First I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback, both positive and negative. It has been a great help to decide which aspects need to be worked on further, and by far the most major critique was the car handling. For this update that was #1 priority as it was clear that the handling could become frustrating due to the twitchy and difficulty required to master it, so it was clear that some major work was needed.
As a result the entire car handling has been overhauled from the ground up to make it much easier to pickup and play by being less twitchy at high speeds, less prone to unintentional drifts, and most importantly it is now far more predictable and forgiving. The main way this was achieved was by making the drift behavior require a button press to initiate, so now the handling in normal circumstances is much more grippy and difficult to initiate a slide unintentionally, however the new drift input allows you to commence a drift at any time by simply tapping or holding when entering a turn.
This was by far the biggest change included for this update, however there were also a lot more improvements and additions included:
Additions/Improvements
- Redesign car handling model from scratch.
- Drifting now requires tapping or holding the drift button to commence a slide when entering a corner, otherwise the handling is now typically much more grippy.
- Add a racing driver model into the cars. Some players noted that it was strange particularly in the open top cars that there was no driver. It makes perfect sense so now all cars have an animated driver model.
- Add extra game music during races. In previous versions there were only a few music tracks played on repeat which could become repetitive quickly. Now there are 5 additional music tracks to make it less repetitive.
- Add extra UI tips and hints regarding the new handling model and how to initiate a drift.
- Improvements to performance so that the game will run smoother on all hardware.
- Optimize install size.
Finally some of the known issues with the game have been fixed to make it more stable:
Fixes
- Fix some soft locking issues when in the main menu and particularly the loading screen caused by improper handing of controller input in some cases.
- Fix some visual glitches when in a race causing bright flickering light, prominent on some tracks more than others.
- Fix the car front camera view that could go out of bounds in some cases, depending upon what speed the car was launched at.
- Block off some additional track side roads that should not be accessible and could lead to confusion.
- Fix UI navigation issues in menus that could cause controller input focus to be lost, or move to unexpected positions.
- Switching to keyboard or mouse when a controller is connected will now require a mouse click to hover over a button to take input focus away from the controller. Previously an unintentional mouse movement could cause this.
- Inputs from controller devices when in the main UI will now refocus on the main button if any controller input is detected.
- Fix an issue with some variations of the Grunberg track having missing checkpoints, which could cause some problems with the lap counting.
- Fix a few minor issues with online mode.