Vroom

Overview

This project was my third project in Year 2 at BUas. I was put in a team of 7 people to make an engine that could make a racing game. As a team, we made and engine in which we made two distinct demos with some distinct features.

Editor

Features

Engine & Tools

Feature	Credit
Basic engine	BUas Lecturers & Quillan Wielhouwer
Filesystem IO	Ayush Bhardwas
Scenes	Ayush Bhardwas
Scene graph	Quillan Wielhouwer
Prefabs	Ayush Bhardwas
Editor menus	Quillan Wielhouwer
Packaging	Quillan Wielhouwer
Splines	Quillan Wielhouwer
FMOD Studio Audio	Patrick Vreeburg

Physics & AI

Feature	Credit
Arcade vehicle controller	Guus Ros
Drifting (Arcade controller)	Guus Ros
Car-to-car collision (Arcade controller)	Guus Ros
Jolt vehicle controller	Donna Weerdenburg
Checkpoints	Guus Ros
Item pickups	Donna Weerdenburg
Spline-based AI	Quillan Wielhouwer

Graphics

Feature	Credit
DX12 PBR Rendering	David Boyd
PS5 PBR Rendering	Patrick Vreeburg
DX12 in-game UI	David Boyd
PS5 in-game UI	Tygo van Gorp
Post-processing pipeline	Patrick Vreeburg
Motion Blur	David Boyd
Shadow mapping	Patrick Vreeburg

Maro Kart

This Mario Kart-inspired demo features spline-based AI, a custom arcade-like vehicle controller with drifting and item pickups.

Trackman

This Trackmania-inspired demo features an in-game level editor with a Jolt-based vehicle controller.

My contributions

GitHub CI pipeline

Since some of this is under an NDA, I cannot show images here.

To assure that all code added through PRs work on a clean clone of the repo, I added a CI which included linting through clang and build tests for both PC and PS5. I also did some optimisations to assure that the CI build does not take ages. The steps I took to optimise the CI can be seen in the table. The times were recorded on my local machine through building the engine in Debug with the msbuild CLI.

Change	Time on my machine
Baseline	43s 850ms
(CI Only) /Z7 + removed /RTC1 + removed /JMC	40s 070ms
PCH with all file includes optimised	33s 280ms
Turn off /bigobj for engine	35s 370ms
(CI Only) Turn off PDB generation on Debug	32s 490ms
(CI Only) Add /UNITY	29s 740ms

Post-processing pipeline

The post-processing pipeline for Vroom supports some basic effects built into the engine and the option to make your own HLSL shaders. The user-defined shaders make use of Dxc and DXIL to runtime compile and link the HLSL shader to the post-processing pipeline. The video below is relatively old, but the workflow has not changed much from this throughout the project.

Shadow mapping

I used a simple 3x3 Gaussian PCF filter on a cascaded shadow map to add shadows to the engine. This was my first time ever doing shadow mapping, so this took a while to get right.

FMOD Studio integration

Through the use of the ECS and the engine’s trigger box system I made a system for interfacing with FMOD Studio banks. In the engine I expose some components to interface with Studio.

In Maro Kart these components and a custom system for example modulate the sounds of the car based on the speed of the associated car

Speedlines (Maro Kart)

These give the player a false sense of speed. The faster the car goes, the more opaque the lines become. I also added the option to specify frames and some parameters regarding the random shifts in position, scale and opacity