The update is available ONLY in the BETA channel until players have verified its state. Also if you don't know how to work with files you may screw up your savegame and other settings so be sure to follow the backup instructions very closely and all will be fine!
(Giant list of) release notes:
Track Editor Beta with Steam Workshop support! Our main event for this update! This means you'll be able to create, share and play each others tracks for the first time! Very early beta, but it works! Your feedback is very appreciated especially in this area as we've been the only ones using these tools before.
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
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!
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.)
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 creating tracks!
/Benny
1st Anniversary on Steam!
Hello everyone!
Thought I'd do a short status update in celebration of our one year anniversary! Roadclub was released on Steam (Early Access) Jan 8th 2017 and it has been one year already (it's Jan 8th somewhere already right?)!
I couldn't wait getting this out because our testing is merely complete. If all goes our way the editor update will be released this week, maybe even tomorrow. We have one bug to squash and that should be it.
In the interest of full transparency, due to the huge upcoming update we will be increasing the price again as soon as we can after the winter sales. So if you're on the fence you'll have a couple of weeks to get the game at the current price (all future updates will still be free and we'll continue to run any sales at no more than 30% up til launch).
Currently due to the time available to us to develop the game we are also aiming at a summer launch date but nothing is set in stone yet. We'll still take the time we need before going for real launch if needed.
Finally, I'd like to thank all of you that played the game, wrote feedback and sent us bug reports over the year. You all make this adventure worth it!
Hopefully the next news is the release notes for the next update!
Take care and see you next time!
/Benny
Next big update details!
We have reached the feature freeze stage on our next big update! That means all features we wanted to include in this update is complete and our focus is instead only on stabilizing everything until it is ready for ya'll, you know testing and squashing bugs and the like.
However, because this a MASSIVE update of our codebase even after WE think we are ready we can't be sure the game is in a good enough state for everyone unless more people test it (we don't have a fancy QA department, it is just us two little guys!). So this time we'll be running a beta release separately from the public build for a couple of weeks until we're more confident there aren't any game breaking bugs left. This means we'd LOVE to hear from you if you're willing to play the new stuff before everyone else and help us test this thing! Don't worry, we will make another post explaining how to play the beta when it is out (if you can't wait you can check the forums).
To give you an idea of what's coming, here are the highlights:
Track Editor Beta with Steam Workshop support! Our main event for this update! This means you'll be able to create, share and play each others tracks for the first time! Very early beta, but it works! Your feedback is very appreciated especially in this area as we've been the only ones using these tools before.
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
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!
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!
All of this just in the very NEXT update!
These new systems also enable us to create many more modes and enhancements to the game in the future which we're really excited about!
Hope it sounds cool! We'll provide more details as the release draws closer. This has been a huge undertaking during the course of the past 6 months (some even dating back 2 years in the making) in addition to all the updates and hotfixes we've released during that time so we really appreciate your support and help with testing and feedback going forward.
New hotfix update v1.34 is live!
Hello!
An issue that could cause a random crash in local multiplayer has been corrected.
The update is available in both the public and the beta channel.
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there.
Happy holidays!
/Benny
New hotfix update v1.33 "Control Assigned" is live!
Hello racers!
Thanks to a report we were made aware of an issue with control assignment in the options menu. It should now work to map buttons in Options->Controls again. Huge kudos to Ralf for getting up early christmas morning to fix this while his kid climbed on his back :)
The update is available in both the public and the beta channel.
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there.
Happy holidays!
/Benny
Next update progress news!
Hiya everyone!
Thought I'd bring you an update on how we're doing. Although we haven't said much, a lot has been going behind the scenes.
Thanks to some happy circumstances I managed to convince my boss to let me work 80% on my regular job and therefore get 20% quality time with Roadclub every week for a while! And lately Ralf got a good deal with his dayjob boss allowing him to work a lot on the game AT his work for a few weeks. This meant we suddenly had a lot more time than usual on our hands to work on the game.
We didn't waste this opportunity and decided to add some more stuff to the next update that we've been wanting to do for a long time. This means the next update will be more ambitious but the good news is we'll have some really cool stuff for you guys when it is done!
It's actually not that far off. We've started merging all our feature branches and are closing in on testing and final polish so we're probably talking a few weeks at this point.
We haven't gotten any bug reports for a while so instead of making another hotfix we're focusing on the next big one. You'll have to wait a bit longer for it though but we're sure it is worth it!
With holidays coming up work might slow down, or speed up depending on how much we actually manage to slow down and recover energy over christmas and new year's. I don't really know how much we'll work but it'll work out!
OK, rambling over. Thanks so much everyone who have supported Roadclub during its early access year, it's been a blast reading your comments, ideas and reviews! Release is drawing closer (but we'll stay in early access for a while longer, it isn't good enough yet!), see you in 2018!
Take care everyone and happy holidays!
/Benny and Ralf
New hotfix update v1.32 "The Bad Kind of Slo-mo" is live!
Hello racers!
This update improves and fixes some issues related to frame pacing and AI/UI. I introduced a bug in an earlier update that made the game sluggish for players with 60hz displays and I'm really sorry for that! This update should fix it.
The update is available in both the public and the beta channel. Release notes:
New!
To deal with pacing issues in windowed modes we added an adaptive frame pacing system that changes update frequency of most of the cpu-intensive tasks running during a race depending on the current frame rate. It tries to push updates as far as the computer can handle up to the monitor refresh rate and during heavy load where it can't keep up it adapts and let the machine catch up. You will notice a small hickup when this happens sometimes but this is the best solution yet to handling all the wide configurations PCs can throw at us and sudden situations that arise due to background programs stressing your machine or anything unforeseen we've yet to encounter. TL;DR: Hopefully this will make the game more enjoyable to more people using a more diverse configuration of settings!
Fixed issues
Fixed frame pacing issues introduced in an earlier update for 60hz players. Sorry for the inconvenience!
AI no longer randomize their Neon and Spoiler color when League screen UI is updated.
AI no longer uses Neon customization unless Enable Arcade Elements is on in Game Options. They're all serious now. Unless you don't want them to be.
Fixed checkpoint on The Village track to prevent shortcuts that won't count your lap.
Removed mention of track records in Time Trial that didn't make sense anymore.
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there.
Have an awesome day!
/Benny
New hotfix update v1.31 "Videomode Choice" is live!
Hello racers!
This update improves and fixes some issues related to video mode selection.
The update is available in both the public and the beta channel. Release notes:
New!
Added video mode option. You can now freely select between Fullscreen, Borderless fullscreen and Windowed modes.
Added windowPercentage ini option so you have a way to select window size in Windowed mode.
Fixed issues
Fixed a few issues related to video modes and other minor issues.
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there.
/Benny
New update v1.30 "Curbed Enthusiasm" is live!
Hello racers!
Surprise update! We've been working on some cool stuff while also working on even cooler stuff so we've packaged all the updates not having to do with the Track Editor in a nice little update in the meantime! Is it only boring fixes you say? Nay we say! How about a brand new TRACK with new objects never before seen in Roadclub! Also some other nice stuff.
The update is available in both the public and the beta channel. Release notes:
New!
New track! "Drydock Circuit".
New props: Modular curb system, Containers, Spools, Woodpile.
Game now runs fullscreen as "Borderless windowed" making it faster to ALT-TAB and if the game crashes it shouldn't freeze the whole computer anymore.
Optimized view area calcs for better performance. Especially in rotating camera mode.
Lowered "bounceiness" of collisions which should make it easier to recover after crashing into stuff.
Improved car-on-fire effect.
Fixed issues
Result screen is no longer shown if all players are wrecked.
End-of-race overlay screen are now properly placed in local multiplayer games.
Fixed issues with zooming manual camera.
Fixed issues with cars not being bought in extremely rare instances.
Other things we've worked on but still not ready for release
Huge reworking of the track editor codebase to make it easier to extend and maintain.
First workshop integration tests successful (upload/download).
As always, post feedback in discussions or join our discord and post there.
/Benny
Track Editor News
Hello everyone!
We've been pretty silent for a couple of weeks and probably will be for a while now. The reason is that we're finally focusing on making our track editor public and integrated with Steam Workshop. I still can't promise it will be available at launch but we're really trying to get it there now as we feel it is the final major feature that will really make a difference for the real launch.
Since the last update we've started the hard work of refactoring all the old editor code, researching how to integrate with Steam Workshop and changing a lot of our infrastructure to support user content for the editor and in the game. Some of the work needed has actually been going on in the background all year so we're finally at a place where we feel this is achievable (and why I'm even mentioning it here).
Our first plan is to make a minimal track editor available with limited features but with workshop support giving you enough power to create and share tracks on the same level as our own tracks so far. We want to add a lot more in the future but this would be a great place to start.
Like I said, this is still pretty early but I hope you'll be happy to hear that we're working on it and that it explains why the next few updates will be small or take longer.
The game seems pretty stable right now so in the meantime, just keep playing and you'll have some new free stuff to enjoy before you know it!
