21.05.2020

Release Date: 21.05.2020

New UI

• Improvements to our new UI are ongoing, and we have already tackled the following things:
• We’ve now included options to select a custom showroom and HUD.
• Tuning info for the selected car is now correctly displayed.
• Setups now allow you to view and edit notes again.
• Enabled resume from replay.
• Added options to create custom skins and teams in the showroom.
• Properly detect if we’re offline and adapt the UI to that situation.
• Disabled options in the setup screen are now more clearly marked as such.
• Notification icon changes when there are new, unread messages.
• Ensured that parc ferme settings are always respected by the UI.

Improvements and Fixes

• Apart from the bigger features above, we have done quite a few “smaller” improvements and fixes that should improve the overall experience:
• Fixed a graphics freeze that could occur on some systems after driving for roughly half an hour, at which point it could freeze for over a second, which was sometimes causing mild framerate stutters at other times.
• Improved the speed of real-road synchronization when a client logs into a server. As we developed more laser scanned tracks with significantly higher polygon counts for the road surfaces, this synchronization was taking more time. This has now been addressed, and you get a message when joining to indicate this process is ongoing. In general, you will want to wait for it, but you don’t have to. During the process, your frame rate might be slightly lower.
• We’ve reviewed the package management system and fixed several bugs related to packages and their dependencies that could cause scenarios where content would not correctly install and, worse, allowed you to join a server without having all content installed. The whole system is now made much more robust, and we also managed to speed it up.
• Our real-time logging has also been improved as we keep trying to track down further issues.
• Fixed the wrong track loading sometimes when loading a saved replay.
• Fixed newly saved replays not immediately showing up.
• Made a few small improvements to controller rearrangements, making sure we detect a controller regardless of what USB port it plugs into.
• Especially for long races, we have now implemented a way to resume a race on the same or a different server in case of networking problems. At the end of every lap, the current standings and order are backed up and these script files can be run on a new server to resume the race after all drivers have rejoined. We’ll explain this system in more detail in the upcoming weeks.