Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of making an online horse racing simulator, you know, just for kicks. It all started when I was watching some old races and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to create something like this myself?” So, I got to work.
First thing I did was to think about how the horses should move. I mean, they can’t just teleport from start to finish, right? So, I started with some basic coding. I made these little virtual horses, just simple dots on the screen for now, and I got them to move across the screen. It was pretty rough at first, they were all moving at the same speed, all boring and uniform. There’s no fun in that!
Then came the tricky part – making each horse run at different speeds. I figured, not every horse is the same, some are faster, some are slower. So, I wrote some more code to give each horse its own speed. I did this by randomly generating a number for each and assigned that as their speed. This made the race a bit more interesting, you could actually see some horses pulling ahead of others.
But it still wasn’t quite right. Real horse races aren’t just about speed, there’s some randomness involved, right? So I tweaked the code a bit more. I made it so that each horse’s speed could change a little bit during the race. I added a feature that would randomly increase or decrease a horse’s speed by a small amount at set intervals during the race. Kind of like they’re getting a burst of energy or getting a bit tired. This made things a lot more unpredictable and fun to watch.
Next up, I wanted to make it look more like an actual race. I mean, who wants to watch dots racing on a blank screen? So, I spent some time adding some simple graphics. I drew a basic track and gave each horse a different color. It was nothing fancy, but it was starting to look like something!
Building the Betting Feature
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Then I thought, what’s a horse race without betting? So I got down to adding a betting feature. I had to figure out how to let users pick a horse and place a bet. It was a bit of a headache, to be honest, working out the betting odds and how to pay out the winners. This took the most time out of the whole project honestly.
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After a bunch of trial and error, I finally got it working. You could pick a horse, place a bet, and if your horse won, you’d get a payout based on the odds. I set the odds based on the initial speed I gave each horse, so faster horses had lower odds. It felt pretty rewarding to see that part come together.
Finally, I added a simple scoreboard to show the results at the end of the race. It wasn’t much, just a list of the horses’ finishing positions and the winning bets. But it wrapped things up nicely.
So, there you have it. That’s how I made my little online horse racing simulator. It’s not going to win any awards, but it was a fun project, and I learned a lot along the way. Plus, it’s pretty cool to watch those little colored horses run, especially when you’ve got a bet on the line! It’s still a bit rough around the edges, I might go back and add some more features, some sound effects perhaps. We will see. Might keep you guys posted on that one if I do end up improving it.
