Hello all! Long time no see!

After 5 months, there's a new update!

In those 5 months, I was working on a new game, a little space station simulator in Godot. However, I didn't have a great time dealing with Godot issues that amounted to ultimate frustration and with new rally season coming up, I decided to put the space station game on hold and go back to Shakedown!

This update introduces replay saving and loading, new wheels and wheel motion blur, and a bunch of other fixes and improvements.

Replay Saving and Loading

Replays now can be saved to a file. When you are in the replay mode, you can now click on Save or Load to open the file dialog. Replays are binary files saved into .sdr files (ShakeDown Replay). Note that replays don't have any info about car or map right now, so you need to make sure to load the correct combination first. Loading wrong ones will not crash, but your car will probably fly in the air and through the ground.

If you are interested in the implementation, check this.

New wheels and motion blur

The default car (spec17) now has shiny new rims! I've replaced the old wheels I made long time ago (for a totally different car for INFINLAND) with new WRC inspired ones. There are 3 wheels right now, tarmac (used in Monty), gravel (used in Finland), and snow (still not used, but coming up in Sweden).

This also introduces a new system where you can switch out wheel models in car's config, by setting `wheelObject = nameOfWheelObject`. Btw, if you want to use those new wheels in your own mod, feel free, just load the spec17.glb in blender, and copy the wheels to your model.

Not only that, but the wheels will also have motion blur at speed! It uses an old trick used in classic games where pre-blurred textures are swapped.

Well, more precisely, they're all on the same texture but I offset the UV in shader. Modders can also specify their own motion blur parameters, see Wheel Motion Blur.

Monty changes

After almost a year of not touching Monty, I came back to it to add a few more things that were sorely needed.

It was known that players who played the game for the first time were completely lost in the track and didn't know where the stage is supposed to go. I thought the orange arrows were enough but I was quite mistaken, (seriously, I should've guessed!). So, I've added a few barriers to make it much more clear some roads you are not supposed to take.

I've made a few mesh and texture fixups here and there, and there's a few more trees. I removed the birches at the last hairpin because their style didn't match the rest. But essentially, the road surface and adjacent walls haven't changed, so all records should still be standing.

This is not the only reason why I'm back in Monty of course, but real-life Rallye Monte-Carlo is happening next weekend! And guess what, I will make even more changes to the track until the rally!

Finland changes

Finland has also gotten a little facelift. I've finally fixed those gaping holes near crossroads, and they now have properly baked light. I've also added a few more houses. Fog has been pushed back so that you can see further away now.

A bunch of other fixes

This update actually brings many tiny improvements. I've also fixed my first officially submitted issue #6! Keyboard steering has changed slightly to improve precision, there's much less "lag" when releasing the key now.

See the whole changelog here

Enjoy driving!!!