After a few patches addressing technical stuff, we are back with the first major update for Death Taxi 3000 since launch! Even though the game was complete enough on a content perspective to not warrant the Early Access tag, it was apparent there was a lot of late development polish work to be done, so we went silent for a bit until we could bring you the highest quality possible on a game update.
It's not all just small tweaks and fixes though, there are many new features that flesh out the gameplay, making it more engaging and replayable! The highlights for this update are:
Steam Achievements and Career Mode Overhaul
There weren't clear objectives to the Career mode other than unlocking all upgrades to the car. The game now keeps track of several stats for your runs, which are required for 100% completion:
- Purchase all upgrades
- Meet all passenger characters
- Complete all challenges
- Complete a certain amount of trips
- Reach a certain amount of total distance traveled
- Maintain a 4+ star rating at all times!
Challenges are a special set of funny or pointless quests, like reaching the maximum speed of 260km/h, doing questionable things to your car like crashing it to full damage, or returning to the garage with a near-empty fuel tank.
Most of these game events will unlock a Steam achievement to your profile when you complete them for the first time! Whenever you start a new career, however, you will need to perform them again to advance your stats.
Also, in case you missed one of the previous updates, the new hard difficulty setting increases damage and fuel consumption, so if you thought money for upgrades was too easy to come by, be sure to give that a try!
Arcade Online Leaderboards
The game's Arcade mode was always a great fit for competitive play, being short and sweet and having a good balance between skill and RNG luck. However there wasn't any incentive to challenge any scores other than your own.
Your highest scores will now be uploaded to Steam whenever you are online. You can check the top scores ingame through the Arcade menus to know how well other players are doing and push yourself even further!
New Test Track
Speaking of skills, the Test Track is a new place to explore and race around, getting to grips with the game's physics without having to worry about running into traffic. There is a fast Indianapolis-style course with 90-degree corners to practice your turning points, a few obstacles to navigate, and a parking lot suitable for handbrake drifts.
Graphics Performance Improvements
The game's original raycaster graphics engine, especially due to its fine grid resolution, provide some unique challenges when converting to true 3D rendering. Several techniques for sorting, occlusion and culling of level geometry are necessary to unlock its full potential, and we finally took the time to try lots of different things and keep the ones that resulted in a good performance increase.
Overall you can expect your frame counts to nearly double in comparison to the previous release, and it should also be the case that 3D OpenGL will be faster than Software graphics across all scenarios, even with older notebooks and such. Of course, you are still welcome to play with Software graphics if you like its retro aesthetic!
Other than pure speed concerns, the 3D graphics mode was tuned for better lighting, all menu screens were revised to be prettier and more readable, and it is now possible to navigate the user interface with the mouse.
Notes on MS-DOS
As usual, all changes and new features on the game make it through the DOS port, unless there is a limitation on the platform preventing so. In this case, all online Steam functionalities (achievements and leaderboards) will be unavailable when playing through DOSBox, because the Steam API doesn't support a 16-bit system.
We could hack the emulator to do so, but I don't feel that would be authentic and that's the point of playing the MS-DOS version. If you'd like to try the online functionalities while keeping that VGA look, then I recommend trying 640x400 or 640x480 resolution on Software mode, with Scaling Zoom enabled.
Read the full changelog
version 1.3.3:
- added Steam achievements and online leaderboards
- partial mouse input support
- much improved 3D rendering performance
- fixed several issues with vsync, framerate accuracy and timing smoothness
- launcher now attempts to set common environment variables for vsync under Linux
- added "test track" mode under arcade menu
- added career challenges and game completion stats
- added total distance counter
- added new passenger character
- balanced randomness of character spawning
- increased occurrence of courier missions
- player can now cancel going back home
- added turbo lag simulation
- added collision grace period to fix one-hit kills
- blinking squares on road now give off a light source
- dashboard warning lights now blink
- brought back brake temperature indicator
- added animation to upset passenger messages
- added blood particle variations
- fixed fuel consumption to be linear in relation to throttle input
- minor user interface revisions across all screens
- fixed broken high resolution UI in DOS
- fixed common palette corruptions under DOS
- fixed pressing [esc] behavior on garage screen + DOS lockup
- fixed issue with city generation writing outside the map area, could cause several artifacts
- fixed several issues with AI traffic logic
- revised music transition routines for better behavior
- improved detection of controller d-pad axis
- optimized/reduced size of save files
Since the internals changed so much, your previous saves will be reset once the game is updated. We invite you to try the Career mode again from the beginning.