LAST PAGE UPDATE:
2 September 2003

LATEST NEWS:
Shutting down my email!
Well... The spam merchants finally win. I'm changing my email address as I'm sick of receiving bucketloads of spam every day for viagra, online pharmecuticals, free cable TV, willie enlargements and viruses in general. Bugger off!

If you're desperate to get in touch with me, you can find an e-mail addy on my band page (see links below)

"IS THIS PROJECT DEAD?"
Nope, just resting... Well it's been almost a year since I last did any work on this game; shortly after my last update, I slewed off the road into the icy waters of divorce and crawled out of the wreckage without even a computer to work on. Well since then I've been taking some time out to get a few things out of my system... Mainly jumping off mountains strapped to a paraglider and finishing my band's album (in shops soon all over - umm... Eastbourne & Hastings, pop fans!)

Well... Now it's high time I got me finger out and polished up the game for ya'. The lovely fella's at Dark Basic have sent me a complementary copy of DB Pro, which I'm going to finally get out of its wrapper and get me teeth back into GGC. Expect the long awaited multiplayer (!) and some well-overdue enhancements to the AI (!!) in due course, as well as the championship mode promised in the title!

Watch this space, guys... And thanks for your patience! I'm feeling better now.

CURRENT DOWNLOAD:
1: Please read the Minimum Spec notes.

2: Check the description under Version History in the main text to see what's new.

3: Then click below to download.

LightcyclesGGC_105.zip
(3003KB)

When unzipping, make sure the MAN2.X and MOUNT.DAT files have installed into a subdirectory called "Objects".

LINKS:
Some of the other Tron games out there on the Net...

glTron
Andreas Umbach's masterwork - extremely slick

Discs of Troff
A brilliant-looking game in development, based on the other big game to come from the movie

Armagetron
By Manuel Moos - widely hailed as the best lightcycles game ever!

StarTron
A neat twist on the old formula

Super Cycles Arena
A great high-speed thrash from Roger Yarrow

UnrealTron
This will have it all, I'm soo looking forward to this arriving!

TRON FANSITES:

Auric's Tron Sector
The biggest Tron resource on the Web... Collectables, cast interviews, images, trivia, games and plenty more. Essential browsing!

Lego Tron
Heh! Some people have too much time on their hands. Inspired!

OTHER STUFF:

The Seven Tenths Rule
Well, gotta get a shameless plug for my band in here somewhere! Go check out my "day job", buy our singles, make me lots of money. You can find an e-mail contact for me on that page too.

THANKS TO:

IceNine still has many drinks owed for his considerable work on the game's 3D models and for tons of technical advice.

Edgar Ibarra has come up trumps with a cool model of Sark's Carrier, which you can look forward to in the next demo.

Huge thanks also to Roger Yarrow as the whole game would have died on its arse very early on had he not sportingly shared his experience and source code with me.

You're welcome to download it, play it and copy it, with my blessing.

Enjoy!

Lightcycles is more fun with a gamepad!
(and rocks with a Sidewinder!)

Light Cycles: GGC was started in March 2002 as a project to keep me occupied during a week off work on a sickie but quickly developed into a marvelously unhealthy, life-sapping obsession (of the getting up at 5 in the morning to put in an hour's coding before work variety). Hope you people think it's all been worth it!

AIM:
"Why do yet another Light Cycles game? There's hundreds of them already!"

True, but aside from the fact that you can never have enough Light Cycles games (IMHO ), I'm - kind of selfishly - writing this for my own pleasure above anyone else's; chiefly because I've never been satisfied with the AI in many of the Light Cycles games I've played so far: the computer players never really seem to actively come after you. But also, as a huge Tron fan myself, I wanted to see if I could create a game with a look, feel and excitement as close as possible to that of the sequence in the movie.

About the demo
Grab the current demo from the link in the left-hand panel. It's still early code and a bit buggy as it's being released mainly as an AI field test... Anyone is welcome to take a look!

Recommended Minimum Spec.
Being that this is getting to be quite a chunky download now, I'd hate for you to spend many minutes of your life downloading something that makes your computer run like a 286 so:

This game has been written on a P400 Celeron with 256MB RAM and a 32MB Geforce2 MX graphics card, and it's starting to chug on that! I've received reports that it's still playable on a P200, but I wouldn't recommend trying it now, as the new radar takes a big ol' bite out of the framerate. In a later version, I'll make the radar toggleable. The game has been known to crash certain setups and I'm looking into that. I've done some different things with the textures now and hopefully the new demo will behave better.

Known Issues:
Getting reports that some Voodoo 3 set-ups corrupt the menu screen.

Dave Gregory

Current features:

4 camera views that are switchable on-the-fly... The in-cockpit view can be intense!!

Authentic movie sounds!

AI enemies actively pursue you (and each other when you're dead), cut you up, box you in and try to prevent you doing the same to them.

A radar to keep track of the action with.

Different starting patterns including the classic Tron arcade game face-off.

Accelleration - drag race for position!

Version history:

V 1.05 Alpha Released: 11 August 2002
The long-awaited "eye-candy" update! Bigger, better explosions; towering arena walls; Sark's Carrier looming overhead; movie-look lightcycle textures; white lines on the jet-walls and improved glancing. Tweaked the turning to hopefully allow more precise control in tight corners.

V 1.04 Alpha Released: 15 Mar 2002 / Patched: 16 Mar 2002
No new eye-candy, but finally added a match-play mode! Added full radar, speedo & scoreboard. Added options screens - player can now select: arena size; starting pattern; number of victories needed to win the match; number of AI bots; skill of AI bots. Added user-definable in-game screen resolutions; user-definable joypad buttons; changed to new glancing method.

V 1.03 Alpha Released: 06 Apr 2002
Fixed the jaggies! :) ; fixed AI suiciding - well, sort of; switched to lower-poly lightcycle from IceNine including the essential jet wake from lightcycles' rear wheels; game now defaults to furthest view; tweaked sounds a bit; implemented sideways glancing; patched the glitch that was preventing the rider's animation from playing at the start; winner's lightcycle now stops at the end of the round.

V 1.02 Alpha Released: 02 Apr 2002
Improved sounds; fixed AI players to now turn across you when racing side-by-side; added "warrior" model & rezzing-up lightcycle at start of round; dropped 2-speed acceleration as I need the second button for controlling sideways glancing - now just goes faster the longer you hold the button.

V 1.01 Alpha Released: 29 Mar 2002
Original AI test - just the basic game with 3 AI opponents in face-off mode. Used Charles Babbage's lightcycle model from GLTron (many thanks to both Charlie & Andreas for letting me pinch the model).

Still to do:

Graphics: Improve arena wall textures; improve the 'Tron figure' textures; add new Tron model; add some arms to the internal view; lots of other stuff.

Game: Add AI opening attacks (enemy bikes to sometimes set off in various co-ordinated patterns); work out a way to get the AI to realise it'll box itself in if it turns in a certain direction (tricky); fix a couple of AI glitches; add multi-player networking; add Championship Mode gameplay against Computer players with differing styles of play and aggressiveness; movie-style "ThrillCam" to follow the action after player dies; add an intro fly-in to the player's start position; head-jog/vibration for internal view and rolling for close chase views; re-position the explosion so it shows properly when you hit the arena walls; fix the glancing glitches; and more as I think of it...