GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Where to discuss the official sequel. Developers blog, kickstarter, your experience with pre-alpha demo, ideas etc.
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James
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GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Well, the day and the hour have arrived... GeneRally 2 is on Kickstarter :bg:

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported and encouraged us so we could reach this point - we are forever in your debt!

If you'd like to take a look at our Kickstarter launch blog (including the video in 1080p, which it isn't on Kickstarter), then that's over here.

Long live GR :D
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Crono »

Finally! I just pledged :)

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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Buka »

T-shirt, T-shirt! :bg:
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by duck »

Those extra features are too good to turn down.

If I don't pledge to the kickstarter but buy the game when it is released do I still get those features? All of them?
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by ivaneurope »

Under Cross-platform support what does mean - does it mean that GR1 tracks and/or vehicles can be played on GR2 as well?

@duck, maybe it will depend on whether or not the Kickstarter campaign will be successful or not. Some of the extra stuff are must-have :P
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Areen »

This game is so laggy xD Can you promise me that at least in beta phase this will be playable?
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

duck wrote:If I don't pledge to the kickstarter but buy the game when it is released do I still get those features? All of them?
Some of the perks (like the boxed copies, etc.) will almost certainly not be available after Kickstarter. The extra features for backing GR2 will be available to people who purchase after Kickstarter - but only if we actually succeed at the Kickstarter campaign in the first place (otherwise we'll be looking to an alternate funding model, which may work differently).
ivaneurope wrote:Under Cross-platform support what does mean - does it mean that GR1 tracks and/or vehicles can be played on GR2 as well?
Cross-platform support means it'll work on Windows, Mac and Linux in this case. However, we are planning on offering a means to play GR1 tracks in GR2 - either in-game itself, or by means of a track converter (to allow people a finer degree of control over any changes) :)
Areen wrote:This game is so laggy xD Can you promise me that at least in beta phase this will be playable?
Short story: We will be focussing on performance improvements, starting during the backer alpha phase. We're really early on in development still :)

Long story: As mentioned in the campaign, we're at approximately 15% of progress on GR2 - and, as yet, no optimisation steps have been taken (over and above good development principles, of course). When we enter alpha access for backers, we'll be gathering as much information about performance and system specifications as possible, so we can try and target improvements across the board. There are plenty of gains to be made, but optimising before we have a full feature-set is problematic (as what might be optimal when you, say, only have 3 cars on the track, might not be optimal when you have 12).

With all that said, we're actively looking into (today) how we can improve the performance of the builds for those of you having lag/stuttering problems. If you could PM me your system specs, and if anything seems to make it better/worse, that'd be really helpful :)
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Herbal »

Actually, I can report the same what Areen said, however it is also true, that my netbook (Acer AspireOne ZG5) isn't a Hoover-dike at all. Fortunately the game works with slight lags set to low quality and 640×480 resolution.

And most of all, guys: thank you for your effort, I hope I can find a solution which will be a good compromise between my wallet and the amount you deserve. ^^
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Areen »

It's all about Unity engine. It looks like you need a miracle to really build a proper no laggy experience. xd
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Areen wrote:It's all about Unity engine. It looks like you need a miracle to really build a proper no laggy experience. xd
There's nothing wrong Unity in this regard - it's built on a perfectly robust and proven set of libraries and frameworks. There's no reason to believe that there's anything "inherently laggy" about Unity over any other game engine or framework :)

We are aware of what areas are our biggest performance hits - and there's plenty we can do to optimise this (in fact, one of this week's tasks is aiming to cut our draw calls by more than half). These things are not related to Unity and would be the same in any other game engine - they are a symptom of the early stage of the development process, not of the engine choice :bg:
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Daniel Rosenberger »

Hi
Just a quick question about kickstarter.
I need a credit card to back a project or are there any other possibilities?
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Bouncebackability
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Bouncebackability »

I assume I can pledge on more than one occassion, for example after pay day :P

edit: turns out you dont get charged until July 9th, after pay day!

best of luck :goodvibes:
Last edited by Bouncebackability on Mon Jun 09, 2014 9:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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James
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Daniel Rosenberger wrote:Just a quick question about kickstarter.
I need a credit card to back a project or are there any other possibilities?
Kickstarter, unfortunately, only supports credit/debit cards - I really do wish they supported more payment methods, though. The 'easiest' suggestion I've heard for this issue, is to get a pre-paid card from a bank, post office, etc. and use that to back (the recommendation is that you add at least £1/$1 extra onto the card than you plan to pledge, as sometimes pledging exact amounts from pre-paid cards fails).

If the Kickstarter is successful, we'll probably try to offer some additional payment methods for people to fund with - but we're reluctant to do that until we're certain we are going to meet the goal, and we will get the money from Kickstarter :)
Bouncebackability wrote:I assume I can pledge on more than one occassion, for example after pay day :P
You can pledge and adjust your pledge at any time :D
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Areen »

I don't know actually if there is a problem with animations frame rate or with engine itself, but I worked with Unity, and it isn't that good in terms of overall performance.
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Buka »

BTW, James, how about my previous request about donating for more than one copy of the game as a present to my brothers? Is it possible to do?
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Buka wrote:BTW, James, how about my previous request about donating for more than one copy of the game as a present to my brothers? Is it possible to do?
Am sending you a PM about this now :bg:
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Bird »

I believed in miracles. But the game does not work on Windows 98... so sad. It seems that I will be out of the race with Generally 2, because my little netbook (Win7) is not good at all for 3D-games (Generally 1 was the only 3D game working). But the interest in the game seems to be high, even outside the community. One more or less doesn't make the difference.
Maybe in some years, I will have a better PC and then I will come back here for racing with Generally 2. James, I wish you best luck with the project.
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Bird wrote:I believed in miracles. But the game does not work on Windows 98... so sad. It seems that I will be out of the race with Generally 2, because my little netbook (Win7) is not good at all for 3D-games (Generally 1 was the only 3D game working). But the interest in the game seems to be high, even outside the community. One more or less doesn't make the difference.
Maybe in some years, I will have a better PC and then I will come back here for racing with Generally 2. James, I wish you best luck with the project.
I'd have loved if we could have made it happen on older operating systems, too - but unfortunately there are far too many tools and OS-features that allow us to make quicker development progress on more modern ones :( Thanks for your encouragement, though - it is always greatly appreciated :bg:
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Areen »

Bird wrote:I believed in miracles. But the game does not work on Windows 98... so sad. It seems that I will be out of the race with Generally 2, because my little netbook (Win7) is not good at all for 3D-games (Generally 1 was the only 3D game working). But the interest in the game seems to be high, even outside the community. One more or less doesn't make the difference.
Maybe in some years, I will have a better PC and then I will come back here for racing with Generally 2. James, I wish you best luck with the project.
You don't need greater PC for GeneRally 2 because this game will not require as much as you expect from the demo. Demo provided by kickstarted is really far from any kind of optimization. It's really hard to think about miracle with this lags when these guys work on engine which is slow and does not require even basic knowledge about programming languages... I worked for short period time on Unity and I dropped it because there is plenty of better and simplier ones. Most of games based on this engine looks like that: you buy already done scripts in unity "store" and then you put it to your project. Then you can only pray that this will work with your other scripts and somehow it will work as a game. Sadly but true.

I really appreciate your work and what you guys accomplished, but from my experience I can say that it's gonna be hard to get this game be well optimized :shrug: I hope you guys do well.
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Herbal »

Bird wrote:...It seems that I will be out of the race with Generally 2, because my little netbook (Win7) is not good at all for 3D-games (Generally 1 was the only 3D game working). ...
I guess it will be fine for netbook, too. I also own one and could run GR1 and GR2 properly. So in your place I'd try to install the game there, you won't regret it! :bg:
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by James »

Areen wrote:You don't need greater PC for GeneRally 2 because this game will not require as much as you expect from the demo. Demo provided by kickstarted is really far from any kind of optimization. It's really hard to think about miracle with this lags when these guys work on engine which is slow and does not require even basic knowledge about programming languages... I worked for short period time on Unity and I dropped it because there is plenty of better and simplier ones. Most of games based on this engine looks like that: you buy already done scripts in unity "store" and then you put it to your project. Then you can only pray that this will work with your other scripts and somehow it will work as a game. Sadly but true.
I'll admit - I had a fairly long post written in response to this... but I'm going with these bullet points instead:
  • To assume we can, will, or have copy-and-pasted/bought our way here is pretty insensitive. All three of us write code for a living (to a greater or lesser extent), and we're perfectly capable of doing what needs to be done. We've put hundreds of hours of our time into GR2 already.
  • I'd really appreciate if you'd stop bandying about the idea that Unity is a horrible mess, and we'll never have a working game from it. It's just not true. "A bad workman always blames his tools," is the expression that applies here. As with any game engine, the far bigger part is how you utilise what tools you have. We are not bound to using any of Unity's many features and, as all of their builds compile to Mono JIT binaries, excluding unused features and assets, there's no real performance overhead associated with features you're not using.
  • We know the source of our current "lag" issues - and it's in a system without a single line of code written by Unity ;) In fact, I wrote it... so perhaps blame me instead? I already mentioned we have a problem and we know how to fix it - it has been on the agenda for a rewrite this week for months (but it's a big job). It's to do with a poorly-written implementation of sampling under the car wheels for the track surface (for producing physics modifiers and visuals like the skidmarks, dust, etc.).
I don't expect people to only give positive feedback, far from it, we need constructive criticism to improve. But please don't go around spreading misinformation... I genuinely don't know why you'd choose this particular time to do it, when our choice of engine has been public knowledge for ages :(
Herbal wrote:
Bird wrote:...It seems that I will be out of the race with Generally 2, because my little netbook (Win7) is not good at all for 3D-games (Generally 1 was the only 3D game working). ...
I guess it will be fine for netbook, too. I also own one and could run GR1 and GR2 properly. So in your place I'd try to install the game there, you won't regret it! :bg:
Herbal's right - it's worth giving a shot :) We need as much feedback from as wide a variety of people as possible so that we can attempt to make improvements. If you'd like, drop me a PM with your system specs and any issues you might have with the demo, and I'll see if I can find a similar test rig to start testing our builds on as we move forward - there's a long way to go :)
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Crono »

Yea, dont worry about Unity - especially for this relatively simple game (from a graphics-viewpoint). Unity is definitely capable of performing well - if you know what you do. And i belive James, Markku und Kimmo will provide a smoothe game experience at release. I saw much more complex games made in Unity performing very well. And although Unity does a lot of work for you - You cant make a game like GeneRally just by adding some scripts from the Internet ...

It is pretty dangerous to judge a game by its alpha or even beta version! So please consider that there is a reason for calling it "alpha" or "beta"! Every Game in this state is far away from being perfect! But you can have a look at the game and give feedback. See it as the gift it is and give constructive feedback instead of blaming some frameworks ^^

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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Areen »

James wrote:To assume we can, will, or have copy-and-pasted/bought our way here is pretty insensitive. All three of us write code for a living (to a greater or lesser extent), and we're perfectly capable of doing what needs to be done. We've put hundreds of hours of our time into GR2 already.
It simply comes with faith in your coding skills because I've never seen any line of code for this game. I know how it sounds, but it's my opinion, and that's how forum works, we share opinions with each other. So actually the point is - it's good that you're doing all job by yourself, so it should be done. The problem is, I can only believe in your words or see the code by myself, but actually, it doesn't matter to me. I only pointed that low ammount of Unity developer are like you guys and it gives me a little look at your work, but I hope I'm horribly wrong and you do really your best. (It's better to be sceptical about something, because I can be only surprised - a little or with a big gun ;)) And I'm not trying to mislead someone, I'm simply basing on my experience.
Crono wrote:Yea, dont worry about Unity - especially for this relatively simple game (from a graphics-viewpoint). Unity is definitely capable of performing well - if you know what you do. And i belive James, Markku und Kimmo will provide a smoothe game experience at release. I saw much more complex games made in Unity performing very well. And although Unity does a lot of work for you - You cant make a game like GeneRally just by adding some scripts from the Internet ...
That's why I believe in their work and what they do. That's why I've said and James said, that it's gonna be hard to fix.
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by Glen »

I don't understand this: I allready backed for £25 (Alpha etc...). I'm now interresed in the "Design a track" for £75.
You also get EVERYTHING from the £25 tier and below.
then
Add £10 to ship outside the UK
But! There is nothing in tier £25 and below that has to be shipped.

Is it a mistake?
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Re: GeneRally 2 - Kickstarter Launched

Post by puttz »

Just wondering, why hide what some of your stretch goals are? Why not give an incentive to give even more to get those features in the game? Just curious.
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