It’s time for the second beta branch roundup! This month has seen a lot of progress on the new menu as well as the return of Nova Split and Arrivon XI in their final forms. So without further delay, let’s dive into what’s new:

New Menu

The new menu is now fully functional, it lacks a few screens which are to be added in the near future but it’s usable enough that it’s replaced the old menu entirely! All content in the game now has references loaded into memory when the menu starts, it’s extremely quick to load and allows for some useful things such as leaderboard support for workshop tracks. Both ships and tracks are categorized too now, this is now handled automatically based on your UserData folder structure to make it easy to organise your content. If you were previously a Patreon donator then the new menu now has a ship turntable that allows you to select them properly without the need of the console. This will also be true for the three alt liveries which will be introduced in the coming months. You can now also change track and ship ingame from the pause menu, the next track option will also be replaced with this in the future. Here’s some showcases of what everything looks like:

Gameplay Changes

Speed pads are now much more powerful, their trailing boost is the same but the push applied when over them is much stronger. Weapon wise there have been a few bug fixes regarding warnings and ships now fire three rockets, the outer rockets spread making it harder to hit opponents. The game can now also load .flac and .ogg files for custom music, if metadata is available in the files then the game will try to read them to display as the song name too. XP is no longer gained in events, it’s being stripped from rewarding small achievements like perfect laps and is instead being used only for getting medals in campaign events. This will tie it into the game’s upcoming progression system where unlocks are tied to campaign completion.

New Content

Nova Split and Arrivon XI have now been added back into the game, remade completely from scratch to bring them up to scratch with the latest improvements to the game’s visual fidelity and art direction. These two tracks are now also being fully implemented into the campaign as standard tracks, bringing the standard track roster up to 12. There have also been some visual updates overhaul. Bloom, lens effects and tonemapping setups have been altered for every track to make their effects more subtle. With this is also sun flares, these flares are subtle additions to add some extra eye candy.

And the new sun flares in action

Thanks for reading and hopefully you enjoy the updates! If you want to join the beta branch to see all of the new stuff in action you can do so by right clicking the game in your steam library, going to properties, the beta tab, select beta from the dropdown and then clicking close. The game should then update automatically, if it doesn’t then restart Steam and it will.