We'll be honest: today your favorite sim developer is taking a day off for its tenth birthday. But until yesterday, we were hard at work on a new update for Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing and it's a biggie!
However, with great changes comes great buggability... update 1.4.0 is not one we're just going to release into the wild straightaway. It'll be spending some time acclimatizing on the Experimental Branch first. If you want to get a sneak peek (and provide us with much-valued feedback), read how to access the Experimental Branch here.
Once we're confident about the stability and polish of these changes, they will be moved to the main game version.
What to expect?
Update 1.4.0 is a massive upgrade with a lot of improvements across the board. Chief among these is a complete overhaul of our flight behavior to Liftoff Physics 5.0. (Read all about it.) The long and short of it: you should see a significant performance increase, leading to a smoother experience, even on weaker systems. We've also moved the game to a new version of our game engine, for even more optimization and future-proofness.
Additionally, we've made a bunch of smaller quality of life fixes and features requests. These will continue in the near future, as we prepare up for a new level release. Stay tuned!
Read on for a full overview of the changes in 1.4.0
1.4.0 change list
- Updated: flight controller - relies less on Unity's built-in physics and increases performance.
- The new Liftoff flight controller has an A.I. PID tune feature that adjusts itself based on the system's performance for a perfectly tuned setup in light. Manual tuning is also still possible.
- It relies a lot less on Unity's physics system, greatly decreasing the time required for physics and collision resolutions, freeing up more time for rendering and increasing overall FPS.
- Fixed: the throttle is now more responsive
- Support for multiple rate models. More models can be added later on.
- Updated: Unity engine - better rendering and code performance.
- Updated: Single player Infinite Race now has bots that continue flying, thereby behaving more like a multiplayer game.
- Updated: players in a multiplayer game show up in the player bar on the right as soon as they join, instead of only upon entering the level
- Updated: all multiplayer menus have been merged together into a single menu, removing several loading screens between joining, creating and browsing multiplayer games.
- Updated: the "old school" level selection menu now allows you to directly select the drone, removing a loading screen.
- Updated: all interactable UI elements have been made more consistent across menus and levels. Many elements now have an additional highlight to emphasize the selected element.
- Updated (macOS-only): re-enabled voice chat. Before voice chat can be used, it will need to request microphone access. You can do so in the audio settings menu.
- Added: macOS M1 platform support. The mac build contains a hybrid app which should run natively on both Intel and M1 platforms.
- Added: search bar for tracks and races during multiplayer room creation.
- Added: As a result of rendering optimizations, propellers can now once again remain in view (on supported rendering APIs, see next point.)
- Fixed: On supported rendering pipelines (DirectX, Metal and Vulkan), the rendering distance is now fixed instead of dynamic.
- Fixed: some frame parts referenced the wrong weight data
- Fixed: the Night skin of the KHole frame had some colors not working as intended.
- Fixed: the pause menu could become unresponsive when the menu was closed during a dropdown selection.
- Fixed: drone trails now properly reset during a race, whereas before they would show a big jump from the previous positions.
- Fixed: the field of view option is now consistent between menus and in-game controls.
- Fixed: dropdown labels that were too long would not slide back to their original position.
- Removed: the 'Display' option from the graphics menu since it's internally broken on the engine-side.
- Removed: support for 32bit Windows and Linux versions of Liftoff.