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ClubSilo Racing Game Demo Released

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CS_header.jpgYou might remember our post about ClubSilo, the racing game using the game engine and modeling tools in Blender. Now, rather than looking at nice screenshots, you can experience the game for yourself.

Announcing the ClubSilo demo. From the BA thread announcement:

Once you have downloaded the file, double click "ClubSilo_Demo_Setup.exe" and follow the on screen instructions. Once the application is installed you will find CLubSilo in your START menu. You will have the option of launching the following variants:

  • ClubSilo Demo (640x480)
  • ClubSilo Demo (800x600)
  • ClubSilo Demo (1024x768)
  • ClubSilo Demo (window)

The numbers in brackets are the resolution the game will be launched at, smaller resolution for slower machines. The last option (window) is a dragable window which can be made to whatever size you wish, with the optimum quality graphics. (Simply maximizing the window will give a poorer result than dragging it to the edges of your screen). The Quick Start Guide is also available from this dropdown menu. It contains all the info you will need for controls, driving tips and so forth. An OsX and Linux version will be available soon for download from the link above. The above site will host updated versions, as well as support.

PS > There is a BONUS if you complete Green Meadow Speedway (track 01) in under 2 minutes and 50 seconds, and you will then be given access to downloading the next track. As you complete tracks within a set time, more tracks will be unlocked. New cars will also be made available as you progress.

ClubSilo is an ARCADE RACER, not a SIM.

You can see the official press release here. So download the demo and take a drive thanks to the Blender game engine!

About the Author

Eugene

Just a guy really into 3D, especially where Blender is concerned.

41 Comments

  1. That's great news! I was waiting for a demo to be released. I'm downloading now, hoping for it to work on my poor pc...

  2. The game is great for a blender game engine game, but it isnt anything near a commercial production.

    And it ran pretty poorly on my PC, which for a game with such medium quality graphics (ive seen far better in NFS 3) is unaceptable. Also the cars have too low weight - when you hit anything, the car just flies into air, no mather how hard you hit it (i know its just arcade, but this makes the game pretty anoying after a few minutes of playing). Also the R key seems to put your car in a random position, very often facing the wrong direction.

    The sound is nice... for the first minute, after which you notice that it consists of one music track, and 2 other sounds, and when you start to accelerate your car, and stop after a second, the sound of engine acceleration still plays.

    Also the intro movie run worser (choppy), than most HD tailers ive seen on the web.

  3. Thanks guys!! I haven't tried it yet but, it's very important that things within the Blender community be actually completed. It's nice to see yet another project started and finished. Congratulations!

    I will definitely check this out...

  4. It runs very well on my desktops here. They have mid-range nVidia GForce cards, and run smoothly even at 1024x768. Intro movie plays ok too. (Athlon 2600, 1GB Ram and GeForce 6200 and 5200 - they aren't ultra gamer machines).
    I second the "too low weight" thing, though. It's very annoying.

    @massta: Don't use "R" key as a "recovery", use the "e" key, that keeps the right direction.

  5. I agree with Massta. The game takes too long to start up, and the physics, while nice, are excessive. Kernon's reply, "Make a better one" doesn't help. The developers need to hear our criticism if they want to make their game better.

    Even so, this is better than any other game I've seen come out of Blender for sure.

  6. It is by far the most professional game made under Blender I have seen and that I think is great news already. Shame that I did not get to the playing, because the loading took really long...

  7. First of all thanks for the great demo!

    Here are my machine specs:

    Dual Opteron 165 @ 2GHz
    2Gigs Ram
    Nvidia 7900 GT overclocked

    I played the demo at 1680x1050 resolution.,

    The frame rate was acceptable. With fraps it measured in at about 40-60 fps.

    I've played the Ogre demos and they feature about as much detail (a little less) than this blender engine game and the frame rate was featured as being 1,600 fps and higher at times. That's not your fault, the Ogre engine is by my understanding simply superior to blender's game engine.

    Despite control issues and physics my constructive criticism is simple to add more detail and content. And remember that fun arcade racers are tough to master, but also forgiving in their physics, however selectively forgiving any particular racer may be.

    Now, I have to say that the presentation was very nice. I really enjoyed the feel of the CG movies in the intro. Made me feel like I was popping in one of my good ol Playstation discs.

    Overall, I feel as though this demo has lots of room for improvement. Some of which though, can be attributed to the limitations of the rendering engine you are using, however.

  8. Looks like they themselves some limitationms too.

    "We created the ClubSilo Demo to demonstrate our ability to create a good quality product within the budget constraints and time frame of a standard Television commercial." (from the press release)

    I'd be interested to hear hour many man hours went into the production.

  9. I think there are some problems with some names. NOS it's a brand name, not a material name.
    NOS don't identify nitrous oxyde, but a product of a company who produces nitrous oxyde. So, unless you have a licence to use this name or a written authorization to use this name, it's use is improper.
    Just like you can't use everywhere the name "Ferrari", you can't use the name "NOS".

  10. @Howitzer:
    My comment was because of the way that "massta" chose to issue his criticism. An example of the kind of comments the developers can appreciate and actually use can be seen in the post by "MagicMyshu". There is a way to offer constructive criticism without tearing down someone's hard work.

  11. Im sorry but this game is almost unplayable. Its good I guess for a blender game, but the physics are extremely annoying. I cant freaking keep the car on the road, right side up, or even facing the right direction. The cars dont really feal like they weigh all that much. Other than that the graphics are pretty good, and my computer doesn't seem to have too many issues playing it.

  12. Ok guys. Let me set the record straight.

    Luma is an animation and design studio specializing in 3d character animation for the commercials market. We also do short form animation projects and series. An off-shoot division of Luma Design (which specializes in motion graphics) is multimedia. Along with this goes what has traditionally been the domain of flash and shockwave gaming, most of which has limited appeal, and very little depth.

    We decided that perhaps we could up the game in this commercial sector.
    ClubSilo became an in-house project whereby we decided that Herman and myself would attempt to build a game in a three dimensional environment with as little resources as possible. One of my business partners suggested we try Blender, as it is a familiar environment for a 3d artist to work in, and it has a game engine. After looking at the app, we decided that, sure it was easy to move a box around, but after that, it really didn't do the job.

    Then along came a preview release of Blender, in which Erwin had been working on the Bullet physics engine. We figured we now had a fighting chance. Our goal > beat the net output of a flash game.

    The brief > simply > CREATE AN ARCADE RACER. And so CLubSilo was born. It took three months to get to the stage it is at now. We joined this forum,
    and it also became the perfect testing ground, we felt. ClubSilo will continue to be a pet project of ours, and we will continually work at getting it to work better.

    I can easily see why suddenly we were being compared to some off-the-shelf packages from the screenshots > partly because we didn't initially explain what our intent or positioning was > and partially because of our core business being special effects, animation, and post production in commercials, we know how to make something look good.

    We did our utmost to create as good a product as we could, and, well it got attention. We have been contacted by professional game development companies, and given a pat on the back, saying, HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO GET IT TO WORK? Also, I feel we got a lot of publicity for Blender.

    Erwin is in the process of making Blender a better app in terms of being a game development tool. It may seem that this might possibly only be a dream at this stage, but imagine this > The bullet physics engine gets even better, the advent of Ogre allows HDRI lighting, soft, real-time shadows, the BGE possibly gets replaced by a more optimal engine, or is reworked for better efficiency > and thus Blender as a real-time tool, moves into the 21st century.

    There are lots of powerful engines out there for around a hundred dollars. So why does Blender exist as a real-time tool? I guess you have to be a Blender user to answer that. It draws you in, it spits you out, but you just cant help coming back for more. It will always be installed on my machine, and that little orange icon will always say Double click, double click, you know you want to...

  13. @Luma
    Thanks for taking the time to write and to give your perspective on the matter - especially as one of the creators. Very well written and it certainly gives me different perspective on the game itself.

    @buergi
    It crashed on one of my machines because it didn't meet the system requirements. What are the specs of the machine it crashed on?

  14. You are critizing a 'baby's first steps' :)

    This game is a good testbed to improve the premature vehicle physics.
    The goal of the PSP Contest (with entries including driving/racing games, pinball, 2d/3d breakout and other physics based games) is to have fun, and to fix problems with the new physics system.

    If you didn't have much fun with the unforgiving physics, the might be fun in one of the other entries:
    http://www.continuousphysics.com/mediawiki-1.5.8/index.php?title=Entries

  15. Erwin is totally correct.

    Some of the criticism is senseless. This is a great project which is enjoying fantastic results so far. This wasn't a mainstream-ordered game slated to dominate the racing scene, these guys just wanted to try their hand at something.

    Well done Luma Team.

    To the critics though, some of the ideas sound great. Perhaps you all wouldn't mind whipping them up for us?

  16. IMHO thi is an absolute outstanding demo game!!

    I was without words when i've started the first time. Great textures, great physics (maybe over realistic), great design and modelling;

    MY COMPLIMENTS!

    BRAVI!

    ;-)

  17. Cool stuff. If you really want a lot of publicity. You can make a blog about everything you are learning in Blender as you go =)

    Or do you already have something like that going on?

  18. I have been playing around with the demo and found some interesting undocumented controls.

    Here are the ones I found:

    T - increases the time
    L - increase the lap by one
    C - changes the camera angle
    F - increases the fuel
    N - increases Nitro
    D - increases the damage

    Using the lap key, I completed the race in under a second!

    Has anyone completed the game in under 2 min. 50 seconds? It appears that the game devs. will send you a link to download the next track if you acheive that time. My best time is 2 min. 54 seconds.

  19. Well, it's taken me a while to find time to have a go at this. I am seriously impressed, so congratulations and thanks to Luma for raising the standard so high. It's excellent to have something that at least has all the attributes of a commercial game, which leaves improvements as exactly that - improvements - rather than proof of concept.

    Thanks again and please keep going!

  20. @ Luma

    It's a big compliment that everyone is having a go assuming you are a pro game developer!

    I'll try it out tonight and see what it is about. Looks really cool, and that is just from the splash screen on the Blendernation website!!!

    What special build did you use for this project?

    Isn't it in the pipeline that Blender will be switching over to the Ogre engine soon anyway?

  21. This is a brilliant demo. The physics do need work, but it is the first release. The graphics are near professional quality.

    I agree with BArrYZ: "without words"

    It ran perfectly with short loading times at 1024x768.
    I'm running:

    Intergrated Graphics
    512MB RAM
    3GHz processor

  22. Thanks for the input.

    We have changed the vehicle setup completely, and have also fixed some of the collision issues.
    We are currently setting up an analogue steering wheel input in addition to improved keyboard input, and it really makes the game a lot more enjoyable.
    Also, a whole bunch of bug fixes have been done!
    Level 2 track , with additional cars is also almost complete, but will probably not be available in the next download.

    The new version will be available within the next 10 days or so.

    ClubSilo is a Bullet Physics Game competition entry.

    http://www.continuousphysics.com/Bullet/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=446

  23. I played it the other day and its great! The only problem I had was that the car was difficult to control some sort of sensitivity input control might be a good option here, or offering mouse control as an option.

    Apart from that it looks amazing! Great job!

  24. Hi all.
    A new version is availabale for download.

    http://www.luma.co.za/propeller

    1. WHAT'S NEW IN V1.1

    * Support for Joystick / Wheel and Pedal input devices.
    * Improved drivability and physics settings. (Not as yet resolved, but improved)
    * Auto Recovery for the car.
    * Track changes and additional environmental models.
    * Ambient effects such as moving clouds and sun with lens flare and glows
    * Particles (when you nitro boost)
    * Customisable difficulty setting added.
    * Improved AI.
    * Improved wrong-way detection.
    * AI made pluggable.
    * Minor bug-fixes.

    Also, have a look at our new news page
    http://www.luma.co.za

    Regards
    :-)

  25. Jan the Freeze on

    thank you! This game is lots of fun and really cool looking too! Please add a MP3 player so i can play my rollcage tracks! ; )

  26. You guys are the pioneers! OK on my machine things where a little jumpy, I managed to get the car stuck up the side of the road for a while but who cares. The fact is up to now you have done a great job with the resources you have had. I can see a great future for Blender, for Animation Blender has been breaking new ground, (Elephants Dream), well now it's time for the game engine.

    Keep up the good work.

    Steve - in Scotland

  27. I live in South Africa, a 3rd world country. Breaking into the gaming scene is virtually impossible because there aren’t a lot of options available, on the African continent, for aspiring game developers. It is very inspiring to see what the Luma guys have done with such limited resources. Amazing things can happen with a little budget and a whole lot of talent.

    The sky is the limit; someone just had to take the first step. Blender has a big role to play in developing countries and this is where Blenders will truly shine in the years to come.

    Kudos to the Luma guys, the game is freak'n awesome! (Bakgat)

  28. the link is not working to for me, is someone can upload the file to rapidshare or somewhere? really thanks for the help

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