39.1% Virtual Racing

Last year at R2UK 2019, we had the first 39.1% championship, won of course by our own Sam Prentice. These miniature droids proved very popular and since then many weird and wonderful versions have been made.

A couple of months back, whilst we were talking about the upcoming Droid Builders UK 2020 – Live event, it was suggested that it would be good to maybe do some form of racing online seeing as we couldn’t do it in person.

Not one to back down from a challenge, I started reading and coding. After a few dead ends and rather rubbish looking prototypes, I came across Unity. For those that don’t know, Unity is a game engine used in a lot of popular games such as Cities: Skylines and Pokemon Go. Armed with this and a few tutorials I started really getting into it and soon in one of our producer meetings I revealed it to the rest of the team.

Thankfully, I got quite a good response!

I carried on working on it, tweaking it, finding new ways of doing things, taking 3 steps back, adding new features, and generally having good fun with it.

Wind forward to August 1st 2020 and the actual Live event, Sam and Lee had a race to demo it, and it was released to the masses!

https://racing.droidbuilders.uk/

To say it was popular I think is an understatement. During the live stream alone over 10,000 laps summing up to well over a day and a half of racing time were played. Battle for the top spots were on, with the lead constantly changing throughout the day, contending for the coveted Egg Cup!

Finally, at 7:00pm (UK time), the competition was closed with the two top racers both getting their prizes. Congratulations to:

• Droidtastic
• TrevorZ

The game is still available to play, and you can view the current leaderboard here:

https://racing.droidbuilders.uk/race_leaderboard.php

Merch is also still available, with proceeds going to CALM (https://thecalmzone.net)

For those more technically minded, the source code is available on github:

https://github.com/Droid-Builder-Web-Team/droid_racing

Ideas are welcome for version 2!

Also, a massive thanks has got to go out to Tim Berry, who thankfully shared his project with the droid builders and started off this fantastic hobby of mini droids!