Happycake Development Notes:
Rough-Draft Vehicle Designs
25 June 2004

We have three vehicle designs kicking around in the game right now: the Roller, the Hexapod, and the Flyer.  We will have more by the time we're done, and they will probably end up looking significantly different from these.  These current vehicles are basically in there so that we can write the AI and steering code, and figure out how to best do things within the framework of Atman's physics system.

The following screenshots have some screwy shadow artifacts; in fact the shadows look downright messed up sometimes.  Still, I left the shadows turned on because they help out with communicating where the things are in the scene.

Currently we can test all these vehicles by steering them around under player control (though the final game design has AIs piloting them).

The Roller

The roller currently has three wheels, one of them being a big wide one in the front.  Not sure how well that will work when we try to run him on uneven terrain.

The Hexapod

Your classic 6-legged creature.  It maintains 3 legs on the ground at all times, providing a support triangle, so that the vehicle is statically stable.  Right now you can blow legs off with the rocket launcher and it will adjust its gait to maintain upright (insofar as it has enough limbs left to do that).

Note: there are obvious gaps between the pieces of the hexapod's body.  Don't worry about this for now; just pretend there are some invisible joints holding the pieces together.

The Flyer

The Flyer is a VTOL hovercraft.  Two hover jets mounted to the left and right, forward of the center of gravity, provide the main source of lift and steering control.  A third jet mounted on the tail provides stability and pitch control.  Right now all these jets look like inert slabs just like the body; visual upgrade coming soon.  (Once again, ignore the gap between the tail and the main body; it is attached by an invisible joint.)

The Flyer turns left and right by tilting the two fore jets in opposing directions.  Here's a screenshot of the Flyer turning right.

There are also turrets we can mount on these vehicles.  (Currently, two kinds; an autocannon turret and a rocket turret).  The turrets track and fire at targets, but they don't look very good right now and they're kind of messy (firing way too much) so I took them off for these screenshots.  They may appear in next update.