TL;DR it takes composing a vehicle in Life or Virtua and fusing the dynamic traits to tweak handling like torque or laser cannons. Keep reading to see how this brings Life's mechanics into Xolo for easy, evolving fun.
Back when racing games were hitting their stride, titles like Need for Speed 3 dazzled with 3Dfx support that cranked up the visuals—smooth tracks, shiny car bodies, and those epic collisions that sent sparks flying, but hardware limits kept mechanics basic, with cars handling like scripted rails rather than feeling the pull of weight or torque. You'd smash through barriers or rivals without much real physics, just pre-set bounces and speed caps, no dust kicking up in deserts or adaptive grip. As games grew, designers started baking in more realism—modeling suspension, tire friction, and engine roar based on math for acceleration curves and drift angles—turning simple drives into skill tests, though early setups struggled with consistency across hardware, paving the way for worlds like Life where desert districts churn realistic dust trails under wheels, blending environment with vehicle feel for that immersive rush.
Modeling a 3D vehicle in game development calls for a unique strategy compared to characters, mainly because vehicles often feature mechanical moving parts and are built to handle user-driven customizations that can alter their form and function on the fly. While characters focus on organic anatomy with fluid animations like muscle flexes or facial expressions, vehicles demand rigid body dynamics for components such as spinning tires, suspension bounces, or rotating steering wheels, using hierarchical rigging where parts like chassis serve as parents to child elements for precise control without deformation artifacts. User changes add another layer—swapping tires for off-road grips or adding exhausts for speed boosts means designing modular meshes that snap on via attachment points, with metadata tags for easy fusion or dissolve in systems like DDAs, ensuring upgrades don't break physics simulations in PhysX or clash with the base model's aerodynamics.
Ground vehicles like a car handle with grounded precision—steering via analog input for tight turns on roads, acceleration building torque against friction for virtual rubber-burning, and collisions with PhysX simulating debris scatter and energy absorption to bounce or flip realistically. A jetski shifts the feel to fluid dynamics, controls leaning into handlebars for wave-skimming maneuvers, throttle pushing through water resistance with buoyancy adding lift over swells, and crashes splashing with watery sprays, softer bounces from foam effects, and potential flips if you hit at odd angles. Then there's a TIE Interceptor soaring in zero gravity venues, joystick controls thrusting in zero-g for omnidirectional spins, acceleration relying on inertia without drag for endless momentum, and collisions exploding in fiery bursts with shrapnel, no ground to halt the chaos — just pure kinetic mayhem that scatters parts across your screen. Just like Azimals, we have classified vehicles for land, sea and air (or space in some situations) and we have developed a long time ago the controllers to perform these actions with just setting properties in Tetra.
We have long embraced a detailed system for tunable vehicle parts, allowing players to transform them into high-performance machines through a vast array of upgrades that directly impact handling, speed, and overall dynamics with the PhysX engine. Starting with basic components like tires for better grip or brakes for sharper stops, the vehicle system lets you dive deep into engine overhauls for more horsepower, transmissions for optimized gear ratios, and suspensions that adjust ride height, camber, or damping to fine-tune cornering — each tweak technically altering the vehicle behavior, such as reducing understeer in tight turns or boosting acceleration on straights, all calculated in real-time based on simulation models inspired by real-world automotive engineering learned by Onyx.
For example, adding a turbocharger not only amps up power but can introduce lag that players must balance with other mods, while aero kits reduce drag for top speeds but might affect stability, creating a strategic layer where experimenting on the tracks reveals how these parts interact, making tuning feel like a mini-game of its own. It rewards mechanical knowledge and trial-and-error. Each ties into dynamic NFTs - DDAs - for upgrades, like fusing tougher hulls to soften crashes or speed boosts to amp acceleration, all evolving via Onyx in Xolo or Life for that personalized thrill.
In Xolo games, a racing opponent or enemy piloting a TIE Fighter starts off with basic instincts — sticking to predictable paths, firing opportunistic shots, or dodging with simple evasion patterns based on initial player moves, much like early arcade foes that reacted without memory. But as the agent "gains experience" through iterations, it analyzes past runs stored on the Avenge blockchain: what maneuvers led to hits (like flanking during your boosts) versus misses (overcommitting to chases that left it vulnerable), gradually building a knowledge base of player habits, such as your preferred turning radius or acceleration timing. This learning loop, driven by Onyx's adaptive algorithms, makes the TIE Interceptor "smarter" — it anticipates your drifts in tight corners, coordinates ambushes with environmental hazards like asteroid fields, or feints attacks to lure you into traps, evolving from a scripted drone into a cunning rival that feels increasingly aware, pushing you to adapt and turning each race into a high-stakes mind game. And to add even more difficulty; agents can - based on the theme of 1 vs 1 or 1 vs many - work together.
Vehicles are designed to be responsive and upgradeable, blending engineering accuracy with player creativity. And in our Metaverse, they are not just another save game to boast and brag about, but actual personally owned with a history and value to trade or share with other players.