[WIP] Alternator Power: (New working title) Arcade racer for Windows 10, Android and SteamOS+Linux

@Baldinoboy: yes, the AIs atm are either dumb as walnuts, (they sometimes do a flying collision at you and bounce off over the edge... ) or REALLY NASTY! I know this from the amount of times I have been at the finish line and had a Blue Shell moment... (BTW, blue shell moments are where you are at the very finish in 1st in mario kart, then... BLUE SHELL IN YOUR FACE!)

And sometimes, the way I added variation to the steering of the AIs means they sometimes lose their normal turning circle and turn off the road into the water...

 

People, I present a new car:

And... SHADOWS!

New playthrough coming soon.

 

Ok, new playthrough ready!
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2tqYgzg1_lWS2pmYThLWkpEYVE/preview
Noting: shadows do need work, and they still clip through the track sometimes...

 

Nice man. Is it a different model and script or just model? Seems to handle better.

 

It goes forward and forward, very cool. I noticed some annoying soundeffects, where those errors? I would not know what it could be. Have you made the music and soundeffects by yourself? If yes what tools did you used?

I just read that you are targeting 60 fps and wanted to add to keep in mind that on mobiles the battery usage is increased with 60 fps. Maybe you could cut your game down on 30 fps and see how it feels?

Anyways keep it up

 

@0tacun: Actually, it is going to have settings for 30fps and 60, depending on the quality settings you use. and what sound fx were annoying? If it was the actual soundtrack, it was probably one of the background instruments, but if it was a random sound every now and then... that would have been the explosions, they aren't particularly good!

 

For those who want to hear it, the link to New Endian City's Soundtrack:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2tqYgzg1_lWQW5mdE84ZWVSd2M/preview

 

@Baldinoboy: actually, different model, same script, different speed and handling variable assignments...

 

bump

 

Cool. Whenever you make some big improvements send me another apk.

 

Will do! Once I work out a couple of performance bugs (again...) that is.

And again, it's PhysX... I wonder what the heck it has to do with a bunch of simple cars that takes so much on the main thread!

Would putting EVERYTHING in fixedUpdate (of which is set to 0.04 timestep i.e. 10fps!) be a problem? I am also having trouble batching some objects together. (The cars can't be batched together, as a result of having to use the local material for fake light probes... And the item boxes, being animated, can't be batched. yet... )

Oh, you might not have noticed this, but did you get occasional performance spikes? If so, that was probably an NaN, of which I finally fixed up last night!

I also hope to make three new tracks: A design I am about to whip up, 0tacun's design, and I am currently waiting on Ra1den to deliver his. (he is very carefully refining his, so it can be the best it can get! )

 

Sorry for the late reply. Do you think the new PhysX in Unity 5 will help?

By the way how is it progressing?

 

I haven't worked on the game in a while, due to the ITS project I'm doing. But I will find time to work on this. And if U5's PhysX has any performance improvements, that will help also. Of course, it would be great if U5 was out now... atm, the shadows have been somewhat fixed, they now align to the ground properly.

I also did some work on the GUI, now the boost item shows as a Uranium Rod, and the missiles are now lower-poly (only 6 triangles! ) I also remodeled the items, now they are item crystals!

 

Oh, and i will post screens soon.

 

Cool. Looking forward to them.

Since Unity is using the CPU I do not understand why they stay with PhysX. I would think Havok would be much better.

Anyway the new PhysX(3.3) is a major improvement over the current one(2.8.3). It is supposed to be much faster but is also going to be different. Here is the blog: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/08/high-performance-physics-in-unity-5/

 

I especially like this:

Will not help on mobile but still. Nice to have.

 

Actually, there's a question: would it be possible to use HAVOK physics with unity? I know nearly every Sonic game after 2008 uses Havok, among others, and all I know is that, those games don't use it very well in some amusing cases... (Believe it or not, I managed to get stuck under a spring in Sonic Unleashed by boosting into an enemy and it at the same time!)

Well, at least with free version, pro can use DLLs for that.

 

There you go. Crazy Sonic.

Send us some screenshots and APKs whenever you get things done. Looking forward to trying the new car. Speaking of new car. Are you going to have a system like spend credit to buy new cars or complete achievements and beat championships to unlock some?

 

I will possibly have a credits system, but I was more thinking of buying engine parts for your car, etc. Basically, you pick a car, change it's colour, make an emblem, then pick from some performance-enhancing parts. Of course, such a mechanism would mean the AIs would have to make their own part sets before a race, so that their stats match yours, so as to not make you the fastest car by 100 miles...

And BTW, I had a look around for performance bootlenecks, it could be the audio instead...

 

Audio. Really. Did not think that could be a problem. At least that should be an easy fix.

Could you put an frame rate counter in the next APK? As far as I could tell it ran smooth on my devices.

 

Well, I haven't done testing yet, but apparently one thing that can bring down a game is silly audio compression choices, so I did what was recommended for audio. Again, not tested yet...

 

Hello... After months of sitting dead, I bring this thread back to life!

Anyway... So far, the game is coming along at the best pace it has been at for a long time. First things first, I present the redesgined cars (two in total atm, more coming!):
The HyperSonic 9:

And the Tri-Thrust 12 (Previously the SpearCar... ):

Once I can get a decent connection up, I will post a play-through of everything. For now...

The new features in the game:
Upgrades:
Items List:

• Missile: Homes in on an opponent nearby. Includes opponents behind you... Will burn out after 10 seconds, so make sure your targets are close!
• Shield: Puts an energy bubble around your car. will fade away after a few seconds. while the shield's on, you are invulnerable to all item attacks. Well, except V-Bombs, that is...
• Uranium Rod: Boosts your car... Anything else to add? Yes... boosting the car blurs the screen!
• Infra-Red Mine (NEW!): Drops a heat-sensitive mine on the ground. If you're the one who dropped it, a mini camera will appear on the left side of the screen. Only the last infra-red mine dropped by you will show a camera though... Simply put, once dropped, they sit there, until an opponent gets too close. then the mine blows up, scattering any other targets nearby for the duration of the explosion.
• Scatter Missile (NEW!) (Info Updated): (Not in-game yet... ) Same as your standard missile, with a new upgrade; once the missile hit's it's target, THREE new missiles stored in the warhead shoot out of the flames! Two of them chase down random targets around the course, while the third targets the leader. Useful for stragglers!
• V-Bomb (NEW!): One of the most potent items around, once deployed by an opponent, it will beep five times, then implode, creating a black hole. Any car that ventures too close while the black hole is at maximum strength gets sucked into warped space! Once the black hole shrinks back though, everything is deposited neatly back where it belongs...

Visuals:

• Added realtime soft shadows! Yes, you heard right: on higher quality settings, it is possible to spruce up the game-play with some nice, if not a bit noisy, soft shadows! Only recommended on High-end devices and WILL NOT WORK WITH TEGRA! (Poor Tegra chip, seemingly supporting nothing... )
• Some particle systems, in particular the clouds on the main menu, and most explosions, use a new lighting shader that gives particle systems some volume! Now, particle systems of this nature are lit with the main directional light.
• Now, when the player's car boosts, a radial blur effect will play, giving a nice impression of speed! Tested on a low-end device, and although there is a small hiccup in framerate (that's because of ReadPixels...) it runs well, nonetheless!
• Now, the main menu (and in future, all other menu GUIs) is powered by Unity 4.6's new GUI system! Behold the arrival of 3D menus!
• In general, just some cleaning up, mainly getting rid of artifacts in the water shader on the android device...

Performance:

• I finally found one of the major bottlenecks: believe it or not, it's because my device somehow lacks decent hardware MP3 decompression, so as a result, I now use Decompress On Load for a HUGE performance boost!
• Some non-atomic and intensive calculations are now executing on a different thread, for a nice performance boost.
• In general, just tuning the fixed frame-rate to accommodate for all 10 players on the field.
• Fixed a bug in the new UI where having the "Always Included shaders" array blank caused the UI not to render. Thanks to those on the associated thread who pointed this out.

Current Issues:

• Occasional Lag and stuttering when an infra-red mine is deployed by the player, due to having to render two views at once. (The MINE-CAM and the main view) shouldn't be a problem on high-end devices. Tends to be a bit worse with shadows turned on.
• Sometimes, the game will hang permanently on level load. Why it does this I have yet to investigate.
• (Should be fixed now by cleaning the memory first!) Every now and then, repeated runs of the same level a few times sometimes results in missing textures next time it's loaded, mainly Cubemaps for some reason...
• Changing the quality level sometimes causes the game to freeze (Possibly a Unity problem that hasn't been fixed yet after all these years... )
• Sometimes, opponents fly a RIDICULOUSLY HIGH distance from the ground if an infra-red mine is dropped right in front of them. possibly caused by the upwards modifier, needs more testing to confirm the issue.
• Collision issues: (Unfortunately, trying to fix this results in poor performance!) Sometimes, after being hit by an item, (Usually the Infra-red mine) the affected car, while dropping back on track, will hit the floor, but then fall through it. This only happens if the issue with the mines detailed above this one happens...
• Sometimes, the radial blur effect doesn't play when the player runs over a dash panel.
• Lap counter still shows 4/3 when the player finishes a race.
• (Temporary) due to the addition of a new track, the default "play again" action no longer works.
• A thin-enough wall in a head-on collision might as well not be there...
• (New Issue): On ASUS Memo Pad HD 7 tablet, both shadows and the radial blur don't work properly.

Phew! After that ridiculously long post, that's all for now!

Regards!

-FuzzyQuills

(EDIT: Updated the "current issues" list with new info)
(EDIT2: Updated the "Items" list with new info)

 

UPDATED CHANGELOG:
Upgrades:

• The scatter missile item is now in the game! This item, when deployed, will hit the target in front of you like a standard missile! not that special... Until you see what it does when it hits an opponent successfully! if it does, THREE MORE missiles will fly out. Two of those missiles go after random targets, while the third one (It has a green trail!) will go after the leader! As a bonus, this one's rocket engine spurts out rainbows as it travels!
• Possibility of publishing to Windows Store: I recently got my laptop upgraded to Windows 8.1 (Thank you, School IT support!) so I now have a couple of new platforms!
• Some re-texturing: The course "On Titan" now has nicer texturing, due to a better designed UV layout.
• If the upgrade to Unity 5 is successful... the physics engine may give a performance boost!
• Main Menu is primitive, but finally in the works, as the main engine is essentially done!

VISUALS:

• Possible Unity 5 visual upgrade! If the attempt to port this game to Unity 5 is successful and is performant enough, then expect shadows to be usable on all devices! Some bugs with the old system may be fixed also, I will have to coordinate that with my beta-testers!

Coming Soon:

• Hopefully, I will finally have a proper main menu. atm, only the single player button really works, and the profile button redirects to the options menu.
• The first track I built (New Endian City) is due to be re-designed to be a lot more performant on mobile devices. (Previous/current model managed to eat up 9K verts!)
• New track (The Asteroid Belt) is in the works (These images rendered in blender):

• A couple more track designs are ready to leave the drawing board. I will post about them as they move to the modelling and integration stages. Another interesting track is also in progress, but the guy working on that one went a bit AWOL, like I did for a while there...
• If unity 5 porting (there's that sentence again... ) is successful... I will port my current shader framework over to the new lighting system, mainly so that the new Enlighten GI can use it. Who knows, the standard shader might be performant enough on a low-end device to not need this... NOTE: May also be possible to upgrade the water shader a little bit!

That's all I can inform you about right now.

I will also admit that this project probably looked dead at some point. This is mainly due to the fact that I am now in Year 12, and have a lot more stuff to take care of, and likewise, I haven't had much time to work on this project. (Or any other Unity projects, for that matter; that's why IndieEffects 3.0 isn't ready yet... ) On top of that, I just got Unity 5, so again, expect some crazy changes down the road!

 

Cool. PhysX 3.3 should definitely be a help but I am not sure what is included in android free. There is still an android pro so not sure what the limitations are. Hopefully you can have shadows and stuff. I think the shadows you implemented are pretty impressive. Not sure Unitys' mobile shadows would be as fast.

Anyways glad you are still working on it and hope it goes well. Let me know when you want some testing.

 

@Baldinoboy: the shadows from before WERE unity shadows! They just had a special filter over the top!

But once I actually build a shadowing system, it will use a color format supported by all devices (hopefully!)

 

Oh okay. Cool. The screen shots from your last post just showed up. The track looks awesome.

 

That track looks really good! actually it might even be too good....Isn't the current visuals already too heavy for the android platform?

 

@Ra1den: I wish... that was rendered in blender!

But I could get similar visuals, now that Unity 5 gives free users RenderTextures. Means I can add a custom shadowing system now! And plus, there's FastBloom to test out!

 

Ohh it's blender! I was really surprised

If Unity 5 couldn't achieve something similar, I doubt they would have released it

 

Well, from testing (atm, trying, my SDK's out of date! ) a Unity 5 android build, if it runs fast enough, it probably could!

And I am yet to modify the Legacy deferred light pre-pass shader to be less expensive on the mobile device. There is also the possibility of me building my own framework, integrating the GI into it, then installing such a system into the game. Means I would have complete control of the pipeline!

 

Ok guys, my full report on how Unity 5 things went...
First the bad news: atm, Unity 5 is doing something REALLY WEIRD with the shader compiler process everytime I go to build & run:

Only started happening today, and will hopefully be resolved soon!

But the good news? Other than the above, most of my shaders AND some new stuff have been successfully upgraded!

Changelog...
Upgrades:
- ALL shadow mapping is now done with a custom shader and special projector, so now shadows should work on ALL devices, even those lacking the GL_OES_depth extension!
- Shader framework was re-written a bit, to take advantage of the new GI system! (It doesn't however use the dynamic stuff. ) Water shader was also re-written, and now uses GrabPass for refraction!
- Radial blur effect was re-written to take advantage of RenderTextures, and looks a lot better!
- In general, checking over anything that might slow the game down.

Current issues:
- atm, the game won't build anymore, due to an internal Unity 5 issue related to the UnityShaderCompiler process. I am investigating why it's doing this, as it only occurs with this game. Checking the logs reveal that it might be my Windows 8.1 installation causing issues! (There's some failed ReadFile call in the shader compiler log... )
Could also be a corrupt shader file... could try re-writing the shader in a new file container!
- Soft Shadows not implemented yet in the new shadowing system. The last test run with such a filter didn't look like it should, so I have yet to try it again some time. One bonus however is that the method used for shadow projection keeps any bilinear filtering, so they don't actually look bad!
- Actual method of doing shadows is similar to how Super Smash Bros. Brawl on Wii did character shadows, and likewise, might have artifacts in some places. I don't plan on adding any sort of depth test to correct it to keep the amount of operations per pixel down.
- For some reason, scatter missiles cause a major performance hit on the target device, likewise, the rarity of this item has been re-done to reduce the amount of missiles on the field at once.

Fixed issues/oddities:
- For some odd reason, using skybox as camera clear mode doubled the vert count, so I simply went back to using a sky mesh. (Skybox material is still assigned in lighting inspector however, and doesn't do the same thing. )

 

GOOD NEWS: The crash bug above was fixed!

Somehow, having the shader code declared outside the Pass and SubShader blocks (Between a CGINCLUDE and ENDCG tag) makes the process crash... After moving my shader code into the pass block, the problem vanished.
Another note: there were some syntax errors that were somehow compiling perfectly on d3d9, but upon hitting the GLES build, it would crash. I should file a bug report!

nonetheless... everything works again!

Once I get the current track done, I will post a playthrough!

 

Changelog:
Upgrades:
- Missile tracking fixed. beforehand, missiles would sometimes bury themselves into the ground on coming near a car. Possibly due to physX 3.3 working differently.
- Fixed bug where occasionally, the scatter missile would sometimes spawn anywhere from 5 up to 10 missiles (and in some cases, more than one leader missile... ) on collision instead of 3, causing performance performance issues on the target device. Fixed by chekcing if scatter missile has already spawned the 3 of them, as the issue is more likely linked to Destroy() having a slight delay.
- Fixed extreme lag by enabling VSync. This is a known Unity 5 problem, and likewise, this will do until they fix the switch...
Visuals:
- Radial blur only blits to screen if the effect is active, otherwise, a direct blit is done. Designed to optimize image effects a little for low-end devices.
Current Issues:
- atm, NONE!!! Once I do a test run and find more, I will update this area.

 

Ok... why does this thread show up on tdtechnosys.com?

Anyone know? Not a problem, but still, who did it?

 

Change-log:
- Finally overhauled the Options Menu Now the texture and shadow settings are separate.

- New menu added: The Garage! Just a fancy way of switching your cars around atm, but car performance tweaks are to follow suit soon!

- "The Asteroid Belt" Racecourse is now finished! Will post a play-through later on today. Also, track is only one lap, due to massive length...
- New camera transition added. Now, in marked areas, if the opponent falls off, or get's sucked into a V-bomb, the camera will freeze it's position, and look at your car on the spot as it falls to it's death...
- Menus redesigned. Will post screens soon.
Upcoming changes:
- Going to add dedicated profile menu, for changing emblem and nickname, among other things...

 

WOW, I'm really Impressed, Give this game some good art, and it gonna be a hit for sure.

 

@Botanika: Yea, art's getting there...

Being that I am attempting to get this to run on slower devices (like, er, a PendoPad 4?) my one-man art dept. (aka. Me! ) is having a heck of a job right now! I essentially have one texture (for The Asteroid Belt, two) per stage where possible, so that stage files don't blow the 50MB limit... (atm, the game's 49MB and that's without one of the stages due to be re-designed!)

BTW, I may end up posting a proper play-through today... depends on if school allows for it! That way, you get to see the final quality of the track shot up above. (The shot above was rendered in blender, ye see? )

 

New change-log! Due to events towards the end of my school term (including Yr 12 retreat! ) and school holidays, I have been a little quiet for a while...
Nonetheless, I'm back to reveal a few things I added and fixed over the last couple of days:

Upgrades:
- NOT MENTIONED IN LAST CHANGE-LOGS: Since the unity 5 update, I have had code stripping enabled for some time now. It manages to reduce the file-size down to something like 35-45MB!
- AI UPGRADE: Now AIs can drift round turns just as I have been able to on PC!
- Missiles now have a "phase" ability: Missiles are now allowed to pass through the stage mesh to get to opponents. fixes some weird bugs I had with them...
- Explosions and other particle FX re-engineered: now they're less intensive on the mobile device. In addition, the leader missile's smoke hangs around for a bit longer than the others, to remind other racers of one's first place embarrassment... Also, the flames of the Mine are more realistic!

Fixes:
- Frame skipping issue fixed: One of my last beta-builds, tested by baldinoboy, had an issue with the physics and other parts of the game stuttering every two seconds. Since updating to Unity 5.0.1, and getting rid of any sort of multithreading I was doing in my own code, that issue's gone now.
- Framerate boosted: I found one of my bottlenecks was actually my soft shadows, so now the shadows have been tweaked to use less samples; Now runs at 25-30 like it's supposed to.
- Strange freezing issue fixed: When I started working on this game again, I found an odd bug with dynamic batching freezing rendering of the scene. (Strangely the GUI was still rendering at 30fps!) So likewise, disabling dynamic batching has fixed the freezing issue. (Only seemed to happen on the racecourse with the asteroids!)

Coming soon:
- the profile menu...
- Two (Actually three... ) new tracks and one redesigned track: the first track I built had some major issues with the way it was modelled, causing bad performance! so I will be re-doing that one... (It's the first track on this thread, New Endian City)
Now, onto the three new ones...
i. "Terra Mars"
A unique racecourse set on a heavily terraformed Mars, this track has you racing across a small boat dock and into an island forest, where a fairly easy to navigate road ends in a huge hairpin that leads to a tunnel that goes back out to the dock! (Will probably look better once finished and seen in motion!)
ii. "Olympus Road"
This special racecourse, sort of like "The Asteroid Belt" is split into two sections. the first section is a track suspended in Jupiter's atmosphere near the Great Red Spot, of where a warp point takes you to a space station high above Jupiter. Once in the space station, one has to navigate through one of the large air-locks, and make sure his/her car doesn't get pushed out into space... The last warp-point takes you back to the section in Jupiter's atmosphere.
iii. The third one is actually being designed by someone on this forum! (Thank you Ra1den!) When he finally finishes his epic new design, I will reveal more details!
- The first car I designed for this game is getting a new coat of paint soon, with 3D modelling and texturing being the last step!
- two new cars are coming: one is called the "Warpshere 5" and sort of resembles a farm chopper head suspended in a quad bike frame. the second one I am still drawing down, but I am going to call the second one the "Ebony 8!"
It might resemble a computer mouse when finished, but I am not sure yet what shape it will be...
- Small title demo coming: when done, when the player sits at the title screen for a little while, an AI-controlled race aka. Demo reel will start and play for a few seconds before returning to the menu.
- A completely overhauled soundtrack: I recently modified one of my guitars to take an audio plug for my virtual stomp box setup, so expect some fresh new tunes soon!

And that's the final change-log for tonight!

One more thing; If you are able and would like to help beta-test this game, feel free to PM me!

EDIT: corrected a few typos...

 

Mini-Changelog (Called that because there aren't any present big developments atm... ):
Current Developments:
- Drifting now has a special bonus: If one drifts for a little while now, the engine power will charge up a little bit, giving a mild speed boost upon exiting a drift. I made it so it possibly acts similar to a scenario I thought of, since a real car skidding would technically have it's wheels spinning a bit faster due to lack of grip...
- Actually, forgot to mention: Now it possible to drift in android (FINALLY!) with an extra button on-screen to do so.
- NEW RACE MECHANIC: At the start of a race, it isn't possible to try and rev the engine until the 'driver' starts the engine. Makes for an awesome and tense starting sequence!
- New soundtrack's base recordings are done. All that's left now is to do the electronic instruments and drums!
- Shaders were tuned up. Performance is a bit better now.

Coming Soon:
- Visuals: Cars may be given a new coat of "shader paint" After seeing what a reflection would look like on the cars through blender's internal rendering engine, it actually looked awesome, so expect shinier cars soon!
- Terra Mars racecourse:

as you can see above, most of the base mesh is done. All that's left is adding the dock, the trees, and of course the final texturing...

Current issue:
- On mali400 devices, the water shader is pixelated and distorted. I am currently investigating workarounds, as it is due to texture coordinate rounding errors in the GPU itself... THIS HAS BEEN FIXED! All it took was a special plane with no tiled UVs!

 

The car design I was taking about has been drafted:

Not sure yet what number to give it (It was going to be 7, it's 5 atm, but it will be different from what's here!) I also changed it's name a little. (It's now simply "Ebony" instead of "EbonyLaser" which I thought sounded too childish... )

And sorry about the poor quality; I literally used my laptop webcam pointed downwards near the page to take this.

May also change the name (again) in the future.

And while I'm here...

ChangeLog:
CORE:
- New Limit: (Currently broken on android however... ) Due to how easy it was to cheat the drifting system (it was possible to do an illegal speed boost doing it while driving straight... ) I now have a limit in place that means you can't drift unless you're turning sharply enough. Should stop the "free straightway boost" glitch!
- Soundtrack composition is in progress! My guitar recordings (except one where I stuffed the timing halfway through... ) are fully composed now with the stomp box filter over the top; all that's left is adding the electronic parts and drums.
For those who want to hear an older version of the track I stuffed up (This older one had perfect timing!) here's a link to it: http://www.driveplayer.com/#fileIds=0B2tqYgzg1_lWT0xfejhxMFV0SGM&userId=108053813501794687183 I did this one using the GTG DPC 3 VST drumkit, and a steel string guitar with my TRRS mic attached to it, of which actually works really well! (I usually use my nylon string, of which has the proper guitar socket setup)
- Shaders modified: Now the cars are fully reflective, with static cubemaps providing the shininess! Also removed per-pixel specular highlight, which was potentially expensive. Also fully fixed the water aliasing bug on mali-400 GPUs by 1. using NO tiling in the shader and 2. by using a mesh with a special UV grid layout. I am yet to investigate whether adding the tiling in the vertex shader might fix it. (I had it done in the fragment shader before! )

EDIT: Updated link with working interface. (Google drive music files don't play through the default player atm... )

 

that car looks super cool.
The music is not playing for me thou.

 

What does the link do? Is it blocked, or does it simply "not play?"

 

Here, try this link. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2tqYgzg1_lWT0xfejhxMFV0SGM/view?usp=sharing
Noting however; YOU MUST USE GOOGLE CHROME! This link doesn't work in other browsers...

 

In the first link the player keeps loading forever.
the second link works just fine on Firefox for me.
I like the composition of the track, it got stuck in my head for a little while now, witch I believe its a good thing. however I think there is room for improvement,especially on the transitions.
keep up the good work, you have some serious talent.

 

@Botanika:

Thank you! Not every day people get to hear what I make, so I'm open to any sort of criticism to help improve my recordings and compositions.

I do agree with this myself. Since I use an MIDI keyboard for composing drums, it's very easy to mess up the timing while exiting a transition, I have found. On top of that, when recording the guitar, I sometimes speed up the tune by accident halfway through, making it really hard to keep consistent timing! (I usually get that problem at night though, during the day's usually better. )
As for getting the tune stuck in your head, my mum suffers that fate several times a week sometimes...

 

For those who saw my previous post (The one with the design drawing) here it is: The Ebony 5!
And here are two shots raytraced in blender, with the subdivision surface modifier used to smooth things out.
(Actual base meshes are under 1k verts! )


Only things left to do:
1. Add headlights
2. Add small writing to side of car.
3. Produce finished mobile model for game. (One above still using multiple materials!)

 

Model needs work. It has no shape, way too round. And smoothing groups are not there. Keep trying.

 

Second attempt! This one uses edge splits to remove some of the "roundedness" in some areas.


How's it look? I did realise what you probably mean't in my last post. (I did see what looked like the car "melting" into the wheels!)

Will also put in front, back and side view soon. (It's a little hard to see the actual shape of the car here...)

 

Definitely looks better, though you have some bumps all around. how an un-smoothed wireframe.

 

Looks really good. Great job!