[DOWNLOAD] EvoForge new update

A lot of the work in this release comes from things that were difficult to see from the outside: the way Assetto Corsa actually handles dashboards, cockpit lighting, drivers, materials, shaders, physics and parts.

This time, instead of trying to reproduce what AC1 seems to do, a large part of the work was based on reading and measuring what Assetto Corsa actually does.

And that changed quite a lot.

⚠️ Please read this first

A converted car keeps the files it was built with.

None of the improvements below are automatically applied to cars you have already converted. You need to re-import the mod.

The garage will tell you which cars are out of date.

Nothing is broken on your existing conversions — they simply won't benefit from the new conversion logic until you re-import them.

🖥️ Screens & digital dashboards — rebuilt against AC1

The converted cockpits had a whole family of problems:

• Digital screens showing frozen artwork.

• Rev ladders appearing as pale plates.

• Warning lamps that never illuminated.

• Dashboards staying completely dark at night.

• Dark-on-light LCDs disappearing entirely.

The reason wasn't one bug.

Assetto Corsa declares lighting in four different places, and EvoForge had been reading only one of them.

The rendering behaviour of AC1's digital dashboards was therefore studied directly in its own engine.

Three important things came out of that work:

• A segment that is off is removed from the frame rather than dimmed. An off segment must therefore render nothing.

• AC1 does not read a rev-ladder colour setting. A lit step is its own mesh and texture patch, multiplied by the material's glow.

• Colour therefore lives in the geometry.

Across 73 cars and 2,229 rev-ladder steps, 53 ladders were found where every step has its own texture patch.

So painting one colour per ladder — what EvoForge was doing — was structurally wrong.

Rev ladders sitting on digital screens are now rendered by the screen instead of being treated as LEDs.

That also solves a hard limit: the LED shader exposes 26 channels per car, while a digital ladder can declare 30 to 60 steps.

For example:

• BMW M4 Akrapovič: 26 saturated channels → 6 channels used, 34 real steps preserved.

• McLaren F1 GTR: 19 quantised packets → 48 real steps.

And this isn't limited to those two cars: 99 of the 328 AC1 cars measured declare a rev ladder.

The three major dashboard defects are fixed

BMW M4 — the white plate across the windscreen

The head-up blade declared a veil that was transparent over 84% of its surface. The previous conversion interpreted it incorrectly, producing a solid self-lit plate over the 34 rev steps.

The transparency is now rebuilt from the actual brightness information.

McLaren F1 GTR — the black frozen rev counter

The slot controlling surface brightness was never connected on that rendering path. It therefore fell back to the artwork of the unlit panel.

Dark artwork = a lamp that could never light.

Fixed.

Dark-on-light LCDs

Some AC1 cars use dark content over a pale panel. Because the generated page represents the backlight, painting black effectively painted nothing.

These screens now switch to negative mode: the panel is painted and the content is cut out of it.

More AC1 rendering differences corrected

Six additional differences were measured and fixed:

• Hatching across rev ladders caused by 47 bright lines where quads failed to close.

• Black frames around screens.

• Double brightness where panels and steps overlap.

• Glow halos that AC1 does not actually produce.

• The colour formula itself.

• Panels being illuminated twice in negative mode.

Screens are also now:

• Framed to the actual glass shape instead of a square.

• Correctly rotated when mods placed them sideways.

• Given their own background artwork instead of losing it.

💡 The dashboard finally lights up at night

This is probably the first thing I'd check if you drive at night.

In Assetto Corsa, much of the cockpit's night lighting isn't stored directly in the 3D model.

It lives in a lighting file:

• Dial faces.

• Needles.

• Buttons.

• Pit-limiter lamps.

• Other interior elements.

These are switched according to the game's lighting stages.

On a 63-car test bench, 142 interior lighting entries were measured across 53 cars.

For 82% of them, the 3D material itself had no glow at all.

Everything came from the lighting file.

EvoForge had previously dropped 78 of those entries and leaked another 55 into the headlight system.

The result?

No cockpit night lighting on 100% of conversions.

These meshes now receive their own illuminated material instead of modifying a material shared by the rest of the dashboard.

The system is driven by the game's three light-switch stages, with pit limiter and hazards separated into their own channels.

Screens also now turn on with the ignition.

Engine off = dark glass.

Engine on = screen.

Everything that glows inside a car now goes through a single specification instead of four accumulated recipes.

🧩 Custom Shaders Patch configuration

EvoForge now correctly reads a mod's Custom Shaders Patch configuration, including:

• Includes.

• Auto-numbered sections.

• The community's official configuration base when available.

On one E36, that means 19 previously ignored include files are now read.

On the M4, which had no configuration of its own, this fixed four cockpit surfaces that had always appeared black.

This part is deliberately conservative and is still under construction.

Lighting channels are connected and warning lamps are resolved, but remain switched off for now.

Turning fault lamps on permanently would be worse than leaving them dark.

❤️ A special thank you to Alien

A big thank you to Alien for the work and research on the shaders.

A significant part of the improvements around cockpit rendering, emissive behaviour and shader handling wouldn't have been possible without that work.

This release is the result of a lot of testing, digging into AC1's behaviour and comparing the output against the original game — and the shader side has been a huge part of getting there.

Thank you, Alien! ❤️

🧍 Assetto Corsa's own driver — now in your converted car

You told me the driver wasn't right:

• Wrong seating position.

• Hands away from the wheel.

• Wrong proportions.

Retargeting was ultimately abandoned in favour of the obvious solution.

EvoForge now imports the driver Assetto Corsa itself ships with.

That includes:

• His mesh.

• Suit.

• Gloves.

• Helmet.

• Steering animation.

• Pedals.

• Gear lever / paddles.

• Idle animation.

The channel that allows a car to impose its own driver was found and proven, so this happens per car, not through your profile.

Placement is calculated from AC1's own seating formula rather than manually calibrated.

After reading how AC1 composes the seating pose, the M4 driver went from being 38 mm away from the wheel plane with his hands in front of it to a correctly positioned driver.

Against AC1 after the fix:

0.0 mm difference on every bone, hands included.

And:

0.0° difference on spine, neck, thigh, shin and foot.

Your verdict after the third in-game test:

“nearly perfect, well positioned, the hands fall right”

One remaining issue was found: intermediate animation frames were being interpolated linearly where AC1 rotates them differently, causing some poses to contract by up to 6%.

That explains the occasional “slightly deformed” appearance.

Gloves passing through the steering wheel, however, are already present in Kunos' original animation — inherited from AC1, not introduced by EvoForge.

🛞 Wheels, tyres & the new Parts Workshop

Wheel textures were being placed incorrectly on several reported cars, including the Simca Rallye 2 and R34.

The underlying issue was a material limitation in EVO.

EvoForge now packs a wheel's materials into a single atlas, keeps real decals isolated at full resolution and checks the converted result against the original AC1 wheel.

Parts swapping

Parts swapping now works with your mods, not just factory cars.

Four new slots have been added:

• Electronics — ABS and traction levels.

• Wheels.

• Tyres.

• Turbo — including naturally aspirated engines.

Two rules govern the system:

The physics follows the visual.

Tyres move as a complete set:

• Mesh.

• Textures.

• Compounds.

• Load curves.

Brakes were removed from the available swaps because their visual components are baked into the body mesh. A physics-only brake swap would therefore misrepresent the car.

Nothing is linked.

Everything brought in by a swap is copied into your car:

• Engine curves.

• Turbo files.

• Sounds.

• Wheel assets.

• Other required files.

The donor car can then be deleted.

A differential scan across 27 swaps found zero remaining references to another car.

And reverting to stock is byte-identical.

Tyre fitting

Fitting tyres to borrowed wheels went through three rounds of in-game reports.

Previously, tyre fitting relied too heavily on nominal wheel size.

Two 19-inch wheels can have flanges 14 mm apart.

The system now measures the actual rim:

• Bead seat.

• Flange gap.

• Section.

The fitting law was calibrated against eight factory wheel-and-tyre pairs.

The Parts tab itself has also been rebuilt into a proper build sheet:

• One card per slot.

• Source of every part.

• Important specifications.

• Compatibility and the reason behind it.

• Pending changes before building.

Two-stage turbos can now be edited stage by stage.

Engine swaps also bring their sound with them.

🏁 Conversion & tuning fixes

ABS

Some cars were being converted without ABS.

Assetto Corsa has two ways of declaring anti-lock brakes, and EvoForge had only been reading the older one.

That affected 12 cars out of the 386-car fleet, including the Mercedes 190 Evo II, Kunos M3 E30s, quattros and several E36 mods.

Another detail was also corrected: the “present” flag means any non-zero value, not literally 1.

That had silently disabled traction control on cars declaring 2.

Cameras

Cockpit, bonnet and bumper cameras were pointing at the sky.

The pitch angle had its sign inverted.

174 of 178 cockpit views were therefore tilted in the wrong direction.

Bonnet and bumper positions were also being interpreted in the wrong coordinate frame.

The median bonnet camera position went from 0.59 m to 1.03 m, matching the range found on factory cars.

Large vehicles

An imported coach was receiving the template car's wheels.

The plausibility limits in the import pipeline had all been calibrated around cars.

Those limits are now widened while remaining unit and frame guards — they are not intended to decide what kind of vehicle you're converting.

One failed axle also no longer cancels the other.

Tuning that didn't reach the game

One report showed suspension tuning doing nothing in-game.

The entire tuning chain was tested end to end.

The problem was that when the game package couldn't be rewritten — for example because the game was still running, antivirus interference or cloud synchronisation — EvoForge swallowed the error and reported success.

It now:

• Fails loudly.

• Flags the car in the garage.

• Replays the settings on the next build.

A setup range narrower than the value already fitted is also automatically widened to contain it.

🔧 The Chassis Bench

The Chassis panel used to be a drawing of a BMW E46 with a spring whose coils simply followed your slider.

That's gone.

It is now a real chassis bench running on the car you are editing.

You get three views:

• Rolling profile.

• Geometry from above.

• Orbitable 3D view of the running gear.

Everything is drawn from the real silhouette of your mod and its colliders.

Underneath that are four quarter-car models integrated at 2,000 steps per second, across two separate wheel tracks and coupled through the anti-roll bar.

Acceleration is no longer a number you simply impose.

It comes from the car:

• Engine curve.

• Turbo.

• Automatic gearbox.

• Per-wheel braking.

• Wings.

• Aero map.

• Tyre grip as a function of load.

Weight transfer is recalculated from those values at every step.

Two measurement errors were also corrected:

• Dampers expressed in “clicks” are an index into a curve list, not a coefficient.

• Bump-stop travel is measured from the car's resting position, not from where the stop was drawn.

The second correction is important: reading it the old way put 92 of 136 axles permanently on their bump stops.

Centre-of-gravity height was independently validated on all 68 factory cars.

Median bias:

−0.3 mm.

🔊 Sound & rev limiter

The limiter you couldn't hear had three separate problems:

• A gate intended for backfires was applied to engine events and cut the limiter layer by 80 dB.

• Limiter samples were matched by filename, meaning some mods could trigger them during traction control.

• Mods without a dedicated pop sample remained silent instead of falling back to their own limiter takes.

All three are now addressed.

Flames nobody asked for

Cars without their own flame declaration — including the M4 and R34 — were producing flames during downshifts.

The neutralisation system was acting on empty fields while the template car's flame pack remained active.

That's fixed.

Exhaust positions were also tightened.

The four central pipes of the McLaren F1 GTR are now treated as four separate emitters, rather than one.

And one important clarification:

A flame held continuously while the limiter is bouncing cannot be produced from data alone.

The engine's firing conditions require the throttle to lift, with thresholds compiled into the engine.

Assetto Corsa itself doesn't produce that behaviour either — what you see there comes from a shader patch layered on top.

The audio side is now correct, and the visual paths exposed by EVO have been identified for a future pass.

🛣️ Tracks

Track conversion remains experimental.

This release isn't about making converted tracks prettier.

It's about making sure a broken circuit is never silently handed to you as a successful conversion.

81 AC1 circuits were put through the importer to identify what actually breaks.

Every import now generates a report covering:

• Missing 3D files.

• Empty placeholder textures.

• Missing physics meshes.

• Missing starting positions.

• Other conversion failures.

A track without a starting position is now shown in red and blocked, with a “convert anyway” option.

Other fixes include:

• Truncated AI paths no longer abort the entire import.

• Registering a track with the game can no longer bring down the conversion.

• Pre-flight checks verify that the game's package is writable.

• Available disk space is checked.

• An estimate of required disk space and conversion time is provided.

The same research also established what converted tracks are still missing and what will be tackled next:

1. Ambient sound and reverb zones.

2. Thumbnails and menu maps.

3. Multi-layer terrain.

4. Trees stored outside the 3D files by CSP tracks.

5. Open point-to-point layouts, currently treated as loops.

🖥️ App & quality of life

A number of smaller but important fixes also landed.

Your own brands

A manufacturer outside the game's original brands is recognised from the exact asset-folder name.

Typing “YI Design” while the folder was yi_design could therefore make the brand disappear from the selector.

That's fixed.

Menu translations

Generated content was missing translation declarations, causing raw translation keys to appear in menus.

Every car now ships with its own text file.

Manufacturer badges

Car-list manufacturer badges now come from your actual game files instead of falling back to lettered monograms.

Your own brands are also reinstalled at every startup, so changing your logo actually reaches the game.

Startup

There is now:

• A proper splash screen with logo and sound.

• An 8-second intro video for creators making videos about their conversions.

• A manual AC1 folder selector when automatic Steam detection fails.

🚧 What is proven — and what isn't

Being honest about this matters more than usual in this release because a lot of this is new machinery.

Proven in-game

• Screens switching with ignition.

• AC1 driver — three test rounds.

• Tyre fitting law — three test rounds.

• Tuning chain end to end.

• Wheels and tyres through multiple in-game tests.

Proven on the bench / through measurements

• Cockpit lighting.

• Emissive protocol.

• Most screen rendering work.

• AC1 output comparison across a 63-car bench.

• Ten control cars unchanged from the previous release.

But that's not the same thing as driving every car at night and looking at the cockpit yourself.

Still under construction

• CSP configuration handling.

• Advanced lighting channels.

• Warning lamps.

• Some of the newer Parts Workshop slots.

• Visual flame behaviour.

• Track conversion as a whole.

So please keep the reports coming.

If something looks wrong, a screenshot + the car or track name is exactly what helps.

Nearly every fix in this post started with one of your reports.

❤️ Thank you

Thank you all for the reports, screenshots, testing and patience.

This release wouldn't look anything like this without the people who keep trying the conversions, finding the weird cases and reporting them.

And a special thank you again to Alien for the shader work and research that helped make a large part of the new rendering and cockpit pipeline possible.

Finally, as always:

Please respect the work of the original mod creators. Convert what is yours, or what you have permission to use.