Particle Systems

Particle systems are often used for special effects. They consist of particles that are emitted from something, and these particles have velocity, size, color and many other variables that can be varied over time. The particles often have an image attached to them, and when lots of particles are used you can not tell them apart. They kind of melt together and it can look like fire, smoke, explosions, exhaust gases, blood splatter and much more.

Nearly every graphics engine has particle systems built into them, and some even come with an editor where you can set all parameters and directly see what the result would be. The graphics engine I use, jMonkeyEngine, has a particle system and an editor but I found it a bit limited in functionality so I started looking elsewhere. Requirements:

• Java based
• Open source 
• Easy to integrate with jMonkeyEngine
• Lots of features

And I found Java Open Particle System (JOPS) which really fulfills the above requirements. Unfortunately, there were no ready-made code for displaying the particle systems made with JOPS in jME, but that was easy to make with a little help from the author of JOPS, Guilherme Gomes. The integration code will be released publicly as open-source when it has been cleaned up a bit.

In this video you can see some nice particle systems made with JOPS:

Start sequence

I have been revamping the start sequence, which was much needed. In earlier versions it looked like a big wooden wall that fell down when the countdown was over. That sucked, according to the testers.

Watch this video to see the current start sequence in action, the graphics need improvement but you get the general idea:

If you pass the start line too early the red light will go off and there will be a restart. At the end of the race you get statistics on when you passed the start line and at what speed, to give you the proper tools to improve your start skills.

Meta-game structure

In games there are many different ways that the player can progress, and this I like to call the meta-game structure. Think of a football (soccer) tournament: the game is football and it is being played by a number of players on a football-field. This is the gameplay. The meta-game is the tournament, player replacements, sponsorship deals, and anything else that affects the team's progress and quality. If the team wins, it moves on to the next level of the tournament. If they lose, it's game over. That is the meta-game structure of a football tournament.

There are various manager games that focus on the meta-game aspect of football, and in that case what we call the meta-game of football is the actual gameplay.

In Mad Skills Motocross, the game is to ride a bike and win the race. But what about the meta-game? How does winning affect your progress? What about losing? There are so many possibilities:

• Tournament. You lose a race, you're out.
• Series. You race the whole season, and the top riders move on to the next division.
• Incremental. If you win a race, you go to the next race. If you lose you get to retry until successful.
• Anything you can think of...

I chose a mixture of Series and Incremental (a name I made up just now). There are five divisions 1,2,3,4 and Turbocharged Division. Even though they are called divisions, you must win a race to go to the next race. When you have successfully won all the races in a division (different tracks every time), you move up to the next one. If you lose a race, you may simply retry until you win.

That's the basic meta-game structure of Mad Skills Motocross, but there is still room for some variations. Maybe there are always three unlocked races so that if you can't get past a particular race, you can win the next one and then go back to the previous. This will be up to the testers to determine.

Modifications

The meta-game structure is defined in simple text files, to allow players who feel like it to produce their own mods for Mad Skills Motocross. A text editor like notepad and the built-in track editor is all you need to be able to make whole new career modes. Which you can share with your friends on turborilla.com.

The modifications does not stop at the divisions and tracks, however. With a text editor and a graphics program like The Gimp, creative players will be able to modify bikes, riders and backgrounds

With the JOPS editor you can modify the exhaust gases, the dirt spray and the celebratory special effects displayed when winning a race.

Take care
// Tobias
Turborilla Games

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