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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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...

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.

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.

>"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.

press c

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

Nice, thanks.

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

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