Two small updates, part 1: SuperSight 2.0

While my next big writeup is cooking, here’s a report about some smaller projects.

SuperSight 2.0

Last week I published a new release of my mod for Stunts. Best I can do is to copy-paste my original announcement, and invite you to the Stunts forum in case you’d like to talk about it.

The new version number does not bring revolutionary improvements, but it wants to represent that the project has reached a certain maturity and stability, and also that the focus will be less on the raw number of polygons and more on other aspects of the playing experience.

Here the new features since v1.6:

• Unlocked the camera zoom.
• Unlocked the camera elevation. Note that if you go to 90° (elevation = 256) the camera will be fixed with having the North on the top of the screen. This is a consequence of how the Stunts graphic engine works, up to you if you consider it a feature or a bug.
• Extended the status infos shown with the F5 keys. Now they also show the camera orientation. Useful to reproduce particular screenshots, compare replays, etc.
• Fixed the bug where the explosion effect would sometimes appear in a wrong position (related discussion).
• Minor tweaks to the rendering algorithm.
• Reduced the exe size to 250 KB, so that you can load more tracks on your floppy disk.

For daring drivers, I also provide a “boosted” variant, SuperSight 2.00X, which pushes the engine to the limit. It is more beautiful to see, but subject to crashes.

• 5 graphic modes with different detail/speed balance.
  • FULL: 180 tiles, slowest but most detailed algorithm. A fast 486 or DOSBox with cpu=dynamic are recommended.
  • GOOD: 110 tiles, similar to current official release.
  • FAST: 80 tiles, should work well with emulators in low-power machines.
  • VFAST: 50 tiles, for your dear 286.
  • BLIND: 1 tile, the one you’re in. You think you could drive on Default with your eyes closed? Time to prove that!
• The graphic level is autosaved in a file called STUNTS.INI, and auto-loaded at startup (curious people might want to edit that file and set the parameter to 5 to activate the mysterious 6th graphics mode).

You can get both variants in my Stunts project page.