Spintires: Awesome offroading game

LeVeL

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Discovered a game called Spin Tires today and it's a lot of fun. It's still in development but the current/demo version is awesome. Great mod support base too. You can use differential locks, low range, switch into RWD, etc.

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Hehe, I've played quite a lot of the tech demo and I agree it's brilliant. It still has a long way to go but it's the best off road game so far. I found out today that someone has imported the knockoff Defender from Off Road Drive, the game that had so much potential but failed miserably.
 
Played around it for a while after seeing someone on Youtube play with it some time back. Got it mainly because of dat deformation!

I do hope it gets popular.
 
Damn that looks good! I have always wanted an proper offroad game and that looks like it would be it! Shame that my laptop is too slow for new games.


Have you guys ever played 1NSANE? It is more arcade than hardcore offroading, but damn it was good and there were some epic mods for it. Me and my friends had such a good time playing it over 10 years ago, good memories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insane_(2001_video_game)
 
Most of my off road memories are from 4x4 evo 2 and its missions. I played MotorM4X: Offroad Extreme sometime back and had fun with it.
 
Is that volumetric terrain I'm looking at? Quite the novel idea to use old Soviet hardware, maybe they'll add some BMPs and T55/T72s for shit and giggles. :p
 
Although the deforming terrain making for realistic mud is brilliant, the water is probably the thing I'm most impressed with. For once it has proper current and mass, being able to sweep your truck downstream if it's too light. The waves are also impressive.

Shame you can't drown your truck but I suppose that would take some of the fun away.
 
Well, the screenshot says that having the diff on the whole time will damage it over time so I guess in the full game you will be able to drown the vehicle, as well as destroying it. ;)

The tech demo looks promising, it would be awesome if there was a truck trial-mode in the final version - the proper vehicle is already programmed. ;)
 
Damn that looks good! I have always wanted an proper offroad game and that looks like it would be it! Shame that my laptop is too slow for new games.


Have you guys ever played 1NSANE? It is more arcade than hardcore offroading, but damn it was good and there were some epic mods for it. Me and my friends had such a good time playing it over 10 years ago, good memories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insane_(2001_video_game)
insane was awesome, the best offroad game i've ever played. the various game modes were so much fun!
sadly i couldn't get it to work on win xp last time i tried.

lets hope spintires will be able to simulate light and fast 4x4 trucks just as well as it currently does with the big trucks.
most of the mods i've tried don't work that well. the steering and everything is more suited to huge trucks it seems,
although playing with a wheel will probably help in this regard.
 
I like how the "driver" yells and swears in Russian whenever you switch the big trucks into AWD (probably because it's a huge lever that's difficult to pull). :lol:
 
Bought it today, it's really awesome and huge fun.

Highlights so far:
- getting myself utterly stuck on a steep, muddy incline in the huge 8x8 truck, then spending half an hour winching until I managed to turn the truck around and drive out.
- rolling one of the Ural-ish trucks on a forrest path, then rescuing it with another Ural I had previously left nearby, by spending another half hour winching. :p

:D
 
yes its awesome, but there is also a nasty bug that ruins my hardcore games, when the tires get stuck under the terrain and you can't ever get out again. :(

played two days though without delivering any logs yet. :D
crossing "the river" can be quite a challenge in the smaller trucks, especially since you only start with the three smallest trucks.
i tried to cross it simultaneously with the kamaz and zil, which i towed behind all the time because i thought it was good to have a backup truck at hand.
well...it ended with both of them falling into the river and getting totalled, so i was left with only the uaz.
but i've actually got both out with just the help from the uaz in an operation that lasted over an hour. :D
 
It's released? Will have to get this. As it happens I found a Land Rover model online so have been trying that out of the original tech demo.
 
Bought it tonight and so far I'm very disappointed. In fact I'd have my money back if I could. My main gripe is with the 'damage' system that gives you 150 damage and stalls the truck if you touch a rock at the side of a tarmac road, or gives you 62 damage for going over a crest. The camera is also still crap, why they couldn't fix this after the tech demos and betas is beyond me.

I was hoping stuff like this would be fixed before selling this game for a whopping ?20. That's a lot of money for a small game with bugs. I want my money back.

Edit: Add to this the volume which turns itself down every time you go in to the fucking pause menu. Grr...

Edit (2): OK so I decided to abandon the 'mission' and try and clear the stupid cloaking that is on the map for no apparent reason, at least I'll get an achievement for that. Since free roaming around an off road sight is what I do and enjoy this was better, but I still came across problems with collision boundaries (getting damage points for hitting a house the truck wasn't touching) and had some fun with the attachments.

I came across a tree in my path and I remembered that in the tech demo you could fell trees (this is apparently an achievement too so I'm not wrong about it), so I tried to use the grappler crane to get a tree. Now if you were designing controls of a multi-axis crane, it would make sense to have those axes controlled separately. Instead they have tied the controls of multiple axes to multiple buttons, meaning that when you press one the crane will do what you want, accompanied by other actions that might completely counter what you had previously done.

Also the winches are pretty poor. They appear to only have a few metres of cable, which is complete rubbish for trucks of this size, and don't seem to be powerful enough to pull these trucks or fell trees, which I'm pretty sure would be possible with the real thing. Still disappointed. :(
 
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My main gripe is with the 'damage' system that gives you 150 damage and stalls the truck if you touch a rock at the side of a tarmac road, or gives you 62 damage for going over a crest.

Which truck were you using? Some are more sensitive than others, from my experience the Kamaz (orange cab-over) is especially easily damaged, I suspect because of its limited ground clearance.

The camera is also still crap, why they couldn't fix this after the tech demos and betas is beyond me.

This I can absolutely agree to. Once you get used to it the camera becomes workable, but it's still very cumbersome.


I came across a tree in my path and I remembered that in the tech demo you could fell trees (this is apparently an achievement too so I'm not wrong about it), so I tried to use the grappler crane to get a tree. Now if you were designing controls of a multi-axis crane, it would make sense to have those axes controlled separately. Instead they have tied the controls of multiple axes to multiple buttons, meaning that when you press one the crane will do what you want, accompanied by other actions that might completely counter what you had previously done.

The crane is another thing that is pretty obtuse. Probably because you'd intuitively expect to control each of the crane's axes seperately, but they've set it up so that you basically control the position of the grapple.
On a controller the scheme is as follows:
left stick up / down -> raise / lower grapple
left stick left / right -> rotate grapple (if activated)
right stick up / down -> move grapple inward / outward
right stick left / right -> rotate crane

With some practice you can get good results, but it's still fiddly and a bit of a weird system.
By the way, I don't think the crane is really capable of felling trees, only picking up loose logs lying around or spilled by a capsized truck.

Also the winches are pretty poor. They appear to only have a few metres of cable, which is complete rubbish for trucks of this size, and don't seem to be powerful enough to pull these trucks or fell trees, which I'm pretty sure would be possible with the real thing. Still disappointed. :(

I heard that the length of the winches was a conscious gameplay decision, because the devs found that (realistically) longer cable made things too easy. The trees you can attach the winch to are all static and can't be felled anyways. The smaller trees and saplings where you can't attach the winch can be felled by driving over them with a big enough vehicle and enough momentum.
How did you use your winch? I haven't really found them to have too little power. One (unintuitive) thing you have to pay attention to is that when you enter advanced mode to use the winch, your vehicle automatically applies the parking brake and won't respond to throttle inputs. So you have to attach the winch, deactivate advanced mode, then pull and apply some throttle. I've encountered very few situations where I wasn't able to get myself unstuck with the winch. :dunno:
 
Between this, GTA V coming to the PC with a ton of exclusives and American Truck Simulator, I will 100% surely be in the market for a new powerful laptop this coming holiday season. All I did last night was watch Spintires videos (before and after test driving the best BMW ever)

[video=youtube;CZ-q1BR7CxY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-q1BR7CxY[/video]
[video=youtube;_aH-v2KV0y8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aH-v2KV0y8[/video]

EDIT: FYI http://www.oovee.co.uk/forum/files/category/8-new-vehicles/
 
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Two things:

1. I really want this game. I've had a blast playing the tech demo, and I just got my 360 controller working which makes it easier to control.

2. Someone needs to mod this into the game!
 
Still enjoying this game a lot, just did a 3+ hour session with two friends and had an absolute blast. :D
Have some screenshots!

After scouting the whole map and deciding on a path to take, we gathered at the lumber camp and loaded up our trucks. Our little convoy consisted of one 6x6 KrAZ with a 1000l fuel cistern, and an 8x8 MAZ plus a 6x6 Ural, both with cranes and medium length logs loaded. While the Ural and MAZ did the heavy hauling, the KrAZ lead the convoy as a point man, scouting for suitable paths trough the muddy logging roads, providing backup when necessary and countering the massive thirst of the MAZ. Before we set off I thought the KrAZ and fuel cistern would be a bit useless, but it proved to be very important. By the end the cistern was completely empty, the KrAZ ran out of fuel a good distance from the objective just after hitting a paved road, and the MAZ barely made it to the objective. Only the Ural still had a reasonable amount of fuel left.

Setting off from the camp.
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The haulers waiting while the point man checks the path ahead.
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This part was so muddy that we were barely inching through, with the MAZ pushing everyone else until I finally got in range of a tree to winch myself out and then pull the Ural behind me.
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The route we took had us driving up a relatively steep and long incline, on which the Ural continuously dug its tires into the ground, even though the path was pretty firm, dry mud. So the procedure was to pull him along with the winch, unhook it so I could drive a few meters ahead, hook him up again, rinse and repeat.
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After that it was only a few hundred meters to the paved road, but the Ural got stuck and tipped over in a nasty mudhole. Luckily I managed to pull him upright again in such a way that all logs remained on the trailer and he didn't have to load them up again with the crane. By that point I had around 5 liters left in the tank and was just hoping he'd make it out of the hole before I ran out, and amazingly he did it under his own steam. The little KrAZ barely made it onto the open road before it ran out of fuel, but by that point it had already done its job - it got the other trucks and their loads through it all and to the delivery point! :)
 
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