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I've decided to turn development towards making a little "remaster" of Lego Racers 1. Racing around cartoony tracks shooting cannon balls at other brick built karts, pretty fun stuff. A bunch of work lately has been UI related and thinking of how the menus should look and feel. More work has also went into the kart/vehicle physics and feeling, there's still work to be done, but they're getting better. https://streamable.com/fmnp4 More work went into AI as well. They actually have a very small brain now! They're just smart enough to drive in reverse if stuck, and to follow a given course. Currently they are insanely good drivers, too good, they're very difficult to pass, let alone beat in a race. Gotta make em a bit dumber. https://streamable.com/q5r10 https://streamable.com/37ti3 Lots of other stuff has gotten work done, such as basic HUD elements, sounds, particles, a simple test-track "ripped from LR1" and more. I also quickly added a screenshot camera last night courtesy of Garry Newman, which allows you to take some super cool screenshots ingame. If ya wanna keep up to date further on this project, I've made a Discord server where I'll be posting development info and taking suggestions, feedback, etc. https://discord.gg/TT5FD5q

Tutorial: Running LEGO Rock Raiders in Windows 10 with VirtualBox This tutorial will show you one method of running LEGO Rock Raiders in Windows 10. This may work for Windows 8 too but I haven’t tested it. Also I cannot guarantee that this will work for everyone as Rock Raiders is arguably the most fickle game to install on RRU, but hopefully it will work for you. There are a lot of instructions in this so I will break them down into steps and explain as clearly as possible. Here is an overview: 1. Download a copy of Windows XP 2. Install VirtualBox 3. Set up Windows XP 4. Install and run Rock Raiders

You might want to look into Entity Component Systems (ECS) as a way to structure everything. After taking a dive in the wiki, it appears that the LRR engine was structured similar to an ECS originally, though clearly it was made "to just work" rather than something that was made to be reused and extended. And re-usability and extendability is presumably what a remake is for, after all. There are plenty of resources online that can explain what an ECS is and what its advantages are better than I can, but basically it would allow for content creation and addition to the game to be trivial. Possibly even as simple as creating a single script to add new monsters, vehicles, buildings, etc. (excluding additional assets like textures and models), like you said yourself, and anything extending the actual engine could be done with a few java files through the help of an API. There are a lot of other advantages as well such as easier to maintain code, less resource hogging by objects, possible performance improvements, etc. It also reduces spaghetti code. Of which any coder is undoubtedly guilty of at least once. Either way this is just food for thought (that delicious spaghetti code), and I am by no means an expert on ECS design. Also lua is a great idea for a scripting language. I took a look at LuaJ and the performance seems comparable to java as long as it is compiled into bytecode instead of interpreted. But then again lua probably runs faster on modern hardware than LRR did originally, so... this is a moot point. LRR isn't exactly a resource intensive game.

4. Install and run Rock Raiders Now for the final step. Installing Rock Raiders Insert the Rock Raiders disc or, if it’s already inserted, run it from My Computer. Now follow through the installation instructions to install it. You may get a message about a Direct3D accelerator not being found, or something similar, if so just ignore it. When it’s finished, click Yes, I want to restart my computer now. and press Finish to restart the computer. Running Rock Raiders After logging back in you will find two new Rock Raiders shortcuts on your desktop. Right-click on the LEGO Rock Raiders - Enhanced shortcut and select Properties from the menu. Under the Shortcut tab you will see a section named Target:. At the end of this box should be a line saying -best. Replace this with -ftm so that it appears as so: Click Apply, then OK, to save these settings. Now run the shortcut by double-clicking it. After the initial loading screen a Mode Selection window will appear. Choose Window from the Window Size section as Full Screen doesn’t work. Now click OK to launch the game. Congratulations, you have successfully installed and run Rock Raiders! Final notes To install mods or transfer files from your Rock Raiders game to your PC, just place the files in the shared folder and they can be accessed from both Windows XP and Windows 10 systems. The Windows XP virtual machine is only valid for 30 days as it’s a trial. However, it is possible to simply delete the machine and set it up again in VirtualBox (assuming you transfer any important files into your shared folder to save them) to restart the trial, but I’m not sure if that’s legal/in breach of their terms and conditions.