Hey everyone, it's about time for another devlog! The past month has seen quite a few changes and new additions. Campaign balancing is underway but in the meantime here's what's been going on:
Updated Explosion Effects
The explosion effects have been given a small facelift, an additive shader is now used which removes saturation artifacts that the previous multiplicative shader caused. Because they're now additive it also means they're brighter!
Track Overviews
Before the race begins you will now be treated to an overview of what you're about to race on. Every track has also had a major ambient sound overhaul to compliment this update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rircss7iFHA
Rescue Droids
The rescue droids that help keep you on the track are now present on the start grid during the countdown! They keep your ship suspended and then fly off when the race starts.
These and the track overviews are implemented with a new spline backend that more parts of the game are starting to utilize. Other utilizations include a new hunter attack animation, the energy wall bolt now following the track and soon the transfer beam.
New Ship Effects
The collision effects have been updated for improved visual feedback. The repair effect when flying through pitlanes has also been updated to be arcs of electricity that trail slightly behind the ship.
More options
The game now has more graphics settings to tweak! These new options are important for scaling back the game for lower end hardware. In particular the Video Billboards option has a big impact on low-end CPUs and other settings like Environment Projectors and Light Flares have a large impact low-end GPUs.
Ship - Ship Collisions
The ship - ship collision model has been completely overhauled. Ships now use box colliders to resolve collisions with other ships and now scrape along each other instead of bouncing off. Ramming into the back of another ship will now transfer your momentum to them so care must be taken when approaching other ships from behind.
Anti-Skip
The game now has an anti-skip mechanism in place. It's still in early phases and there's still plenty of fine tuning to do but all of the game's major skips have now been stopped in one sweep.
The system works by keeping track of where you exit and enter the track and uses the distance travelled, angle between where you exited and entered and side of the track to figure out if you have potentially skipped.
If the game believes you have skipped then it will respawn you where you left the track initially. Custom tracks can take advantage of the allow out of bounds section flag to disable this on a per-section basis.
Practice Mode
Practice Mode is a new option in the campaign where you're loaded into a race on Cassandra with unlimited laps, Toxic class with respawns enabled. A guide on mechanics is also available from the pause menu. This is designed for new players to have an easily accessible sandbox environment where they can experiment until they're comfortable to jump into the campaign for real.
Unity Tools
The Unity Tools have had major updates with a vastly improved TRM editor, optimized track editor, more assets from the game included, per-tile maglock control, new shaders and support for several new game features. The TRM reverse and atlas transfer tool used to create the game's reverse tracks has also been added.
Up Next
Next months devlog is going to be skipped in place for something else ;)
Stay tuned for more news!