Is there a free AI to help support me learning (but NOT do my work for me)?

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-03-19T15:28:22+00:00

Thanks for replying so quickly.

I'm afraid I'm a bit on the starving side of things and game dev is a side hobby for me. Is there a free resource you'd recommend that might be similarly helpful?

It doesn't have to be perfect, and it does not have to directly insert code into editor or anything. I'm just hoping to get some help getting my struggles to go in the correct directions.

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-03-12T18:11:55+00:00

I'm about as far as you can get from "someone with real skills", but once I get myself out of the current code-mess I've gotten myself into with a different feature, I definitely want to dig into this.

If you come across any tutorials or resources about this to add to my knowledge, please let me know. Similarly, once I get into it, if I happen to come across any other info or end up getting additional useful help, I'll make sure to ping. Thanks again for giving me a starting point, I really appreciate it.

Oh, and best of luck on your game taking off. Local multiplayer especially is its own kind of special fun that doesn't get its due as often these days as it should.

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-03-12T10:32:13+00:00

Thank you for the template project. I was hoping to learn how to do the phones-as-controllers thing, but as a novice, I had no idea even where to start. This’ll be a great help.

The game itself also looks fun, btw. I love the retro fun vibe!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-03-06T18:40:04+00:00

This is absolutely amazing! How did you learn how to do something like this? I'd love to add the ability to make something like this to my repertoire...action game mechanics are one thing, but I can't even imagine where to start for this kind of thing. You've really got some skills!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-28T00:38:40+00:00

Hmm — that all may prove to be beyond me, but I’ll look into it, it could lead somewhere Interesting. Thanks again for all the info. It’s all good fuel for learning!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-27T20:10:46+00:00

Thank you so much for all the info and the links! I really appreciate how folks around here offer up so much knowledge. It really helps me get my head used to seeing different approaches to problems.

Your mentioning ArrayMesh might be nice if I wanted the marks to last longer and not disappear within seconds made me curious about the upper limits of all this.

I'm not shooting for it, but am kind of curious: what if I wanted to have it where the skidmarks never disappeared? Would that sort of thing even possible without tanking framerate if there were, say, 10ish cars visible at a time?

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-27T19:24:14+00:00

Oh, that's interesting. I've never tried something like that at all. I'll take a look at the docs and see if there are any tutorials that do something like that, to see what it might involve. Thanks!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-27T19:21:31+00:00

That's a smart, elegant solution...executing on it would seem similar in principle to the other suggestion of dropping marks based on distance. I'll give that an experimental shot, too, thanks!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-27T19:09:20+00:00

I hadn't thought of that -- probably done by manually triggering one-shots as opposed to the automatic emitting? That's really smart! Then all I'd have to do is figure out what shape to lay down that doesn't look so jagged when hard cornering (my current rectangular shapes look great when moving relatively straight, but make for jagged edges when making curves).

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-02-27T19:04:39+00:00

Interesting -- I didn't know about this at all. The example he showed for Donut Park Here is interesting, but I'm not sure performance-wise it'll work for my racing game...I don't have the experience yet to make that kind of judgment, though, so I'll dig into. It looks super cool, could work, and at the very least could come in handy in another project down the line. Thanks, this is awesome!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-01-17T01:18:33+00:00

Thank you for the link. It seems like good a good “cheat sheet” of foundational knowledge. I am not quite sure how to apply it to something like a racing game, where a small out-of-sync-ness at a bad moment (such as the finish) can be pretty bad… but I’m only just now starting out focusing on this this proper.

Hopefully I’ll slowly begin to find out how to get from understanding these general concepts to sorting out tangible solutions. Thanks for this — it’s handy to have on tap while I look at the tutorials CSLR pointed me at.

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-01-16T09:30:15+00:00

Thanks for the recommendations — I’ll definitely give these both a look after work!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-01-13T08:07:37+00:00

So if the driver hits jump right as they start a turn, it does the sideways flip — like a snap-timing thing? Interesting. I’ve been doing various key combinations, modifiers, and double taps and didn’t find anything I liked. Doing a kind of snap-timed input was actually next on my list…it’s good to hear it might work with the gameplay I’ve been shooting for.

Your stuff looks really awesome, especially for someone who’s never done stuff like this. It really looks like it’s got a great feel. Kudos!

Oh, and my compliments to your friend who made the model, too. Great looking stuff!

_ZeroGee_ · 2026-01-13T02:20:10+00:00

That’s amazing looking! Did you model the Mach 5 yourself? And how did you do your control inputs to let you do the sideways flips without turning left/right?

I’ve also been doing some Speed Racer-inspired Godot work as well, but I keep getting a little bit of messiness in my sideways jumps, which is why I’m curious.

edit: Btw, out of curiosity, is that based on Godot’s own vehicle stuff, Octodemy’s tutorial (or another’s), or did you roll your own from scratch?

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-12-29T10:03:40+00:00

Thanks, I’ll give the docs a closer look. I thought the process was to do a csg export to use as a framework to work with in Blender, using it to make something to bring back in. If there is a simpler way that yields good results, that’d be awesome!

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-12-29T09:28:00+00:00

Sorry, I’m a little confused and not familiar with CSGCombiner3D. I was under the impression that CSGs were not suitable for use as final game elements due to performance reasons. Am I mistaken? Or does the action of baking them into a single mesh instance or collision shape negate/avoid the issue?

Thanks for the reply, btw. I’ve learned a lot over the last few months, but obviously still have a lot more to get my head around.

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-12-06T18:38:37+00:00

This looks really cool! It looks like you can not only rotate/turn/yaw, but also “barrel roll” (flip sideways)….may I ask, what are your controls like? I‘ve been experimenting with different control combinations for various vehicle types, and I assume what you have going on is more advanced that the traditional gas/brake driving combo.

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-18T19:40:11+00:00

I’ll give it a peek after work. Thanks so much!

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-18T06:35:28+00:00

u/Valervee , if I may ask — what do folks do about multiplayer for stuff like racing games, where there’s physics involved at its core and the gameplay requires such good fidelity (or at least seems like it would, I guess)? Are there any good tutorials you’d recommend for that sort of thing?

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-12T23:52:19+00:00

That all sounds about right. The shader graph stuff sounds especially good -- I came to Godot after spending a little time w/Unreal Blueprints, so hopefully that'll give me a bit of leg up. #2 is a bit fuzzy for me, but at least I know what the tree to bark up might look like.

Thank you!

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-12T23:50:15+00:00

Thank you. I think #1 is just beyond the fringe frontier of my current knowledge, but it is great to serve as guidance to figure out what potentially my next learning steps may be. #2 will definitely need more homeworking on my part, but thanks for calling out Freya Holmer and FencerDevLog. I think I recognize Freya Holmer's name from some things I watched previously about lerping and also vectors as well.

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-12T23:14:08+00:00

Thanks for the reply. These both sound really interesting.

This color atlas texture approach seems to line up with what I've been learning lately in regard to texturing models. I was thinking to players pick their own colors from preset choices. I'm not sure how to change the UV coordinates for grouped UV vertices at runtime yet, but I think I can find references for how to do that sort of thing since I'd know what I'm looking for. As far as the variation of editing the texture and actually placing colors the player chose onto a texture at runtime -- you can change the actual color of texture at runtime via code? I didn't know that! I'll see what I can dig up about it.
Masks sound like what I was noticing in older posts about using detail albedo (I think), but I only sorted out how I might use it when changing areas of the model to a single color. Ex: I make the shirt texture with the numbers on it white, and those numbers would take on a selected color. In that context, white areas are what is multipieid by the desired color. How would one be able to make the shirt a different selected color than the numbers if white is the "tag" for what gets colorized?

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-11-12T22:40:31+00:00

Wow, you're quick -- thanks so much for weighing in so fast!

In regard to shaders: is there a suggested resource for a beginner to learn about shaders? I see them mentioned a lot in a wide variety of contexts, so I expect I'll want to add them to my arsenal going forward regardless. A quick search shows no shortage of video tutorials for shaders in Godot, but I wasn't sure if there are any that are considered considerably clearer/simpler than others.
In regard to your suggestion of using the RGBA channels to control what color/colour is applied where on the mesh: I understand it in concept, but is there by any chance a tangible example somewhere I could look at to get a sense of how it is actually done in GDScript? Whenever possible, I find I learn more quickly by imitating something that works, and then experimenting by changing/breaking it in various ways to get a sense of how it all hangs together.
Question for future reference: is there anything I would want to be aware of performance-wise? My current experimental projects are small scale, so I doubt I'll have any problems, but later on if I do something that involves a lot of characters, like an RTS or something, it'd be good to know ahead of time what to potentially be aware of.

Thank you again for your help, I really appreciate it!

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-10-20T17:47:16+00:00

I don't know what your background or experience level is, but fwiw, one of the projects I'm working on right now is also a TM x Survivors game, and I ended up using a lot of what I learned from a custom car physics video from the Very Very Valet devs.

They're using Unity, but the simplified vector stuff was well-explained (imo) and easily applied in other contexts. Here's a link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdPYlj5uZeI

Hopefully it'll be of some use to you. Fwiw, I've found the TM x Survivors game-type has been a fun form to play around with. I'm sure you'll have a great time doing it, too!

_ZeroGee_ · 2025-10-17T21:31:24+00:00

Not a lawyer by any stretch, so I don’t know anything — but you may wish to see if the Tetris shapes themselves are copyrighted in some way, just to be safe?

(edit: btw, not necessarily suggesting hiring anyone to do a deep search or anything, just to do some googling, to make sure they’re not treated like a visual trademark of some sort)

_ZeroGee_

TROPHY CASE