Maintanence update

Getting very close to the next public update, for this build we mostly focused on fixing all sorts of issues. A lot of internal stuff has been rewritten from scratch, a lot of bugs old and new were solved, so the whole thing should run smoother now. There are also a new things that might be quite interesting:

Car body flex

A new feature for custom car physics giving cars a bit of flexibility controllable separately for rotation and offset for different axes. Should allow to recreate less rigid street cars, or even lesser rigid roadsters and other cars with no roofs, both visual and physical aspects of it should work well integrating with aero, suspensions, collisions and even having a bit of a flex from the engine’s torque. Thanks to ODE openness it also comes with pretty much no performance penalty.

Also, if you’re racing with karts, now they can be configured to allow for drivers to shift their weight left and right (effect here is greatly exaggerated for testing) within a specified range with two extra buttons, and if a VR headset or TrackIR tracking is connected, they can be used instead of buttons.

(Please note, currently those things would only apply to cars if explicitly configured in car physics data. We’re working on documentation on how to set it up, coming very soon.)

Experimental physics tweaks

Nine options tweaking physics simulation, currently as some experiments to make sure it’s not game-breaking not available online, but so far they seem to improve things overall. Collisions between car rims and ground for situations where tyres alone are not enough to stop wheels going through the ground, a fix stopping cars from sliding downwards when parked on a tilted surface, a strange option forcing wheels to pop back in place when suspension turns inside out, brakes limit preventing wheels from jittering from braking torque, a fix for ground colliders stopping cars from falling straight through the ground, option for smoother collisions to prevent cars from getting stuck on thin or weird walls, adaptive hard collisions increasing contact rigidity based on intersection depth to prevent objects going through other objects and a couple smaller tweaks, all might increase overall quality of life.

Updated particles

Piece particles have been reworked so that pieces of grass now actually look like pieces of grass and not some strange alien bits. Now with fully reworked collisions they should also properly interact with cars, even getting shoved away by wipers or bouncing off walls. Sparks were also improved to finally get a bit of life back into them, and smoke (together with pieces and skidmarks) now can sync with surface color for a more dynamic look.

App Shelf

That’s the name for the new app gallery thingy. Browse apps, install, update and uninstall them live, all with automatic updates too. Already moved some of the built-in apps in there, and added a couple more (and more apps will be coming soon, including some third-party ones). Some of the apps worth mentioning:

• Radar: replacement for built-in radar app, now written in Lua. Unlike the old one, this app has a new shading, shows edges of a track, as well as brake lights and some more details.

• Time Shift: if you want to practice a certain corner, this app can help by allowing you to rewind back the time in offline practice sessions. It would invalidate your lap time, so this kind of functionality won’t allow you to set the best lap times in the world, but it might still be good for testing.

• Paintshop: that older app for painting car skins got an update and now can be used to draw things on track textures and change the canvas resolution. Performance should also be better now.

• Setup Exchange: a small tool extending the setup menu, allowing to share setups in a gallery, download and apply setups, as well as discuss setups in comments.

CSP Debug app physics helpers

If you’re working on new cars, or just like to test things further (or maybe just want to train a certain corner of a track in a practice session), CSP Debug app now has a few more features on its “Car” tab. Save and load full car state (including velocity), use mouse to drag car around, press a button for a small jump or simulate extra weight to see how suspension will react. Even more interesting with body flex.

Fixes

It would be too long to list all the fixes here, so, just a few highlights:

• VR got a lot of fixes, including a fix for stereo mirrors, smoothing for mirrored image, ASW2 and post-processing;

• New trees now work with VRSS and got some more fixes for shading in the distance;

• Dynamic shadows from headlights won’t flicker as much anymore;

• Major part of rendering logic has been fully rewritten to run faster and more reliably;

• Filter for curved monitors now works with single screen rendering mode;

• Parallax for skidmarks no longer makes VR drivers sick (along with some other improvements).

Here is the whole list of changes, and a link to quickly install the build with Content Manager. 

As always, thank you so much for such incredible support! For the next part we’ll be focusing on the next public update, now that the things got a lot more stable, and after that there’ll be a lot more features coming too.