Hey everyone. This month we've been focusing on more small vehicle tracks content, which is now getting close to being done.
With Brattelva Circuit finished there is now only 3 small vehicle tracks left to go. We're already working on these last tracks and we're aiming to have stuff to show next month.
We also only have 1 more track to go for Maceno Island: Maceno Peak. The layout for this track is already prototyped. Refinement and then eventually scenery will come once we've made some more progress with the small vehicles tracks.
Don't forget you can also track progress on our roadmap: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap
New Content
Brattelva Circuit
Brattelva Circuit is a somewhat technical track running through the Norwegian countryside, built on top of an old river. This secluded area is primarily used as a small wind farm, and with the track came a pub with open crowdstands to watch the races.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcnxOODemGA
Other Updates
Expanded AI Roster
There is now an option to allow post release ships to be included with the vanilla ship roster without needing to setup custom AI rosters in custom race.
Right now this includes Orbitronix and Mako. We've opted not to include the Barracuda Model 0 in this as it doesn't have weapons.
The option is off by default as keeping the vanilla roster to 8 teams is part of the game's original design. When turned on it applies to all aspects of the game (campaign, custom race and multiplayer bots).
Rebalanced turbo drops
Turbos have been unbalanced for a while. Since they were originally for a cheat mode or used in Speed Lap where you're given one every lap, we hadn't really thought too much about their drop rate.
As turbos have been a toggle for custom races for a while now, 1.3 will have the turbo drop rate reduced by 70%. This is still enough to give you one per a 20-40 second lap on average, while before you'd easily be getting 3-4 per lap.
These changes aren't necessarily final and we'll gather some feedback regarding it when we run the final 1.3 beta.
Fixed alt tab soft locks
It's possible to cause a soft lock if you alt tab out during track loading or rapidly spam the pause button, which is a particular problem for stuff like multiplayer where the person who soft locks would have to alt F4 to allow the rest of the lobby to start the race.
This is now fixed for 1.3!
Splitscreen weather
We've had an issue since initial implementation where player 2 wouldn't have their own weather effects, but could still see the weather effects for player 1.
This is now fixed, with both players having their own weather effects that only they can see.
As a side note we also had an issue where playing in splitscreen would trigger the cheats enabled notification, which is also now fixed.
Multiplayer host performance improvements
Whenever somebody connects to a server the host builds a list of ships that everybody is using. For other players this is fine as the host already knows the name of them and can just pass them on, but the host fetching it's own ship requires a database lookup every time. When you start reaching several hundreds of installed ships this can cause very noticeable frame hiccups.
When we first introduced our content database system during early access we had never updated player selections to directly reference it. This is finally addressed, and with a bunch of code updates later the host can finally just pass its ship information on without the costly database lookup.