Features
Smoke Screen
The smoke screen powerup creates a huge cloud of dense smoke behind the player’s car for a short period of time. The smoke cloud occludes the entire track, making it difficult for players to see the course as well as their enemies. This protects the user by making it harder to target them with guns, and may put distance between him and an attacker. The smoke is generated using geometry shaders and a particle system.
Machine Gun
This hood-mounted machine guns pack a punch, and with enough bullets - and some clever steering - you can blow a hole in the car of any fellow prisoner who had the gall to be riding ahead of you! Since the machine gun is hood-mounted, you must steer the car to aim the gun, making killing your opponents a tricky feat.
Health
Death Race is a survival racing game. Simply put, winning the race is not your biggest concern: it's finishing. Your car is protected by a thick armor called the tombstone. When this takes enough damage it falls off, leaving your engine exposed to further attacks. One more well placed bullet and "BOOM!" you're dead meat.
Turbo
Can't get enough of speed? Well, in Death Race, we got you covered. Each race car is equipped with some serious juice, and if your top speed isn't doing it for you, a press of the space bar will ignite your nitro, jettisoning you into first place... or a wall.
Technologies
Occupancy Grid
This spatial data structure breaks the world into a grid, making it very fast to find approximate locations of objects in our world. The occupancy grid plays a huge role in view frustum culling and collision detection.
View Frustum Culling
We define a view frustum and only render things that will end up on the screen. This saves huge amounts of time, because only a small part of the map is not culled at any given time.
Shaders
Death Race implements over 40 shaders to make everything look as awesome as it does. We use vertex shaders, fragment shaders, and even a few geometry shaders, taking advantavge of some of the most modern features of OpenGL.
Audio
Death Race uses OpenAL to provide all the sounds you hear in the game. The sound engine was revamped to reduce its reliance on the deprecated ALUT library, and now provides its own ogg/vorbis decoder and streaming system.
Networking
Death Race is not meant to be a 1-player game. We implemented networking to support up to 4 players racing together, and - hopefully - blowing each other up! One player hosts a server, and the other players connect as clients. So get your three friends together and start the mayhem!