Interesting. What are your specs?

I tried under the same conditions as you (5 bots, 1 human, large dirt patch, score limit 300) and never dropped below 60 fps. I tried again with some more ridiculous conditions (13 bots, 1 human, large dirt patch, score limit 999, weak spot), and while my framerate wasn't great (mid-30s), it didn't vary enough to cause notable jumps. I kept an eye out for evidence of memory leaks, but the only place that could be possible is in the way I allocate space for replays, and everything seemed to be managed quite smoothly.

In those crazy conditions I hit up the debug panel (obviously not available in the release version) and saw script execution was taking up a whopping 10 ms -- I'll have to optimise my collision function, I think, with some sort of means to eliminate collisions that aren't going to happen more quickly. It'd be a shame for CPU performance to be such a bottleneck, even under the worst conditions.

These are my specs:
Intel Pentium D 3.00GHz 3.01GHz
4 GB RAM
32-bit Windows 7
GeForce 9600GT

But I couldn't find any reason for (nor evidence of) jumpy performance. There's the slightest possibility it could be happening in v0.1.4 and not v0.2 (since now I'm working on v0.2), but I seriously doubt that since the only changes I've made so far occur out-game, in the menu.

Jibb

Great work here! I voted for your project on ModDB. Keep it up. :|)

Thanks William Needless to say, I've voted for Silas. Hopefully see you in the top 50!

Jibb

That's a nice update, the AI is pretty solid.
Two suggestions:
1) Reduce the radius (and maybe the strength) of exploding cars.
2) I think that you explode too fast, try some different values there, too.

That makes sense. Another friend mentioned on IndieDB that the explosions can be a bit much, particularly in weak spot. Something like that affects gameplay quite a bit, I think, so would other people also like to see the strength and/or range of explosions reduced?
That was also mentioned before, and I completely forgot. The whole purpose of players not dying instantly is to give them a chance, so I'll see what I can do to increase that chance without letting them go too far out the ring.

Jibb

well playing it again, this time, it felt different, when i played it before with just two players, it was ok, but with so many cars now, the handling really feels weird, theyre behaving too much like real cars, even RC cars respond better, u knw, accelerate, decelerate, turning speed, half the time i died because the response was a bit slowed.... though i guess this may be an opinion

also, i'd suggest adding an icon above the player cars, u knw, like a translucent 3d arrow or something..

other than that, good job, coming on nicely

That's odd -- car physics/handling/acceleration/so-on have not changed since the first release.
That makes sense. I'll have to think about how to go about doing that without them being too distracting.

Jibb

Jibb, please do not change the behaviour, I think it's the best part of the game! The drifting and handling is cool.
I could imagine a mutator for increased acceleration or even a time lapse mutator.

not necessarily feeling different, just that with more players, the response time becomes more obvious, maybe have an RC car mutator that gives quick response and faster throttling =] because as said, its just an opinion of mine

Thanks Superku The handling hasn't changed since the game first came out, and it's something I won't change unless people hate it, since it takes a lot of tweaking.

Something I might add in future is the option to have player profiles, and to have preferences associated with each profile that include things like turning circle, steering speed, and maybe even acceleration -- but as long as friction and top speed remain unchanged it is (theoretically) automatically balancing (for example, a player with increased turning circle might have more maneuverability at low speeds, but at higher speeds they'll more easily spin out). This is all still just an idea, and something I'd be very cautious about implementing.

As such, I was very hesitant to make changes to the strength of the explosions, especially since they only seem to be a problem in weak spot. Then I played some more and realised explosions aren't significant at all without weak spot mode anyway (since they only occur out of bounds), so I can change their strength for the sake of weak spot without worrying too much about "breaking" the rest.

I increased the rate of fall-off for explosions, and reduced the cap on their strength. The old values are still there, commented out, in case I need to revert, but it makes weak spot much more playable!

Also, I played with how long it takes for cars to explode. It is affected by how far out-of-bounds the car is -- this means that cars can now survive a solid second drifting out and in again, but if a chain of explosions sends a car rocketing out they'll explode much more quickly, preventing the camera from being dragged too far out of the arena.

I hope all that made sense :S

Unfortunately, no one outside my family will be able to try out these changes until the next update is out, and I'm pretty determined to just work on online play until it works at this stage. If we're all lucky that means the end of this week, but I wouldn't count on it.

Jibb

EDIT:That makes sense (I've been saying that phrase a lot, lately). I'm putting it on my to-do list, and we'll see how that works out. You might notice that RC cars don't really knock each other around very far -- the factors that afford them quick acceleration and maneuverability (namely their friction:weight ratio) work against this kind of gameplay to a degree. Not that my game is a simulation by any means, but it might need some workarounds.