This game started out as a tiny weekend project. I found a 3d model of a toy car that I used to like as a kid, and decided I wanted to try to make it drive in Unreal Engine. I posted a youtube video about it and forgot about it for a little while. Someone reached out to me and sent me models for additional toy cars from the same series, and asked me to make them drive as well. From then, Project Acceleracer was born. The team grew over time to 10 people, and the playerbase has grown to over 5.000 players.
Project Acceleracer is a successful game within the Acceleracers community, with a playerbase of over 5.000 players. That said, it has some flaws, mainly within the multiplayer latency and steering handling. The game gets criticized as being too realistic for what it is trying to depict, as opposed to being a more arcade-like experience.
Each car has a massive ammount of customization options within the engine to make sure each car feels unique to drive. Ranging from diffirential settings to transmission gear ratio's and from downforce to drag. That said, the base controls are the same for each car and remain rather simple.
There are various special techniques implemented in PA to enhance the feeling of speed of the car. These include dynamic camera field of view, camera follow lag, camera shake and wind sound effects. Each car also has unique engine sound effects that blend between high, medium and low engine rotation speeds.
To ensure quick and efficient level creation, I made a spline system to quickly drag points around, which change the shape of the road the cars drive on.
Each "racing realm" track offers an unique challenge that the player needs to pay attention to. For example, the "Ice Realm" tests the player's ability to handle the low grip offered by icy roads, while the "Cliffside realm" tests the player's ability to make sharp U-turns without slowing down
Players can unlock more cars and other items. These are saved on your PC so that the player can resume their progress next time they play the game. There are also input settings and preferences the player can set up, such as steering sensitivity and deadzone for controllers.
For certain levels, optimizations have lead to 10x higher framerates compared to without optimizations thanks to dynamic LODs, shadow optimizations, shader optimizations, and limiting line of sight to reduce the ammount of terrain being rendered.
For lower-end hardware there is an extensive ammount of graphics options available to make the game run more smoothly.
Players can play toghetter online through a so-called "P2P NAT Punchthrough" system, which allows any player to connect to any other player across the internet.
The car and other computer processes are run on the client, meaning whoever hosts does not need a better PC. The system is also built to practically remove latency, but fully trusts clients to not hack.
A lot of people have done minor or major contributions to this project, ranging from sound effects, to 3d models, to helping out with level design.
This project is 100% no-profit, as well as open source. This is because I do not own the Copyright to the Cars and other content included in the project.