Hey everyone, it's about time for another devlog! The past month has seen quite a few changes and new additions. Campaign balancing is underway but in the meantime here's what's been going on:

The explosion effects have been given a small facelift, an additive shader is now used which removes saturation artifacts that the previous multiplicative shader caused. Because they're now additive it also means they're brighter!



Before the race begins you will now be treated to an overview of what you're about to race on. Every track has also had a major ambient sound overhaul to compliment this update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rircss7iFHA

The rescue droids that help keep you on the track are now present on the start grid during the countdown! They keep your ship suspended and then fly off when the race starts.

These and the track overviews are implemented with a new spline backend that more parts of the game are starting to utilize. Other utilizations include a new hunter attack animation, the energy wall bolt now following the track and soon the transfer beam.



The collision effects have been updated for improved visual feedback. The repair effect when flying through pitlanes has also been updated to be arcs of electricity that trail slightly behind the ship.





The game now has more graphics settings to tweak! These new options are important for scaling back the game for lower end hardware. In particular the Video Billboards option has a big impact on low-end CPUs and other settings like Environment Projectors and Light Flares have a large impact low-end GPUs.



The ship - ship collision model has been completely overhauled. Ships now use box colliders to resolve collisions with other ships and now scrape along each other instead of bouncing off. Ramming into the back of another ship will now transfer your momentum to them so care must be taken when approaching other ships from behind.

The game now has an anti-skip mechanism in place. It's still in early phases and there's still plenty of fine tuning to do but all of the game's major skips have now been stopped in one sweep.

The system works by keeping track of where you exit and enter the track and uses the distance travelled, angle between where you exited and entered and side of the track to figure out if you have potentially skipped.

If the game believes you have skipped then it will respawn you where you left the track initially. Custom tracks can take advantage of the allow out of bounds section flag to disable this on a per-section basis.

Practice Mode is a new option in the campaign where you're loaded into a race on Cassandra with unlimited laps, Toxic class with respawns enabled. A guide on mechanics is also available from the pause menu. This is designed for new players to have an easily accessible sandbox environment where they can experiment until they're comfortable to jump into the campaign for real.

The Unity Tools have had major updates with a vastly improved TRM editor, optimized track editor, more assets from the game included, per-tile maglock control, new shaders and support for several new game features. The TRM reverse and atlas transfer tool used to create the game's reverse tracks has also been added.

Next months devlog is going to be skipped in place for something else ;)
Stay tuned for more news!

It's time for another devlog! This one is a short one as development the past week has been focused on finishing up with content updates and preparing for gameplay balancing.

Omega Harbour has seen the final straight populated with more buildings and the Aquarium reworked to be a real space and not just a boring texture.





Aciknovae has had some building changes, most of the buildings have been updated from simple cubes and made a bit more interesting. There have also been some other extra additions to improve the use of vertical space.





Advertisement display boards are now replaced with music visualizers in Survival mode! Like the track visualizer these also respond to custom music. For track creators, everything you need to get these setup will be available in the release version of the unity tools.





There is now a menu in-game which lets you browse and subscribe/unsubscribe from workshop items! It's planned for there to be a featured mod section exclusive to this menu so we can help the best mod creators showcase their work.



This is the end of the content portion of pre-1.0 development and the focus will now be shifting onto campaign and gameplay balancing. Stay tuned for the upcoming devlogs showing these changes!

Hey everyone, just a quick announcement to let you know that MacOS builds are now officially available! If you already own the game you’ll now see 0.9.4 downloading. Full gamepad support, leaderboards and the workshop will now also be available to you.

If you’re playing on Linux you’ll also be seeing an update, the Made With Unity splash screen has been removed for both the Mac and Linux builds. Both versions have also been updated to Unity 2018.1.

Have fun!

It's time for the first content related devlog and in this one we'll be focusing primarily on new weapon effects, an update to Utah Project and custom campaigns.

Weapons have had some visual updates! Projectiles now have flares and use a trail mesh instead of particles. This makes them look more sollid in gameplay and makes them look much nicer to take screenshots of in photo mode.







Utah Project has had a scenery overhaul to bring it up to level with other tracks in the game. The environment has been redone entirely from scratch, with brand new textures and much more city. The general building design has stayed somewhat the same and the small dam originally seen now spans across the entire length of the track and towers over everything.









It's now possible to load in custom campaigns. For the time being the campaigns are defined by hand in XML files, building an interface to make this easier is on the agenda. The game also supports streaming a video file from disk for the animated graphic you see down the right hand side of the campaign list.

Custom campaigns support custom tracks, ships and gamemodes! The only limitation is that you cannot force a specific custom ship, only allow the player to select one.

When you create a custom campaign the game will integrate it into the campaign menu as if it was an official set of events. It will have its own progression so you can build a list of events that unlock as you earn medals.



This is a list of other major development changes. A lot of the smaller changes have been left out for simplicity.

• Added a new screen to manage C# mods
  
• Added custom music playlists - you can organise your music by folders and choose to play everything or only play music in a specific folder
  
• Removed texture filtering option. This has been long overdue, on release the game will always use point filtering unless a track author decides otherwise
  
• 3D track pads can now be used in 2159 physics. If you have a custom track with no pad tiles of a certain type the game will now enable manually placed 3D pads in place of them
  
• Quitting in survival now ends the session instead of quitting back to the menu straight away (campaign awards are also counted when doing this)
  
• You now start survival with a boost
  
• VR now uses a separate settings.ini file so you can change graphics, audio and gameplay settings independently between VR and non VR sessions
  
• Speed pads now also increase engine thrust, making a more permanent and noticeable speed increase (especially in higher speed classes)
  
• The menu can now load custom music. Supports up to 4 instrument layers
  
• The unlock screen now uses animations, see here: https://twitter.com/BallisticNG/status/992110160423407616

For the next development log there's going to be work on improving Aciknovae's buildings, Omega Harbours aquarium (if you didn't know this was a thing then yeah, serious improvements needed) and some general updates to spice up Survival mode, so stay tuned!

Hey everyone! To keep you updated with development up to 1.0 I’m going to be continuing with development logs, previously posted as the beta branch roundups.

There’s already been a few updates behind the scenes but I want to use this first log as an opportunity to lay out the roadmap and answer questions that I’ve seen the past few weeks. If you want to get in on updates in between these development logs then check out the game’s twitter, it’s now being used to show off what’s happening as soon as it happens - https://twitter.com/BallisticNG

As there is still plenty to do a release date hasn't been set yet, the current target however is sometime in winter 2018. The aim is to get a release date set by the end of August, this will be when the roadmap below is almost complete.

This is a simplified version of the roadmap to release. The order of listings isn’t necessarily the order that development will happen in, just a rough guide so you have an idea of how everything will be piecing together.



I got the game when it was free, what happens after release?
You will continue to own the game including all future updates. Just note that Steam treats free copies of any game as disposable, if you uninstall it then you will lose your copy.
If you plan to upgrade your computer or reinstall your OS make sure to backup the game, BallisticNG does not use DRM so your backup will continue working.

Will the price be changing after release?
Yes! The game’s price will be increasing to $8 upon release as mentioned in last September's free to paid transition announcements. A short demo with 3 tracks and teams will also be available so new players can try before they buy.

Will you be selling on any other stores?
At first the game will only be sold through Steam and Itch.io, the soundtrack will also release through Itch.io.
I had reached out to GOG but they were not interested at the time, if the game sees more attention in the coming months I’ll be getting back in touch with them.

Will official Mac builds be coming?
This is currently unknown, there is a bug in Unity that is preventing the required libraries needed for full gamepad input to load. I will be working with Aidan to hopefully have this resolved for release.

Will there be matchmaking for multiplayer?
As of currently writing there aren't any plans. The reason for this is because the game is built around direct connect, meaning the online isn’t tied to any third party servers and will always function.

Will the game be coming to consoles?
There are currently no plans for this. Once the game is released the possibilities for console releases will be looked at.

Any plans for DLC?
There are post-release content plans in the works, any additional content will be coming to the game for free via updates.

Hey everyone, following up on the previous announcement.
Valve have responded and fixed the issue, they had made a mistake configuring the game when helping with the free to paid transition which is why it's been possible for people to exploit Steam to activate free copies.

Owners of free copies will now find their game is back and updating as per usual. Apologies to the free players who were affected by this issue.

If you obtained the game for free before it had gone paid you might have noticed that the game has uninstalled itself and isn't installing anything if you try, here's why:

When 0.9.4 released last week an exploit in Steam was discovered, I won't be providing details on the exploit itself for obvious reasons. However, the result of this exploit allows anybody to activate a free copy of BallisticNG officially through Steam. This shouldn't be a problem, but over half of all game copies are being obtained through this method and on 0.9.4s release alone 99% of all copies from that day came from this exploit. Because the game is now paid this is effectively piracy, this wouldn't be a concern if it wasn't happening through the store front the game's being sold on.

Do not attempt this exploit, you will only end up with an empty game in your library!

Because of this I have temporarily pulled the free copies contents from Steam. I contacted Valve last week to query and let them know about this issue but they haven't got back yet, this a critical issue that free players need to be aware of so I needed to post ahead of them responding. It is currently unknown when Valve will get back and what the result is going to be, but if you're a free player the only way to play the game right now is to unfortunately deactivate the free license from your account and buy it.

Apologies to the free players this affects, I'm hoping this can be resolved soon. I will be posting about any further developments of this situation when I'm able to.

Important Notes:

• DX9 support has been partially dropped, the game now defaults to DX11 and all custom tracks built with the updated unity tools will now target DX11 too. The game will fallback to DX9 if your GPU doesn't support DX11 however.
  
• 2280's option has been moved, see the secrets menu section for more info!

BallisticNG 0.9.4 is now out! This update comes with a few announcements, so without further ado let’s jump in:

Version 0.9.4 is the last early access version of the game! It’s been a crazy three years of development and we’re now at the stage where we’re ready to polish what we have and get the game released. We’re incredibly grateful to everybody who has joined the community and supported development throughout these three years, we hope you continue to enjoy the game after it releases!

For this last period of development we’re going to be working with a select few community members in private to fix bugs, balance gameplay and implement final features. We’ll still be reading public channels for suggestions and issue reports as normal, we just won’t be pushing updates on any public channels until the 1.0 release (this includes the beta branch!).

We will be announcing a release date in the next few months with information regarding the post-release plans, so stay tuned for that!

With this update we are pleased to announce the release of the game’s soundtrack! The soundtrack contains 34 tracks with over 120 minutes of music. The soundtrack is currently available on Steam and will be coming to other major stores in the future!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/837830/BallisticNG__Soundtrack/

BallisticNG now has SteamVR support! Right click the game in your Steam library and use “Launch BallisticNG in Steam VR mode” to play in VR. With exception to splitscreen, the entire game is functional in VR!

This is just the introduction to VR in the game, we’ll be working to further improve its implementation for the full release. If you have any issues, please let us know in the Virtual Reality forum in discussions!

To support VR the game now uses DX11 by default. If your GPU doesn’t support DX11 the game will fallback to DX9 (as mentioned above).

For almost the entirety of the game’s existence on Steam, community member Aidan has been very kindly building and maintaining OSX/Linux versions of the game. Today we are pleased to announce that the Linux builds are now stable and officially available through Steam! Official OSX support will be coming later down the line, there are some specific Unity related issues preventing us from setting up and releasing these builds.

The precision run tracks are now fully implemented! These short challenges are built to push your skill. There are currently 4 tracks and we plan to add more in the future, as well as adding support for custom precision tracks.

Campaign unlocks have also been changed. With exception to the Barracuda Type S which you still have to unlock, all ships and tracks are now unlocked from the get go. All you need to unlock now are liveries and physic modifier cheats

The secrets menu is now functional! Glide and Ballistic64 can now both be activated from here. Additionally 2280 mode has been moved to this menu too. The reason for this is that 2280 is a cheat mode and having it exposed in the menu alongside other options gives off the impression that it is more than this.

The unity tools has had a small update (reimport the unitypackage file to update). When building for DirectX it now targets DirectX11. If you have any custom tracks with particles or custom shaders you'll want to rebuild your track with the updated tools.

Custom shaders in this case means any shaders you have written yourself or imported from elsewhere, the built in BallisticNG shaders are swapped out at runtime by the game and will not be affected by this change!

• Reworked campaign unlocks, the new unlocks are as follows:
  
  • Rank 4: Allt Liveries
    
  • Rank 8: Neon Liveries
    
  • Rank 12: Clean Liveries
    
  • Rank 16: Glide CHeat
    
  • Rank 20: Ballistic64 Cheat
    
  • Rank 24: Barracuda Type S
    
  • Rank 50: Ballistic Gallery
• Barracuda and Caliburn are now locked in the campaign
  
• Added animated campaign graphics
  
• Added SteamVR support and a new VR options menu
  
• Added final precision runs and precision delta ship
  
• Added no internal camera tilt setting
  
• Added animated clouds to tracks with rain
  
• Updated the game's icon
  
• Updated cockpits for VR, the head positioning has been updated and ship hulls are now visible
  
• The information panel on the menu is now a news panel
  
• The game now uses DX11 and falls back to DX9 if the GPU doesn't support it
  
• The reverse camera no longer tilts with the ship
  
• The afterburner can no longer be used in pitlanes
  
• The weapon icon now flashes when changing
  
• The weapon icon background is no longer drawn when an icon isn't being displayed
  
• Energy walls now using the TRM geometry to determine their width, eliminating edge cases where they can spawn in massive
  
• Material queues are now copied when loading custom tracks
  
• Inputs on the binding screen have been re-arranged to put gameplay specific binds first
  
• Removed quick race option from the play tab
  
• The secrets menu is now functional, Glide and Ballistic64 can now be activated from here
  
• 2280 mode has been moved to the secrets menu
  
• The 2017 april fools cheat can now be toggled at any time by typing vaporng on the menu
  
• Fixed precision run menu entries duplicating
  
• Fixed energy wall bolt trails starting at the world origin when spawned
  
• FIxed weapon drop sound not playing
  
• Fixed tremor fire and loop sounds not being played through the SFX channel
  
• Fixed onshot sounds not being affected by reverb zones
  
• Fixed misplaced wall tiles on Aciknovae and Arrivon Peak
  
• Fixed Xpand - Raging and Xpand - Hydronium not playing in the game
  
• FIxed the next track button not functioning for non-standard tracks
  
• (Custom Tracks) Fixed BallisticNG/SkyDome shader not having its appropiate in-game version swapped in
  
• (Soundtrack) Added Shiftdelete - Dream Catcher
  
• (Soundtrack) Updated Vonsnake - Hyperion
  
• Improved crowd ambience mixing on Cassandra, Luna and Dover
  
• Updated airbrake and maglock sounds
  
• Slightly reduced SFX volumes:
  
  • Wall scrape
    
  • Wall collision
    
  • Projectile fire and explosion
    
  • Mine deploy
• Normalized music volumes
  
• Some default settings have been changed:
  
  • FoV - now defaults to 80
    
  • Draw Distance - now defaults to 200
    
  • Ship Reflections - now defaults to on
    
  • Music volume - now defaults to 100%

Work towards inclusion of VR for 0.9.4 is currently underway on the beta branch. Right now you're able to play the entire game in VR as everything is being developed!

Here's a video showcasing the current state of VR as of today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsij5YJwWEA

The game uses OpenVR so this means any HMD supported by SteamVR should work!

Just as a side note, because of the VR integration the game now uses DX11 instead of DX9. The game will fallback to DX9 if your GPU doesn't support DX11 however.

To try out VR mode, first make sure you're on the beta branch. You can access it by right clicking the game in your library, going to properties, the beta tab on the window that opens and then select the "beta" option from the dropdown.

You'll likely now want to restart Steam. When you load it back up you'll now see BallisticNG in your VR list and if you right click it again, you'll see a "Launch BallisticNG in Steam VR Mode" option.

For those of you looking to run the game without Steam, you can also launch the game in VR mode using the new -vr argument. There is a .bat file next to the game's executable which will launch the game with this argument without you needing to setup a shortcut. Just make sure you've got SteamVR installed and running.

If you've found a bug please let us know about it! You can do so on the new Virtual Reality forum - http://steamcommunity.com/app/473770/discussions/9/

You can expect daily beta branch updates for this next week as VR starts to take form.

The precision tracks for 0.9.4 are almost finished, as soon as VR is stable and the precision tracks are done 0.9.4 will be ready for release. We have something else to release alongside 0.9.4 too, stay tuned!

Work towards inclusion of VR for 0.9.4 is currently underway on the beta branch. Right now you're able to play the entire game in VR as everything is being developed!

Here's a video showcasing the current state of VR as of today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsij5YJwWEA

The game uses OpenVR so this means any HMD supported by SteamVR should work!

Just as a side note, because of the VR integration the game now uses DX11 instead of DX9. The game will fallback to DX9 if your GPU doesn't support DX11 however.

To try out VR mode, first make sure you're on the beta branch. You can access it by right clicking the game in your library, going to properties, the beta tab on the window that opens and then select the "beta" option from the dropdown.

You'll likely now want to restart Steam. When you load it back up you'll now see BallisticNG in your VR list and if you right click it again, you'll see a "Launch BallisticNG in Steam VR Mode" option.

For those of you looking to run the game without Steam, you can also launch the game in VR mode using the new -vr argument. There is a .bat file next to the game's executable which will launch the game with this argument without you needing to setup a shortcut. Just make sure you've got SteamVR installed and running.

If you've found a bug please let us know about it! You can do so on the new Virtual Reality forum - http://steamcommunity.com/app/473770/discussions/9/

You can expect daily beta branch updates for this next week as VR starts to take form.

The precision tracks for 0.9.4 are almost finished, as soon as VR is stable and the precision tracks are done 0.9.4 will be ready for release. We have something else to release alongside 0.9.4 too, stay tuned!