Preview of the upcoming update 0.1.76 (Patreon)

And another update took longer than I originally intended… Originally I wanted to make a bunch of quick fixes, but new bugs started to pop up, some new ideas I thought to try, and, well, here we are. This is a preview of the upcoming update, hopefully should be stable and ready for release (apart from RainFX part, that one still needs more work, although it’s getting there), but could you please give it a test?

Main change related to RainFX is that now dynamic conditions finally work online. Now CSP expects server plugin to broadcast condition updates (more options will be available later). For demonstration purposes new CM update (the one currently in preview branch) has a new CM-as-server-plugin option, showing extended race status, mirroring chat and optionally syncing server conditions with real conditions. Right now I’m working on documentation so that other server plugins could use dynamic conditions as well.

Another big change is fully reworked smoke/dust/spray particles. Initially I just wanted to fix a couple of issues, but after breaking performance as a result decided that it’s finally time to rewrite it properly. Old code was such a mess with small undocumented corrections here and there, any small change to pretty much anything was making things worse. For example, to calculate transparency of a particle, it was referencing its size about ten times in all sorts of strange ways. Change a bit how size works — and whatever that cocktail of corrections was meant to do, just wouldn’t work anymore. Thankfully that shouldn’t be the case with new system, now it’s much more straightforward and better documented, allowing to create a lot more. For example, now dirty wheels produce a bit of dust, dust and spray particles got smaller dirt and splash particle variants, colliding with walls would produce clouds of dust based on collider shape, smoke and dust accumulate and stay around for a few minutes, plus a screen-filling effect can help with performance for when camera ends up inside a smoke cloud. Coming soon: localized fog and that rain haze effect (I’m still thinking about the best way to implement them, but whole system definitely allows it now).

Other possibly interesting new feature is custom rendering modes: 360°, fisheye and split-screen for single-PC-multiplayer. I haven’t wasted much time on it, just a quick detour to better understand how things work. To use them, make sure to update CM to latest build, should appear soon in the untested branch.

There are quite a few more changes, like new springy walls (works well with new soft collisions), and all sorts of fixes, here is the full list. Please give it a test and let me know if you’d encounter any issues. Thank you very much for all the support!

(New smoke might need more tweaking to look right, but hopefully it’s acceptable enough that I wouldn’t have to roll back all the changes. If you would experience performance issues, there are new settings in ParticlesFX section, “on-screen size limit” specifically can help.)