BallisticNG 1.3 Released!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG43rcdEC6U

Coming close to two years of development, we are very pleased to bring you the BallisticNG 1.3 update! This monster update is packed with lots of new features, content, improvements and bug fixes. Thanks to many of the under the hood changes this update makes, we're also excited to bring you long standing feature requests!

A big thanks to the internal testing group who's helped test this update from start to finish, and another thanks to the community at large for trying out and providing feedback on the beta releases!

This time around our changelog is too powerful for Steam. A lot of the smaller changes won't be mentioned in this announcement which is a more general overview, so if you'd like to read the detailed list of changes you can do so on our website here: https://neognosis.games/2022/11/30/ballisticng-1-3-is-now-released/

Notices

Price Increase

As we detailed in our release date announcement, the price of the game has now been increased to $15 or your regional equivalent. If you already own the game this change doesn't impact you.

For more information about this change, see:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/473770/view/2949283287708655708

Custom music

When re-writing our music backend for 1.3 we fixed a bug where the game would read everything in the custom music folder. If custom music no longer works in 1.3, it's because you now need to store music in sub-folders (or use the new external.txt system).

Unity Tools

The Unity Tools have been updated to Unity 2020.3.5 alongside the game. With changes to the packages structure and some engine changes that will corrupt track lighting in updated projects, please make sure you read through the upgrade guide thoroughly:

https://ballisticng-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/unity_tools/install_update.html#upgrading-to-1-3

Bling Pack

We've now implemented a better way for us to handle the Bling Pack DLC. With this release the reliance on an initial launch through Steam is no longer required, making the DLC steamless like the track packs and base game.

Switch Version

We've seen lots of comments and received plenty of emails asking about the Switch version of BallisticNG.

Since we're handling the port ourselves we're adjusting the game's code base to handle both the PC and Switch version with as little changes needed per platform as possible. A lot of work towards this is present in 1.3 and we'll be working on it much more exclusively for 1.4, which will be the initial Switch release version

Around a year ago we had test builds running on the system from a prototyping branch to determine what we needed to do. Some of the code and system changes from this has been ported back into 1.3 already and we'll be bringing the rest of it over as we develop 1.4.

In short it's still in the works and hasn't been forgotten/abandoned, but we're taking our time and doing it properly to make it as solid a port as possible while also being easily maintainable on our end. We don't have much more to talk about regarding it at the moment, but we'll update everybody once there is!

1.3 Update Overview

Unity Upgrade

BallisticNG is now running on Unity 2020.3. This brings many improvements for us behind the scenes and you'll see some good general improvements to performance and frame pacing with the game running in this newer build of the engine.

If you're making custom tracks/ships and want to take advantage of the latest mod tools features, you'll need to update to Unity 2020.3.5. See the link in the above Unity Tools notice for upgrade instructions.

Small Vehicle Tracks

Small Vehicles is a new set of content built around smaller pedestrian sized vehicles running pure races. 1.3 kickstarts this new vehicle class with 8 tracks and a campaign to accompany them. Atacama, Alice Mountain and Forgotten Coast were made by community member Brobama!

We've also provided our content templates with the modding tools. You can use these to get started with making your own small vehicle tracks! These templates include track tile textures, the holographic wall texture and material, a .blend file with the walls and a layout creator file with the default track width and speed modifier pre-configured.

Ribble Raceway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXKQVv4kkv4

Brattelva Circuit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcnxOODemGA

Atacama

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0wW3MBSMgA

Alice Mountain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO85HkExeYU

Forgotten Coast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJn3O-wDoSg

Skylight Gardens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OVGmhyhno4

Maria Tide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJn3O-wDoSg

Vega Waterway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmSaFte4jBU

Track Updates/Reworks

We've taken what we considered to be some of the weakest tracks from a visual standpoint and made improvements or rebuilt their scenery from scratch to bring them up to standards we see appropriate for 1.3.

Omega Harbour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyYUmoi3Tro

Arrivon XI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS7-QwnD7LQ

Metro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3D4Uv-4iGg

Arrivon Peak

Kuiper Overturn

New Ships

Some of these new ships are hidden as cheat vehicles as they're intended to be fun extras. To unlock everything type nanomachines and then spacerace on the menu. If you'd like to keep everything unlocked across game sessions then you can then type funallowed. This also works for the devfunds cheat. We'll be looking at shifting extra ship unlocks to dedicated options on the interface in a future update.

Mako

The AGLS new-comer from Maceno Island with a sturdy and agile ship that can hold its own in a firefight.

Aster LB221

Aster's flagship vehicle. An AG bike fitted with AGL technologies to ensure the rider is safe while flying at speeds comparable to a regular ship.

Aster VB221

A virtual version of the LB221 for use in Barracuda's Pilot Acclimatization Simulators, matching the Barracuda Model S's ship performance for consistency in training scenarios.

Aster KA10

An experimental AG go-kart that shares components with the LB221. It has a higher top speed then the LB221 but its extra mass makes it slightly worse then accelerating and steering.

Scorplet

Scorpio's Heavy Duty Hydraulic forklift with AG suspension.

Omnicom Cd-AG32

A manually controlled Omnicom Camera Droid.

M-Tech RD-1

A manually controlled MediTech Rescue Droid.

Barracuda MT Mini

A race ship sized Barracuda Martian Transporter, the ship of choice for transportation for those involved in the Outer Reaches project.

Wyvern Scc Ares Mk 1

A minature Wyvern Space Cargo Carrier, the main cargo ship being used to carry resources to Mars.

Ship stat updates

Protonic AG4
Protonic has seen a pretty major update, making it a lot less twitchy and letting you carry its momentum a lot more while still being controllable. See the full changelog for the detailed stat change list.

Omnicom
Omnicom has had a slight buff to its steering speed and had its grip marginally increased. See the full changelog for the specific value changes.

Barracuda Model B
The Model B has had its hover rotation power reduce to make it more vertically stable at the speeds it travels. See the full changelog for the specific value changes.

Barracuda Model C
The Model C has had a few stat changes to improve the sensation of drifting while keeping it controllable. See the full changelog for the stat change list.

Barrcuda Model B/C Updates

The Barracuda Model B and C ships have been merged into their own single ships, making all of the livery variants part of a single ship like every other ship in the game. Community member Vista has also worked on liveries for all of the game's additional teams to boost the number of liveries!

Custom Race Options

Custom Ai Rosters

It's now possible to manually control the AI roster in custom races. Enabling this new option will provide a list of all possible AI in the race and let you use the advanced ship selector to pick both the ship and the livery that will be used.

We've also implemented a preset system for this so you can save and easily recall your favourite roster of AI ships!

Cheat Options

We've added more cheat options for custom races! You can now toggle barrel rolls and side shifts in 2159 and manually adjust every ships speed with a speed multiplier. We've also added a reset cheats button so you can quickly reset the game to a leaderboard enabled state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEe7LqHdEHQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7kpi9WNML0

Stunt Mode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1CKBeCq_3E&t=8s

Stunt is a new gamemode built around barrel rolls, with rolling being bound to a single button press instead of the usual steering movements. This mode is built around 2159 physics and does not work for floor hugger / 2280. The mode plays as follows:

• Your goal is to rack up as many points as possible before finishing all laps.
• Points are awarded for sucesfully barrel rolling. The less time between the roll and the landing, the higher the score. The score is split into 3 types; Perfect Roll, Good Roll and Roll.
• As you perform succesful rolls you build up a combo chain. The number of rolls you perform in a combo multiplies the scoring, so maintain long combos to quickly rack up points. Failing a roll or having a heavy impact with a wall cancels the chain.
• The ships afterburner is replaced with an uplift boost, allowing you to exchange shield energy for a jump, Uplift boosting also freezes your combo time, making it useful for freezing the combo on big jumps or as a general panic button.
• Your shield energy replenishes slowly over time, but performing good and perfect rolls refills it at a much quicker rate.
• Every 3rd roll in a combo gives you a turbo, allowing for lots of oppertunities to push the ship away from the ground even without an uplift boost.
• You enter overtime if you pass the finish line while still in a combo. Normal rolls do not reset the combo timer like normal, only good and perfect rolls do.

Stunt has leaderboards and can be played in splitscreen. Let us know what you think!

Multiplayer Updates

Multiplayer has had a few updates. The first is more options, with the three new custom race cheat options getting added and an option to set the bot count when they're enabled. We've also implemented a lobby preset system, so you can save the lobby config and then quickly recall it later.

The host also now has control over the results screen time and how long people have to finish the race once somebody has passed the finish line. We've also rewritten how player ship selections are handled in the backend which will reduce host client connect lag spikes when lots of ships are registered into the game.

Physics Updates

Hover Improvements

Ship hovering behaviour has received an update to eliminate the twitchy behaviour when pitching up where the ship switches between being grounded and airborne. This is most noticeable at low speeds.

This change also makes it harder for ships at low speeds to leave the grounded state, this means constantly pitching up at low speeds will now slow you down as the ship will no longer be nose diving in the airborne state to level itself back out.

Better Collisions

Collisions have had a massive update so walls no longer grab you and height lock the ship. Scraping your rear end against walls is now nice and smooth!

Major Campaign Updates

Note: these change adds more events to the campaign. Your campaign rank will drop as a result of this.

We've taken the time to address many long running complaints with the game's campaign and implement changes to address them.

Aster League

The Aster League is a new expansion campaign that takes you through the new small vehicles content. With 8 tracks with reverse variants, this campaign is a fairly lengthy one and will take some time to complete.

Complete the last event with a gold or platinum for an addition to your pilot licenses on the main menu!

Time Trial Updates

All of the campaign time trials (including DLCs) have been updated with a new method of setting up the bronze and silver medal requirements. They are now based on a percentage of a lap in the gold run which now means they scale on a per track basis. This makes a huge difference in long tracks like the Omega Harbour Nexus event because of the tracks length, so those kind of events are no longer an endurance test to reach a bronze like before.

More Lenient DLC Livery Unlocks

Instead of needing to get at least a gold in every campaign event you now just need to achieve 50% completion. This completion percentage can be achieved by getting any combination of medals in any event.

This change also applies to campaign unlocks for custom ship liveries.

Easier Progression

All campaigns have been updated so you only need 4 points to unlock the next set instead of 6. This means you'll need 2 silvers, a bronze and a gold or a single platinum to progress to the next set of events.

The points of course follow through to further sets, so achieving a gold and platinum on every event will have you very quickly unlocking every event to play.

Event Updates

Many events have been updated/added for various reasons:

• Utilizing the reverse tracks
• Changing up mode and track combinations that take a long time to complete
• Make use of the game modes added since the 1.0 release

Redesigned Model A / B sets

The Barracuda A events have been cut back drastically. There are now 4 time trials on select tracks instead of one on every track. The Barracuda Challenge has also been given the same treatment, with the track list being cut to focus on a particular set of tracks.

The Barracuda B events have been split out into individual races so they're no longer endurance tournaments. The last two events in this group are veteran challenges which still test your endurance on the forward and reverse versions of the Model B tracks.

Refreshed UI

We've updated the user interface to be a more stylised and provide much more information about selected events.

Here's a look at the updated event details panel:

Ship Loading Improvements

We've rewritten ship loading to run in the background, meaning no more lag spikes for larger ships! Vanilla ships have also been split into individual files and run off the same asset management backend as the v3 custom ship format.

This change means you will see a brief loading period for the built in ships as their resources are no longer constantly loaded into memory, but this now gives us much more overhead to add more ships and ship liveries!

Modding

external.txt

The game now allows mod content to be loaded from anywhere on your computer using external.txt files! This can be useful for things like custom music where you don't want to make duplicate of files just so they can show up in the game.

We've opted to do it this way since all three operating systems have different ways of handling shortcuts and this makes it easier for us to maintain and potentially implement user interfaces for in the future.

For more information about external.txt files, check out the documentation here.

Custom Liveries and the Ship Viewer

The game now supports custom liveries! Check out the documentation here for how to set them up..

Any ship loaded into the game can have custom liveries, you'll just need the author to provide a template file for you to work off. For internal ships we've provided PSD and XCF files!

To help with making liveries we've also implemented a ship viewer, accessible from the main menu. This tools let's you load up any ship currently loaded into the game and orbit around it. You can reload the current livery to immediately see livery changes and control which texture maps are drawn and change the light level to test illumination and reflection maps!

Layout Creator 2.14

The layout creator has seen some big updates for this release! See the full changelog or documentation what's new section for all the details, this is just a small overview.

Orthographic Camera
It's now possible to use the editor with orthographic side/top cameras! The different camera modes can be cycled through using the 1 through 4 keys.

More node tools
Node scaling and orbit tools have been added.

Holding S allows you to scale nodes away/towards the average position of all selected nodes.
Holding R allows you to orbit nodes around the average position of all selected nodes.

Junction Smoothing 2.0
The editor's junction smoothing has been rewritten and drastically improved. You can switch back to the original smoothing in the Route Tools window, and tracks saved in an older version of the editor will still use the original smoothing.

Ingame Campaign Editor

You can now make custom campaigns in-game. Accessed from the campaigns menu, this new editor makes it much easier to setup custom campaigns with everything that you can do by manually writing an XML exposed to you. The updated base game campaign, upcoming maceno island campaign and the new Aster League campaigns were all made using this!

Custom Virtual Palettes

It's now possible to override the game's color palettes for virtual environments using PNG images! Click the image below for a guide (we've also included this image with the game, in the modding folder).

Dust Zones / Surfaces

Dust zones and surfaces are a new engine feature that allows you to define areas or hoverable surfaces that will kick up material using particle systems and play a sound. Dust surfaces in particular can also be used as proxy triggers for other triggerable areas, such as push zones or damage zones.

We're currently using these on the small vehicle tracks and in the upcoming Maceno Island expansion.

For more information, check out the documentation.

Animated Characters

Please note that we currently don't have documentation up for animated characters, we'll get this written up in the future. If you're familiar with animating characters in Unity, the stand-in documentation page provides the information you need.

BallisticNG now supports animated characters! We're currently using this the pilots on the small vehicles and already have the system exposed for modding.

Characters use Unity's Mecanim system, allowing mods to take a set of variables and use them to blend between different animations however is seen fit.

Debug Hub

The debug hub is a new overlay that can be accessed by pressing F9, it provides various tools and can be extended by code mods to add additional functionality!

Logger
The logger allows you to log information to the screen. This is hooked into Unity's logger, so you call Unity's logger to print into it.

Memory Profiler
The memory profiler provides information on how much memory is being used by the game and provides information on the amount of resources loaded.

Render Profiler
The render profiler provides information about what's currently being drawn. This is useful for track development so you can see what's causing rendering bottlenecks.

Fog Editor / Sun Ray Editor
If a track has fog / sun rays enabled, these editors let you configure them on the fly for you to copy back out into Unity. A useful tool for track developers!

1.3 Support Cycle

We're now entering the 1.3 support cycle, where we'll be spending some time bringing more free content, features and bug fixes that build upon what we've been working on for this major update.

Refer to our roadmap for more information: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

We have 3 updates planned, each focuses on a new free track and an update to an existing track. The track updates were originally planned for 1.4 / Switch release, but we've decided to pull them back since we're already on a roll with major content updates and doing so brings the content to you sooner.

• 1.3.1 will bring a prototype for a post-1.4 virtual themed DLC and a scenery update to Harpstone.
• 1.3.2 will bring a prototype for a post-1.4 floor hugger DLC and a scenery update to Nova Split.
• 1.3.3 will bring a track set deeper in the Aciknovae reactor and a scenery update to Aciknovae.