Hey everyone! It's been a while since our last update on the development branch, and it's still going to be a while longer, so we want to give everybody an update on what we've been working on. Please note that we currently don't have an ETA on when we'll be dropping 1.4 Dev 3, there's still plenty of work to be done.

2280 Ships

The majority of work these past few months has been on a roster of 2280 ships. With the help of community members Brobama, Kabelsalat, MrX, Nathancubed and Vista, we've been hard at work giving each team a new ship that better suites the 2280 physics mode! These ships are only cosmetic changes and do not alter physics stats. We're also not limiting where they can be used. Not only can they be used in 2159 and floorhugger, but you'll also be able to select them in the campaign! Each ship will have the full livery set, including expansion DLCs and Bling Pack liveries. We'll also be working on new cockpits, although these will be made for an update beyond 1.4 Dev 3. Livery templates will also be made available for modders. The goal with these ships is to evolve their design and give them a cleaner aethestic, which will be tying into the design of 2280 track environments. We already have a 2280 track in development for release with 1.4, but we'll be showing that off at a later date. Here's a look at the new ships. We're still in the initial development stages for the Barracuda Model A, B and C, so you'll get to see those once 1.4 Dev 3 is out.

New Content Selector Menus

With the new ships added, we needed a way to select them. The easiest option would have been to register them as new ships and display them in an ever growing flat list, but there's issues with the existing content selector menus we want to address and this was the perfect time to revisit them and figure out a better way to handle content selection. Ships now support variants and tracks now support variant and route entries:

• Ship variants allow us to point the game to a completely different ship prefab. This ship prefab can be any ship, however internally we're just using this to create duplicates of the 2159 ship prefabs and slap different models into them.
• Track variants do the same thing as ship variants, but also have a second layer of variants called routes. Routes can also point to any loaded track in the game, but the intended use is for situations like Pines Complex where the track is 3 different courses bundled into one. A track variant in our internal use case is the forward and reverse versions of the track,

These additions allow us to compact how many listings there are in the menu. In our most extreme example, Pines Complex has gone from 6 different menu entries to 1, with additional inputs to select the specific version you want to play. This also means we've been able to merge the reverse track category into the standard track category, and cut the track listings in the Extras and expansion DLC categories in half by merging the forward and reverse listings into a single button. Another improvement with the new menus is how custom ships are now handled. Custom ship categories are actually just a single category that gets broken down into sub-categories. This was reflected directly in the previous menu where you'd navigate to the custom ships category and then have to use different inputs to navigate the sub-categories. The new menu unfolds those sub-categories so now you can just scroll through them as if they were normal categories. We had already implemented this for the advanced menu, so it made sense to also do that here. This also works nicely with the new category list feature, where you can press the category previous and category next inputs at the same time to bring up a list of categories to hop between. We'll go into more detail about these new menus once 1.4 Dev 3 is released, but for now here are some screenshots of what they look like:

We may also look at implementing the advanced menu search functionality into these new menus. Doing this will allow us to make the advanced menu completely redundant so we can remove it and just have a single menu with all of the functionality.

Some other smaller changes

• Sideshifting now has a per ship stat and has been reduced in strength significantly
• 3D pads are no longer automatically generated in 2280. Tracks will use the tile pads unless 3D pads have been setup.
• AI in 2280 have been tweaked to make them more competent
• The Model B and Model C categories of tracks have beeen renamed to Drag and Drift so they're in parity with the ship category names
• The NX2000 is no longer part of the standard ship leaderboards and is now in the Barracuda leaderboards (which have been renamed to Highend). We'll be doing a global leaderboard reset with the full release of 1.4.
• Vonsnake - Always On Target and Xpand - Rush added to the soundtrack. if you have the soundtrack on Steam, these have already been added to it.

And a bunch of other stuff that was already pushed out to the development branch a few months ago. If you're on our Discord server then the changelog for that is already available, and we'll include it as part of the 1.4 Dev 3 changelog here on Steam once that build goes out.