BEWARE v012

Dear patrons, happy, and quite relieved, to be finally able to release v012! Thank you all very much for your patience.

If you want to jump straight into v012, here's the basics for this update:

* The caravan, the one with the drawing on the side, now has a proper purpose - it's still rudimentary now, but will make more sense within the game's story later on. When you enter a camping ground with the caravan attached it will be saved as the starting point, next time you load the game. So basically a checkpoint system.

There are currently four camping grounds spread over the map. I've placed specific road signs to help indicate their location.

You can detach the caravan by pressing "t" for 3 seconds. Beware that it is quite difficult to loose the enemies with it attached.

* Rather than to make an "easy-hard" slider, I thought it would be interesting to give you more control over the values that alter the AI's driving ability. In the pause menu there are now three parameters to tweak:

1) "Approach Limit": true if the enemy's approaching speed is greater than this value

2) "Distance Limit": true if the enemy's distance from us is smaller than this value

3) "Drift Limit": true if the enemy's sliding less than this value

if all 3 are true, then slow mode will kick in. If you want to disable slow mode completely, then you can set "Distance Limit" to 0. And if you want max slow mode, then set

1) Min

2) Max

3) Max

Oh, and also decreasing "Steering Assist" does increase overall difficulty.

I'm very much looking forward to your feedback and which settings meet your driving style :)

Now into the full details for v12 : Described in part in my last post "autumn info about the state of development", I've created the final Lada car & corporate design. There's a new tractor to populate the rural areas and a fitting agricultural trailer too. I've also created a new camping ground + surrounding area and dirt roads. The goons uniforms and gear are very early WIP. I also started work on the Dacia model.

But the real star of v012 is the driving AI. I have to admit that I've been extremely nervous about whether I would be able to achieve something at least comparable to the old driving model which used CarX and did not really simulate wet driving conditions. Since v011, the roads are more slippery, as they should be in that kind of weather, and the enemy cars are much heavier due to their passengers' load being properly taken into account. Adding the slower driving mode and making the fast mode faster was also a huge challenge. Definitely looking forward to all of your feedback and feelings.

Some aspects are still not satisfactory, for example the vehicular combat: the side ramming and pit maneuvers could be improved upon. On the other hand, the blocking is now more effective - if an enemy brakes in front of our car it will bring it to a halt, unlike in prior versions where you could bump them from behind.

It also does not help that my coding skills have gotten way better over all these years, so sometimes I almost felt like re-writing the whole thing... But in the end, I think there's now a solid foundation for all driving AI & physics setup. For v012 it's only the Lada & Dacia duo being represented, yet I hope it's enough quality over quantity to have some car chase fun for all of you :)

Other vehicle types will follow after I figure out more of the game's plot and what would make sense where. It's really exciting to have the whole map now and enemies and be able to start thinking and testing how everything could come together in a meaningful way - and that's what I'll also be doing after this v012 marathon. Possible upcoming tasks for the next updates are varied:

1) Proper realistic vision system to enable hiding (I've already started some work for that)

2) Adding the new driving AI to the refinery autonomous pokeys + final mode + textures.

3) Locomotion & animation for goons, kids & tourists.

4) Work on the game's audio - especially the car-related sounds.

I don't know yet.. 1) & 2) would  take less time, so maybe those.

Best wishes to all of you, and beware.

Ondrej

[EDIT 14.03.23]   v012c:

1)fixed missing AI waypoints inside refinery region

2)added shadow options to pause menu

*shadow distance: you can set at which distance shadows will appear

*shadow resolution: switch between low, medium and high shadow resolution

3) minor performance tweaks  The road from "demo terrain" to the bigger town & greenhouses is still too heavy on performance. I will have to delete some of the trees there for better perf.

[EDIT 27.03.23]

If you experience audio issues like cracking/popping, I have replaced the old v012c with a fixed one. It was caused by the low pass filter on the engine sound audio sources, especially during perf-intensive moments. To fix, I had to reduce the frequency cut-off of the audio effect. This means that the engine sound is now less muffled. It now sounds like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0re0MqwFS8

Also reduced the intensity of the volumetric fog from the enemy cars headlights a bit.

To install, just delete the old v012c and download the new one. Your saved settings will be kept intact.