feature this time. After playing around with the palettes of the VB's graphics architecture, we figured out that we could simulate different time of day scenarios by carefully manipulating and configuring those palettes while varying the brightness levels as well. It required a lot of tweaking and testing to make it work properly, but we are very pleased with the results.

The game supports four times of day: day, dusk, night and dawn; each with different palette combinations and brightness settings. But not only that, transitions between them in real time during races are possible too! Before each race, in the track selection screen it is possible to select the time at which the race starts plus the scale of the time lapse, so you can fix the whole race at your preferred time or you can choice how fast you want it to transition from one to the other.

Here is a sample of the differences between dusk and night races:

Lighting bells and whistles

Races during night, dusk and dawn look nice, but we weren't satisfied just yet. So, we used a couple of tricks that are based on the hardware's features to achieve lighting effects like headlights for the racers and static lamps across the track. Not only that, but both kinds of light show dust particles and can even light up some underground elements that are visible through the semi-transparent track segments that we've created to add more visual variety to the tracks. 

Please, notice that the flicking that is visible in the GIFs is only due to the different frequencies at which the VB's and computers' displays work plus the software methods of screen video capture; inside the VB's headset, no such flickering is perceptible.

That is all for now! Beta testers, watch out for the next demo containing these (and possibly a couple more?) features in the following days.