It's easy to get the hang of the controls. The terrain shapes was pretty cool to play around in.

For a rocket powered snowboard, there seemed to be no handling while in the air, and maybe about half of the time playing it the character was in the air for me.

The frame rate was about 60 fps on my non-gaming laptop.

1 hour ago, DavinCreed said:

It's easy to get the hang of the controls. The terrain shapes was pretty cool to play around in.

For a rocket powered snowboard, there seemed to be no handling while in the air, and maybe about half of the time playing it the character was in the air for me.

The frame rate was about 60 fps on my non-gaming laptop.

Man.... I was getting 8 FPS on the WebGL version.

My Specs:

Windows 10 64 Bit

32 GB Ram

GPU: GeForce GTX 1050 TI SC 4GB

CPU: i7 4790K 4Ghz

I used Chrome to play the game on.

EDIT: I tried Firefox and I get 60 FPS... odd....

Odd, I just tried it out on Chrome:

Pretty consistent around 60fps.

Win 10 64 bit

i7 4 core 1.9 Ghz processor

16GB RAM.

Some Intel video card, not meant for gaming.

Wow, thanks for the feedback guys!!  Oh, did you guys try out any of the race courses?  I know they are pretty boring right now, but I'm curious if they "worked" for you.  You just load it up, maneuver into the green starting-zone and wait for the timer, then you will get a completed time once you cross the finish line.  The races will be a core game component and will be integral in the "leveling / achievements" system, plus the primary source of Leader-board data.

@DavinCreed  I'm still working on all the mid-air and trick related goodness.  There will be boost rockets that you can use while airborne and I may enable the main thrusters for mid-air maneuvers too, it would definitely add something to the rocket aspect.  This is probably going to be one of the more tune-able aspects of the game.  i.e. you'll be able to upgrade your board's parts / get new better boards.  There will also be achievements where you gain new abilities and unlock certain things.   This build was meant mainly to see if I don't have a bunch of game-killing bugs in the core components of the game-mechanics.  And, well, I think it's passing that test so far.

@Rutin  I know there are some performance settings in FF/Chrome that you can adjust to make gaming performance improve some, but I also know that Chrome is fairly notorious for behaving erratically where WebGL is concerned on "some" systems...

https://forum.unity.com/threads/webgl-performance-in-google-chrome.456519/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31106321/non-optimal-webgl-performance-with-chrome-and-windows

Thanks for checking it in both browsers guys!!  Really appreciate it!!

I've also noted extreme performance changes depending on if you have multiple tabs open as well.  I have gamedev and one of those above articles open and my game is only playing @ 30fps..(EDIT: this 30fps was because I had Unity open and the game was running there too.. hahaha, so nvm that.. But the point still holds true..)  So it's a very shared environment.  Maybe something on your system is using an embedded version of Chrome, and causing some performance problems due to sharing resources? 

I need to spend some time playing with Chrome to see if I should put a note in the game about using FF instead..

Now, to build some competitive NPCs, Leader-Boards, Music & SFX, and all the other things I'm completely forgetting.  

I did try the courses. I completed one and then tried to load another and it looks like that broke it until I restarted the game. I did not unload the course when I did that. The first time everything worked well. When I loaded the second one, I got the 10 second countdown immediately after loading, before passing the start. Once it reached zero it would start over again. Unloading the course stopped the countdown, but left the number up on the screen. Loading a course started a new countdown immediately. Tried unloading and loading the courses a few times.

29 minutes ago, DavinCreed said:

I did try the courses. I completed one and then tried to load another and it looks like that broke it until I restarted the game. I did not unload the course when I did that. The first time everything worked well. When I loaded the second one, I got the 10 second countdown immediately after loading, before passing the start. Once it reached zero it would start over again. Unloading the course stopped the countdown, but left the number up on the screen. Loading a course started a new countdown immediately. Tried unloading and loading the courses a few times.

Okay, cool, I was afraid there might still be some bugs in there once the countdown timer has started...

..Think they are fixed now though..   Just uploaded v 0.1.6

It will now unload and/or switch between courses correctly once the countdown timer has started.  Thanks @DavinCreed for catching that, it was last on my "test list" and I obviously never got to it...  I suppose it's time to make an actual test list and not try to keep it all in my noggin..  haha

1 hour ago, Septopus said:

I know there are some performance settings in FF/Chrome that you can adjust to make gaming performance improve some, but I also know that Chrome is fairly notorious for behaving erratically where WebGL is concerned on "some" systems...

Well I found my issue... I normally have hardware acceleration on, but it must've reverted to software on an update or something. When I changed it back it went to 60 FPS.

I played all the courses, no issues!  

Just now, Rutin said:

I played all the courses, no issues!  

Wicked!!! 

Did anybody find the visibility of the camera's far clipping plane to be annoying?  (the mountains getting clipped in the far distance)  I originally had the clipping plane out far enough that this wouldn't happen but ... performance...   I expect it will probably go mostly unnoticed once I have NPCs and some more bells and whistles going off...

Also,  you can create your own courses, just hit the "Record New Course" button and off you go.  I have have a max course size of 100kb on the meter, but none of the courses on there went past 20k when I was recording..  So, I dunno how a BIG course will work/break everything..    It should be fine though.. haha!

19 minutes ago, Septopus said:

Did anybody find the visibility of the camera's far clipping plane to be annoying?  (the mountains getting clipped in the far distance)  I originally had the clipping plane out far enough that this wouldn't happen but ... performance...   I expect it will probably go mostly unnoticed once I have NPCs and some more bells and whistles going off...

Didn't notice it, and most likely wasn't bothered by it.  

I noticed it, but it didn't bother me because it was very far away.

Very cool, thanks again!

It ran fine for me I only tried it in firefox, I got between 42 and 60fps, usually around 55fps. I don't have superfast computer.

I've never been snowboarding but I found it a bit disconcerting that you didn't slow down when you turned side on to your velocity haha does that happen in real life?  I suspect I would fall over very quick snowboarding.

The tracks loaded okay I wasn't very good at keeping within, and didn't know what happens when you go outside hehe! But when I finished it gave me a time.

All the basics seem to be working great and I think with some sounds and some attention to the physics it will get much more immersive too.  

Awesome @lawnjelly!!

Thanks!!  Yeah I'm still a little torn about adding in the ability to crash without a collision..  But it seems like everybody "expects" this to happen in a snowboarding game. 

Even though it's robots on rocket powered boards.. haha. 

I guess I'm just going to have to make it more challenging to ride, since that's what folks do seem to expect.   And I suppose it will make the high scores more valuable.

To answer your question though... Yes, in real life you can ride at angle to the velocity, it's very hard to do without catching your front side and tumbling over(weight shift to the trailing edge of the board)...  And you "can" slow down a bit because the angle of the board can start carving into the snow a bit.

It seems this is one of those scenarios where the more realistic approach(robots on rocket powered boards just shouln't fall over because TECH), isn't going to be the "best" approach for creating an immersive player experience.  I suppose they are human controlled robots anyways, no reason to make them BETTER at snowboarding than the player is.  haha

Thanks again, you're the second person who has verbalized a concern that the player doesn't fall over in this scenario, so I'm going to run with that as the accepted perception and make it happen!  I do recall that this is how most snowboarding games I've played have worked too..  Okay!  Get ready for challenge.

I've been eager to use the ragdoll I rigged up anyhow.

As far as the courses go, yeah there's no logic written for anything but the start line and finish line at the moment.  I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to handle the bits in-between.  My rough idea is that since I have an array holding all the positions for the line running exactly down the middle of the course, I can increase/decrease the players points based on distance from the "nearest" point on the line.  If that nearest point is more than a certain distance away then you start losing points for every ms you are outside of the boundary distance(relative to how far out you are), and if you are inside that distance you get more points added based on that distance.  If you reach zero points during the race, you are disqualified.  That's the idea anyhow, still trying to figure out how I'm going to calculate the nearest position in an array with thousands of positions...  Without using up all my cpu..

Hmm.. course logic might not be so bad afterall.. 

I forgot that I've already decreased the number of positions in the array to the number of "course marker positions" instead of the thousands that are in the raw data the courses are generated from.  So, at race start, the closest position should be easy to calculate, it's 0..  as long as I keep track of the last closest position and test a small range of values around that position for closeness, it shouldn't be too taxing.  i.e. Last pos was 0, check 1, 2, 3, ... only until they get further away instead of closer, update the closest value and update the last position, calculate points with that value, repeat...  Even if somebody gets WAY off course, they should still be trying to move forward on the line, so I shouldn't need to check distance on anything before the last recorded closest position.  If they move in the absolute wrong direction, they'll just get disqualified quicker.