Back in 2018, we were inspired by g13ba's clean ports of the SL1 garages to SLRR v2.3.1, to see what else might be possible...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1496364393
Soon after, having been helped by amilmand in sorting out AI paths, we managed a visually broken, but living and totally drivable SL1 Valo City!
From there, it was clear that the idea has a future, and we have been making slow but steady off-time progress on it for almost 3 years now!
Why revive the original Street Legal?
Beyond "hey! that's kinda neat!", SL1 offers it's own unique gameplay, hardly seen in other driving games;
We'd call it a game of the 'Vehicular Survival' genre!
Unlike SLRR, you can't just spam Repair All to refresh your car after every short drive, but actually need to dive deep into the components, to do maintenance yourself!
Straightening the chassis is not a trivial task either.
With more of a time investment needed for repairs, you'll find yourself squeezing the last ounces of drivability out of your worn-down wreck, and using easily-replaced body panels as protection for the hard-to-repair chassis.
It's a slower, more thoughtful experience, that fans of the more sandbox-friendly nature of SLRR may even find tedious, but luckily for them (and everyone else for that matter), the street racing itself is anything but that;
Here, the career progression is not just a question of having a big engine and a lead foot - you never know where the next point-to-point race will take you!
As rewards, you'll unlock new areas of the city, new cars, and new engine types, keeping your career journey fresh and interesting!
What's with this "REVision"?
If you have played SL1 before, you'd definitely know how terribly unstable it was - it's worse than playing an older version of SLRR, before patches;
Not only you'd be fighting to keep your car alive, but the game itself too - returning to garage after every 2-3 races to save your game was an absolute must, lest you lose progress from the inevitable game crash!
For sure, becoming the #1 was a hardcore task deserving of respect, and we'd like to keep it that way, just not by crashing you to desktop :)
REVision runs on the game engine of Redline, solving a LOT of problems, while still maintaining the original feel of the game, and further opening it up for mods!
The progress so far
SL1R started out life as SLRR v2.3.1, and will grow to show no traces of it's earlier form!
Valo City
- Looks as good or better than in SL1 in 99% of locations.
- Working and more-functional paths for traffic, racers, and pedestrians.
- Almost all grass-painted concrete acts like grass now, and more ground material fixes.
- Object occlusion support all around the map, massively improving performance.
- Working street lighting for Night Mode (a bonus mode for chill cruising, and top speed runs on the quiet streets).
- Fixed disappearing walls, some gaps, and placement of a lot of objects.
- Removed double-placed objects.
- Fixed most instances of object flickering.
Test Track
- All tests functional.
- All grass is now real grass.
- Improved object positioning.
Garages
- Featuring all the subtle behavior differences of SL1.
- Non-crazy camera.
- Envmaps for all garages.
- Material & texture fixes.
Part shops
- Material & texture fixes.
Car dealer
- Material & texture fixes.
All maps
- Support for extended view range.
- Color-matched fog nicely blends distant objects in with the background, making obvious pop-in rare.
- Lighting direction matches that of the direction of the sun.
- Fixed navigator desync related to reaching the edges.
Cars/parts
- Fixes for traffic materials & textures.
- Attribute fixes for some wheel/tyre combos.
- Improved handling.
First-person mode
- Fully functional conventional walking mode.
- Physically simulated body hull.
- WASD to move, Space to jump, Shift to run.
- Using Shift/Ctrl, stand on toes, lean, crouch.
- LMB to remove parts.
- RMB for other interactions (open/close doors/hood/trunk, take/leave seat, grab steering wheel, etc...).
- Scroll or number keys to select items in inventory.
- Supports the basic car building actions.
- Sit in any seat of the car.
- Use the mouse or keys to look around while driving in first person.
- Leave the seat anytime, and explore on foot! Reach some car-inaccessible areas!
- Traffic avoids hitting you, and pushes you along if it does, sometimes being lightly dented.
- Movement fine-tuned by a long-time FPS player.
- Feature is fully optional.
Photo mode
- Sliders for adjusting FOV and Roll.
- Positions & settings can be saved, for things like bookmarks, timelapses, etc...
- Works anywhere in the game!
Camera rails
- Animates camera movement, rotation, and FOV between a set start point and end point (intended for trailers and player-made videos).
- Two-click setup for a simple action.
- Support for curves,
- Speed adjustable directly, by total travel time, or based on player car's distance to placeable checkpoint(s).
- Nodes can be attached/set to move relative to a car.
- Support for locking view angle onto positions (static or car-relative).
- No limit to the amount of actions in the sequence - set up enough action cameras for a long drive across the city, if you want!
- Available anywhere in the game.
- Setups saveable.
More-technical stuff
OSD
- SL1ified almost everything.
- Support for swapping between pre-loaded textures of buttons on hover/click.
- A lot of features to allow more-dynamic menus/HUDs, without introduction of stutters.
- Redesigned sliders.
- Typed input support for sliders.
- Elegant right-click and modifier key handling.
- Cursor animation support.
- Support for context menus, with screen edge awareness, and automated scaling (two-dimensionally, if needed).
- Custom syntax for easy implementation of context menus.
- Adjusted formulas, for more-predictable element placement.
- Sharpened fonts.
- Ton of other small/less-interesting features.
File Manager
- Re-made full-screen 2D interface for careers, camera angles, and anything else that you might want to save!
- Supports basic OS functions: Move/copy/rename/delete.
- Folder support (supports above functions too).
- Folder navigation via elegant, dynamic clickable address bar.
- Automated backups of overwritten/deleted files - should totally prevent unintended destruction of saves!
- New, flexible format for save files themselves, making for easier modding/development, and preventing errors related to datastream desync (career restarts shouldn't be needed for any mods, and removal of mods shouldn't break careers either).
Console
- Press tilde anytime to open!
- Quick-to-implement command handling.
- Saves typed history for the session, to be accessed by arrow keys.
- All entries timestamped.
- Special timing mode, for fairly-precise timing of code execution speed, that minimizes overhead by the console itself.
- Command macro recording, playback, saving.
- Can run multiple commands at a time, if separated by semicolons.
- Allows on-the-fly binding of hotkeys to commands. Savable.
- Support for saving commands for on-launch execution (to load straight into a specific area, for example).
- Global entry readout in the upper left corner, with individually addressable lines (by ID or name), and flexible scaling.
- Bunch of useful existing commands.
- Counts your game launch count. <--- very important!
General/misc
- Automatic error.log readout on game exit/crash.
Plus, a lot of minor changes/features, that could easily double the length of this list!
As you can see, a lot of time was spent on various background stuff, and not so much on the core gameplay yet!
At this point, we are almost done with any large extras, and are quickly moving towards fully stripping out the placeholder SLRR content, implementing all SL1 car parts, filling the shops, redoing the menus, and finally - enabling the career logic!
Well - that's keeping it brief :)
...
What's next?
The project is moving into full-time development, with hopes of releasing it this year!
For the past few months, we have been very busy with making the game more presentable, producing promotional materials, getting it on Steam, and planning/setting up crowdfunding reward mechanics!
That's right! The plan is boost this project via crowdfunding, so it's no longer tapping into the budget of the other games we're working on.
A detailed list of things left to do, crowdfunding info, and trailers are coming very very soon!
Stay tuned! :)