Video : First Look

Managed to capture a video using CamStudio. This experiment proves I really need to look at different compression/codecs as it looks more than a little shoddy. Forgive the framerate issues; they are in the video not the game. Honest :)

Rural Scene

Been working mainly on the French countryside. I've created a distant rural landscape background that scrolls and creates a nice sensation of depth.

The other focus was creating telegraph poles and wires to string along the roads. Initially the wires were black, but they created harsh aliasing issues due to the black pixels being so large on screen.

I needed to fade the wires thus giving the impression they are thinner than they actually are, and creating a form of anti-aliasing (as the background can be seen through the wires). I could have created a separate sprite for the wires and rendered those sprites to screen using an alpha value, but I wanted to create the poles and wires together as a single sprite to make placement along the route easier.

I used the function:

sprite_set_alpha_from_sprite(telegraph_spr,telegraph_mask)

Here, telegraph_spr is the main source sprite for the telegraph pole and wires and telegraph_mask is the alpha mask.

telegraph_spr

telegraph_mask

The other trick was to create a single sprite that could be placed along the route, to represent a long sequence of poles and wires. You may notice that in the sprite, the two poles are identical. This is so that when the sprites are placed down, the start and end poles can be overlapped thus creating an unbroken line of poles and wires.

Rainbow Stripes

I've extended the weather system to include a rainbow. This fades in and appears immediately after a downpour for a brief spell. Those odd colour choices represent the rainbow stripes of a World Champion. But I guess you already knew that.

Weather System

As every cyclist knows, not every ride is under beautiful blue skies. I therefore felt it necessary to create a simple weather system.  Whilst it's in the test-bed, the weather system simply cycles between sunny and stormy over a set period. I've written the system so that it can be triggered at any point in time, or at any point on the stage. For instance, you might want the rain to come in after the first mountain climb.

The weather system currently consists of 2 layers of fog (blended in over time) and a particle system for the raindrops.

There is a fog layer between the clouds layer and landscape. This is only used to darken the clouds as the storm rolls in. There is another (more subtle) fog layer over the entire screen. This is used to create a mist layer to 'grey out' the scene.

The raindrops fall and create splash effects upon hitting a surface (eg. rooftops and roads). It's tricky to make out the splash effect from the screenshot, but looks good moving. I have also created a simple lightning effect triggering a full screen 'white-out'.

It is intended that the weather system will affect gameplay; examples could be rider fatigue, puncture frequency, tyre choice etc

Sunny:

Stormy:

Stone Bridge

I've created a little stone bridge from tiles. Again, the bridge is made from two layers of tiles, creating a 'foreground' and 'background' element allowing the cyclist to appear to be riding between those layers. The system that I use to define a path for the cyclists allows me to easily add the hump for the bridge. It looks great when the peloton rides over it.

I might experiment with using rivers or waterfalls as natural breaks in the scenery. This might get around the problem of how to blend urban to rural and make it look convincing.