Moody Non-Photo-Realistic Driving

An anonymous reader points out a project called Drivey, which he describes as "a dark and fascinating example of 2.xD [not quite 3d] graphical rendering. This tiny, free [as in beer] demo gives you an amazingly compelling driving experience. To quote the author, 'It was conceived as a driving simulator for old farts like myself, who are kind of nostalgic for the "old days" [ca. 1985] but are not so thick as to believe that the games from the 80s were actually in any way superior to the games we play today.' Even works fine under WINE!"

Comments

I cannae see shit, cap'n!

[Willeh]

That looks really amazing...All it needs now is for the Queens of the Stone Age song "Go with the Flow" to repeat in the background. Like alot of (OSS included) projects of this type though, it stands the risk of just being abandoned for one reason or the other (probably because it's just a hobby project in this case), which would be a shame, since this is a nice case study for simplicity and would be nice to make a game of some sort with. Burnout in the dark maybe?

Re:I cannae see shit, cap'n!

[Eric Giguere]

One of the best projects I did at school was a networked tank game in my computer graphics class, on (now quite ancient) IRIX workstations. Battlezone kind of game, very simple, but lots of fun to play -- especially when the professor was manning one of the tanks :-)

Simplicity is a virtue, and not just in coding. Now take this project and combine it with Google Maps and it could be very interesting...

Eric
See what your browser's sending with the HTTP header viewer

Well, gee whiz

[katana]

Hold on while I just go ahead and download an executable called Drivey through a link that was submitted by an anonymous author. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Well, gee whiz

[OpCode42]

Exactly the same risks as downloading a tarball of sourcecode and compiling it. Oh, you read every line of source you download? Including the configure script, which may well contain a trojan? Ignore me then!

Re:Well, gee whiz

[Mr. Underbridge]

Exactly the same risks as downloading a tarball of sourcecode and compiling it. Oh, you read every line of source you download? Including the configure script, which may well contain a trojan? Ignore me then!

Well, except that almost every program on windows expects to be run with elevated priveleges, to the point that it's about impossible to install any program otherwise. So if a user is duped, your machine is rooted. Not true of unix, unless you're installing it as root, which you probably shouldn't do for anything shady.

These days, as far as local exploits go, that's the big difference between unix and windows - unix has an inherent sense of privileges, which Windows really still lacks in large part.

You do make a good point though - using a !33+ OS doesn't make one secure.

Re:Well, gee whiz

[Anonymous Coward]

Wiping out your user directory is pretty low on the list of sinister things a trojan can do. Think about all of the things Windows trojans do. They can make the system a spam or DDOS zombie or they can just install a backdoor giving the trojan's author access to the system.

Just back up your personal files regularly.

Re:Well, gee whiz

[Dimensio]

Age of Empires (a Microsoft-produced title) requires full Admin rights to run. It's not just third-party developers doing a lousy job of coding within acceptable security standards.

Style

[CleverNickedName]

here is a quick pic.

Simple cell-shading done with style. This is what's missing from most games. Real style.

If I wanted photo-realism, I'd get up from my PC and head out the front door. Games such as WoW, Rez, Killer 7 and Ico have shown that a little creativity in the design can go a long way. It can also be easy on the gpu.

Re:Style

[badasscat]

Its a _RACING_ game.

Its one of the very few genres were maximum realism really is wanted, because everybody known how it look to drive and have expectations how it should look like when driving, well, faster...

You've obviously never played games like Burnout, Outrun, Daytona USA, Ridge Racer, Wipeout, F-Zero, or any of the other myriad of racing games where realism is most definitely not the goal...

And to the "style" of this "demo". Well, i cant call it style, and i cant call it a demo. Its more like a short looping flash movie, and the "style" is using only one colour and making everything so dark you cant see there isnt anything too see.

And from this, I can tell you've obviously never played any of the prior art listed on this page, such as Night Driver or Speed Freak.

Racing games are not a genre that requires any more realism than any other genre. The point of a racing game is to have fun. There is no need for them to be realistic - there is only a need to make you feel like you are driving something.

This guy does call this a "driving simulation", which implies realism, but even that's a misnomer. There's nothing about the word "simulation" that implies realistic visuals - the dictionary definition that applies in this case is "Representation of the operation or features of one process or system through the use of another: computer simulation of an in-flight emergency."

And to further that example, modern commercial flight sims (you know, the ones that cost $2 million each) have less realistic graphics than commercially-available flight simulators available at your local GameStop. Because simulating the inner workings of something is not really about texture-mapping every single crack on the asphalt.

Re:Style

[Kinetix303]

It's a 500k demo. Stop complaining.

Please.

It's just a fun little project. You're going to give yourself a heart attack trying to find fault.

Re:Style

[modecx]

Racing games don't need to look shiny to be good racing games, you know why? Because you're almost always focusing almost all your attention right at the center of the screen... Just about like you do when you're racing in real life, or just driving down the highway, for that matter.

Aside from looking in your mirrors your peripheral vision takes care of the rest, and if you're not focusing mostly in a 20 degree cone when you're doing better than 200 km/h, well, you're toast.

Even if all of that stuff was displayed perfectly, you're just not going to see it. It's total information overload--unless you're some superhuman with brain bandwidth that can handle it, in which case you'd probably make a fantastic race car driver, and you wouldn't need or want for simulations.

The grandparent is absolutely right, as long as a sim gives you the impression that you're doing something and you're having fun, then so what about the eyecandy? One of the most realistic flight sims I've ever played was the Harrier sim on Apples in the early 90's and it's not because it was pretty--I've played sims that were more detailed graphically even at the time--but because it REALLY made you feel like you were flying a Harrier. That's what it's all about afterall. If someone can acheive that in a 500kb executable, all the more power to them.

Re:2.5D graphics rendering

[Anonymous Coward]

Without a description of what exactly his rendering code does, one can't tell what goes wrong. In general, it's a little harder to render objects which don't have any vertices on screen compared to rendering objects which are entirely within the bounds of the screen, but it's certainly possible and not really that complicated. On the other hand, he's probably not doing his own 2D-clipping, so that may not be it. I guess he just likes to be the mysterious hacker fighting unexplainable algorithmic problems.

Uh, what?

[Corngood]

They don't need to exploit a buffer overflow to execute their code if you execute it for them.

Re:Burnout ruled

[Jaruzel]

Then you, my friend, are missing the point.

Not all games/demos have to be at the burning edge of graphics.

15 years on, and loads of people still play lemmings. The emulator scene for old 16 bit machines, and even old arcade machines is bigger than ever. All these people can't be wrong.

All modern games have, is their graphics. Most of them don't even have enjoyable game-play. Graphics are not everything, calling a game with low-spec graphics, rubbish, is like saying Impressionists couldn't paint.

-Jar.

Re:it makes sense really

[brokenarmsgordon]

I think the real problem is that the majority of drivers treat driving as a purely casual task, lend no importance or self-criticism to how they drive, and believe that traffic laws are designed for those with even baser intellects than which are in their own stunning posession. Perhaps accentuating this in America is that many of us now (purposelessly) are driving SUVs. Couple these wider cars with a poor sense of space and you have way too many people cutting turns and drifting across the double-yellow. Crashes would be inevitable.

While driving on the side of the road opposite to your position in the car is smart for visibility and other such matters, accidents due to negligence and human absurdity are unavoidable regardless of which "side" we're on.

Excuse my blind trust

[Programmer_In_Traini]

Actually...you know, yes, i just did that :)

I assumed that the link & post was verified by the /. team prior to its approval for display on the /. website.

Of course, the anonymous author could just as well have changed the .exe after the article was published but ... nah ... I prefer blaming /. for linking a virus if it happens :p