I've been in contact with one of the people behind DRAG, a fantastic looking racing game which will come to Linux soon. The fun fact is that the game engine is custom built under Linux too. The developer I spoke to, Thorsten Folkers, wanted us to announce it early to gather a bit of interest. They certainly have my full attention, that's for sure.
I have to say, I'm really excited about this one. Not just because we don't have enough good racing games, but because of all the detail that's going into making it. They're simulating 4-suspension physics to make the car really feel realistic, just take a look at this:
The crazy thing is—this is built by two people, two brothers in fact.
As for the game engine, it's built to use OpenGL 4.5 with Vulkan possibly coming at a later date. They've been working on this for a while, with the game engine being a private side-project since 2001. They said the game engine really started to come together sometime in 2011, when they decided to really take it further. It's been a long road for them, but with a release coming soon they will finally be able to see what people really think of it.
It will feature:
- Singleplayer
- Online Multiplayer
- Splitscreen Online Multiplayer
- Realistic physics, suspension and driving mechanics
- Support for all common Gamepads
- Windows / Linux (Steam OS) support from day one
- Available on Steam early access in 2018
- Price 29.99$
Here's some more gifs they sent me, I've converted them to small video files to save your bandwith:
And another one to show off the damage model:
If you want to read more on it, they've been keeping a development log here. They also did some more background info here in a post here.
I've been told we will get a Steam key to check it out next month and the current plan for release is around March/April, this is one to firmly mark on your calendar. Looks like it could be a serious amount of fun and good racing games is something Linux certainly needs a lot more of. If it really is anything like the shots they're showing off, it really could be a big hit with gamers.
Note: Article updated to be clear that the release is expected in March/April.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
This hearkens back to the days when some of us were playing [Indianapolis 500: The Simulation](https://www.mobygames.com/game/indianapolis-500-the-simulation) while the rest of the gaming world was in its diapers playing Super Mario Bros.Oh, there's a whole forum thread in that. :)
I've been videogaming for about 35 years. We didn't get the NES in Europe until the late '80s, by which time it was ridiculously outdated. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was seen as a bit of a joke here. I appreciate the Mario games' importance to videogaming culture as a whole, but honestly, they weren't even on our radar in Britain in the '80s. We were too busy playing Elite, Lords of Midnight, Tau Ceti*, Mercenary...
* “It was groundbreaking at the time for its extensive use of 3D graphics, shadow effects and its large gameworld set on a small planet, Tau Ceti III, orbiting the titular star. The planet also has a realistic day and night cycle (much shorter than our own).” And it had smooth 50fps (PAL) movement, albeit in a little quarter-screen window. When you consider that this was on a 2.5MHz 8-bit machine with 48K of RAM and effectively monochrome graphics, the progress we've made since actually looks a bit underwhelming. In a just world, Pete Cooke would be as famous as Myamoto or John Carmack.
I don't mean to veer completely off topic here, but for any of you youngers that want to see the PC gaming journey as we olders experienced it, this always gets my vote.
Thanks for the link, nice memories ;). My PC/MS DOS time starts at 10 minutes, though had a C64 before :)
Last edited by jens on 21 January 2018 at 6:53 pm UTC
I'm not really into racing games, but this looks awesome, i might pick it up!
Yup +1
Mohandevir Jan 22, 2018
This is good news!Considering the insane prices of GPUs right now, I hope the devs have a clear target market in mind, otherwise there might be only a handful of PC customers for this.
We tested on Intel Core i5 and NVIDIA GTX 660 with maximum graphics settings as shown on the screenshots the game runs around 60fps at 1920x1080 resolution.
We will try to get some numbers on GTX 750 Ti aswell.
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
I have A10-7800/660SC in my desktop and i5-3570/1070Ti SC in my Steambox.
1080p@60 is definitely the sweet spot, especially the 60 fps. Burnout 2, 3 and Revenge on the PS2 are still my gold standard for racing games. (Something got lost in Paradise. <-- Haha!)
Glad you are focusing on the CPU threading. That really is what separates the men from the boys with PC games. Looking back, Indianapolis 500 was, graphically, no better than Mario in many respects, but what you could do with those graphics was worlds apart!
Oh... Do you smell it? Windows vs Linux (true native) benchmark incoming! :)
Last edited by fenevadkan on 22 January 2018 at 7:17 pm UTC
Sorry for the headache with the GIF´s. :S:
I didn´t realize that it´s going to be problematic for all the mobile viewers.
Glad you found a solution!
marcin1509 Jan 30, 2018
why nobody couldn't make a standard racing game in this level of graphics ...
ZombieBarricades Mar 22, 2018
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