Hello fellow drivers!

New update, the largest to date, is now up and it brings a lot of cool updates, most importantly, the replay system!

Replay system

The replays are recorded automatically when you start driving the car. You can play the replay through the in-game menu, by pressing ESC and then hitting R. During playback, you can still manipulate and switch cameras with C, so it's effectively the "photo mode".

Since a new snapshot of the game state is taken every frame and pushed into a resizable array, it might be a problem on lower end machines, so I've added an option to turn off automatic replay recording in config with autoRecordReplay=0. But on a 6 year old mid-range laptop, I haven't noticed any hiccups.

I've also added some noise in the free look camera, to recreate the shaky feel of a handheld camera.

The menu

Now, there's an in-game menu as well! When you hit ESC, now it opens the menu instead of just restarting the game. Well, it's not navigable for now, but you simply use keys to activate items. I'm not a big fan of games that make you go through elaborate menus with fancy animations you have to wait for, wasting your precious time. Therefore, I've kept restarting still fast by just hitting ESC + Space!

And can you believe.. You can actually "properly" shut down the game now! (although there is no difference to hitting alt+F4).

When the menu is open, it pauses as well. And btw, you can also pause the game by hitting P during gameplay without the menu.

The Paid Version

As I have already mentioned a couple of times, for me to be able to keep working and improving the game, I have decided that now is the time to put a fee on the game. The initial price is 6.99 EUR for now, and will grow over time as I add more content.

To be clear, this version of the paid game doesn't bring any new content right now, but it opens up the doors for moddability as I am dedicated to make it as easy as possible to add new cars and tracks! So, look at it as supporting me and investing into the future content and features. ♥

The Demo

From now on, the old non-moddable version now effectively becomes the "demo", and will remain free. The only difference between the demo and the paid version is going to be more content and ease of moddability. In the following updates, I will add easy in-game car and track switching to the paid version, while the demo will remain with a single "spec17" car. The demo will still be updated and have most of the other features of the main game, like the new replay system and upcoming pace notes.

(Yes.. you can still mod the demo version replacing the spec17.gltf car file, but it's a nuisance for sharing, as it was until now)

Splitting the car data from main config

The main feature of the paid version is that the cars are now split from the old monolithic `config.ini`, into separate `mycar.car.ini` files. This allows different cars to be loaded with different parameters and models, by setting `car =` property in the main config.

The parameters have simply been moved to a different file, so it is very easy for any modder to easily upgrade. Btw, you can even reuse the same model for multiple settings, you could have a tarmac setup and a gravel setup for example.

The resource structure has also changed, and now all cars are inside a `cars/` folder. There's been a number of other car modding changes, see modding page for details.

For now, there is still only one official car, the infamous generic white spec17 (2017 specification WRC car), but I will likely add this nice old boat in the next update:

The same "split" will also happen with tracks in an upcoming feature, but I haven't done it yet since tracks have so few parameters right now.

Physics fixes

I've made a couple of major physics fixes. The car no longer slides when stopped on slopes and the drivetrain doesn't jitter when the parameters are low.

Another thing of note is that the timing is now calculated in physics (fixed) update, instead of being relative to the start time. This has caused an inconsistency on lower spec machines, making the times slower than they should be. It is now consistent between different machines so you can be sure when competing.

Other improvements

Besides the stuff already mentioned, there are many other fixes and improvements: See the entire changelog here!

Modding Corner

Meanwhile farfadet46 has released this Lunar rover track: https://farfadet46.itch.io/lunar

It's nuts and I love it. Because he requested, I've added a special `gravity=` parameter to the config so he could lower the gravity. But as I added it after he already finalized the mod, he didn't change it, so I suggest you change the parameter to `gravity = 0, -1.62, 0` to match Lunar gravity.

Happy driving!