A chill driving game with procedurally generate scenic landscapes | Hacker News Reader

A chill driving game with procedurally generate scenic landscapes

slowroads.io

760 pointsitsuka195 comments

Really neat! My only complaint is that the handling is very sluggish. Also it might be nice to have a first-person vew, maybe the camera view contributes to the sluggish feeling.

I love the procedurally-generated landscapes. It really captures the feeling of driving on unfamiliar roads.

I'm curious how the physics works. Is this using raycast wheels? A couple of years ago I made a racing game for Oculus Quest using Godot[0], based on Godot's "VehicleBody", and getting the physics to work satisfactorily was a major headache. But a procedural world would have made it so much cooler.

[0] https://sidequestvr.com/app/1403/ghost-racing-vr-wip

press c

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLB6rP3KHcc

Nice, thanks.

The author did a little write up here: https://anslo.medium.com/slow-roads-tl-dr-a664ac6bce40

By the sounds of it they’re doing a very simple sim with raycast wheels and not using a rigidbody physics engine.

Interesting that they generated terrain first and then tried to fit the road onto it (with the headaches involved, like getting stuck on peninsulas) and not generated road first and then surrounded it by terrain!

I figured that was the best way to get organic-feeling roads stitched seamlessly into a far-spanning environment. I also didn't recognise at the time just how hard it would be, but I still think it was the right choice.

You are probably right! The results are stunning.

Physics are always a major headache - mine are pretty hacky and cut a lot of corners, such as ignoring trees or preventing the car from flipping. I only height-test the wheels, progress them independently, and then resolve the chassis position from that. It's not terribly physically accurate but it gets the job done, and is pretty cheap!

Yeah these simple approaches are great and a bit of a lost art. Physics engines give a lot of flexibility and emergent behaviour but add a lot of complication when you want to constrain the madness. I wrote my own simple vehicle for our platform the other day which was a lot of fun:

https://dotbigbang.com/game/b0e8bf8b309b44a3b0abed8f9525e335...

The first bit I landed on looked exactly like the roads around where I grew up...

>"Really neat! My only complaint is that the handling is very sluggish"

I tried it on PC, laptop (both are Windows) and on Google Pixel 6 Pro. All are very fluid. But reaction on keypress I think has slight constant delay. Not sure what's the reason. Anyways I used it on auto drive and just stared for a while.

I'm not saying it's not fluid. If anything it's too fluid! It's difficult to drive fast because the car takes so long to react to your inputs.

> maybe the camera view contributes to the sluggish feeling.

Can confirm. I was physics lead on a console driving game, and we discovered to our surprise that the camera is a critical piece of making sure the physics actually feels like physics, and that it’s quite difficult to get the camera right. The camera can make real physics feel sluggish, cartoony, or just wrong, and a great camera can make fake physics feel real. We humans are pretty sensitive to subtle motions.

Making physics feel right is also about lots of other cues too though (cues which aren’t here in this game). Sound and effects and even sometimes tactile feedback are also needed to complete the illusion. Sometimes real physics is surprisingly sluggish, and we don’t notice how slowly momentum changes until we take away the sounds and bumps and dust and skid marks.

> we discovered to our surprise that the camera is a critical piece of making sure the physics actually feels like physics

This was my experience when I made Speed Haste, a 3D racing game back in 95. I spent a few nights banging my head against my car physics code, and being frustrated and tired, I switched to tuning camera code to clear my head. Voila! Car physics and handling felt completely different. As you say, audio was huge too, even back in these primitive and (by today's standards) cartoony times.

I've used this anecdote when teaching gamedev students, to hammer in their heads that games are complex because they're the sum of their parts + the sum of all the interactions between all the parts.

(for the historically inclined, code for the game is available at https://github.com/TheJare/SpeedHasteSrc)

Reminds me of watching an interview with a racing game dev who mentioned that humans interpret higher pitch engine sounds as higher speed.

Fascinating since we evolved with no cars or engine noise yet our brain is still making correlations around the audio inputs.

I wonder if there's some link to rate of footsteps? The step rate of an approaching/retreating human or animal would have been relevant to survival.

Oh wow. I found speedhaste demo via one of the many computer magazines that started flourishing in/around 98/99. Played it quite a lot and loved it. The music, the physics, the graphics, was so good. I still remember the music & the transmission select voice when you start a race. Fantastic stuff, thank you

Speed haste, I remember that game maybe on a Twlight CD or an alternative? I played this game a lot when I visiting my grandpa and grandma.

Good memories and a fun game, you also had that flight game, but I don't remember the name.

Another reply by me, the best racing I have played are Need for Shift 1 and 2. With velocity based motion blur and an incredible camera.

I think it's because there are only full left and right and no slight turn of wheel like we do 99.9% of time in real driving.

A small note: 80 miles an hour on windy roads, driving in the middle of the road, is not slow and chill. That's "I want to die" fast and reckless... maybe have two autodrive settings. "slow and chill" going appropriate speeds and driving correctly (left/right toggle?) and "landscape zoomies" or something for what it currently does. Right now auto pilot is literally stress inducing =D

There is a cruise control option to the lower right. You can choose a slower speed

Sure, but if the title of the site is "slow roads" and it's billed as "slow and chill", then careening down a road with half your car in the oncoming traffic lane at 80 miles an hour by default is not a good default.

It's a bit like a "ambient study music" site that plays darkstep with flashing lights when you press "just play me something to study to" =)

Ha, true. I'll see to making it a little less reckless, and probably give a setting to have it follow a lane, if it isn't too difficult. The idea of a "slow road" is more about taking the scenic route - back roads like these tend to have some of the highest speed limits, at least in the UK.

i found the bus averaging 80km/h pretty realistic. what felt wrong was the acceleration. it would go to max speed on a straight road even if there was a curve just a few hundred meters ahead. perhaps reducing the acceleration when autodrive is on will help.

maybe you can add a self learning component. every time the vehicle bumps the barrier, it was going/accelerating to fast.

> maybe you can add a self learning component

Basic physics is also pretty applicable here. ;)

acceleration = velocity^2 /radius

with a simplified

max friction force = coefficient of friction * car weight

And to tie them together

force = mass * acceleration

Here in Canada 80kph is the maximum for back roads, but when it's twisty by nature, or it's straight with a few turns but has a cliff to one side, that road is a 60kph road. Add most of the time anything S-bend or hard turns will be on a 40kph advisory.

No going 115+ in a blind corner over a road that will launch you off the side of a mountain if you steer poorly =D

Don't know whereabouts you are in Canada, but in BC and Alberta all speed limits are excruciatingly low. So much so that it's a norm to drive 20km/h over the limit on the highways and the police won't bother at all until it's an excess of that.

This also makes for an excellent emergency budget fill-ups at the end of the quarter - just set a photoradar in the 50 zone where everyone everyday go 80 and, voila, - no deficit.

> back roads like these tend to have some of the highest speed limits

I assume that's because there are some roads still left where they're trusting drivers' common sense to not try to drive as fast as they're theoretically allowed to.

Just assume the roads are closed to everyone else but you, the VIP.

As for the speed, it’s nowhere near ‘i want to die’ reckless for those long sweepers and a lot of people do find the rhythm of that sort of driving to be relaxing. The other component is simply that the sensation of speed is always much lower than it would be in real life in these kind of things.

If you read "slow and chill" as an imperative, not adjectives, then it works just fine.

even autodrive managed to crash into hill on the side of the road on me, hah.

That's ~130km/h for those on the other side of the world... which is a normal average speed on the Autobahn.

Is the Autobahn windy?

It is, if you stick your head out...

Ditto for France and Italy.

For real slow and chill, I propose a third setting - "Medieval handcart" https://youtu.be/RlcuPPPXY3w

You may prefer the other terrain. At the bottom left of the screen you can switch away from the hills. The other road makes more sense to be flying down the middle.

Yeah, I love how it's called "slow roads", and the car is just zipping at insane speeds.

Anyway, good job, actually cool!

This would be great for Rally racing games, since it's all about reacting to unknown terrain.

Also, it would be better if mouse steering is damping impulse based, i.e. every frame the steering position exponentially decays, mouse position resets to center and the change is added as impulse on the steering position.

  sensitivity = max_ang / ( screenwidth/2 )
  decay_rate = 6.0

  frame(dt){
    dx = mouse.x - center_pos
    mouse.reset()
    steer_ang += dx*sensitivity
    steer_ang.clamp(-max_ang,max_ang)
    steer_ang *= exp(-decay_rate * dt)
  }

Thanks! I'll give that a go and at least add it as an optional alternative, if not the default :)

Oh, and I noticed that the tyres don't seem to respond to the steerangle changes immediately, instead it seems to slowly interpolate towards it. Not sure if it's cosmetic and does not represent the logical wheel state, but if it does then you might want to change it so that the steer-bar position directly sets the wheel angle, otherwise they'll end up being derivatives of derivatives making it extra sluggish.

bike doesnt lean

Any chance for joystick controls?

Your description is that steering decays then has mouse impulse added, which makes sense to me. But the code decays the steering after adding the delta-X. Is there a reason for that?

As the discrete impulse is meant to approximate average derivative, applying decay after the impulse ensures that the value is always attenuated by decay (low frame rate underestimate the ground truth impulse, whereas the converse overestimates at low framerate).

> This would be great for Rally racing games, since it's all about reacting to unknown terrain.

Indeed, eventually you know the tracks by heart, so much so that you don't need the pacing notes anymore. I'm surprised nobody thought of using procedural generation here.

It's not exactly true that you react to unknown terrain, though, because IRL there's reckons in order to make pace notes, and I suspect that rally races tend to happen more-or-less on the same roads.

PS: actually someone did think about using procgen for rally games: https://www.racedepartment.com/downloads/procedurally-genera...

I have a keyboard steering related question. I like key control, but I do find the on/off nature of keyboard turning to be lacking.

First let's move WASD over to the right by one key, so ESDF.

S and F would now turn slightly.

Now let's add A and G and assign those to more extreme turning.

Is there any driving game which has done this, or at least has some sort of configurable system where it could be tried? I assume it has to exist somewhere if it is at all usable.

Interesting idea - I could try implementing this experimentally

Or alternatively, have ijkl serve 75% weight and esdf serve 25% weight. Then you can achieve 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25% combinations using both hands.

    Left | Right | Total
   ------|-------|------
   +0.25 | +0.75 | +1.00
    0.00 | +0.75 | +0.75
   -0.25 | +0.75 | +0.50
   +0.25 |  0.00 | +0.25
    0.00 |  0.00 |  0.00
   -0.25 |  0.00 | -0.25
   +0.25 | -0.75 | -0.50
    0.00 | -0.75 | -0.75
   -0.25 | -0.75 | -1.00

(two ternary digits -> 3^2 = 9 combinations)

> but I do find the on/off nature of keyboard turning to be lacking.

This may interest you: https://aimpad.com/

> Aimpad® patented technology adds full analog movement control to the traditional WASD keyboard layout

Does this require software at all?

> This would be great for Rally racing games

I'm pretty sure the tracks in Dirt 4 were procedurally generated. This made them feel extremely generic and bland compared to the hand modelled tracks in the sibling-series Dirt Rally.

That is also why Bethesda switched from procedural generation for Daggerfall to hand built for Morrowind. I have to wonder if we could train a model now to do this stuff? For terrain it is mostly mappable to an image anyway. Could fix undercut cliffs in a post processing step using voxel models instead. Probably not a very good database to pull from for underground stuff though if you want to generate dungeons.

You're right - I spent a while looking for existing procedural driving games before I started, and seeing how disappointing the Dirt 4 implementation was was all the motive I needed. Thanks for the kind words.

CORRECTION: missed a divide-by-dt for the +=

corrected code should be

  sensitivity = userpref.sensitivity * max_ang / ( screenwidth/2 )
  decay_rate = 6.0

  frame(dt){
    dx = mouse.x - center_pos
    mouse.reset()
    steer_ang += sensitivity*dx/dt
    steer_ang.clamp(-max_ang,max_ang)
    steer_ang *= exp(-decay_rate * dt)
  }

I wish the autodrive had a defensive driving option. As it is, it goes at 120 kmph on these windy roads and takes over the entire available space including the opposing lane. Wish you could limit the speed for a more relaxed cruise

This is very lovely and really relaxing (aside from the crazy speeds the autodrive goes at haha). Kudos to the creator! Btw if you haven't tried the numerous options to change weather, time of day, vehicle and even planet, go for it! There's a surprising amount of options

OH! I'm just finding out that there's a lock that's next to the speedometer that limits how fast the car goes! Damn this is so neat!

This is really cool! Thank you for making/posting this. I played around with it for about half an hour to 45 minutes or so. I did manage to break it two or three times but I can't reproduce it reliably yet. I'll provide a proper bug report if I can figure out the exact conditions, but mostly if you go off road and get to the top of a big enough hill and then accelerate down the hill as quickly as you can and crash into a barrier you can sometimes flip yourself over it. When you do, you are no longer tethered to the ground and, instead, kind of hover above it and the road. Sometimes you can slip through the ground and the water, and all other barriers become passable.

https://i.imgur.com/YDyJa5g.png

(edit: It might be related to hitting slightly awkward terrain?)

(edit 2: Got it on video, though my commentary didn't get recorded for some reason) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7U-qS7P2tI

Thanks for the kind words! That screenshot looks like the tail-end of the road - the world despawns behind you as you drive, leaving behind this weird-looking trench. That isn't a bug, but it definitely looks like one - the plan is to add a little achievement for driving back that far, so that people will know it's expected behaviour. Don't worry about replicating bugs, or finding exact coordinates; I've been seeing them all stream in on my analytics backend, and they come with all the metadata I need :)

Oh, nice re: the analytics backend. Good thinking! This project has prompted me to dust off some code I was working on a couple years ago, I'm excited to play around with it.

Wow, I didn't expect I will like this as much as I did. This is a really neat idea and could probably be turned into an actual product. If the author added some more content (like some landmarks sprinkled on the landscape every now and then, possibly some varied terrain eg. bridges over rivers, cities/villages, windmills, dams, maybe some simple wildlife, etc.) and released it on PS4/PS5 for few bucks I can imagine it could sell pretty well.

Edit: Seems there's actually a way to support the developer on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/slowroads

Edit 2: Also props for good optimisation, it runs flawlessly on my M1 Macbook even on the highest setting.

It actually does generate bridges over bodies of water. If the road goes over a lake/river, it creates a simple bridge over it. I'm not sure if there are other bridge types

I'm not sure I want cities but I agree with adding a few villages and landmarks

Yeah cities might be overkill, but small villages you can just pass through would add in to the chill atmosphere of driving the countryside.

If we're putting in requests, my two would be a forest setting (would allow the Autumn option to be more colorful - particularly with some Aspen) and a Mountain/steep valley option.

And yes, please advise when it's available for sale :-)

The next location I add may well be a denser forest in the mountains - I'm picturing tunnels, fog, and snow at higher elevations.

I don't plan to sell it, but you can follow my twitter for updates. I'd like to keep it freely available if I can :)

https://twitter.com/anslogen

Why not both? Have a free version and a paid version with more features/terrains/cars etc.

Made a KoFi contribution. Perhaps one of your "goals" can be to hit a level where you can keep it freely available?

Much appreciated! There isn't any reason it can't be freely available; it costs almost nothing to host. Development time is the true cost, so it's more a question of how much I'm able to add.

The beauty of that project is not because it is a product

It is the fact that it is freely available for everyone to experience it thought your browser

Racing games? there are a shit ton on steam/ps/xbox/switch/mobile

Money people are very annoying

If anyone is looking for this but as a more complete game, check out art of rally: https://artofrally.com/

I've spent a lot of time in GTA V doing exactly this and nothing more.

This is a really minor detail, but — how long are the lane dashes? It looks like they're 50% white, 50% space, but in real life they are actually a lot longer and spaced a lot farther apart than most people think. A tiny detail to consider if you're going for realism.

Examples:

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700533,-121.9225333,59a,35y...

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9700286,-121.9224894,3a,60y,...

A typical single lane road in the UK under national speed limits (60mph) have dashes that look like these - if not opposite (longer lines with shorter gaps)

Based on some other road details, like the barriers, bollards and road signs, I'd say it was modelled fairly realistically on UK roads.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/r2ZfKdv9eVUPm4H89

Bingo - the dash spacing is still wrong, but it's based on the roads you might find around the Peak District (Cat and Fiddle, Snake Pass, etc.). I didn't reckon many people would mind the line spacing, but it'd be an easy fix

Wow, I was so wrong! TIL, and sorry I imposed an incorrect assumption.

i seem to remember that i have seen them vary in length, and i have the distinct impression that the length variation is dependent on the suggested speed. that is, shorter dashes if you should go slower, longer dashes if you can go faster. the specific details probably vary from country to country.

I really enjoyed these settings:

- Autopilot on

- Using the motor bike

- Setting roads to "casual"

- Season to summer

- Cycle timer of 3 minutes

- Setting cruise control to max 120

- Hitting "c" until you get complete first person view

- View distance: Ultra

- Detail: Ultra

Very cool experience, sort of put me in a trance a bit.. and I can't quite put my finger on why!

I did the same type of thing with the moon but I had to cycle the camera views a bit until I was comfortable.

When I set it to 15 mph it feels like a really nice screensaver.

Which, really -- turning this into a screensaver for mac/pc that skipped the sound and slowly/gently cycled through days and seasons would actually be really nice! At least on my M1 MacBook Air it seems to be pretty low CPU usage.

Man, I wanted something like this when I was a kid. (I liked it as an adult too, but I immediately drove off the road deliberately… just like I would have when I was 12)

Around 2000 when I was 11, there was a language called Darkbasic that had a 3d cave runner demo with a procedurally generated track. I made it faster and played it.

http://vplanet.petesqbsite.com/arch128.shtml

Nice! Loved driving around and trying to break the physics.

At first I was disappointed you couldn't leave the road until I found you just needed to use more speed + boost. After that I spent all the time driving off-road.

I drove backwards at the start and clipped into some geometry, causing the car to gain a ton of vertical velocity and fly high into the air up to the clouds! When it dropped back down it bounced around a lot. Found you could reproduce this by finding where the road surface was clipped and gain some speed before entering it.

This made me think: You should add some planes!

Had a great time exploring.

There are some less hilly areas you can leave the road easily, there's something of an achievement when you manage to careen off a cliff that says "The edge: what did you expect" or something to that effect. To be clear, I did not expect to continue flying through the air like an airplane going through turbulence (which is what happened)

Some time ago I added ABS, traction control and some torque vectoring to the Unity CarDemo ... that made the supercar surprisingly handable (is that a word?) even with acceleration levels increased to insane values. Especially with keyboard control (ie full tilt left or right) the car would not spin out in curves. Maybe you get a kick out of implementing some "electronic assists" for your car?

s/handable/handleable/ ... note to self: write out the words in your head correctly :-/

I don't know if there are other achievements but the one with the "What did you expect" text popping up really made me laugh. Good foresight anticipating players like me.

"What did you expect" - ha! Nice. The keyboard controls could definitely feel snappier, but once I got a feel for the mouse controls I settled right in. And taking the coach offroad is super fun!

Love it! If feel like you should lean into the landscapes, which are the biggest draw, by not penalizing driving off the road as much. Maybe dirt roads with some more floaty handling but not the speed penalty?

Great work!

It isn't intentional, that's just the physics of low friction on steep slopes. But you're right, nearly everyone starts by immediately seeing how far off-road they can drive, so it wouldn't be a bad idea to better support that :)

Some underwater features would be nice for people that likes to try silly things.

[Note: It was difficult to reach the water. Most of the time it has some protection, that makes it more realistic. But I finally found a part without protection :) . )

Got me surprised when I realized it is a browser game. Driving off-road in Hills gives Just Cause 3 wingsuit over fields vibes.

Feedback, Off-World was incredibly laggy.

It would be nice if autodrive was on to start so that those on mobile could see it in action, even if control is currently not possible.

you can tap even on mobile on autodrive button and it will work fine

The only correct play is to drive forward a few hundred yards, do a u-turn and drive back past where you started. Very entertaining. Especially when you fall off into the ocean and earn an achievement.

I turned right, drove up the hill in the woods, down to a lake, kept going on the bottom of the lake and arrived to The Edge. Nices views from the top of the hills.

One of the vehicle options needs to be a Lotus, and it should convert into a submarine when you hit the water.

Kudos to the developer! I'm a huge fan of open world driving sims (Forza Horizon series) and find the endless roads (and the long races) a great way to unwind. Knowing the roads is one thing, but add in changing weather conditions and general road traffic, each corner can be different each time you go round. Certainly keeps me on my toes!

Driving off road works too! One thing I wish it had was a look around function so you could admire the scenery when not driving.

I got really weird results when I set the seed to 0099FF - not the decimal value of 0x99FF, I mean the literal string "0099FF". I got all kinds of terrain generation glitches including one where the surface on which my wheels rested was a good 50 feet above what the texture was applied to.

For anybody else on mobile, I found this video of it: https://youtu.be/mEDywA7aVLo

I was really glad for the "I'm not on mobile" button – I am on mobile, but I do have a keyboard on it!

And here's the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZ8zH1CzKSM

Neat, this is my project - thanks for sharing! For anyone interested, I have a brief overview post up on Medium while I work on a deeper technical write-up:

https://anslo.medium.com/slow-roads-tl-dr-a664ac6bce40

This would be great for spin cycles and exercise bikes. many bikes now come with BLE controllers that transmit speed and cadence information that could be used for speed controls. The directional controls can be emulated by a keyboard emulator (arduino based) etc.

Procedural landscapes are such a fun thing.

When I was in high school I read about perlin noise landscape generation technique in a random blog post. I shared the technique with a friend and he was very excited. A week later he presented a program which rendered Minecraft-style landscapes in ortho projection. A few more weeks passed and he added 3D perspective (using alien tech called "projection matrices"), water reflections, grass and day-night cycle animation with shadows from Sun and stars. All this using Pascal and some primitive bundled-in 2D graphics lib.

Another related high school memory is Audiosurf game, where the road and environment are generated using an algorithm based on music tempo. What if we replace this algo with a modern generative model? Probably literally a bad trip.

i loved the drive but the speed is offputting.... i mean it only seems to work when i am like 100km, something that autodrive does while i can expect a mountain winding road to be comfortable at 20-50 because of twists and turns?

like there is

1. incline effect on the speed (up turns down speed and going down increases) 2. snow effect on wheels 3. traffic mode 4. like above, speed responsiveness at slower speeds 5. gear shifting

thank you for building a great product

Very nice creation ! But sad that AZERTY keyboards are often forgotten in mini games. The game is not really playable outside QWERTY keyboards. (Arrow keys would be a good alternative too)

I had the same concern, but it turns out the arrow keys already work! They're just not mentioned.

Rookie error on my part, apologies - I was needlessly agonising over having to make string comparisons in my input controller. This week I'll be refactoring it to use a map, and be adding some UI for remapping.

You can also map to physical key codes: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...

Thank you for caring for this :)

For fun, I went off-road immediately and ended up floating over the ocean after a few minutes

I love the cruise control and auto drive options. I don't find the default cruise speed very relaxing and appriciate being able to bump it down.

A feature request that, if I were you, I would probably say no to:

It would be cool to have URL flags to load with auto-drive on and cruise control at a certain level.

I think it would be fun to easily share what I find relaxing about this. Also it would be a kinda cool default new page.

Additionally, if you add the seed to the URL GET parameters, I can share this with my colleagues to compete who clocks more kms during a morning stand up.

For now there's ?seed=myseed&topo=[easy|normal|hard] but I'll be adding more in future!

I appreciate the player is rewarded for going offroad. That was fun. :)

I noticed as I approached the edge that large square tiles started to show up (the terrain was still contiguous until I go all the way to the edge, but it divided into uniform-sized squares by increasingly-high dirt walls with no collision detection). I wonder what caused that?

Reaching the edge of the world produced varying results:

- "The edge. What did you expect?"

- Going off the edge and seeing the terrain from off the edge.

- A crash.

Nice, looking great. Roadster feels like a super heavy electric car though :D

Controller support would be great. Or I wonder if there is already some way to map the controller inputs? Browser extension maybe

I've heard it's mappable on a steam deck, but I don't know about others. Controller support is one of the most-requested features, so I'll be trying to work on it this coming week. Thanks!

Excellent! Yes, it would be much more chill if I didn't have to use keyboard steering :)

Well, the roadster is also a 2+2 coupe reminiscent of a 5th generation Chevrolet Camaro, which is ~3860lbs (1750kg) for a V8.

A roadster would be a 2-seat convertible (no C-pillar), like a Mazda MX-5 (Miata) or a Porsche Boxster.

"Critical Error

Apologies - please click below to continue with a different generation seed. Your distance progress will carry over.

This error has been recorded for investigation."

Well, I guess that's what you get from leaving the road and continue driving through the hills.

Sorry to broke it, I was enjoying driving those hills and was impressed to not hit a "border" of the world. I thought it would happen sooner to be honest.

It popped up a message saying "Hold shift to increase acceleration". But I got the feeling that I was playing it wrong if I went far above 40 mph, so the shift key seems perfectly useless.

Lovely countryside -- very evocative of winding country roads in the southern or midwestern USA -- but I get stressed out when driving even in a simulation; real world driving is worse, so I'm not feeling the "zen".

How about re-creating the classic "Desert Bus", where it's still a straight road, but with more interesting scenery

I think this would be way better if it could work with only the mouse. LMB/RMB for brake/accelerator and moving mouse left/right for proportional steering with steering position visual feedback.

I've always also preferred the more immersive inside-out view where the view rotates directly with direction of motion rather than the overhead/behind view.

Press C for inside out view. Bottom right has some settings for mouse steering.

Nice.

Conversely, it would be nice to be able to use the mouse to look around in keyboard mode.

Great idea, but landscape is not very realistic, I'm driving next to sea or huge lake going uphill, then driving further away from sea, all the time going uphill and after some time I'm back at coast at same elevation where I started while going all the time uphill and NEVER going downhill.

Also why is autodrive driving in the middle of the road and not in the correct lane?

That's interesting - the sea plane is set at a y position of 0 so I can't imagine how that could happen... You can press F3 to get a debug overlay showing your position, maybe you could verify that the Y value looks correct?

Autodrive is in the middle of the road because it was much easier to implement. I'll see if I can get around to letting you choose a more legal lane-follow option.

I think what happened is that some people perceive they go upwards even when going flat. I discovered that after I once tried to stop at the top of a hill but already was beyond the top because the car started to roll down by itself. Perhaps you could adjust some angles of view?

I think you're probably right. The camera's pitch exactly matches the car's pitch, so I'll fiddle with having it maybe only take 50% from it.

that's what I tried, it always rolls back and I went clearly long time uphill and at best only flat, but clearly never went downhill to make up for same elevation as I gained to be back at same level with sea where I end up no matter how long I go uphill

When driving down country roads in the UK, it's normal to drive in the middle of the road - or entirely on the other side of the road, briefly, if:

  * You have a clear view of the road ahead
  * You're wanting to drive fairly quickly, which is when this road positioning can help

Took some finagling, but I made it off the road and onto the endless meadow. Really fun to slide around on and try to avoid the trees. Can't comment on the road driving, as I never spent more than a minute on it. I'm surprised you have an effect for driving underwater, too.

OP could add an optional online mode where you occasionally see other drivers cruising around and make it so that you'd just go through them as if they were ghosts if you tried to crash into them

That's very well done. I was pretty happy about turning my Camaro into a Jeep and being able to go off-road for miles before finally running out of map.

The fall and winter modes are especially evocative. Winter with fog or winter with night reminded me so much of driving in Utah.

If you're on mobile enable autodrive (the wheel icon at the bottom) and enjoy being a passenger.

Looked for this but it doesn’t appear on iPad

This is really cool. I was reminded of the following thread on elaborating the illusion of engine sound https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32367979

It looks great, but I can't stand the wasd controls. Please let me control steering with one hand (e.g. z-x or a-s) and acceleration/braking with the other (e.g. k-m).

Supporting the gamepad API would be ideal.

You can also use the arrows, so may be a combination of arrows / wasd will suit you ?

this is awesome! i love having a web-based chill car game like this to play to calm down, let my brain chill, and play it when im in bed or the middle of thinking or in between meetings.

for the last 5 years or so, its been this game for me: http://uploads.ungrounded.net/alternate/1099000/1099839_alte...

you can see its very similar vibe to yours.

in case you shut down the site, is there a way i can download this for personal use so i can host it on my own servers (in the event you take it down)? thanks for making and sharing!

Nice and funny. Adding more details in grasses would make it awesome.

The sounds are especially nice.

On physics side, the car will really stick to the ground, even when jumping beyond a hill.

Also, where are the horse/dragon versions? :D

>the car will really stick to the ground

I've got some airtime on the Moon map.

Feels like Test Drive 1, cliff/mountain combo, pretty relaxing.

This is really soothing and nice!

The endless explorable landscape is what I wished games could be like when I was a kid.

Any way you could offer an alternative to WASD controls for those of us who aren't using standard keyboards?

Looks like you can use the arrow keys too.

The mouse wheel controls your speed. I wasn't aware of this at first.

I really like this, nice work! Only thing missing for me is police sirens with flashing lights chasing me, on coming traffic, and Limp Bizkit and Bush playing in the background.

"The edge" is a pretty amazing place at sunset. Well done.

Fun!

Nothing in the lakes; nothing under the sea. Just boring half-light and featureless bottom. Would be nice to see it populated

And you can't hit anything! Can drive right through forests, ghost trees.

Auto-drive could go slower and stay on it's lane for extra relaxation.

Currently I just kept wondering, that driving on a middle of a road with such a tight corners seemed like dangerous.

Thank you for acknowledging that I made it to the edge :)

This drives really nicely. Reminds me of some good driving games from the 90s when a keyboard was enough. It's so well done, thanks for sharing!

I would like an engine noise that's more of a deep rumble and less of a high-pitched whine. But this is nice.

I have RTX 3080 but fps is low.

- Distance: Ultra - Render scale: 0.75 - Detail: Low

Even if view distance is low, setting detail to med lowers the FPS.

You might have GPU acceleration turned off in your browser settings.

This has been an issue for a couple of people, yeah - I mention it in the FAQ but I'll probably make a more obvious warning when I detect a low FPS

It turned out to be a broader issue. Firefox was behaving the same. Reboot didn't work either. There is a setting in window 10 control panel to set choose GPU for selected apps. That worked.

Car is too big, barely fits in lane :)

Can you add a URL option so it goes straight into self driving mode, without any need to click anything?

Yes, and I'll be adding query params for for all other config options too

Excellent! I noticed some beautiful scenes on your twitter feed, it would be nice if I could pass the seed in the URL to just jump in (if that's how that works).

Well done!

It's chill when you drive into the water, I wish they added some bubble sounds to complete the effect.

Neat! Will you release the source code?

Very neat, but also made me very glad we don't actually have to steer real cars using a keyboard!

Nice, would be nice if it could switch to dvorak so wasd is actually ,aoe

Makes it easier for me to drive ;P

Lots of fun! My favorite part was taking the motorcycle off-road and doing wheelies :)

This is a lot to ask for but damaging the car would make this into a fantastic game.

I love it, I'm not the only person who likes to drive fake cars to relax.

Me: nice, a chill, contemplative game, just what I need.

Also me: try to counter-steer at 100 mph.

This is really cool! It's a bit much for my puny laptop, but it's fun!

Got an achievement for driving off the edge of the terrain. 10/10.

Nice ... needs the occasional pair of superbikes blowing by for realism. :)

Great job. Reminds me of an old pc game called Vette! I played as a kid.

I like the weather/lighting effect when pressing Q.

Oh, I thought this was "Desert Bus"[1] ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_...

Adding a distance-dependent blue tint would increase realism a lot.

There is a nice way to set fog to be two-tone - I'll play with that and see what I get. The default Summer mode has quite a distant fog, but the morning/evening weathers are a little mistier.

I don't mean fog, I mean just the fact that air is blue, so things get smoothly bluer with distance (or rather, more sky-colored). Check out any mountain landscape, nearby trees are green and distant ones are blue: https://live.staticflickr.com/1009/531101849_a7d297e0cc_b.jp...

True, though in practice that's the way fog is applied in the shader. With the two-tone setup I can have a blue hue in the foreground transitioning into the hard white at the edge of the view dist.

Teaching the self-driving mode to drift would be pretty cool.

There is something fun about a flat earth with cartoon physics.

Did I hear anyone say "Desert Bus"?

How about some relaxing driving music?

Maybe some Eurobeat

This isn't chill. Surely you have to assume people are going to hold down W but not necessarily want to go at uncontrollable speeds?

the Mars terrain is interesting. Also, I found out that the car can go just as fast in reverse gear!

Requesting a max air-time feature!

Nice. Do you have a V8 mode?

Rats! No underwater texture!

wow, now I can drive on the snake pass from my browser :) kudos!

This is really great!

this is fun on lsd

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