Josh Creek
02df09e40d
Every visible surface of the enclosure shared one alpha-blended material and was drawn as several overlapping layers: floor, ceiling and four walls as solid BoxMeshes, plus corner curves and fillets generated on top of the box faces they eased into. Alpha-blended surfaces don't write depth and sort per object, so the perimeter composited that tint twice and the corners three times, giving hard-edged trapezoidal patches that re-sorted as the camera moved. The floor box also overhung the walls by 1 m and showed through them. Replace all of it with a single generated mesh covering the inner surface exactly once, every piece cut to meet its neighbours edge-on and only inward-facing triangles emitted. It carries two surfaces: an opaque hull (deck, base fillets, goal bulkheads) and the translucent containment field (walls, corners, ceiling fillets, ceiling). The field shader is additive and unshaded rather than alpha-blended: additive cannot double-darken and composites order-independently, so overlap is structurally invisible, and being unshaded it no longer picks up per-arena light and GI gradients across a 28x40 m panel. Fresnel replaces the old StandardMaterial3D rim, which was a lit effect and the wrong tool. The deck shader draws plating and field markings procedurally from the boundary's own constants, so markings cannot drift from the collision geometry. Per-face MeshInstance3D visibility toggling is gone; the field shader fades facets the camera has crossed outside of per-pixel from one uniform, which is what allows a single merged mesh. Also adds ELEVATED goal mode and the ceiling fillets, and skips the mesh build entirely under --headless, where training spawns instances that never render. Collision is untouched: 166 collider shapes in FLOOR mode and 158 in ELEVATED, verified byte-identical to before, so trained policies in Game/bots/ are unaffected.
Cosmic Clash
In "Cosmic Clash," the heart-pounding action takes place in variable gravity environments where vehicles hover just above the ground. In this thrilling spiritual successor to Rocket League, players engage in high-speed, gravity-defying matches set in the far reaches of space. Each pitch is situated in a unique environment or planet, offering breathtaking vistas and challenging terrain. But instead of cars, competitors pilot rocket-powered ships, each equipped with its own set of customisable features and special abilities.
Ships hover just above the ground, defying the laws of physics and adding an extra layer of intensity to the gameplay. With no friction to hold them back, players must master the art of control as they glide effortlessly across the pitch, executing precise manoeuvres and lightning-fast aerial tricks. With precise control and lightning-fast reflexes, players boost, drift, slam and even turn upside down on their way to victory, scoring epic goals against their opponents.
Whether you're soaring through asteroid fields, navigating treacherous alien landscapes, or battling in the depths of cosmic storms, "Cosmic Clash" delivers non-stop action and adrenaline-pumping excitement that's out of this world! Get ready to take your skills to the stars and dominate the galaxy in the ultimate celestial showdown!
Reason for being
Since Epic Games bought Psyonix, Rocket League has never been the same, and rather than releasing an Unreal Engine 5 version of the game, or giving any meaningful updates, instead item trading was removed and 'Rocket Racing' was added to Fortnite. With no one else stepping up to the plate, it falls to the Open Source Community to come up with a spiritual successor, to keep the spirit of the game alive.
Legality
The concept of 'vehicle soccer' cannot be copyrighted, but the original expression of ideas such as the specific code, art, music and narrative of a game can be. So long as all code, assets game design and other elements are made from scratch, this project will remain legal. The use of an alternative game engine, Godot, serves to ensure that this is achieved, as does the move to using space ships instead of cars as the vehicles.
Technical Information
This project is composed of two parts:
- Godot game
- C# backend
Contributing
Eventually there will be contributor guidelines, but for now open a PR and make sure it has been formatted according to the auto-formatting rules.
Gameplay
The core gameplay is still football/soccer but with vehicles, however there are key changes to the format used in Rocket League. The vehicles are now space ships, which hover above the surface of the pitch. This will impact core game mechanics, enabling near-immediate changes in direction (thanks to those spacefaring engines!), the ability to play upside down (which will change the way you interact with the ball in as-yet unknown ways), slamming down at full boost speed, and many more that will be discovered along the way.
Bots
There will be default bots available, trained using reinforcement learning, and it will be possible to train your own using a gym for submission to be included in the game itself. It will NOT be possible to connect bots to the game, and with the community itself ensuring rigorous anti-cheat measures are in place we will aim to keep it that way. Cheaters have no place here.
MVP
The first version of this game will be JUST the game, no server-side functionality at all. It will be a local only game where you can play against bots. Split-screen multiplayer could be added in a version 0.2 if demand is high enough. If there is sufficient interest then the server-side functionality can be added to enable online play, with a system in place to ensure that servers can be paid for (perhaps a cheap monthly subscription model?).
Monetisation
The aim for this project is NOT to monetise it. Rocket League saw terrible changes once the Item Shop was added, and even the costs for crates and keys prevented some members of the community from collecting items and fully enjoying the game. Instead, this game will, if it becomes successful enough to warrant online servers, only use funding to keep itself running, and in the event anyone needs to be employed full time to maintain it with a growing playerbase, to pay them a fair wage for their time. Any additional profit in any given year should be held for maintaining servers in the future should demand fall, or for any future needs of the game such as a large effort to upgrade to a new engine, anti-cheating measures, etc.