MacMegasite

We would like to thank you for supporting us. Our December announcement
has seen our registered users database increase,
and we have at the moment more than 1,200 players registered.

The wilderness (outdoor) features we planned to be released in
December are running behind schedule.
They are still under development at this time and it shouldn’t be
long before we have alpha testing with it.

At the same time, the team has been working on adding new features to
improve users’ in-game experience.
This has been achieved by using new blowing explosions.
It is amazing how simple modifications like this one can add to a
game. It changed completely the game’s look.
Particle effects on collisions have been improved as well.
And because explosions and guns without sounds are senseless, we
added them, for your own pleasure.

We decided to give the cars a new look and we are working on new
textures with a higher resolution.
It will take some time before this is done, as we want to have nearly
18 textures per car, and a minimum of 9.
We also added 3 more chassis to the already long list of vehicles.

As this wasn’t enough to have fun, we released a new track on
December 30th. It is very challenging and requires players
to be experienced.
Tracks being an important part of the game, we are going to release
about 3 more this week end!

We are working on getting a consistent universe to play with, it can
only add depth to the game.
Some active members of our community are giving us a hand, and we
came with an official text to present birth of deathracing.

—————————
The Birth of Deathracing
By Matthew A DeBarth

I remember life before the Solar Apocalypse.

I was born in the year 2006, and my childhood was filled with the
soft light of a gentle sun. I remember lying on my back in a field of
grass, soaking up the afternoon warmth of summer, if you can believe
that.

By the time that I was a teenager, we all knew that there was
something wrong with the sun. It was brighter and hotter; an angry
reddish colour. The winters were warm and wet, the summers hot beyond
belief. At first, we blamed global warming, but we were fools to
thing that we had anything to do with it. We were blameless…and
powerless.

And the sun just glared down at us from high above, while we all
scurried around and hid from its terrible intensity.

When I was nineteen, the sun finally grew tired of toying with us and
really started to show us his fearsome power. It was the dead of
winter in the northern hemisphere, which meant it was the height of
summer in the southern, which meant that they took the full force of
the initial onslaught head on.

Almost immediately, the entire communications network broke down.
Computers failed, electronics fried, satellites fell out off the sky
- but not fast enough. We watched in horror as people died horribly
from radiation poisoning all across Australia, Africa and South
America, every moment of it dutifully recorded and sent north for us
to see in real time. We watched the trees turn brown and the grass
turn black. We watched people vomiting and bleeding endlessly from
the mouth, and we learned to spot the vacant far-away look of people
whose minds had been destroyed by the relentless pounding radiation
of the sun. We watched, intimately connected to their suffering, and
yet strangely removed by both distance and season.

And then, finally, a blessed silence.

We spent the rest of the winter preparing ourselves for the what we
knew was coming. We prayed and partied, we repented and rioted, we
connected and clashed. We dug in and gave up.

In the south, it had been so sudden and unexpected that people hardly
had time for the worst in them to come out for all to see. We, on the
other hand, had months full of hopeless days to use in all the worst
possible ways. It was a bad time to be alive. So bad, in fact, that
many people simply chose suicide rather than wait to face the end.

And then the sun came for us too.

We didn’t die quickly. We cowered underground while the sun burned
everything above us away. Plants, animals, anyone still out in the
open - all dead. It was a dark, musty, crowded and miserable
summer…but a reasonably safe one.

We waited, and the sun retreated south again for the winter. We
emerged from the bunkers and bomb shelters and caves to find a very
different world. Hardly anything was left alive on the surface, and
the things that had survived looked like they would have been better
off dead. It was a ruined, blighted world.

Those few of us that still had hope lost it right there, and most of
them didn’t last the winter. A small group of the hopeless held out
until spring, but the hint of dry heat on the wind was just too much
for them.

The sun had expended most of its wrath by this point, but it still
burned brighter and hotter than before. There was enough radiation to
slowly wear the survivors down, to make them age faster and die
younger of terrible cancers. But we lived on.

In a way, it would have been more merciful to have been killed
outright. The world was a barren wasteland of endless sand, rock and
empty cities. The air was always hot but rarely brought rain. The
solar wind had burned so fiercely that it had carried off a
noticeable percentage of Earth’s atmosphere, making it difficult to
breathe even at sea level. Nothing more advanced than the internal
combustion engine or gunpowder worked with any degree of success, and
only a few scanty crops would still grow.

The survivors that had gone to ground in that area gathered and found
a place where the water wasn’t too polluted and the rain still
occasionally fell, and set up a little farming village there. We
called it Elmsfield, after the sickly cluster of elms that still
clung to life there. Against all odds, we managed to harvest enough
grain that fall to supplement the last of our stockpiled food, and we
survived what little winter there still was in the world.

The other scattered bands of survivors nearby noticed that we were a
little bit better off than they were, and started to show up in town
and beg for food. We took in the healthiest and strongest to help
with the farming effort, and a small group of us - myself included -
lead the rest of them off a short distance to the east to start
another town that we named Somerset.

Both towns survived that winter, and the next few as well. Those were
years of hard work and an uncertain future, and a few of us began to
hope again. We slowly spread out, found other groups of survivors and
started feeling a little bit civilized once more.

But then the crops started to grow weaker, and it took more of them
to feed the ever increasing number of hungry mouths that came
wandering in out of the wasteland. Soon there was only just barely
enough to go around, and less with every passing day. It didn’t take
long for people to abandon any ideas that they still harboured about
rebuilding civilization, or for the naked desire to survive at any
cost to show up in people’s eyes.

I’m not sure if any one person came up with the idea, or if it was
purely thousands of years of animal instinct whispering into hungry
ears, but it was decided that those that didn’t have enough money to
buy food would have to fight each other for it. We lived in a land
where life was cheap and plentiful stockpiles of cars and guns sat
waiting in the decade-old ruins of nearby towns.

The deathsports were born.

The violent, the greedy, and the desperate found cars that still ran
and guns that still fired and met in the dry river bed outside of
Somerset and raced from one end to the other, blasting away the whole
distance.

And we stood along the edge of the old riverbanks and watched them.
And, as much as I was ashamed of it at the time, we cheered. We
called out for blood and applauded enthusiastically when it was
delivered.

And when enough of the racers were dead, we crowned the survivors as
champions and made sure that they ate well that winter. That was the
summer of 2035 - exactly one decade after the terrifying summer when
we had all hid underground together. It only took a decade for our
little civilization to descend to outright barbarism.

The following year the crop was good…but by that point the
deathsports had taken on a life of their own. More people wanted to
race, and more people wanted to watch. So we did it all again, bigger
and bloodier than the first time, and at the end so many racers were
dead that we all ate like kings, all winter long. And everyone
understood, even if no one would come right out and say it - the
faster we killed ourselves off, the longer the lucky few would live,
and the richer they would all be. And everyone thought that they
would be one of the lucky ones, right up until their last desperate
gasping breath.

Suddenly, we had an entire economy based on death, polished up with a
thin coat of sport. We used up every working car within ten miles in
our third season, and some clever people went out salvaging for more
in the empty cities - and did quite well for themselves by it. After
five years, we had a vast trade network, and the tools of death
travelled farther than the grain of life ever had. We started the old
oil wells back up and clear the radioactive dust out of old factories
and started making new cars and guns and tires. We even built new and
terrible weapons that were specifically hardened against the
background radiation - progress, after a fashion.

By the tenth season, we were so pleased with our vast empire of
vehicular murder that we started to spread out. New tracks were
built, new towns started hosting leagues, and we killed more young
deathracers than ever before.

And we all cheered louder than ever for our blood-stained champions.

I eventually grew too old to farm, and at the beginning of the summer
that I turned forty, I took up a new line of work. When I was young,
I’d been interested in history, and that interest had lived on in me
even as the end of history came and went. I had a reasonably clever
wit and some slight skill with words in the days before the sun
struck us down, but there had been others that were better at both
than I. But I did have one major advantage over the historians and
writers of the past - I was still alive, and they had all given up
and died long ago.

And so I ended up in my current line of work, and business is good. I
am the wiseman of the wastelands, the devotee of the dead champions,
the high priest of the high-speed wreck. If you live long enough and
die gloriously enough, I might even tell your story long after you’re
gone.

I am Markus Korivak, and I am the Voice of Deathracing.
——————————————————-

Here are a few screenshots of the new explosions and particles taken
on one of the new tracks to be released.

Best regards,

The Darkwind: War on Wheels development team.

Stephan Bondier

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.