Marçal Argudo Grau

I want to talk about my new personal project: a Wipeout-like game including a WYSIWYG track editor. The main purpose of realising this project (apart from enjoying it) is to learn Ogre3D in a practical way. Increasing my portfolio is a secondary but non negligible goal.

Ogre3D is an open-source multi-platform graphics rendering engine widely used in amateur and educational projects, which is as much powerful as many professional engines. It is important to note that Ogre3D is not a game engine in itself, because it only cares about graphics. Features like physics, collision detection, AI, sound or networking must be integrated separately.

I’ve started working on the track editor, because the circuits will be a fundamental part of my game, so I won’t be able to start coding the game logic without having some sample tracks to play around. Besides, developing the track editor will be a good exercise to learn Ogre3D without getting my hands dirty with features non related to graphics.

Tracks are composed from a sequence of deformable circuit stretches. Putting those deformed stretches together results on a circuit allowing loopings and curls. Each circuit stretch mesh is generated and deformed procedurally. I’ve implemented this feature by using bezier patches. By this way, the editor can create many different circuit stretches without the need to have them previously computed and stored.

Next picture shows an example of a circuit generated with a preliminary version of the editor.