There are special kinds of bonds, friendships, that are born through the love of racing. Whether it’s being rivals on the racetrack, or friends hanging out in the paddock, or cousins regularly getting together on a Saturday night for a Gene Rally tournament, or Circuit Superstars fans on Discord helping each other out. These bonds and the experiences that arise from them are what we set out to achieve when we started making Circuit Superstars. This is a goal that we will continue to move towards, and today’s patch marks a big milestone on that goal. So, call your friends, teammates and your rivals: Circuit Superstars is getting social!
For this second patch to our Early Access, we put a strong focus on improving the online racing experience, from improvements to synchronisation, to addressing Time Trial exploits, to adding ways for you to group up with your friends to play or join other members of the community and make new racing friends. We are very excited to put this update forward. Read on for details about what you can expect!
Online
Friend Lobbies
Since before we shipped Circuit Superstars, we knew this would be a much requested feature. As a small team, it has been an ongoing challenge to balance our priorities, and online group lobbies was not a small challenge to tackle. But we heard your requests, and we are so happy to bring you this update! We can’t wait to hear what you think, and more importantly, we can’t wait to see you with your friends on the racetrack!
Details:
- You are now able to group up with friends to matchmake together by creating or joining a lobby.
- Groups enter the matchmaking queue as a unit, matching against other groups or solo players that are also queuing.
- This feature works with the existing public online events, and is not yet a functionality for private lobbies.
Online Synchronization Improvements
We made several improvements to the general experience of playing online, some of which include (but are not limited to):
- More reliable synchronization across all players, this means that players should not encounter races in which their cars or the cars of others don’t get synchronized.
- Players should no longer experience other cars not moving.
- Much better experience of racing in sub-optimal conditions (such as matching with players far from your region).
- Less teleportation or gauges not responding.
Gameplay
Ghosts Design Revisions
We made improvements to implementing how ghosts are triggered based on proximity. This recent change makes them more reliable, and players can expect to trust the system a lot more.
Adjustments to existing penalties
Since we now have penalties for more than just corner-cutting, we made adjustments to the penalty notifications to be more descriptive about what caused the penalty.
Wall Riding Repercussions
Wall riding now can either cause damage or trigger a penalty, depending on whether damage is enabled. This change will help maintain sportsmanship in time trials, while also discouraging wall riding during races.
Adjusted track limit penalties
Based on community discoveries, we made adjustments to the tracks where corner cutting was possible.
Content
New track - Tilksport
A beach oasis surrounded by fresh-water lakes, our longest track yet, Tilksport is a fast and complex track full of challenges for racers to master.
With 3 different routes, racers will find in Tilksport opportunities to test their off-road and on-road skills with a variety of cars and competitions.
Other
- Several UI legend upgrades for readability.
- Integrated automatic bug tracking functionality into the game to help us make your experience as flawless as possible
- Integrated a fix for some occurrences of the “red exclamation mark” startup crash.
We can’t wait to see what you think of this update. Thank you to all the players that signed up to our 2 latest betas and provided feedback on their experience. We hope you know that not only we value your testing; we rely on it to make the improvements we have made.
We’re always looking over your requests and suggestions and use them to help inform our NOW & NEXT list. Tell us what you think of the update with everyone else in Discord Server ( Discord link here ) and in the Steam Forums.
Thank you for showing your love and support for Circuit Superstars!