GP32 Gta Clone

[Spaz O Mataz]

Hi all i'm just posting to see if anyone would be interested in creating a GTA clone as i'm looking at the way it works and i recon it would be possible.

I would take a shot at it but i'm not a greate programmer but have good views on how the levels work and little bits of info. if a cupple of programmers are interested it would be a great game.

the maps would require a massive grid which the squares consist of three high cubes for multi level areas such as bridges.

the cars and people are ovious how they work.

cars go foward an reverse and turn
people do the same but on a smaller radious

i have got the offical files and am currently ripping graphics for it. each object in it's own file. and all map element in a cupple of files (floors,roofs,walls) please relpy if anyone is interested. the sprites are in 24 bit and 8 bit for the cars.

In the cars sprite file the cars are only facing down which makes it look like the game rotates the car not the graphics file. so will that be possible

WHAT IS NEEDED:
Map: 3 levels of cubes with a large amount of them
car engine: with the ability to rotate a sprite
predestrion engine: i'm looking in to
a file format for putting cars and such into. i'm thinking it sould be a file containing the sprite and a data file with the same name with car info in it.
and a file for the map elements. whatever format the pics need to be in i could convert them.

At the moment i'm ripping all the elements then i'm going to sort things ous such as transparency. and have just found out that each car has damage parts at the moment so i'm going to look into the entire thing once if got the main sprite file out. at the moment all the graphics i'm ripping are in bmp but may change to png gif jpg depending on whoever helps

 

[ravuya]

FAIR DISCLOSURE: I wasn't a very good coder when I wrote my GTA clone. I still aren't. So take all this with a grain of salt when I speak about difficulties in game development.

I stopped making my GTA clone about the time I got to car collision physics. I couldn't find a definitive guide (I even bought the Physics for Game Developers book) and it was extremely hard to picture the ideas in my mind to even figure out how to hack out rotation as a result of a collision.

Graphics is not so very hard; unfortunately my webhost containing the source code to my GTA clone has gone down. It just used SDL and rotated and zoomed car graphics as appropriate, and switched between different images based on the level of "health" of the vehicle.

As for my pedestrians, I used a braindead simple pathfinding algorithm (if target x > your x, then increase your x value) and some straight line paths around various city blocks, stored in a vector. This way, it used up an unnecessary bunch of memory (due to the overhead of STL vectors) but worked quite acceptably, as pedestrians were spawned and deleted at the outsides of your visible range (to make sure there were only 10-15 peds at any given time, not that the A.I. wore down the CPU all that much) and allocated a random "path" to follow, simulating a bunch of spastic peds with goals in life. The fun part is where I used a simple collision-detection routine found on GameDev.net to detect when you hit them, and strew gibs all over the ground (with a #define setting the number of gibs strewn across the road).

The same goes for CPU cars, but I never figured out any elegant logic to get them to follow roads; I mostly hacked it.

Handling "height" for bridges, fire escapes and rooftops would not be very hard, but then again you'd have to ask yourself how much it would add versus the potential cost of handling z-sorting and additional logic on the already overtaxed GP32.

I stored my maps as an ASCII array of 100x100 48x48 PNG tiles; this is not very efficient and I was not thinking very well of performance (which is AMAZING considering my development machine is a K6-2/200; after all I'm practically forced to get the fastest code possible).

So don't let me discourage you, but do know of the potential difficulties here and get cracking on them ASAP.

 

[Dozer]

Cool . Sounds interesting ravuya. Could you post screenies of your previous work? Or would you rather let the project RIP ?

 

[MojoJojo]

the cars and people are ovious how they work.

cars go foward an reverse and turn
people do the same but on a smaller radious

It may be obvious, but it is quite hard to program well... Devloping a model from the maths is quite difficult. I have never tried doing reasonably realistic car physics myself, so it may be possible to get passable results by a trial and error, building up the model type fashion.

Going straight for GTA clone might be a bit ambitious... I haven't seen a GP32 overhead racer yet...

 

[Spaz O Mataz]

Thanks for your input ravuya.

For the car directions it could work as multiple maps for the likes of road directions as gta works in a sort of 3d way. set it so it will be 1 is left 2 is right 3 is up 4 is down or something along the lines of that. as for collision detection it only needs to see what sprite is touching what inpassble sprite and so on

the way gta maps work is each tile has 3 layers plus a face for each side so it makes it in cubes whichn i'm trying to figre out a way around it.

ravuya would you be willing to take work back up on it if we get a small team of coders working on this? and any chace that you could send me a compiled version of what you've done so far so i can have a look as i've not got the libarys set up on my computer as i'm having trubble?

Anymore help info is appreciate and anyone who would be willing to help please say as i'm still ripping graphics from the origanal game for use.

Cheers all.

 

[Enslaved]

Guys if you read the new Empee interview by Hooka, you would know that he is already working on a GTA clone, why not ask him if you can help him, and a new community project can be started. If you go about making this, I suggest you make the Buildings 3D like in 1 and 2 but not Sprite buildings.

 

[ravuya]

I'll have to track down the source code. It's all in SDL, and rather useless to an enterprising GP32 programmer. I also think I stripped out the car AI (keep in mind I was trying to avoid the right-angles pathfinding method that the pedestrians used, and instead write a little script that just made the cars detect what tile they were travelling on and try to find others like it).

I'm not sure if anyone ever bothered to build a Windows EXE, though if I find the source again I'll certainly try.

 

[ravuya]

OK, I'll punt this one up now that I recovered the stuff. Here is all the source and crap anyone would need, although it's such a mess that you'd be better off starting from scratch.