Hello, Chasers! This month, our efforts have been focused on squashing bugs for the upcoming major update 0.3, laying the groundwork for the new Daily Contracts feature, completing the repainting of terrain textures to support the new vegetation, and more.
DEBUGGING 0.3
Releasing a major update is always a significant undertaking. This month alone, we've resolved nearly 90 bugs identified by our Quality Assurance team. While a few issues remain, we're making steady progress. Our QA team will continue conducting multiple review passes to ensure that our fixes don’t introduce any unexpected side effects.
We've been working closely with the Catalyst team to eliminate all remaining visual artifacts caused by cloud downsampling, while also delivering the significant rain visual overhaul we previously teased. Throughout this process, we're carefully tracking game performance across various situations to ensure a smoother and more immersive experience.
Overall, we're on track and confident that this highly anticipated update will meet our players’ expectations for quality and performance.
TORNADO VISUALS UPDATE
Between testing sessions, we've been providing the Catalyst team with a steady stream of real-world tornado footage to inspire the next major step after update 0.3: enhancing tornado behavior and visuals. The current tornado system is still in its early stages and lacks many of the complex details, shapes, and dynamics we ultimately aim to achieve. While our main focus remains on polishing and delivering update 0.3, planning for the next phase of tornado improvements is already well underway.
NEW UPCOMING FEATURE: DAILY CONTRACTS
We’re excited to introduce a new way to earn currency: Daily Contracts. This feature, coming in an update after version 0.3, allows players to complete bite-sized challenges in exchange for currency rewards, helping them progress toward their next garage unlock. Players will receive one new Daily Contract each day, with the ability to store up to three at a time. If a particular challenge doesn’t appeal to them, they’ll also have the option to reroll one contract of their choice each day. Here’s a sneak peek at the feature currently in development:
UPDATE ON VEGETATION
We’ve made tremendous progress this month on the vegetation repainting pass. The entire world map has received a fresh layer of terrain texture painting, and new vegetation is currently being regenerated. Once the regeneration process is complete, which takes time but runs automatically, we’ll review the results in-game to ensure they align with our creative vision. After that, we’ll fine-tune the technical data for each vegetation asset and prepare everything for in-game destruction. We’re excited about this major visual upgrade and can’t wait to bring it to the world of OUTBRK.
UPDATE ON THE TIV2 MODELING
To finish the newsletter on a high note, here are the latest screenshots of our work in progress TIV2 interceptor:
NEXT STEPS
All our resources are currently allocated on releasing a quality 0.3 update, debugging all critical issues found by our Quality Assurance team as fast as possible in order to release this massive update to our players. We are also onboarding a senior character artist on a 3 months mandate to produce more customisation assets for our in-game characters. Exciting stuff ahead! You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (March 2025)
Hello, Chasers! This month we started to build the next major update for OUTBRK, which will be our 0.3 version. We’re also showing a preview of new character customisation to come in the future and showing some progress on our update to our weather model.
WELCOMING A NEW TEAM MEMBER
This month, we welcomed a new full-time member to our development team! Angeline is joining us as our newest programmer to help accelerate the development of gameplay features and quality-of-life improvements. She’s already proven to be incredibly skilled and a great fit for the team. Say hi to her on Discord!
BUILDING THE 0.3 UPDATE:
PERFORMANCE UPDATE PROGRESS
Performance and visuals upgrade of the weather is the main core of the 0.3 update.
Our VFX team is putting the final touches on a major visual upgrade that eliminates nearly all rendering artifacts—like the blue or white pixels you might have noticed around trees, small objects, or distant geometry. These improvements also resolve pixellisation issues around objects, regardless of your cloud downsampling settings.
On top of that, they've contributed to a major refactor of our weather data packaging system, resulting in a reduced memory footprint for scenarios and what appears to be a significant overall performance boost.
With these changes—plus enhanced rain visuals and improved volumetric lighting—the storm chasing experience is about to look better, run smoother, and feel a whole lot scarier.
(Screenshot taken with cloud downsampling set to its maximum value of 2)
VEHICLES ON THE MAP
We're adding new icons to the map to display vehicle locations, along with small info cards that show each vehicle’s occupancy in real time.
SEAT INDICATOR
We’re adding an indicator to show in which seat the player is sitting in and how many passengers are sitting in the car. This will be a crucial piece of information for drivers in sticky situations waiting for passengers to get back in their car before taking off as fast as possible.
REMOVAL OF “LOOK BACK” ACTION
We're removing the "look back" action and replacing it with a fully immersive free-look system, giving you the ability to look around naturally in any direction.
VEHICLE LIGHTS
We’ve completely overhauled the engine’s lighting system to define our own custom falloff rates. This results in more realistic illumination of roads and objects ahead of vehicles. Lightbars now cast light properly as well, adding to the intensity and realism of the chase experience.
TOW AVAILABILITY AND MAP ICON
Since not every gas station is a location you can get towed to, the map will show a slightly different gas pump icon where towing is available.
To prevent players being towed directly to their inevitable demise, we’re adding a status on the gas stations to disable towing when inside a tornado warning. This new feature comes with an icon and a description on the map.
DESTRUCTION
We’ve improved the precision and timing of destruction to eliminate odd offsets or delays when tornadoes impact objects in the OUTBRK world.
HATS!
We started working on getting hats into the game. This is not planned for 0.3 but here is a preview of what's to come:
WEATHER MODEL
We're making great progress on our high-resolution weather model to deliver more detailed and visually stunning storms. The first major step is complete—we've successfully run our initial simulation. Now, we're moving on to the next phase: running the model on a massively powerful computer setup. This will drastically speed up processing times and even open the door to generating playable scenarios based on real-world upcoming weather setups.
Here’s a comparison of the same setup showing the radar simulation before and after—an incredible improvement!
NEXT STEPS
We started looking at integrating daily contracts for players to gain more currency by completing various challenges. This will hopefully help players get currency faster and also help new chasers have some sort of short term goals early in the game while learning the game systems. You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, -The OUTBRK Team
Changed "radio voice chat" from d-pad down to LB, for a more enjoyable driving + radio experience
Changed "toggle action wheel" from LB to d-pad down
Changed "toggle advanced products" from LB to left joystick click
FIXES
Fixed an issue with UI showing the wrong button for certain actions when using a controller
Fixed an issue causing sudden death when stuck between gas pump and vehicles
EDIT
We forgot to mention that we made small changes to the dominator.
increased the dominator's weight, and slightly increased the torque and brake strength
UPDATE 0.2.3.1113- Car Radio, Community Guidelines, and Bug Fixes!
NEW FEATURES
Added a functional CB radio to all cars in online matches
A total of 5 car-to-car communication channels with a default muted channel
Ability to adjust channels in the driver and copilot seats
Added an official community guidelines agreement to foster a safe and welcoming environment
Every update going forward will prompt this agreement
Enforceable by new moderation features to ensure compliance
Added functional anti-aliasing
Available in FXAA & SMAA
CHANGES
Updated the scenario pool to incorporate 15 brand new scenarios
Updated the F9 menu to support reporting players and removed feedback category to remove noise from the reports. Keep sending feedback via Discord and Steam!
Changed controller bindings of Probe to DPad up and Camera to Dpad right to accommodate Car Radio being on Dpad Up.
Removed some actions being replicated on the server to boost performance
Removed voice chat icon displaying in offline mode to prevent confusion
Removed the option to view game credits while in a match
Removed all preexisting anti-aliasing options
FIXES
Fixed multiple issues causing the players screen to freeze after exiting vehicle
Fixed an issue causing some servers to crash
Fixed an issue causing a scenario to crash half way through
Fixed an issue with a tornado appearing out of nowhere in a single scenario
Fixed an issue with solstice wiper blades not clearing rain
Fixed an issue causing players to get stuck in vehicles if opening camera while entering
Fixed an issue causing terrain to not unload after driving long distances resulting in flying grass
Fixed an issue causing the credits menu to not open while on title screen
Fixed index errors on tornado calculations
Fixed some logging at the end of scenarios
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (February 2025)
Hello, Chasers! This month we prepared the content of the imminent new car radio feature and community guidelines update, started integrating and preparing to release the massive performance and storm visual update that will follow, and progressed on two new exciting unique chaser cars.
UPCOMING UPDATE: CAR RADIO AND COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
We’re in the final stage of testing our upcoming patch that will include a new multi-channel car radio feature that will allow players to voice chat with each other from car to car.
We’re also implementing community guidelines that all players will see the first time they launch OUTBRK and have to accept it in order to play the game. This code of conduct outlines general online rules surrounding text chat, voice chat and general behavior. Breaking the community guidelines might result in different disciplinary actions such as getting prevented from using text and voice chat, or playing in multiplayer games for a limited time.
PERFORMANCE AND VISUAL UPDATE
Right after this update goes live, we jump right back to work into preparing to finally release our biggest update to our volumetric weather since launch. This will include not only a notable improvement on performance, but also significant improvements on the visuals of the rain shafts, tornado blending, anti-aliasing, fog and lighting all around the environment. This is a massive one and we’re very excited about it! Here are few teasers, captured in editor, about what to come:
NEW UNIQUE CARS
We're not done with cool news. Here are some cars that are currently under development, in partnership with the car owners and our 3d modelers. First of all, the PredaTOR from Prairie Storm Chasers https://prairiechasers.com/vehicles
And we're very pleased to announce that we're bringing the TIV2 (https://livestormchasers.com/tiv2/) to OUTBRK! The TIV team sent us a large amount of reference pictures and we're building the car as close to the reference material as possible. Here is a work in progress picture.
NEXT STEPS
With the progress made on the clouds and performances by our VFX team, they are now ready to start working on upgrading our tornado technology to bring bigger and more realistic tornadoes to OUTBRK. On the vegetation update side, we keep progressing on technical tasks to accelerate the deployment of the new grass and trees while improving rendering performance. We also hired a freelance vegetation modeler to create the broken version of all those new trees to have a more realistic depiction of damaged vegetation after tornado damage. You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, -The OUTBRK Team
OUTBRK: Development Outlook (January 2024)
Hello, Chasers! This month, we released a patch enhancing the private match experience, kicked off development on sanctions for toxic players, and made progress on the vegetation update. Additionally, we have an update on the Catalyst team’s work on improving clouds and tornadoes.
IMPROVEMENTS TO PRIVATE MATCHES AND SMALLER GROUPS
We recently released a patch that lowers the minimum group size required to start a private match on a dedicated server from 8 to 4 players. Additionally, we introduced a timer for groups with fewer than 4 players, allowing the match to start automatically if additional players aren’t found during matchmaking. These changes aim to make it easier for friends to quickly start a chase together. However, early player feedback suggested this may have unintentionally reduced the number of players in open lobbies. To address this, we’ve just released a hotfix that should resolve the issue and restore a better balance between fast matchmaking for small groups and keeping open lobbies populated.
This update also introduced UI improvements for passengers, allowing them to view the minimap and access important data, including wind speed (if the driver has the mesonet upgrade) and their own probe data.
You can read the full patch notes of this update here : https://steamcommunity.com/app/1107320/eventcomments/597391378287190879/
ADDRESSING PLAYERS TOXICITY
We’re aware that every online environment is bound to have a few bad eggs. We’ve been working on a solution to be able to put sanctions on players actively trying to be a nuisance online by abusing voice and text chat or having other unacceptable behaviors. In a future update that is soon to be entering its testing phase, we will be able to put timed or permanent restrictions to text and voice chat, or even to online play entirely to players that do not respect our terms of services. A more official and detailed communication will come regarding this in due time.
VEGETATION UPDATE PROGRESS
The vegetation update is a colossal task, but the technical work and preparation work is complete and the work in the world is starting. Here is a screenshot of the playground where all the assets and biomes were crafted and layed out next to each others to validate the cohesion and general feel of the entire palette:
XQC PLAYS OUTBRK
Twitch/Kick streamer XQC played OUTBRK a few times this month and made a video on his youtube channel. This is very relevant for us since we made a bunch of easter eggs about him in the tutorial room. XQC played on his own (not a sponsored stream) and loved the game enough to come back to it a few days in a row. We made a post on reddit to show the easter eggs we planted about him: https://www.reddit.com/r/xqcow/comments/1hveaak/outbrk_tutorial_room_xqc_easter_eggs/
Here is his youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShobJY-9fOg&ab_channel=xQc
CATALYST PROGRESS
This month, a second member of the Catalyst team joined the effort, and together they achieved a significant milestone: eliminating visual artifacts—specifically, the blue pixels around small objects—while preserving the performance benefits of cloud downsampling. This breakthrough comes after persistent work since the game's release, requiring extensive modifications to the cloud shaders. These changes not only resolve the issue but also lay the groundwork for upcoming enhancements and new tornado-related features. We are now entering the testing phase of these improvements and anticipate some iterations over the next couple of weeks before they are included in an upcoming update.
NEXT STEPS
The focus for the next month is to continue the development of the vegetation deployment in the world and continue to support Catalyst in their incredible work. We also started to look at bringing the Car Radio feature (car-to-car voice chat) in a future update. You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/ Till next time, -The OUTBRK Team
HOTFIX 0.2.2.1075 - Group Matchmaking Adjustment
FIXES
Increased timer for group chase to automatically convert to private match from 45s to 180s, to improve matchmaking.
HOTFIX 0.2.2.1074- Hiding UI Fixes
FIXES
Fixed an issue causing the UI to not restore after toggling it back on with F1
Fixed an issue causing the camera to disappear on players after hiding the UI
Fixed an issue causing player names on top of vehicles to not hide
