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Submitted by , posted on 23 October 2004
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Image Description, by
Etees: The Nut is Nut Enough. This is the first game project I worked on with my friend Alexis Angelidis. We actually started the project in 1999. After working on it during our spare time for almost two years, the project got lost in the deep unexplored undergrounds of my computer's hard drive.
Recently, after a frog suddenly jumped through my apartment window directly into my overclocked GPU fan, I suddenly remembered about Etees and thought it may be great to put the project online. And here it is.
The Story:
Small but unfriendly creatures, the Etees, have just invaded the Earth, enslaved the Frogs and destroyed Humanity. And why? Just to create a huge devastated land where they can play their favorite game: fighting for nuts.
So, have fun, and do not forget that this was a first project, so it is absolutely far from perfect and contains (lots of) bugs.
The Game:
The goal of the game is to take small nuts (enclosed in red capsules) that are at some random places on the ground. Once you have taken one you must bring it back in the middle of the terrain, under the tree. Be careful, your opponents are not friendly people. If you are hit by an explosion, you will lose your nuts.
The game can be downloaded from this page. Two players can play simultaneously in split screen mode. Comments are welcome !
Behind the scenes: Lots of visual debug information can be displayed. Simply hit [TAB] (the console appears), enter map (a map appears), then enter debug. Do not forget to close the console ([TAB]) since it takes the keyboard focus.
You will see all the forces applied to the cars, the targets of the opponent's AI (well, Etees are actually rather stupid creatures ;-), and other stuff that I forgot about. The physics of the vehicles is simple: the car is considered as a solid and the dampers are springs with a straightforward (and unstable) Euler integration. By hitting [z] you will be able to change all the car physics parameters through a small settings window.
The terrain rendering is very simple (grid of display lists (OpenGL) selected by a frustum culling), and quite slow since it is not stored as triangle strips and there is no lod (remember: first project, back to 1999 - at the time, the terrain was using 8 times less triangles). The first implementation was using ROAM lod. Due to the CPU workload (and I must admit poor implementation), this was actually taking more time than feeding the GPU with all the triangles and doing per tiles frustum culling !
The smoke effect of the main menu is done with the following technique.
The most difficult thing with this project was to create a game with all the required elements: nice menus, bonuses, some random physics and a windowing system (hmmm, not trully essential) - oh and well, I almost forgot - exploding frogs.
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