Touge Shakai (Mountain Pass Society), is an online Touge Racing Game based on Japanese car culture in the 90s. With an emphasis on balance between realism and fun gameplay, the physics are tailored for competitive drift racing, while giving a challenge to all players. The game is built upon the fan-made creation Initial Unity that me, and Jia Ying(AugGust), have worked on.
Similarly to Initial Unity, cars drive in a unique way. We're still going for semi realistic handling in the style of a simcade, where it's by design that majority of the cars are able to go around corners faster while drifting, without compromising handling in a unrealistic way.
In this project, we greatly expanded our workloads as it has become a much larger project that is no longer just a hobby project, but something meant to be sold on Steam. As such, every single asset used are 100% original, and are paid for using the funds we acquired from our successful Kickstarter.
Touge Shakai, while is a revision of Initial Unity, has major reworks and restructuring of the entire project to allow for flexibility of adding more features without needing further rewrites. Notably, the entire multiplayer base has been 100% replaced, using Mirror for Unity, together with Epic Online Transport as the transport layer, to allow for a public lobby, with the ability to have 10 players racing together in 1 session.
As multiplayer synchronization is extremely important, we used our own dead reckoning algorithm to better predict a car's positions and velocities by interpolating to a extrapolation of the cars physics based off the last inputs received from other players based on their ping. As we are sending a large amount of packets between many players, most are compressed as much as possible in order to keep bandwidth low. For example, a player's inputs (steering movement, brakes, throttle, clutch, gears), as well as car systems (Horn, headlights, brake lights, signal lights), are compressed to only 11 bytes total. This combined made the game entirely playable against players from the opposite side of the world without odd teleportation or unrealistic movements, and we're extremely satisfied with the results.
As a demo, here's a short clip of the game in a public lobby together with other Kickstarter backers
(Do note that players are allowed to disable collisions)
As simracers, players of games like Assetto Corsa or rFactor, we wanted to also support force feedback racing wheels (E.g. Logitech G29, Thrustmaster T300RS), so I got to work on writing the base to do so. Forces from the suspension, as well as tyre behaviour on the road, is transmitted into the wheel in a realistic manner, making it easier for players experienced with racing sims to drive with a steering wheel.
Unlike many games, for example the Forza series, the steering wheel is animated correctly like in a real car, having varying levels of steering allowed on each car(most cars have around 900 degrees). This together with the simulations of other car systems most games don't bother integrating accurately, like turn signals, engine stalling, lights instrumentation, pedal and gearbox animations, makes the game very immersive.
Here's a demo video we showcased to the public (I didn't mention, but we got VR support too!)
Other notable features new to Touge Shakai
- Car body modification
- Car livery painting
- Freeroam
- First person driving + interior car instrumentation
- Virtual Reality support
This are some things that I worked on notably for the project (Not limited to)
- Car physics
- Steering wheel force feedback support (Support for Logitech/Thrustmaster/Fanatec steering wheel joysticks)
- Car engine to drivetrain simulation (Transfer of power from engine to the wheels through a gearbox)
- Car systems back-end (Headlights, signals lights, reverse lights, brake lights, car battery simulation)
- Turbo and Anti-Lag Systems
- Limited Slip Differentials
- Dynamic torque vectoring (AWD and RWD)
- Car audio system
- Controller haptic feedback
- Multiplayer lobby/gameplay
- Multiplayer network syncronisation
As a result of this project, me and Jia Ying formed the company: Raiyon Studios.
