Here's a quick video showing the latest progress with LayOut. You will want to view this full-screen to see the detail and turn the quality level up. As a bonus, there's some dodgy narration from myself, so turn the sound on.
Current Features:
- Edit Road path, width and height.
- Import existing OutRun levels for editing and refinement.
- Export to Cannonball. Levels are fully playable.
I'm quite pleased with the ability to import existing levels. The import function generates the entire track path using nothing but the Curve Info value and direction that was discussed in a previous blogpost. So the large amount of data specifying the x,y of each road segment is completely redundant.
As you can see from the video, creating a playable level literally takes minutes. However, for the final release it will be important to quickly edit/preview sections of each level. I will be making additional changes to Cannonball to support that.
I must stress this is very much a work in progress; it's ugly, but it works!
9 comments:
Nice!
One suggestion I have is to integrate the road curving and length controls to the waypoints themselves. Something like a little steering control directly on the way point icon graphic. And attach an arrow to the waypoint icon. Click and move it to make it longer or shorter. Have floating text boxes next to the icon so you could enter values manually when needed.
Yes, the interface could definitely do with some work. Creating a good GUI is quite an art and one I'm not that close to perfecting yet ;)
Phase one is going to be a case of getting stuff working functionally. Then I will have a rethink and try to improve matters.
Superb work yt! Looks like it's all coming along very nicely.
It's coming along... slowly ;)
I'm eager to move off the road path stuff and start plonking sprites everywhere and creating crazy levels.
That's where the fun starts!
Lookin' pretty awesome man! Keep it up!
Awesome work.
Keep this up! Waiting to see new awesome levels for outrun!
Will it be possible to include new sprites or LayOut will let users create mods of the existing levels?
There is an import function, so you can import existing OutRun tracks for editing.
Editing sprites will come in a future release. To begin with you'll just be able to place existing stuff.
I'm several years late but I would rather be certain I understand you correctly than make a mistake:
You mention that the road curve is recreated exclusively using the CurveInfo data (the one used by the slave CPU if I recall correctly previous posts). Does that mean that the x/y pairs distributed around a circle are actually completely redundant?
If so then do they still have a useful purpose in the game as it is? I would think that they might still be useful for the gameplay code to avoid having to compute actual road coordinates from the curve data?
In any case, fantastic work. I'm reading your entire blog from the early stages of the project and it's a fascinating endeavour. Congratulations for your hard work!
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