The last month of development has been busy as we start to standardise the game across the PC and Switch builds. This beta isn't focused on a single feature, but is instead more general in getting an engine upgrade to Unity 2020.3.5 available to everyone. If you are making mods do not update Unity on your end. We have not updated the Unity Tools package yet and you will irreversibly break your projects if you upgrade at this time. Stay with Unity 2018.3.8 for the time being.

About

Joining the beta

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
• From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

What is the beta? For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.

What's changed?

Engine Upgrade

After 3 long years we have finally updated to the latest and greatest version of Unity! We were originally going to only be using the latest versions of Unity for the Switch, but there's plenty of new useful features that we can take advantage of so we decided to upgrade the PC version to it too. The game is backwards compatible with all content mods developed on the Unity 2018.3.8 based tools so you do not need to upgrade Unity to make mods for this beta. In fact, the Unity Tools for the new version of Unity are not available yet, so don't upgrade until the final 1.3 release or you will break your projects! Note that certain parts of the Unity API have been removed in this new version of the engine, which could impact code mods that make use of it.

Moving to asset bundles

We've made pretty extensive use of Unity's resource folders for a lot of our on-demand asset loading. On PC this has been fine since the size of it is fairly small and a modern desktop computer can power through its initialisation pretty much instantly. On the Switch we don't have this luxury however, so across both platforms we're extracting our assets out into Unity Asset Bundles so we can load our asset when we need them. So far we have moved out ship prefabs, and while they're not part of the resources folder we have also moved out all of the internal tracks too. This gives us faster build times and allows us to better compress the assets to use even less disk space then they did before.

Fix for a long standing hover issue

If you've played BallisticNG long enough you've probably noticed that ships get really shaky at the top of their hover height when they're moving slowly, and when landing at higher speeds while pitching up it can feel like the ship is hitting a solid surface. This is now fixed! Ship hovering is now in general much smoother and works better across a wider range of track geometry.

External Mods

Mods can now be loaded from any folder on your computer! This is done by creating an external.txt folder in the internal mod folder and pasting a directory path per line. Each directory is treated like the internal directory, so for instance if you point the game to an external tracks folder then the game is going to expect that folder to have sub-folders which will become categories on the menu. Valid external.txt files are: User -> Mods -> Tracks -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Ships -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Liveries -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Sounds -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Ingame Music -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Menu Music -> external.txt User -> Mods -> Campaigns -> external.txt

Changelog

Asset Bundles

• Ship prefabs moved to an asset bundle
• Internal tracks moved to an asset bundle

User Interface

• Ships for the UI for internal and custom ships using the CSF format now load asynchronously. The interface will no longer lock up when loading resource heavy ships.
• Fixed previously viewed custom ship resources not beeing freed in the lobby ship selection turntable when moving to another ship

Music

• Rewritten music playlist backend, fixing numerous bugs and simplifying code for future additions
• Fixed the pause menu not showing the name of in-scene song overrides
• The All Music custom playlist now includes every song loaded from external.txt
• Added Vonsnake - In The Depths
• Added Atlanticore - Slipstream

Physics

• 2159/2280 ship hover damping computation updated to fix numerous movement issues related to ship being at the top of its hover height.

Audio

• Fixed voices being much quieter when spatial audio is enabled

Ships

• Barracuda S liveries can now be selected in survival
• Fixed custom liveries not being applied to duplicate ship entries
• Model C stats update
  • Reduced steer steer falloff from 1 to 0.7
  • Increased steer gain from 1 to 1.22
  • Increased steer slide from 1 to 1.2
• Protonic Stats Update
  • Increased top speed and acceleration to be slightly slower then Scorpio
  • Slightly decreased grip from 3.4 to 3.3
  • Reduced tilt angle from 35 to 30

Engine

• Upgraded from Unity 2018.3.8 to Unity 2020.3.5 to standardise development with the Switch version
• The intro FMV is now smooth (fixed from Unity upgrade)
• Updated to the latest version of Rewired. The Dualsense controller is now fully supported with feature parity to the Dualshock 4.
• The game now uses incremental garbage collection as part of the Unity engine upgrade. We don't generate much garbage data, but any amount that is collected should now have less of an impact on slower hardware.
• Implemented render zones, a new rendering feature that can be used for rendering optimisation and other creative purposes. These are not available for modding yet, but will be in a future update.
• Added support for loading all custom content from external locations using external.txt. See the dedicated section above for details.
• UI inputs are no longer processed when the game window isn't in focus

Controls

• Multiple controllers can now be assigned to players. The UI has been split into separate Add/Remove buttons to manually control the assignments.

Tracks

• All internal tracks rebaked with the newer 32-bit lightmapper (unity upgrade broke lighting)
• Removed an unused tonemapper component from all scenes and custom track camera prefabs
• Removed a light from the final tunnel on Atlantica that bloomed out the exit with the new lighting
• Removed light from Nova Park that bloomed out track sections under the 2nd park bridge
• Added missing lights to ceiling lamps on Nova Park Reverse
• Added light for missing flood light source on Thunderhead
• Surge now has a different track illum color. Surge reverse has also been given a lighting makeover.
• Outer Reaches holopads particle effect update (unity upgrade broke them)

Photo Mode

• Fixed no tonemapping options showing on a select few tracks

Options

• Added weapons quality option. Setting this to low uses alternative particles with much less overdraw for weapon impacts.
• Renamed the tonemapping option to vibrancy boost to better reflect what the option does.

Layout Creator 2.0

• Height labels have been updated from Unity's now removed GUIText components to Text Mesh Pro components

VR

• SteamVR updated to the latest version

Debug Hub The Debug Hub is a new WIP debug interface to provide tools for modding with expandabiility through code mods. It currently has a logger and will be expanded with more built in tools in the future. The hub can be opened and closed by pressing F9.