Looking nice! I bet it would be a huge benefit to learn blender and use it for track design. That's also how fourdee does it now.

Ahh.. I know what you mean. Well, don't be afraid to give blender a try someday. Take the time to learn the mesh and modifiers. It's very hard to learn, but also very rewarding.

Today marks 2 years since the first Ninkeo Kart demo came to be. It was called Forrest Racing at the time and was for a school project originally, until it matured into the early releases of this game (NK-II is based on the old releases). As part of the anniversary, a very whacked up special edition will soon be available to play.

What you do in this special version of Ninkeo Kart is race, but with 4x the amount of racers on the track! The other racers have a few tricks up their sleeves, going to any sort of measures to stop you from winning. There's only going to be 4 tracks and 4 cars to choose from, but the choice of cars is from earlier releases and from the unused models box (I don't know where some of the unused cars came from, I got them from a friend who probably downloads them from the warehouse). More to come soon. 

EDIT:
The AI won't drive really wonky and crap like in Ninkeo Kart 1 anymore. I switched the PCars (except the player car) over to the old Car and they followed the path perfectly. 

Here's some of the features I've been able to slip into this game:
-Dynamic video changing via button press (F2)
-Changing the time of day in the middle of a race(accessed via pause menu). This setting stays the same even if you move to another track!
-Cheat modes via button press (I'm not telling you the buttons, that's where you find out yourself )
-All cars now have shadows under them.

I gave the dashboard a bit of a touch-up as well.

I think you should change the car skinmeshes...

I've made up new ones to replace the old buggy, just haven't gotten around to applying them yet 

the scenery looks much better...

are those trees billboards with transparencies?
hows the performance?

--Mike

The trees are all just one mesh with the vegetation shader applied (it's quite low in polys). They were originally just billboards, but I changed them into X trees and merged them together. I haven't tested it on other PC's yet but the performance here is solid 60fps.

Is using 3DRad tree pack an bad idea? Ive been learning alot about modellig in past year (thats mostly the reason i havent been makin my game projects but now im starting again) and making a 3d tree that looks good is pretty hard and it pretty much depends on how close you want to but the treeto the track. My point here is: put some more nicer (3d or hd textured) models right near the track, because player sees then most and then add 2d or low textured trees a lil more farther. It would add alot to the scene and will not take much resources. Same thing goes to houses and other stuff, no need to make highpoly trees or houses and put them somwhere where player cant even see them. But yes, youve done good work!! When is the next update coming?

Thanks for the feedback! I'll see if I can get better trees in close to the track, although it will probably only be HD textures added to the existing ones. The next update should be out in around 6-8 weeks (depending on school and other stuff, of course), since I completely rebuilt everything from scratch.