An update to make JS fully compatible with the Steam Deck has been pushed to pre-rel-build2 branch. This update is to ensure the game works properly through the linux emulator on Steam Deck and the unique input/control scheme.

The game is finally shaping up well enough that I'd like to start getting some of you to help me get the game out faster.


Join the Discord and go to the #volunteer-work channel. All info should be there.


First things first: Let's be honest. Volunteer work is just a way for me to take some of the development burden off of my back for free. I want to be completely open and honest about this from the get go. There is no money to be made here. I often don't have enough money to pay myself minimum wage, so it would be unrealistic to say I could afford to pay other people. You should only volunteer your time if you are free and ready to contribute to the project. You are not bound by any contracts and can leave at any time. However, I expect there to be some degree of professionalism when you are volunteering. If you volunteer for 2 days, then leave, then want to come back a week later, then leave a week after that, I won't be letting you back in. I'd like people that are dedicated and can spend at least an hour a day on producing assets for JS.

Moderator: With that said, volunteers are automatically moderators of the server. You will have the extra responsibility of looking after the server when I am busy. You are not dedicated mods though. You can just step in when there is no one else around and are not obligated to do any kind of moderation or cleanup.

Free game: Also as a volunteer, you will receive the game completely for free. You are essentially the next step above @Tester. You will be engaging with me and other @Volunteers in mod chat. It should be clear that you will only have access to the game when you are a volunteer. If you leave after 2 weeks, you will not keep the game. But if you show dedication, produce good content, work well with others, and stay with the team for an extended period of time, you will be able to keep the game permanently.

With that said, I appreciate those of you who have stuck around. Please make sure to join the Discord if you are looking to be a volunteer or are just looking forward to the game.

Hope you are doing well. It's been a couple months since the announcement for the re-release and things are progressing at a steady rate.

As of right now, the game is starting to get to the point where I'd like to get people to start testing the game in an early state so we can be ready for the bigger, public*, pre-release testing phase. Right now we are mainly testing UI framework and controls, but we will soon be testing physics, the new customization system, and many other things.

Right now, the testing is only being done through the Discord server so I can personally talk to all of the testers about feedback and suggestions. If you'd like to participate in this testing, then please join the Discord and DM me to obtain the tester role.

Discord: https://discord.gg/Efy2vs9
My Username: Freznosis

I hope to see you guys there so we can get some testing done! ːcarː

*Public, as in all owners of JS can freely test without contacting me for pre-release testing phase.

First of all, make sure to join our Discord for the most up to date information on JS. Also be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel as I will be posting a lot of videos there.

If you aren't already aware, Jidousha Shakai will be re-releasing on Steam. Read about that here. Some questions I have received will be answered below, as well as some other info I'm sure some of you have.

1. Is this really happening?
   Yes! Stay tuned.
   
2. Why should I trust you? You'll probably abandon the game again.
   I don't really have an answer to that. I won't promise anything as I have in the past because over-promising was one of the main things that had doomed the game originally. Additionally, I was still a very inexperienced developer and there were a lot of things I could have done differently. I've grown a lot as a developer and all it takes is two seconds of research to see that. So I'm having a go at developing this game again. As I said, I won't make any promises, but I hope to actually finish the game this time around. Giving all previous owners the game for free is the first step to fixing what I ruined with JS.
   
3. Will I have to pay again?
   No. As I've said, all previous owners will get the re-release completely for free. As long as you have the original JS in your library then you will be OK. You will not get the re-release if you've refunded or deleted the original game from your library or for some reason don't have access to the account where you purchased JS.
   
4. How will I get the re-release if I own the original game?
   All original owners will receive the re-release (and all future updates) as an update to the original game. You will be able to play it simply by launching JS as you always have. New owners will play the game by purchasing the re-release on Steam. I am looking for alternate ways to handle previous owners, as it would be preferable to transfer all previous owners over to the new App ID. But Steam doesn't currently support this. so as of right now, this is how it will be done.
   
5. Will there be multiplayer?
   I would like to say "yes", but I won't. This is because I don't know the future of Jidousha Shakai right now. If the re-release only gets 10 players daily then it wouldn't make much sense to try and spend thousands of dollars on multiplayer servers. At the very least I would like to maybe add "self hosted" multiplayer so you could download and host a dedicated server yourself. With that said, I don't plan on working on any kind of multiplayer stuff until the core of the game is finished and there is a good amount of content. I don't want to fall into the same trap as last time.
   
6. Will there be mods?
   I would say it will be similar to the answer above. I'd love to do it and I most likely will, but I won't promise anything. Mods will be a lot easier to do than multiplayer so there is a higher chance it gets done, but I will have more info on that when the time comes.
   
7. Have any other questions? Head over to our Discord and ask as many as you like!

Some time ago I asked you guys to fill out a feedback form. I got a lot of useful data from that form, including what your favorite physics engine as and over all game version. More than 80% of you chose the early 0.8x builds, physics wise. I decided to take one of the early 0.8 builds and use that as the base for this re-release. I completely rewrote a lot of the game's backend code to be more performant and also benefit from modularity. I have learned a lot in the years I have been a game developer, and a lot of the code in the 0.8 base game was just not good or up to the standards I have now. Additionally, I've implemented a lot of new management systems to help make development easier and also many safeguards to keep the game from breaking. The old game had a lot of "hard references". I won't explain a "hard reference" to avoid boring you, but the game now relies much more on "soft references" and has a lot of auto-instantiation to avoid errors with data or saving. To keep it simple, the game 'should' always even if something goes wrong. It is essentially self aware and can attempt to fix anything that is critical or missing. This makes the game much more stable and dependable than it used to be. (The old game would basically crap itself at the first error and break your save game)



The 2.0 physics engine from 0.8 was completely re-worked to include many of the performance improvements, drivability updates, and overall fixes from later versions of the game. The result is a physics engine that feels and drives just like the 2.0 physics engine but performs and is free from bugs like the 3.0 physics engine. This is the ideal "best of both worlds" based on the feedback I got. In the later versions of the game, I introduced a new tire model that allowed the game to implement a better grip function, tire pressure, dynamic cambering, and some other small features. This made the tire model very versatile, but it suffered from being too stiff or not as responsive as the older tire models. I've combined both the old and new tire models to give you a good mix of responsiveness or stiffness, depending on how you configure it. Lower grip tires like stock tires or semi-slicks will behave more like the old tire model, and grippier tires will behave more like the newer tire model. This allows you to pick how you want to drive and control the car. Great for drifting, great for grip, something for everyone. I've also rewritten or ported over many other features like the improved forced induction system, improved engine torque curves, auto clutch simulation, and much more.



The graphical systems from the newer versions were ported over to replace the old and outdated graphical systems of the 0.8 base. This includes the advanced car paint shader, carbon shader, gauge shaders, many other PBR shaders, and the much improved realtime reflection and mirror system. The post processing effects are much improved but were made to be a little more exaggerated like the older versions of the game so that the same "style" is kept. Not only does the game run better, but it looks better due to the newer graphical systems being much more optimized (not including mirrors, mirrors are basically just drawing the game twice so it's not easy to make them perform well, but I tried). JS has never been a very graphically impressive game, but I think that could be a merit as it will run on many different PC configurations without worry. Not much else to say here.

In the next coming weeks I will release more details about the game and how previous owners can play the re-release for free. Now is the perfect time to give feedback and recommendations for the game as I am still open in working on the core of the game before release. I can be reached directly on the Discord server for this.

Discord
Re-Release Page

Hello all,

I hope everyone is doing well. Let's get right into the meat of this announcement.

A while ago I had shut down Jidousha Shakai and removed it for sale from Steam. I would say most of you were mad at that decision and felt betrayed. Some of you understood why the game had failed and some of you probably didn't care. Regardless of how you felt, I know whether the reaction was positive or negative, you've expressed your thoughts to me since the game was shut down.

I won't explain why the game failed or why it was removed from Steam as there is already a post on that you can see here.

What I have today is some light at the end of the tunnel. I won't make any promises, but I'd like to see where the community is at and where it wants to be in regards to JS. So I'd like to get your feedback on JS and where you'd like to see the game's future go. I've created a form for you to submit your feedback, feelings, hard words, kind words, etc. Feel free to go full rant mode or ask a bunch of questions. I just want to hear how you guys feel about the game or even myself as a developer. I know many of you still love the game, and those of you that don't probably loved it at some point. So I'd love to get your feedback on this form!

Hope you all have a great day.

Hello Everyone.

JIDOUSHA SHAKAI'S REMOVAL

I'm going to keep things as short as possible with what's going on currently. I'm removing JS from Steam and any other mediums. This has been a hard decision but I'm going to save you guys the sad talk and background stories. I'm going through with this because we all saw this coming and there is no use in trying to pretend everything is okay with the game.

THE FUTURE OF JIDOUSHA SHAKAI

There may or may not be a future for JS. I don't really know at this point. There are a couple new racing games that take and broaden the ideas that JS originally had and they deserve your attention much more than JS does. But if for some reason you still want to stick around and see what happens to JS. Then feel free to stay in our Discord server.


A BEAUTIFUL END

This is indeed the end of something beautiful that started in 2016. I loved having my game on Steam! It was amazing getting to feel that accomplishment and all the support I've gotten. I am sad to see most of it go. But I am happy to know there is still a future that I am in control of.

Ciao,

Frezno

Hello all.

Some new information to those who asked for it, and what not. I will be detailing the recent changes, price change, and some failures from the last announcement I had posted. If you only care to see the game changes, scroll to the bottom of this post to see the videos.




JS is currently in a limbo due to it's map status and not having a set map to be able to play on. Due to this I recently brought up the possibility of bringing the old map back from the early days of JS, you can read more about that below.






Though my efforts were not in vain, I have failed in porting the map back from the old versions of JS. This is mainly due to how unoptimized, and badly the mshes were made back then. I had not realized this until now and the newer lighting and PBR flow doesn't fit or just plain doesn't work sometimes with the older meshes. I had been furiously over-optimizing, cleaning, and fixing the meshes, but this was much too big a task for such a small map size. This just plain wasn't going to work out like I had originally planned. So while this didn't work out like I had hoped, I learned a lot of new techniques for map making and what not that will help me in my future endeavors.






Recently I had been talking with my volunteers and brought up the idea of using an outside program to make the maps instead of doing everything inside the game engine. Most game engines don't have specialzied tools to handle specific racing game map needs and this shows in a lot of the previous map attempts. It might also just be my lack of skill, but there are no significant optimizations that can be made within the game engine compared to outside software. So I decided to try and find a program that might let me create a map easily from real world data.



I ended up finding such a program that would allow me to create a map, draw tunnels, etc with realtive ease. I can then send that map data to my 3D program of choice (Blender, Cinema4D, etc) and work on optimizing and generating colliders.

For the time being I will be evaluating the success of the map design in this program to make maps for JS from now on, and if this workflow sticks, JS should be having decent maps from now on.


I've updated the price of JS to refelct the amount of content available within the game. There were lots of complaints and/or feedback about the price not being worth the amount of playability within the game. I fully agree with these statements and have adjusted the price to reflect this. I do not plan on changing the price again until JS is out of Early Access or until JS has a sizeable amount of content to back up a price jump again. This will be my promise to all new and current players.




Discord integration has been improved generously to show more information about play, play time, and the current activity. This update was mostly server-sided and should be immediately noticeable following the small updates received on Steam (100kb+, update your game if no update was received.)

Click The Links Below To See Changes In Videos

License Plate Changes (Added some more options for License Plates)
https://youtu.be/GTwnKF-q1Cs

Paint Changes (Completely rewritten paint system allwos more flexibility)

Dyno Mode (For accurate power numbers)
https://youtu.be/8rN6oLCYuWE

Interior Upgrades (Upgrades as well as more in depth interior simulation)
https://youtu.be/ay1-atp0Hjo

Improved Collisions (Jumping is still very wonky, but it is less wonky now)
https://youtu.be/XQ8cDatQ-Uk

Map Editor In Progress (Still very WIP, needs more integrating)
https://youtu.be/k8HGhMhVchc

Improved Dealership & Realtime Reflections Method (Realtime reflections on all windows is being worked on, this method can also translate to car mirrors and more, high performance shader algorithm)
https://youtu.be/oTZbSjDBNPQ

Breakable Items (Framework and base in place, just need more and actual items)
https://youtu.be/d9K6SJDfItI

Deform/Bend/Auto-Sculpt Upgrades (Framework ready and in place, can also be levereaged by mod support very easily)
https://youtu.be/IphJwDHdlRg

New Cars
https://youtu.be/aFHDcInMpz0

There are more features also being worked on. I guess you could even call this feature creep in a way, but I feel it contributes overall to JS to make it a more feature complete game.

All in all, I'd like to hear your feedback and comments on what you think about these changes and also what you would like to see from JS's new map(s).

Hi all.

Wanted to give another update about the website, since some of you have asked about it.


Currently the website is down ( http://jidoushashakai.com ) for non-payment and is pending deletion. I have considered renewing the website for another year, however I deemed this unnecessary. I plan to let the whole thing go and have the hosting company proceed with the deletion of the domain and the hosting contents.

There are 3 very simple reasons for this outcome.


The website wasn't being used at all. It also wasn't an important resource and had only a couple visitors a day. It held a handful of posts, some files, and not much else.


It is no secret that I've been on the "poor" part of the money scale for a while and because of this I can't afford to run the website anymore anyways. It is a couple hundred dollars a year for the hosting suite I was using and hosting software license costs. This is a big cost for someone in a financial situation like I am, that isn't being utilized.


In between working the actual game, dealing with finances, and life in general. I don't have the time to work on a website. Since the website was originally meant to serve a bigger part in the community, but ended up not, it was made with overkill server specs and software that I sunk time into for no return. This is an overlook on my part but also - for lack of better words - was in a way a "feature creep." If a website is ever made in the futute, I'll be making sure to dedicate much more time and figure out it's scope before putting in the hours.

All in all, the website is part of the losses I've been dealing with in 2018 and now 2019, but on the flip side, it was a very important one. Hope you all feel the same.

Hello all!

Just thought I'd fill you in on the current situation of JS and the missed scheduled update. I'll try and keep this short and get right to the point.



Per the survey, I've been focusing on UI, cars, and more upgrades. Adding cars has been the easy part as I've streamlined the flow pretty well last year. The UI has been the hardest part since I greatly underestimated the work it involved in making a new, fully functional, and controller supported UI. I only thought of making a new UI and adding support for controllers with a simple systems, but it looks like I'm going to need a completely new underlying system that handles controller input funneled into the UI. This is of course an oversight on my part, and I apologize for that. However, proceeding forward I'm going to continue this new UI but in the meantime I will be upgrading the old UI a little bit to have some features that the new UI has in order to make it just a little more bearable.


In addition to this, I've been adding some cars also to add some new experiences to JS. I have teased a bit of this in this Discord for those of you who are apart of it. This includes the new to series ZN6. There are not a lot of problems here aside from parts for these cars, as they have to all be custom made or generalized enogh to fit onto other cars. Nonetheless, new cars will definitely be part of the new JS update permanently and more cars will continue to be apart of future updates.


Let's talk about the game map. It's no good. Lazy. Boring. Somebody has to say it right? I understand and agree with you. JS has failed to have a solid map for the past year and it really shows. I blame most of this on my lack of skill however. I have the skills to create a map and make it flourish, but I don't have the experience or creativity to create a map layout. This is why we need an alternative to my creativity and bring in someone else to make this map idea happen. I plan for JS to have a pretty big map, but we need to start off with something small that allows us to test a magnitude of different settings. Such as small parking lots, bridges, city zones, touge sections, and various offroad locations. We currently have a couple Volunteers for this project, and one of them goes by the name Shapedrift. Shapedrift has offered various layouts that would work as maps for JS. He is currently tasked with creating an interesting and fun layout that we can use. This map is currently in progress in addition to the above things mentioned. When we start creating the actual map for JS that will include the large city section of Osaka, Japan, I plan to have Shapedrift closely involved so that it turns out well in favor of something that will be great to look at but also fun to drive on.

In the meantime...

I have put a plan in action to bring back the old map from the first release of JS. This will include optimization and expansion of the map to include other areas. This would be akin to a remaster of the map. Since the map is largely done and ready to play on, this will bring back some playability and opportunity to JS. On the other hand, a lot of people have been asking for the old map back, so I think this will benefit everyone. You can see the old map layout in this community members video.

Let me know your thoughts on this below.

Any questions? Join the Discord server to get QUICK help!
https://discord.gg/PKPZ2kC