I have been spending a lot of time polishing up the tracks in our game in preparation for the race mode that Brian is working on. One of the fun parts is adding particles to the level, here is a shot of the mine from Spaghetti West with lots of glowy particles.
This will only be of interest to a small group of people using Bullet for vehicle physics. I actually spent a few days tracking this bug down so I am posting it here just in case it helps somebody else.
If you are trying to create a “sensor” or “trigger” type object using Bullet so you can detect if your vehicle enters or exits an area, you might notice your vehicle’s wheels colliding with the otherwise invisible, “non-collideable” sensor. Read more about it here.
bitburo just posted a little interview with Dave about Zero Gear.
Here is the full link to the article
On the technical side of things, I decided today was the day to finally get my networking code threaded. Dave is touching up some of our maps and one of them was taking a bit too long to load which caused the client’s connection to the server to timeout. This no longer will happen…
The latest version of Boost came out yesterday for you C++ programmers who use it. The Thread library has been improved greatly from pre-1.35 versions.
Also, Bullet 2.70 was released a few days ago. I haven’t updated yet but I will be soon. They are doing some really cool stuff with soft bodies in newer versions of Bullet. Check out this video:
Will you see soft bodies in Zero Gear? Perhaps 
The other day we were trying to figure out exactly how long we had been working seriously on Zero Gear, so I went into my backups folder and lo and behold - the first backup of “kart game” I have is dated August 13, 2007. Things have come a long way since then, and there is a long way to go as well.
Apart from doing all we can to get a build of our game ready for the IGF, we have been distributing alpha builds of our garage editor to salivating artists who are hell-bent on creating all sorts of custom items for the game. As part of that process I have been writing documentation for creating those assets on our new Wiki. We are already building a great community with lots of talented artists around Zero Gear which is very exciting. Here is just a sampling!
If you would like to see what other stuff these talented guys are cooking up, go check out the polycount thread (23 pages long! might want to skip towards the end
Also, a sneak peek of our main menu:
Last weekend was my birthday, and in celebration my girlfriend made me this awesome Zero Gear cake! How cool is that?
Something a little darker than usual happened to show up in the garage today, check out these shots!
Here is another fabulous sock monkey whipped up by the lovely Chelsea Heyneman. Hopeully you will have a chance to bid on some of them soon to help us raise development funds!
As you have noticed by now, we like to use Vimeo to host our videos. It is an awesome service.
Recently the Vimeo staff have announced that “game videos” will not longer be hosted on the site. Their reasoning is valid, however the announcement was a little vague in regard to people like us. We own the content we are taking video of and we very much feel the content we are recording is creative in nature (and not a recording of gameplay footage from a 360 game).
So what we have done is simply setup a group on Vimeo for game developers. If you are a developer and use Vimeo, you should join this group. Our hope is that the Vimeo admins will see that the content in this group deserves to be hosted by them and maybe it will become a sort of filter.
Here is the link: Game Developers
NOTE: This is for game developers only (indie or otherwise). So if you wish to join, please provide a link in your Vimeo profile, or better yet, a video. Anyone is able to view the videos from this group of course.
Here is our latest video!
Here we are showcasing the garage portion of the game which will allow players to customize their kart and character. We built this portion of the game with heavy utilization of Hikari which enabled Zero Gear developer Ian Marsh to engineer the gui elements in flash and actionscript. We are using the open source Ogre3d to render the characters and environment. Also you will hear some great sound effects by Tapio Liukkonen of Kaamos Sound.
If you are interested in getting the the garage and toy with creating your own special character, stay tuned! You just might get the chance soon!
P.S. If you are in the United States remember to check out the latest issue of 3D World which has just hit newsstands! It features Zero Gear in their feature of open source software!
It has been a little while since we posted an update - Brian has been a little bogged down moving to another apartment in San Fransisco, and I have been slightly derailed doing some non game related contract work to bring in some more development funds.
But here is just a little feature we got working last weekend, a “look-back” key that you can press to check out what it going on behind you. I think it will be very useful!
Zero Gear Look-Back from marshmonkey on Vimeo.
