Revamping Racing in VC:MP

[GangstaRas]

I think I made a comment about it months ago in someone's topic but I want this to be a topic of its own to check something with the community.

Now I'm an avid racer, particularly arcade style of Midnight Club or Burnout and old school Need for Speed more so than motorsport style of Forza and Gran Turismo, but I've come to appreciate the dynamic blend of arcade style motorsport racing brought forth by the GTA 5 massive racing community.

In all my 9 years of being on VC:MP, one of the most disappointing realities for me was the lack of a good racing server. The few racing servers that made a respectable effort have more or less been lacking for someone like me.
Part of it was the limitations of VC:MP back in 0.3 days stifling creativity (Vice City's map isn't really built well for racing, no custom objects/vehicles/text back then I think). Another part of it being getting scripters and modelers investing in this kind of project. Another part is having a director who knows his racing genre well to lead the scripting team to make a racing server that's fun, special, memorable with useful GUI elements, not just a boring "pass the checkpoint before the other guy to win" experience.

Well, nowadays I have the skill set to fulfill the modeling role, make a brand new city tailored for the open city racing life (hell of an effort though), make brand new vehicles with some actual variability in their handling to make things interesting and direct the scripting to make sure everything is good....but I need scripters willing.

The argument posed to me by scripters was that no one cares for racing games among the community. So this is me checking to see if that's really true. How many of you think it would be awesome to have a nice racing server came along that changes up the dynamic of VC:MP a bit? Have some vehicle and motorcycle skills for a change. No shade on Miami Dade devs but I think it left a bad taste in everyone's mouth for racing in VC:MP, granted AFAIK it brought the same 0.3 server with all of 0.3 limitations to 0.4.....wasn't going to come out very good.

Rate this post and give me your thoughts

[PunkNoodle]

Let me share with you my opinion largely based on LU and a bit on my VC:MP experience.

The argument posed to me by scripters was that no one cares for racing games among the community. So this is me checking to see if that's really true.

It can be true. For the many racing servers I played, the most successful ones seemingly where the ones were the playful side prevailed over the competitive side. As personally I love competitive races in GTA multiplayers few seem to take on the challenge, especially newbies give up easily when competitors are too skilled and racing alone just to get a better time soon becomes boring. That leads to my second point:
Racing servers are less prone to get one player if there's none, mostly because you can't easily freeroam in the city or do other stuff waiting for other people to join.

I think there should be a compromise between those who like competitive racing and those who prefer to mess about. To not shy away the less skilled players, for example allowing ramming (not in every race pls), a pickup system with good as well as bad ones, and other features that allow you to compensate or even take revenge on the more skilled players if you can't overtake them.

in VC:MP I played eXtreme Racing Revolution, some shortly lived racing server from Shadow and Miami Dade.
I feel like saying XRR was my favourite for the incredible amount of tracks, over 400, the short length of tracks which prevented it to become boring, and a few customising features as setting the car colours, locking the radio and setting your skin.
the one from Shadow instead was a bit more competitive, I remember that I liked it but honestly not sure why anymore. I remember it had a neat GUI and a custom track, but I didn't like that cars were given randomly from a preset list so I was overtook in a straight lane due to having a slightly slower car.
Miami Dade honestly was ok, the announcement system was causing big fps drops even if your pc was average (let's say a device that can manage an average 40-50 fps) thus disrupting races when they showed up, the tracks weren't many, often too lengthy, and the red coloured huge spheres often prevented from seeing the occasional lamp post that was just behind them. Last but not least the server often suffered crashes due to script errors, that required poking and waiting for Juppi to come to life and restart the server. As an upside I really liked the point system + online leaderboard, which can be seen here: http://mdr.project-apollo.co.uk, then again the system they used was innovative as much as fucked up. You'd win or lose points based on some factors like final position, number of racers and total amount of owned points, etc. The fucked up part starts when you reach a relatively high amount of points, e.g you'd finish 5 races in first position and earn a total of 54 points only to lose all of them and more, because of a 2nd place right after.

That is all I hope I didn't go off topic too much.

[GangstaRas]

That is all I hope I didn't go off topic too much.

Oh no, it's quite appreciated detail honestly I love it 

I think there should be a compromise between those who like competitive racing and those who prefer to mess about. To not shy away the less skilled players, for example allowing ramming (not in every race pls), a pickup system with good as well as bad ones, and other features that allow you to compensate or even take revenge on the more skilled players if you can't overtake them.

There were some ideas I borrowed from GTA 5's approach that makes their races so appealing to all kinds of people.

• You can join what's known as GTA races where you can hop out of your vehicle and shoot up your opponents, throw sticky bombs or collect powerups for your personal use. Very fun times for a chaotic round.
  
  If you don't want the chaos, then you can join normal races, where the host of the race has the option to toggle contact mode (where you can ram others) or non-contact mode (where everyone is intangible, like you're racing the ghost cars).
  
  
• You're not limited to the preset tracks Rockstar made for the game. They have an in-game Map Editor that you can use to make your own custom races, adding stupendous replay value from the endless track layouts you can create and publish. They also prevent impossible tracks from being uploaded by having the mapper do a test drive on the track to be able to get from the starting checkpoint to the finishing checkpoint. This is also how the competitive racing community was born, because all of Rockstar's presets were street races. The community made motorsport style tracks for themselves and set them up in playlists for tournament showdowns.
  
  The map editor is a very hard feature to implement though and by that I mean a user friendly one that actively shows you what's happening as you're adjusting.
  
  

Then, let's say we have noobs or players that want to grind by themselves and set high scores. There would be two options that I borrowed from Midnight Club

• An option called Frenzy where all you do is cross all the checkpoints laid out in the city before the timer runs out or you're max damaged. You have to do it with no control over your gas (gas always on) and your brakes are disabled (can still use handbrake). Would make for a good survival challenge.
  
  

Some other little competitive things could be brought over as well such as Capture the flag, Paint (grab the highest ratio of checkpoints first), Demolition Derby, Stunt Mode (from Burnout) really make the server and get VC:MP quality on a whole vamped up. And let's not forget some sense of car customization and I mean bodily customization such as rim changes and body changes, make you really feel like you accomplished something. The dream is big

[mairee]

I'm in for the scripting if you need a guy.

[Jokah]

Actually, me, ELK, Xmair, Craig/KillerX, Rest, kiki, Zihad, and etc are preparing a stunting server, which will have amazing features related to motorbike and car skills, and yes it will have racing in it, it will be mapped. I cared about having a proper stunting server which has racing and etc, this is what I had dreamed of from the beggining of my VCMP career. I thought of doing something which is out of the box, something no one had thought of. 0.4 made it possible, I gathered up a team last month, and we are about to start the work. Maybe we can collab? The server will have racing in it too, it will be proper and mapped.

We finished mapping the Demolition derby tho, it was mapped by Xmair.

[GangstaRas]

I'm in for the scripting if you need a guy.

Can we start immediately? This is a project that I've wanted done for so long I've basically finished just about everything that doesn't involve the actual scripting itself lol (GUI elements, comfortable key bind controls, menu layout and features, listing of some of the objects to be used for mapping). You're exactly what I need right now

Actually, me, ELK, Xmair, Craig/KillerX, Rest, kiki, Zihad, and etc are preparing a stunting server, which will have amazing features related to motorbike and car skills, and yes it will have racing in it, it will be mapped. I cared about having a proper stunting server which has racing and etc, this is what I had dreamed of from the beggining of my VCMP career. I thought of doing something which is out of the box, something no one had thought of. 0.4 made it possible, I gathered up a team last month, and we are about to start the work. Maybe we can collab? The server will have racing in it too, it will be proper and mapped.

I'm open to the idea but don't think it would be a full collaboration where I dissolve my dream and mold it to your efforts. Your team has a distinct vision on how you want your server driven and I have mine.

You're making a stunting server with elements of racing in it, I want to make a racing server with the freedom of stunting in it. We can work together to keep things fun and functional for either taste the community has 

[Jokah]

Oh alright, I get it. Good luck!

[ripmemes]

Well, i think it is possible. I remember when I was playing MTA:SA, there was a racing server that I really like.
Here, I have got some ideas from that server:
To make players enjoy the server: you must make and script race rounds around vice city map or another created tracks. The basic of the game is a race after a race: every race must have its own race cars and there must be some repair, NOS, change car pickups. the racer who wins will get points and these points are like money wich the player can spend tuning the car(I don't think that this is possible, whatever atleast he could change his car's paint).
and also there must be some funny, hard and long custom roads.and we don't forget that racing isn't only with cars: there should be some races in which players are using helis or boats...etc!!!

I'm also a NFS and a midnight club player as well as a Colin McRae rally 3 driver.