SGJ Podcast #323 – Racing in Space Games

3 Comments

1. what game is this you're playing? tried looking for it on steam

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2. Space 4x games next topic. hehe….Some do realtime battles but rarely see ground battles in realtime

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3. How to make space racing work: The closer to the middle of the circle you are, the bigger the speed boost you get, though it decreases based on the lead you have on other players and increases based on how far back you are. The boosts are "ranked" and drop off significantly. Boom, everybody's trying to squeeze thru the middle at once and ride the course as precisely as possible. Add decent breaks/retros mechanic so its possible to have a high entry speed if you're skilled enough and you've got yourself something.

   The principles of racing basically depend almost entirely on friction, accelerating, and breaking — and in space, you only really have acceleration either faster or slower (since acceleration is any change in velocity). To make it work then, you need to some how have big "steps" in how you add those things because doing it gradually to produced curved trajectories isn't something that really works in space unless you apply reverse-thrust as you turn to cancel out the lateral velocity that your old forward velocity becomes.

   Basically, racing is fundamentally movement under constraint. You need constraints. If you're gonna do full newtonian racing, why not unconstrain the top speed — and make managing velocity itself the constraint with some pulse based boosting instead of gradual additions? Players function better with integer counts of how many times they need to do something, rather than how long it takes to do something because it means there's a fixed value that is decreasing without consistent measurement through time. If you know it takes five pulses to take a corner, you can focus then on when you'll do them, not grit your teeth hoping you slow down enough through a turn because you got greedy and flew off into an asteroid.

   Cool video

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