XRacer - a clone of Wipeout
Several years ago I half-completed XRacer, which was designed to be a clone of the excellent game Wipeout. After getting some way into it I realised:
- It was going to be a lot harder than I thought.
- Free software developers aren't really ready to help out building games, but everyone wants to play the game you haven't written yet and they bug you about it all the time. (Probably a reason why there are so few good games on free platforms?)
- There wasn't a suitable 3D editor available at the time (things have changed now).
The final straw was going to the Game Blender Developer Conference in Amsterdam. Game Blender (now just called Blender 2.x) makes writing games easy. At least the coding part, you still have to do all the graphics and get good gameplay.
I stopped developing XRacer in April 2000 and suggested people use Blender to write games. At the time Blender was proprietary (free beer) but nowadays it's free-as-in-speech, so there should be no excuse!
Despite the fact that XRacer hasn't existed for 5 years, people still email me about XRacer about once a week and XRacer accounts for a sizable fraction of hits on my site.
So here is the final version of XRacer (0.96.9). It's not nearly as complete as the version number might suggest. In fact, it sucks quite a lot. Do with it what you will. Just don't email me about it.
- xracer-0.96.9.tar.gz
- xracer-data.tar.gz
- xracer-data-source.tar.gz.part1, xracer-data-source.tar.gz.part2 (download these parts separately, and then just concatenate them together - there's a bug in this Wiki which stops me from uploading the whole file at once)
Other projects
Ecksdee is a GPL'd Wipeout clone which is looking rather nice.