Just a quick one today. This hotfix fixes a potential issue that could freeze the game at the intro in unbelievably rare instances. Also some extra logging so we can trace issues like this better. Back soon with a destruction derby mode for 4-player multiplayer!
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there. We want to hear everything you think about the game and the update, big or small, crash or annoyance!
/Benny
New update v1.37 "Breath Rally" live!
Hello racers!
See what I did there? Anyway, surprise! Our small hotfix update turned into a pretty packed regular update! We've worked incredibly hard on improving the game performance in this update. Some low-end hardware might even see 200% increases in framerate! We've also made race versions of a couple of tracks improved a few other tracks with more details and destruction and given collision FX and the feel of racing on loose surface an audio overhaul. There's even more so check the full notes below!
New!
Significant improvments to performance. Some players may see almost a 200% increase in framerate.
Framerate stabilized. There should be a lot less (if any) stuttering, jittering, speedups slowdowns and uneven frame pacing.
Added race versions of track "Kyomu Woods" and "Oasis" (no crossovers or oil).
Improved track "The Village" for racing.
Made cactuses and rolling bushes destructable and added new effects for that.
Resetting the car back on track now flashes the car for 3 seconds and makes sure no collisions happen until the car is free from other cars.
Added 6 more songs. The full song list for launch is now included in the game!
Improved impact effect and collision sounds and how they were played.
Driving on loose surfaces now has a dynamic sound effect.
Added permanent ambience sound during races for a more interesting sound backdrop.
Fixed
Fixed crash in editor when editing track description.
Fixed crash in editor when changing brush alpha.
The ghost car is now more transparent so it shouldn't interfere with races as much.
Cleaned up which portraits are used for opponents.
Moved car overlays out of the way of the car a bit and removed agro icons that noone understood.
I love how the game is starting to feel more polished and more ready to release for every week now and I hope it's the same for you!
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there. We want to hear everything you think about the game and the update, big or small, crash or annoyance!
Have an awesome day and we hope you'll enjoy this new experience!
/Benny
Upcoming hotfix update
Hello racers!
The contents of the next update is starting to come together. We'll fix an editor crash and add some huge performance improvements! We've been profiling and timing and studying parts of the code that runs a lot and have found several issues that'll add lots of fps (the more you have now the more you'll get probably).
This one shouldn't take too long and is smaller so we won't spend as much time testing and polishing as the huge update previously. Don't feel comfortable setting a date yet but.. soon.
Stay tuned!
/Benny
Price increase submitted
Hello!
EDIT: Price was confirmed.
As promised we will increase base price to get it closer to launch pricing tomorrow. The price is now submitted to valve for confirmation and will be $7.99 and your regional equivalent. This is still cheaper than the launch price will be even with launch discount!
Since we last increased the price we've added 4-player multiplayer, editor, optimizations, UX (sound, visual) improvements, new and improved racing modes, cars, music and improvements to career, more tracks and tons more so I think and hope the price is still OK for the game. There really isn't many games like Roadclub as many customer reviews have said!
Thanks for your support!
/Benny
New update v1.36 "Super Spring" live!
Hello racers!
Welcome to our MASSIVE Spring update!
This is the biggest update we've ever done and it brings a lot of new features that has been requested and some bonus stuff we've wanted to implement ourselves. We'll throw out a BIG DISCLAIMER immediately though:
Due to a huge part of our code base being rewritten, reworked and redesigned in this update, there probably will be bugs, some nastier than others. We've done our best to stabilize the build before releasing it to you but we are only two people working in our spare time so it is impossible to test all possible scenarios in a game as complex as Roadclub. So, we need your help testing this one! Please report anything suspicious and we'll get right on it asap!
Anyway, this one is so big we need a highlights section, so here they are!
HIGHLIGHTS
4-player support in local multiplayer
Track Editor and Steam Workshop support is now public (beta)
New elimination race mode
New desert dirt track, Cactus Road Park!
Improved Time Trial mode
Reworked weather system
Basic modding support
Destructible track objects
Animated water
Menu animations
New sounds and particle effects
New race intro
Start sequence countdown speed increased
Wrong way-sign (beta)
Reset car button (beta)
FULL RELEASE NOTES
4-player local multiplayer support added! We also reworked the entire experience of setting up the races so it is much more intuitive and fast.
Track Editor (beta) and Steam workshop is now public! It is still beta and quite rough usability-wise but we think it'll get more testing this way. It should be stable enough but not as easy to use yet as we want. But we need your feedback to know what is hard to understand!
Reworked race rules system. We can now MUCH easier define the rules for a race which means we can add new race modes over time. To illustrate this we have...
New elimination race mode! The classic mode where the last car on each lap is eliminated from the race until only one remain is now available for custom events and local multiplayer modes.
Improved Time Trial mode! You asked for it! You can now run as many laps as you want unhindered until you've decided you've reached your limit and then save the time. You can save the time even if you wreck your car (although you'd have to restart the trial at that point). Just quit the race using "Save time and exit" from the pause menu and the record will be uploaded.
Reworked weather system. Instead of having wind OR mist OR snow OR rain everything is now combined into one system and in addition we've added clouds and everything is affected by the current wind, even the clouds and snow! This means we can now have cloudy, misty, windy, rainy AND snowy weather all at once. Which combinations can happen is also depending on the biome (desert, countryside, winter) so it won't snow in the desert very often (but it CAN happen!).
Wrong way-sign. The game now tracks if you're going the right way and shows a sign otherwise.
Reset car button (beta). If you end up in the wilderness and feel it might take long to get back on track you can now press a reset button (which you have to map in Options->Controls). At the moment this doesn't look very good but it should work OK. We'll keep improving the effect over the next few updates.
New track "Cactus Road Park"! It is a desert dirt track made for some close racing.
Redesigned menus and divided into Single Player and Multiplayer sections and made a new race mode selection screen where we can add new modes in the future.
Improved sliders in the UI to be more intuitive. They no longer need to be activated to change value.
Basic modding support. You can create your own track objects with custom art, sounds and particle effects manually and import them into the editor, just by creating files. This makes it possible to create packages of your own additions and upload them to mod sites for others to enjoy. Many other parts of the game are easily modified as well by just changing files in the main folder. This will be an undocumented feature for a while but if any of you want to dive in immediately you can! (NOTE: Please be aware that modifications of the application folder will be overwritten by Steam when the game updates, so backup your mods!)
Improved object system. We've rewritten most of the code related to the track and environment which gives several new possibilities for more dynamic tracks, as mentioned below:
Destruction! Objects can now be made destructible so cars can slam into for example hay bales, crates and fences and they'll blow up to huge effect! This can also alter the routes of the more arcadey tracks over the course of a race.
Environment sounds and trackside particle system support. Tracks can be made more alive by allowing sounds to be placed in the environment and particle systems to burn, smoke or enhance areas with other effects.
Animated water! A new animated water layer backdrop has been added to enable more varied environments and give some more motion and life to the tracks.
Menu animations. We have a rudimentary system in place to make more animated menus to give them more life and make them seem less static. This is very early yet and we will continue to improve this over time to find a good balance between snappy input and visual improvement.
New skid sounds and particle effect for rough and loose surfaces
New race intro creating a bit of atmosphere before race starts and displaying lap record and track name.
Dynamic race UI makes sure to only display the UI elements needed cleaning up the screen a lot during races.
New tarmac skid sound. Now sounds a lot more realistic!
Dirt skid sound and particle effect finally added!
We now display which buttons are mapped to Back out from menus on the main menu. Further improvements incoming here as well.
Control mappings are now displayed on the pause menu for faster reference during gameplay.
Re-race event button now stores all settings so its easy to get back in if you accidentally quit out from a race you wanted to play again.
Start sequence countdown speed increased to get into the action faster!
"Laps to go" message added on new laps.
Improved design of Spy report screen.
Fixed
Finally fixed nasty bug causing cars to get stuck and send player into space (literally) sometimes during the first race after creating a new profile.
Finally fixed clipping edges of maps. Sometimes the camera could go far enough over the edge you could see beyond the map.
Fixed collision boxes on most cars that were extending outside their visual body.
Many UI cleanups and consistency improvements.
Removed annoying slipstream sounds.
Tons of minor stability improvements and performance improvements. (Please note that with many new effects an actual framerate increase may not happen anyway.)
Notes
Removed "Night" race time. Until we can make it look good we are removing the night mode from the game. Lighting didn't work and it was hard to see anything so it wasn't fun. We'll maybe revisit this later if it is demanded but until launch it's out.
Leaderboards will be reset in this update because the previous ones were only made for official tracks and now everyone will be able to make tracks!
All in all this is starting to give us a great platform to add more things faster to the game in the future, pre launch and post launch.
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there. We want to hear everything you think about the game and the update, big or small, crash or annoyance!
Have an awesome day and we hope you'll enjoy this new experience!
/Benny
Spring Update Release Date!
Hello!
We are satisfied with testing and excited to announce that our next huge update will be up tuesday April 24th! It will include all our work made from November until today including all features in the beta channel like editor, improved 4-player multiplayer and a lot more.
Please note that this means the price will increase on or slightly after May 1st!
Full release notes will be available when the update is live but check previous announcements for more details in the meantime.
Cheers!
/Benny
Spring update status and upcoming price increase heads-up!
Hello!
Things went great these past couple of weeks and I'm happy to tell you development has actually gone faster than expected and we're now done with coding new stuff and we're in full testing mode on the update. A release date will be announced as soon as we're done with testing.
I also want to give you a final heads up of the upcoming price increase. With this update we will be increasing the price one week after its launch, so be sure to pick up the game now if you haven't!
Until next time!
/Benny
Spring update news!
Hello everyone,
Just wanted to give you a quick progress update on our next update. We're still hard at work with the code upgrade I mentioned in the previous post but we're starting to see the light to exit the tunnel grow bigger. The worst part is over and things are coming together again.
Here are some hard data (and very rough estimates) of where we are with the major upcoming features, to give you an idea of how close we are:
Improved weather system: 99% complete
Editor public release: 95% complete
4-player multiplayer support: 90% complete
Reset car to track: 80% complete
New race mode system: 65% complete
As you see, we've come far but there's still some work needed. We will release a big "Spring update" with all of these features at once when they are all good enough. We might release earlier in beta to let you test the new stuff ahead of the public release.
Alright, so that's where we are. Hope you're not too discouraged, but rather encouraged to follow the progress! And as always, let us know what you think of what we're doing.
Until next time!
/Benny
Change of plans
Hey,
In the previous announcement I said the next update would be out pretty soon but we decided that instead of throwing that smaller update out there we'll focus on our last big engine improvement so we can finally be done with big engine work before launch.
This improvement is a rewrite of our race mode system that will enable any number of new race modes. We think this is a very important thing to do as it will add a huge possibility for variety in race types for the lifetime of the game and even at launch. Instead of just race and time trial we can continue to add new modes and try new rules going forward with this work done!
In parallell we'll of course continue to fix any important issues in the public and beta builds out today but no new functionality will be added to those before the big one is complete. But please continue to try to make tracks among yourselves and you can keep each other entertained while you wait :)
So, that's our plans for now! We'll be back with updates as we have them.
Race on!
/Benny
Time for an update
Hey everyone,
Wanted to give you a short update with what's going on behind the scenes.
While we put the track editor in beta we started working on 4-player support for the game! This is very exciting as it makes the game more "party-friendly" and let's you play with more friends! Also it gives us the opportunity to play around with a few more race modes where it's not only laps and finish, possibly a couple mini-game like modes for fun. Let us know if you have ideas! We're also streamlining the cumbersome flow to start a multiplayer game in the process to something more easy and modern.
And some sadder news. Gotta say we're a bit devastated no-one has uploaded a single track to Steam Workshop. We spent a huge part of last year getting that Track Editor out there for you all. So we'd love to hear why that is in the forums. Is it too much of a hassle to switch to the beta channel? Is it broken somehow? Is no-one really interested in making tracks at all? We'd love to hear either way so we know how much effort to keep putting into the editors! If it is this dead we may not work any more on it at all and let it be as it is for release and hope SOMEONE cares at launch :).
Anyway, don't have a date for the next update yet but we should have something out pretty soon since the worst part of development is over and we're more in the testing, fixing and polishing phase of the update.