Physics 2.0
This update brings a complete overhaul of the physics, making them more challenging while also more fair and consistent.
- Cars are now able to accelerate properly through high speed corners and lose control when carrying too much speed, requiring greater skill to dance on the edge of grip and manage tires through these corners
- Cars now lock up much more easily during combined braking and corner entry phases of a corner, increasing the challenge of diving in deep on the brakes
- It is now possible to recover from lock ups and still make the corner
- Rebalanced corner entry vs exit speeds
- Rewritten ABS and rebalanced Traction Control assists
- More accurate tire degradation and heat model. Previously, tires would only degrade/heat up when over their traction budget. Now these values are computed by how much load the tire is under, allowing for wear/heat to increase even when not actively slipping the tire.
- Reworked mistake and collision angles to feel more natural (no longer will you suddenly shoot across the track into the nearest barrier)
With this change, the decision has been made with the community to reset the leaderboards. Now is a perfect time to go claim a few top 10s!
Career Mode Updates
Start your career in Vroomula 2 (or with any team)!
The New Career setup has been updated to allow you to choose the series and team to start your career with. If you choose to start in Vroomula 2 (or other junior series if you're running a custom database), your messages and media coverage will be updated to reflect this.
There is much more to come to make working your way to earning a seat in Vroomula 1 feel like a rewarding journey!
Media Articles
Articles are now procedurally generated for each series
- when a player starts their career
- season previews
- race recaps
- post season reports
Each article also procedurally creates an image using the actual car models of the cars the article references. Articles also have some fun features, like a fake poll to gauge fan opinion of driver signings.
The media articles themselves are largely placeholders for now, and will be expanded in coming updates.
Updated Messaging System
The player can now view public and private channels in addition to DMs. These channels push the new media articles and improved engineering updates (which now show lots of useful contextual data).
This is another huge foundational step towards expanding the messaging system in future updates.
Changes
- Added a new "Semi-Automatic" positioning mode. This mode requires you to manually shift to the inside/outside line when overtaking and defending, and allows you to choose to hold your line. It's more challenging, but our most experienced players enjoy the additional control. Be careful though, if you hold your line and hit the car ahead you may lose your front wing!
- The tutorial will now prompt players to choose between "Automatic" and "Semi-Automatic" positioning modes, with a brief explanation of each
- Reworked Chase camera modes to feel more responsive
- Add UI indicators for when ABS and Traction Control are active
- Increase difficulty of overtaking around the outside
- Reduced dirty air by 50% (the net effect is less than that, as Physics 2.0 is more sensitive to grip levels)
- Optimized physics step processing time by about 5%
- Adjust Engine pitch, tire squeal pitch and volume, and shift SFX volume
- New layout for Roseville Raceway, reducing the number and cadence of slow speed corners and improving its flow
- Add Fade in/out UI transitions (this can be toggled off in the UI settings menu)
What's Next?
0.39.0 marks the first major update since our Early Access launch. Now that physics are (I hope) largely stable, it's time to really dig into expanding Career Mode. Stay tuned!
