Final Oasis (HoverRace)

Danni's picture
HoverRaceFinalOasis.png
Game File: 

For some reason I decided to revisit an old game, HoverRace. It's so old that the server seems to be down, but fortunately archive.org had the installer backed up! I played some of my old courses I made years ago (they weren't very good), and decided to try and make a new one. So over the past few days I created this.

Race across a catwalk and try to thread the needle, or take a detour along the waterway. Climb some steps, then take a flying leap into a speed section and surf along the open water! Navigate an obstacle course, then travel through a tunnel that loops 720 degrees through itself! There's a shortcut if you're good at platforming, but watch out because it will make you miss one of the Pit Stops, so don't run out of fuel!

You will need HoverRace. You can get it from the Wayback Machine here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190105075751/http://www.hoverrace.com/downloads.x/HoverSetup1_23_3.exe

Put "Final Oasis r1.trk" in C:\Program Files (x86)\HoverRace\tracks

The track source for HoverCAD is included in case you want to remix the level.

Update: Added mines to the track

Made For: 
An event

Comments

Whales's picture

Opinions from someone who has never played this game

First up: HoverRace works fine on Wine/Linux, thankyou for the archive.org link. Framerate is not great, even with the 'main loop sleep' set to 0, but is this how the game was designed in the first place?

Your map: really fun and interesting. All of of the different types of pathway & terrain are genuinely much more interesting than most racing games I have ever played, including more more "fancy" ones with realistic graphics. I was engaged with this map, which is a strange thing for me to say about a racer.

I can never make the catwalk :)

"Escaping" the map into the open water is a really refreshing feeling. Very few games have given me this before (The Talos principle road to Gehenna comes to mind, possibly some others), most games that start claustrophobic stay claustrophobic. It's clear that HoverRace is an "indoor engine", so giving the player a feeling of escape and fresh air is impressive map design. It makes me wish I could just hover on forever and discover some secret pirate treasure island off in the distance. How I wish many games would dispense with their invisible walls.

Upon looking at the minimap some time later: oh my god this map is chaos! No wonder it felt so interesting.

Thankyou Danni.

Danni's picture

The game's motion is jank

The game's motion is jank regardless of operating system, but that's part of what makes HoverRace, HoverRace.

I love thoughtful contrast between closed and open spaces which is why I did the open water part like that. HoverRace uses a 2D top-down shape-based room approach to maps similar to Doom and Doom II, though there are differences - line segments can't be too long, so you kinda have to make like a big lattice of smaller triangular/quadrilateral rooms. But unlike Doom the track is allowed to go "through" itself. There's a classic HoverRace map called "Enigma" which has you going around a donut that turns out to be longer than it appears. I wanted to try and recreate that in the last portion of the track.

Danni's picture

Oh yeah the HoverRace

Oh yeah the HoverRace website appears to be back online now. You can go there to try out a lot of historical tracks: http://www.hoverrace.com/

Whales's picture

Sounds like it's more portal

Sounds like it's more portal centric than doom, eg more a build-style engine?

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