A few annoying issues and some other suggestions...

[Beastman1976]

Love this software thanks, and I have created a few nice levels with it, but it does have some annoying issues with the gameplay.

1. The main one is that the tyre squeal isn't working when going around corners. It works fine in the original cannonball but not on a game created with the layout editor. Why? This makes the gameplay pretty boring, going around each corner silently.

2. Cars randomly flying backwards at the last moment. Again ruins the gameplay somewhat as you can't get close up to cars before overtaking them, just in case they suddenly fly back at you like this.

3. A random car appears very briefly just before the checkpoint and you sometimes end up crashing into it.

Some other things that would improve the software a lot, if it's possible to do it, would be these:

*) Ability to change the horizon scenery on each level (eg the big white cloud on stage 1). At the moment you're stuck with them in their original stage positions and it's very restricting. Even better would be the ability to edit them, or edit the colour palette for them.

*) Ability to customize the start line sprites. Currently I've just been ditching it altogether, it only works as a beach themed level due to the palm tree sprites. Looks a bit crap just having the guy with the flag at the beginning and nothing else.

*) Ability to enter your own colour choices into the colour palette for the sprites.

*) Ability to upload your own scenery sprites.

This would really ramp up how powerful the program could be (in my opinion). It's really the lack of sprites and colour palettes, and the horizon scenery you're stuck with, that restricts creativity and I'm struggling after making 5 stages to come up with anything original. Would love to make a totally new 15 stage outrun game with this program but it's not really possible the way it is now.

[J1mbo]

Re (1) - Possibly the curve calculation in the export process might be inverted compared to what is expected in Cannonball (oferrari.cpp).

Re (3) - This is a bug in Cannonball (and possibly the original arcade code). I have a fix in my fork.

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LayOut is based around the 'QT5' framework which it seems is now available only in source code format. I spent a couple of hours on it, but couldn't get it to a point where I could compile LayOut unfortunately.

Possibly it needs someones old workstation with everything set up or a potentially time consuming effort to update the source to work with QT6.

[Beastman1976]

Re (1) - Possibly the curve calculation in the export process might be inverted compared to what is expected in Cannonball (oferrari.cpp).

Re (3) - This is a bug in Cannonball (and possibly the original arcade code). I have a fix in my fork.

--

LayOut is based around the 'QT5' framework which it seems is now available only in source code format. I spent a couple of hours on it, but couldn't get it to a point where I could compile LayOut unfortunately.

Possibly it needs someones old workstation with everything set up or a potentially time consuming effort to update the source to work with QT6.

Is layout compatible with Windows 11? I will need to upgrade my laptop soon.

[Beastman1976]

Is there any way to add more colours to the background palette? The original game has some nice colour blends, yet when I try to create my own in layout, I can only seem to make very blockly colour transitions that only use a handful of different colours. Unless there is a big difference between colours (eg blue to red) and within a small area. If I try to blend say yellow to white over the whole screen it looks terrible, as it tries to do it in linear blocks of about 5 different shades.

[Beastman1976]

Another small issue I'm having is with the height maps. In the original Outrun game they are clearly overlapped in places, allowing for smooth transition from one to the other, eg at the end of the 'old capitol' stage. In layout there needs to be a fairly big gap of about 50 (level position, on the road view tab) between height maps for them to trigger properly. Especially the 'height hold (curved)' style height maps seem to need a lot of space in front of them for them to trigger.