Does anyone remember how when they announced Mario Kart Wii all the way back at E3 2007, Reggie said, "More racers means more fun"? Well, I must say that I agree. This is a mod to Mario Kart Wii that adds an additional 12 racers to each race, for a grand total of 24!
It's been one heck of a grind to get from 12 players, and even 13 players all the way up to 24. So many buffer overruns, so many structures to rearrange, and I know for a fact I have not got them all correct. HOWEVER! The work has paid off, I now have 24 players mostly stable, with mostly working items! And here today I'm showing it off in its current form. I'm super happy with how it's turned out so far.
The game is running at 30fps with 24 players, it simply cannot do 60fps with this much processing. Especially not with items enabled. The most you can get away with without needing to drop the framerate depends on the course, but with items you can only do like 13 - 14 players at 60fps, without items you can get all the way up to 18 or so. Still, I remain impressed that the game can handle 24 and all the items they produce at 30fps, I'm very happy with that.
The item roulette has been tweaked based on the number of players in the race. In the case of a race like this with 24 players, I have it set up so that 23rd/24th receive what 12th would normally get, 21st/22nd get what 11th would, etc. The only exception is 2nd place, which will always get what 2nd place would usually get in order to make sure they can have red shells to stop 1st place breaking away. Other than that, the item logic and limits is the same as in a 12 player race. For now.
Item boxes themselves have been tweaked to respawn twice as fast, since there aren't nearly enough of them with this many people in the race :P
I'm still not ready to release this to the public for a number of reasons, mostly because there are a bunch of minor things that need tidying up, little oddities and also I need to make it so it doesn't spawn extra CPUs when it's not meant to (e.g. online, and no, before you ask, that doesn't work properly) :P Furthermore, I dunno if anyone other than me has a codehandler that can load a code this big. So I may need to do something fancy to release it.
I dunno what I'll work on next with this, either trying to get more players or making the online component work. I think the latter would be more useful long term, but 100 racers at once does sound like an interesting science experiment...
I hope you enjoyed the video and see you all next time!
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