New Game Update Now Live! (3rd May 2013)

[S0L]

Here we go again...

We've had an update in Beta for a while, but it's now ready for Prime Time...!

Notable changes...

1. Time Attack Ghosts - We've changed how the Ghosts work so now if you've set a time it will now find Ghosts across the whole leaderboard, rather than just in the top ten. Hence more Ghosts and hopefully you can learn from each others play a touch more incrementally...!

2. Time Attack Tweaks - And as well as the Ghost change, we've done a bunch of tucks and tweaks to make Time Attack work a little more nicely.

3. Death Egg on NoINTZ Cards - Fixed some shader rendering issues here, this track should now render correctly on cards that don't support INTZ. Well fingers crossed!

4. Misc Tucks and Tweaks - And as always we've cleaned up a few rough edges around the place.

*Important* - This update does clear PB's and archive local Ghosts, we've had to do this to make the new changes to the Time Attack work correctly... But it should hopefully re-invigorate those Time Trial challenges, especially as you can now see Ghosts other users upload outside of the top ten.

Special thanks to all the folks who assisted in the Beta testing - especially those who checked the fixes for being at the top of the table...!

I'll keep an eye over the weekend to make sure this doesn't do anything weird, but it should be OK.

There is a good chance I'll need to clear some of the dodgy wall/stunt exploit times from some of the leaderboards too...

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S0L
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(Old Updates below!)

Afternoon!

So... We've just pushed the update out! Woohoo!

What does that mean then?

Well over the last few weeks we've been making changes and addressing issues we've seen players report. We've also take the opportunity to close off some exploits and tighten the game up a little.

First I'd like to thank everyone who helped us check this update out in the Beta Branch, your help has been invaluable, especially with tracking down some of the issues. SEGA have also been testing this in parallel and gave us approval to push this Live to everyone today.

What's new then? Here goes...

1. Alternative INTZ Render for cards that don't support INTZ.

So if you're on a Radeon 3xxx series card or older GeForce / Intel cards you should find the game can now render everything correctly. Whilst the rendering now has a fall back mode, we can't promise you'll get great performance though without dropping the detail or resolution down a peg...!

2. VAC Support

We had a lot of requests for this and it's now in place. As with all VAC games, if you attempt to cheat using various memory hackers, trainers or altered executables - you run the risk of being VAC banned and this will prevent you playing the game online forever. If you aren't cheating, it should otherwise be transparent to you.

3. Exploits addressed

We've closed off a number of exploits players spotted - and some that you didn't. We're keen to promote a fair online play experience, we want people to enjoy playing the game with each other!

4. Bug Fixes

We've fixed a few bugs that have been spotted, again both internally and externally. It should be more stable in split-screen games after extended amounts of time for example.

...and more... But I don't want to ruin some surprises :P

Due to the exploit fixes, we've reluctantly had to wipe the leaderboards for the game. We had suspicious times on there due to exploits being used and the only way to be fair about this was to get the exploit fixes in, enable VAC and then let everyone start from a level playing field. I realise this won't be to everyones tastes, but it seemed the fairest way to do it.

Hopefully you'll enjoy the changes!

We'll be around of course to keep an eye on things - though I think I'll let Adrian have some time off Transformed and get his batteries recharged :)

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S0L
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[Neek]

Thanks for the hard work SUMO! You've done heaps!

[GreenSwede]

Awesome.

[GeoPin]

Good Job as always Sega!

[MangoTangoFox]

Does it run at 120HZ/FPS yet??? Are you even going to try to fix it? :(

[Xenn]

Thanks for the update, it's much appreciated!

However, as I mentioned in the previous thread, the new update seems to make the graphics appear incorrectly for me. Here's some screenshots to show what I mean.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136703758
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136703785

The tracks appear to be rather dark. In Ocean View, it didn't happen until the whales came out the water.

If it helps any, my GPU is a Gainward GTX 560 Ti 1280MB Limited Edition. It's updated the latest drivers and this wasn't happening until this version.

Is there something i'm possibly missing?

Thanks.

[Sef]

Thanks for the update!
In my first online game (last week), the top player of the server was clearly abusing one of the exploits :/

[S0L]

Originally posted by Xenn499:

Thanks for the update, it's much appreciated!

However, as I mentioned in the previous thread, the new update seems to make the graphics appear incorrectly for me. Here's some screenshots to show what I mean.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136703758
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136703785

The tracks appear to be rather dark. In Ocean View, it didn't happen until the whales came out the water.

If it helps any, my GPU is a Gainward GTX 560 Ti 1280MB Limited Edition. It's updated the latest drivers and this wasn't happening until this version.

Is there something i'm possibly missing?

Thanks.

Can you check the drivers aren't forcing either a specific anti-aliasing type or an adaptive anti-alaising type. Generally when the lighting gets messed up it's as the drivers are trying to force the game to render in a certain way. We use a deferred renderer and forcing settings on the game won't work nicely.

Originally posted by MangoTangoFox:

Does it run at 120HZ/FPS yet??? Are you even going to try to fix it? :(

As the physics engine caps at 60 and since you'd need to interpolate frames or draw duplicate frames above that, you don't actually get any real benefit to it. As such and since it'd need an extensive engine re-write - this isn't going to change.

If your hardware is easily capable of over 60fps consistantly, you're best enabling V-Sync in the games launcher, otherwise it has a software frame limiter (which is best used on older slower hardware).

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S0L
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[Meturoido]

Wasn't the game VAC protected before?? Well, it's all the same, great update guys, and more than SEGA, thanks SUMO!!

[The Buzzard]

I will always take wiped leaderboards over exploiters and cheaters. Thank you!

[Sammun]

surprises? maybe an hint to the DLC characters?

[Reakor]

I just noticed a "Quit Game" option on the title screen, unless im dumb. Was this added in today's update ?

[Evad]

Will the use of this tool[oblivion.nexusmods.com] can result in a vac ban? I use it to force fullscreen on my 16:10 monitor since the game locks the aspect ration to 16:9 by default. Link to WSGF[www.wsgf.org] about the tool in depth.

[Xenn]

Originally posted by S0L:

Can you check the drivers aren't forcing either a specific anti-aliasing type or an adaptive anti-alaising type. Generally when the lighting gets messed up it's as the drivers are trying to force the game to render in a certain way. We use a deferred renderer and forcing settings on the game won't work nicely.

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S0L
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Ah, that seems to be what was causing the issue. Doing a settings restore did the trick.

All sorted now! Thanks!

[JD]

VAC support? YES!

[Okanehira]

Can you add the Outrun track to matchmaking? Its such a shame that you guys spent all that time making a great level and because its not in single player or multiplayer I never get to play it?

At least, in future - release the tracks as free updates and just the characters as DLC so we can have some new tracks online without splitting the community up.