Dawn of the Geeks

Back in the early to mid 1990’s I decided to create a racing game called “Hyperspeed.”

You can actually download it from here although I’m not sure how functional it is. There was nothing fancy to it. There were three track pieces: straight, left and right. Shifting shades of gray were used to simulate movement. It was written in BASIC.

After mucking around with Bunnies for quite awhile now (going on 5 years) I’ve decided to take a stab at bringing “Hyperspeed” back to life in the form of a Super Mario Kart clone. I was expecting it to be complex. Turns out that the techniques used to create Super Mario Kart are 100% identical to Bunnies minus the walls. So actually, it’s easier.

I originally created a new code branch for Hyperspeed but have now compiled a number of pieces into libraries in a “common” folder. Bunnies has been modified to use the new common code. Hyperspeed has been linked up with the Bunnies server. Earlier I had added a feature to the Bunnies website where you could upload a large image, break it into tiles and auto generate the floor of a map from it. Well, that’s why.

The floor is just the first step. Racing games like Super Mario Kart also need a collision map and way points. After playing Tower Defense for awhile and seeing some sample code I realized that you can simply use way-points like in Tower Defense to create racing AI and ensure that the player is going the right direction and not cheating.

A collision map is simply a gray-scale image that indicates whether a position within a tile slows the player down and by how much or if it stops the player entirely.

Currently you have to apply bump and depth maps one tile at a time. I’ll be adding a feature to allow collision maps and make it possible to apply them all to an entire image. There’s a very good chance that the maximum file dimensions will be going up. 2048×2048 works but I’d like to allow higher resolutions. 2048 gets you about 64 pixels per floor tile. I’d like to at least double that. The limit on the site is rather arbitrary. I could just remove the restriction.

Hyperspeed will probably not be released for at least a month. There’s a lot of work to be done to make it a game. In the mean time there’s a new release of Bunnies and an updated game server which fixed a few major bugs. Part of this project is to demonstrate the versatility of the Bunnies game engine and web-site. Once Hyperspeed is ready to be released Bunnies and Hyperspeed will be part of the same download package.