I only briefly touched upon this in the first 0.6 update announcement and given that progress on the new ship importer is underway, I figured I'd provide some information about what's new.

The ship importer now has support for both multiple engines and importing your own cockpits! For each engine trail you can toggle the flare and scale the trail however you like. All the cockpits built into the game can also be used so you don't have to make your own if you want something different.




You are now also exposed to a lot more settings then before, almost all of the settings that have been used to configure the ingame ships! You can now also set the ship settings to any of the built in teams if you need some help with configurations.

Want to make your ship hover much more rigid? Now you can do it.
Making a hover car and don't want it to tilt when steering? You can do that too.



You can now use a full set of transform gizmos to move, rotate and scale your ship! No more hotkeys.



The interface has also been updated to the game's new modding tools UI that was first utilized in the track creator. You now have organised dropdown menus and movable windows.

A much better scale reference has also been added, you can select from any of the ingame ships and it will display a red ghost of the ship to help you out with gettin the scale right for ingame.



Additionally workshop security has been added. If you're not the owner of a ship that has been downloaded from the workshop then you can no longer access the workshop uploader. The ship preview file can now also be chosen from anywhere you like, the image is then stored in the ship file so you can then delete the original image off your HDD if you want.

The SHP format has a new revision to support the new features such as multiple engines. This means that to utilize these features you need to upgrade the file. The game will still continue to read the old revision, but you will need to open the old ship files and re-save them back out again if you want your custom ships to support the new features.

I only briefly touched upon this in the first 0.6 update announcement and given that progress on the new ship importer is underway, I figured I'd provide some information about what's new.

The ship importer now has support for both multiple engines and importing your own cockpits! For each engine trail you can toggle the flare and scale the trail however you like. All the cockpits built into the game can also be used so you don't have to make your own if you want something different.




You are now also exposed to a lot more settings then before, almost all of the settings that have been used to configure the ingame ships! You can now also set the ship settings to any of the built in teams if you need some help with configurations.

Want to make your ship hover much more rigid? Now you can do it.
Making a hover car and don't want it to tilt when steering? You can do that too.



You can now use a full set of transform gizmos to move, rotate and scale your ship! No more hotkeys.



The interface has also been updated to the game's new modding tools UI that was first utilized in the track creator. You now have organised dropdown menus and movable windows.

A much better scale reference has also been added, you can select from any of the ingame ships and it will display a red ghost of the ship to help you out with gettin the scale right for ingame.



Additionally workshop security has been added. If you're not the owner of a ship that has been downloaded from the workshop then you can no longer access the workshop uploader. The ship preview file can now also be chosen from anywhere you like, the image is then stored in the ship file so you can then delete the original image off your HDD if you want.

The SHP format has a new revision to support the new features such as multiple engines. This means that to utilize these features you need to upgrade the file. The game will still continue to read the old revision, but you will need to open the old ship files and re-save them back out again if you want your custom ships to support the new features.

Hey everyone, got some update news regarding the progress on 0.6.

0.6 is turning out to be quite a big update. Most of the standard tracks are being made again from scratch, an event based campaign is being introduced and there has been loads of extra additions, fixes and optimizations.

The tracks being remade are Harpstone, Aciknovae, Zephyr Ridge, Utah Project, Ishtar Citadel, Maceno Bay, Omega Harbour, possibly Luna and the prototype tracks. Most of the tracks have already been updated and are rather ready to go or just need a few more things added and changes to bring them to life. Screenshots can be found at the bottom of this announcement!

0.6 is not going to be the end of tracks, as further into the future there is going to be 4 tracks dedicated to the drag ships. These will be used for unlocking the drag ships. Survival mode will also be getting its own set of tracks that are designed for reaching the speeds you can reach.

The campaign is going to be split up into several event grids hosted by different corporations in the games universe. Each grid gets bigger and harder as you progress through them. You unlock the grids linearly, you have to get a certain amount of points in the previous grid to unlock the next, and once you've collected enough points and earned enough medals you'll get to play the Barracuda challenege, which is how you will unlock Barracuda!

The handling of the ships has been tweaked slightly. Ships now slide a lot more, but they do so in a controlled manner. The airbrakes let you drift around corners exactly the same, but normal steering feels a lot slippier now too. The game can now also support non-flat track features such as loops, while nothing too exciting will be coming in the standard tracks, you can expect such track features to be experimented with in the future!

Wall collisions have also seen a huge improvement. It's now much harder for the ship to slide over the walls, scraping is no longer chancing your shield energy! Wall collision damage has also been greatly reduced so you're less likely to die from the walls alone.

The AI can now use junctions and pitlanes! The AI randomly decide which junctions they want to take with a 50/50 chance and the AI will only enter the pitlanes if they're running low on shield energy.

New weapons are also being introduced, one of them already implemented. These weapons will be the Transfer Beam, Hunter and Hellstorm. Weapons are now no longer randomly given to you too, there are conditions that have to be met for you to get them. For instance if you're in first then you won't get any projectile weapons and if you're in last then you won't get mines.

When you are warned of a weapon you now get an icon displayed on screen for a few seconds letting you know what weapon you're being warned about.

All voices are now lined up in a buffer too, if multiple voices play then the latest voice will wait for current voices to finish as to not create a mess of audio.

Ship speeds have also been balanced. GTek is no longer several speed classes slower then Nexus. It's still pretty slow in comparison, but you're not going to be falling asleep piloting it anymore.

Ships now have proper shadows generated for them, no more blobs. PS1 vertex truncation emulation has also been vastly improved, so if you left that option enabled then you should be pleased by the improvments coming up.

The track creator has seen several new features and fixes since 0.5.2. You can now import a background image to use a template, there's a new unlocked tilt creation mode so you can easily create crazier track layouts and you can now use the prototype environment design for testing.

The ship importer is going to be remade for this update too. You are going to now get hell of a lot more control over ship settings, nearly all of the settings exposed to us will be there for you to edit! These include everything to do with hovering, airbrakes, hover rotation and ship tilt. The game has also had supprt for multiple engines since 0.5.1 so you'll finally be able to setup multiple engines.

A layer of security has also been added, whenever you load a ship the workshop uploader will now be disabled unless the item isn't already on the workshop or you are the owner of that item. There's a lot of reuploads on the workshop so this will help fight that.

And finally, the file browser has been completely remade. Not only is it much faster at loading folders, but it also now handles both loading and saving. No more crap with the game creating the files where it wants to create them, you'll have control over that now.

Right now we don't have an absolute release date, though it can be expected the update will come about around Christmas or just after.

Hey everyone, got some update news regarding the progress on 0.6.

0.6 is turning out to be quite a big update. Most of the standard tracks are being made again from scratch, an event based campaign is being introduced and there has been loads of extra additions, fixes and optimizations.

The tracks being remade are Harpstone, Aciknovae, Zephyr Ridge, Utah Project, Ishtar Citadel, Maceno Bay, Omega Harbour, possibly Luna and the prototype tracks. Most of the tracks have already been updated and are rather ready to go or just need a few more things added and changes to bring them to life. Screenshots can be found at the bottom of this announcement!

0.6 is not going to be the end of tracks, as further into the future there is going to be 4 tracks dedicated to the drag ships. These will be used for unlocking the drag ships. Survival mode will also be getting its own set of tracks that are designed for reaching the speeds you can reach.

The campaign is going to be split up into several event grids hosted by different corporations in the games universe. Each grid gets bigger and harder as you progress through them. You unlock the grids linearly, you have to get a certain amount of points in the previous grid to unlock the next, and once you've collected enough points and earned enough medals you'll get to play the Barracuda challenege, which is how you will unlock Barracuda!

The handling of the ships has been tweaked slightly. Ships now slide a lot more, but they do so in a controlled manner. The airbrakes let you drift around corners exactly the same, but normal steering feels a lot slippier now too. The game can now also support non-flat track features such as loops, while nothing too exciting will be coming in the standard tracks, you can expect such track features to be experimented with in the future!

Wall collisions have also seen a huge improvement. It's now much harder for the ship to slide over the walls, scraping is no longer chancing your shield energy! Wall collision damage has also been greatly reduced so you're less likely to die from the walls alone.

The AI can now use junctions and pitlanes! The AI randomly decide which junctions they want to take with a 50/50 chance and the AI will only enter the pitlanes if they're running low on shield energy.

New weapons are also being introduced, one of them already implemented. These weapons will be the Transfer Beam, Hunter and Hellstorm. Weapons are now no longer randomly given to you too, there are conditions that have to be met for you to get them. For instance if you're in first then you won't get any projectile weapons and if you're in last then you won't get mines.

When you are warned of a weapon you now get an icon displayed on screen for a few seconds letting you know what weapon you're being warned about.

All voices are now lined up in a buffer too, if multiple voices play then the latest voice will wait for current voices to finish as to not create a mess of audio.

Ship speeds have also been balanced. GTek is no longer several speed classes slower then Nexus. It's still pretty slow in comparison, but you're not going to be falling asleep piloting it anymore.

Ships now have proper shadows generated for them, no more blobs. PS1 vertex truncation emulation has also been vastly improved, so if you left that option enabled then you should be pleased by the improvments coming up.

The track creator has seen several new features and fixes since 0.5.2. You can now import a background image to use a template, there's a new unlocked tilt creation mode so you can easily create crazier track layouts and you can now use the prototype environment design for testing.

The ship importer is going to be remade for this update too. You are going to now get hell of a lot more control over ship settings, nearly all of the settings exposed to us will be there for you to edit! These include everything to do with hovering, airbrakes, hover rotation and ship tilt. The game has also had supprt for multiple engines since 0.5.1 so you'll finally be able to setup multiple engines.

A layer of security has also been added, whenever you load a ship the workshop uploader will now be disabled unless the item isn't already on the workshop or you are the owner of that item. There's a lot of reuploads on the workshop so this will help fight that.

And finally, the file browser has been completely remade. Not only is it much faster at loading folders, but it also now handles both loading and saving. No more crap with the game creating the files where it wants to create them, you'll have control over that now.

Right now we don't have an absolute release date, though it can be expected the update will come about around Christmas or just after.

BallisticNG has just updated to 0.5.2, this is going to be the last update for 0.5 as there are big plans for 0.6. See below the changelog for information on that.

This update focuses mostly on the track creator, fixing a few problems and adding many new features!

Visual:
- Tenrai Livery updated
- Wyvern Livery updated

Fixes:
- Custom ships no longer have mipmaps generated for them
- Fixed file browser not showing the last file
- Fixed first race in a custom tournament playing the last track first

Track Creator:
- Now supports playtesting with custom ships
- Added new playmode based options to the settings foldout:
* AI Controlled Ship
* Hyper Speed
* 2280 Mode
* Drag Track Flag
* Generate Speed Pads
* Weather
- You can now import custom textures and create custom environment lighting
- Jumpzones are now automatically generated in the editor if a split is given the jump flag
- Tunnel lights will be automatically generated for dark ambience in custom track sets
- Added smoothing functions for track wall/floor width and wall height
- Added new functions to the segment editor
- Added buttons for existing smooth functions (hold shift when using Smooth Pitch for Smooth Height)
- Fixed junction/exit nudge verticies being able to split
- Fixed UI elements sometimes not deselecting
- Select Next/Previous functions now works continiously
- The selection is now always sorted correctly
- Reduced width of the data viewer window

0.6 is going to be a big content update. Most of the tracks in the game are being remade because they are badly designed. Quite a few of the layouts are already done and now just need the environments modeled. 0.6 will also be introducing a tournament grid system, where you can setup your own grids that unlock in a radius as you complete events starting from the middle.

The first stable release of Multiplayer should be done with 0.6, the unstable branch will keep getting updates with multiplayer fixes in meantime.

BallisticNG has just updated to 0.5.2, this is going to be the last update for 0.5 as there are big plans for 0.6. See below the changelog for information on that.

This update focuses mostly on the track creator, fixing a few problems and adding many new features!

Visual:
- Tenrai Livery updated
- Wyvern Livery updated

Fixes:
- Custom ships no longer have mipmaps generated for them
- Fixed file browser not showing the last file
- Fixed first race in a custom tournament playing the last track first

Track Creator:
- Now supports playtesting with custom ships
- Added new playmode based options to the settings foldout:
* AI Controlled Ship
* Hyper Speed
* 2280 Mode
* Drag Track Flag
* Generate Speed Pads
* Weather
- You can now import custom textures and create custom environment lighting
- Jumpzones are now automatically generated in the editor if a split is given the jump flag
- Tunnel lights will be automatically generated for dark ambience in custom track sets
- Added smoothing functions for track wall/floor width and wall height
- Added new functions to the segment editor
- Added buttons for existing smooth functions (hold shift when using Smooth Pitch for Smooth Height)
- Fixed junction/exit nudge verticies being able to split
- Fixed UI elements sometimes not deselecting
- Select Next/Previous functions now works continiously
- The selection is now always sorted correctly
- Reduced width of the data viewer window

0.6 is going to be a big content update. Most of the tracks in the game are being remade because they are badly designed. Quite a few of the layouts are already done and now just need the environments modeled. 0.6 will also be introducing a tournament grid system, where you can setup your own grids that unlock in a radius as you complete events starting from the middle.

The first stable release of Multiplayer should be done with 0.6, the unstable branch will keep getting updates with multiplayer fixes in meantime.

BallisticNG has just been updated to 0.5.1! This updates fixes a few issues from the initial 0.5 release and introduces new ship engine effect, customizable race settings and custom tournaments.


Additions:
- Added jump zones to ishtar citadel so the jumps are now possible in Toxic and Apex
- Added race settings to gamemode selection screen
- You can now increase the maximum number of laps
- Added breadcrumbs to menu
- Friends are now highlighted on the leaderboards
- You can now create your own tournaments
- The zen tournament for unlocking Barracuda has now been moved into the Barracuda Challenge (see the new tournament menu)
- Changed engine flare texture
- Tremors now inflict damage on ships
- (Unstable Branch) Added lobby search filtering options to join game
- (Unstable Branch) Added lobby browser
- (Unstable Branch) Accepting a lobby invite outside of the game will now autoconnect you when the game launches

Fixes:
- Fixed cockpits drawing over all effects
- Fixed elimination and shield low voices ignoring volume settings
- (Unstable Branch) your ship is reset back to GTek when entering a lobby
- Quitting in the track creator playmode will now take you back to the editor

Sharing tournaments:
You can share your custom tournaments or just save them somewhere by clicking on the "generate tournament key" button. This will generate a key that you can reuse later to reload your tournament. This approach has been used as it makes it extremely easy to share tournaments over instant messaging.

BallisticNG has just been updated to 0.5.1! This updates fixes a few issues from the initial 0.5 release and introduces new ship engine effect, customizable race settings and custom tournaments.


Additions:
- Added jump zones to ishtar citadel so the jumps are now possible in Toxic and Apex
- Added race settings to gamemode selection screen
- You can now increase the maximum number of laps
- Added breadcrumbs to menu
- Friends are now highlighted on the leaderboards
- You can now create your own tournaments
- The zen tournament for unlocking Barracuda has now been moved into the Barracuda Challenge (see the new tournament menu)
- Changed engine flare texture
- Tremors now inflict damage on ships
- (Unstable Branch) Added lobby search filtering options to join game
- (Unstable Branch) Added lobby browser
- (Unstable Branch) Accepting a lobby invite outside of the game will now autoconnect you when the game launches

Fixes:
- Fixed cockpits drawing over all effects
- Fixed elimination and shield low voices ignoring volume settings
- (Unstable Branch) your ship is reset back to GTek when entering a lobby
- Quitting in the track creator playmode will now take you back to the editor

Sharing tournaments:
You can share your custom tournaments or just save them somewhere by clicking on the "generate tournament key" button. This will generate a key that you can reuse later to reload your tournament. This approach has been used as it makes it extremely easy to share tournaments over instant messaging.

BallisticNG 0.5 is now out. Bringing new content, a multiplayer beta and a track creator, this is the biggest update yet!

BallisticNG 0.5 introduces a new track, Cassandra, and various updates to existing tracks. 0x001 and 0x002 and Ishtar Citadel have been completely remade. Aciknovae has had a large scenery update with some small improvements to the layout too.

All standard teams now have a drag ship varient, these are all statistically the same and will be used in a new drag tournament coming in the future. Right now these will be unlocked alongside Barracuda and really only serve as an alternative to those who like drifting, you'll be seeing the full potential of these ships later.

This update also includes three new pickups - The wormhole, tremor and turbo.

Turbo
The turbo is a 2280 mode exclusive pickup that gives you a sudden boost in speed for a brief moment.

Wormhole
The wormhole is a pickup that teleports you to the place ahead of you. The wormhole takes a moment to charge, when you come out a autopilot will very briefly take control of the ship to stablize you but this should be used with caution as technical track sections will make this very hard to use.

Tremor
The tremor will send a ripple down the track which throws ships into the air and slows them down, the tremor covers a long distance which makes it an ideal weapon for catching up if you're behind.

The track creator is a new modding tool that can be found in the modding tools section on the main menu. It's still in heavy development but right now you can easily create your own tracks and instantly play test them! This tool is now being used as the offical tool to make tracks for the game, so you can expect this to get much more powerful in the future.

Goto Help - Open Documentation in the editor for information

The multiplayer is not quite ready yet, but it's in a good enough state that we'd like to get it out to people to test and have a bit of a fun with. If you're on the game's unstable branch then you'll have access to it, it's still rough around the edges but you should be able to race with your friends without any major issues!

Let us know how it goes, the more feedback we get the sooner we can get it out of it's beta state and into the stable version of the game! There is a new multiplayer dicussion board where you can talk about and report issues.

For the past month I've been working on two DLC tracks for the game to celebrate that today (30th of September) is the 20th birthday of Wipeout 2097. These two tracks have been designed to look and feel like tracks that could have been in Wipeout 2097!

Download: https://github.com/bigsnake09/BallisticNG/releases/download/DLC/BallisticNG.DLC.-.2097.Anniversary.zip



And as always, here's the list of changes:
Notice: All leaderboards have been reset
Engine:
- Added performance and ship stats listing (press F1 to cycle these)
- Weapon prefabs are now loaded into memory to stop hiccups when loading them
- Updated game to Unity 5.4
- AI rotation is now much smoother

Audio:
- Added 2 new songs from ShiftDelete
- Added 4 new songs from Shem
- A bunch of existing songs have been updated
- Mp3 support for custom music has been added, .wav files will still continue to work
- Music playback is now continuous across tracks
- Updated menu music and added more music that can be chosen to the menu
- All voice lines have been rerecorded
- Survival mode now has an ambient background sound that increases in pitch the more zones you pass

Gameplay:
- Added splitscreen
- 2280 changes:
* In time trial your shield energy will now constantly regenerate
* The afterburner and pitlane is now disabled
* Dropping an item will absorb it and give you a small amount of shield energy back
* You will respawn instantly
* E-Pack pickup is disabled
- Nerfed hyperthrust
- Added Turbo Pickup (2280 mode exclusive)
- Added Wormhole pickup
- Added tremor pickup
- Added drag ships
- Added Cassandra
- Remade 0x001, 0x002 and Ishtar Citadel
- Replaced Aciknovae with new WIP version (old version can be found in the vault section)
- 2097 ship handling is now much more accurate
- The surival ship has had a number of performance tweaks, primarly removing drifting from the airbrakes to allow for precise steering in

higher zones

Visual:
- Updated Tenrai Livery
- Added categories to the track menu
- Cockpits now flicker when ships take damage
- Added notification to HUD to tell you which song is currently playing
- The HUD will now show you how far in front or behind you are in seconds when passing checkpoints
- Updated leaderboard design
- Survival mode now has a death animation

Other Additions:
- Added Track Creator

Fixes:
- Fixed not being able to pause after rebinding controls
- Fixed infinite menu loops
- Fixed transparency issues in Marina Rush
- Fixed race position being wrong when in junctions
- Prototype ship textures now work

BallisticNG 0.5 is now out. Bringing new content, a multiplayer beta and a track creator, this is the biggest update yet!

BallisticNG 0.5 introduces a new track, Cassandra, and various updates to existing tracks. 0x001 and 0x002 and Ishtar Citadel have been completely remade. Aciknovae has had a large scenery update with some small improvements to the layout too.

All standard teams now have a drag ship varient, these are all statistically the same and will be used in a new drag tournament coming in the future. Right now these will be unlocked alongside Barracuda and really only serve as an alternative to those who like drifting, you'll be seeing the full potential of these ships later.

This update also includes three new pickups - The wormhole, tremor and turbo.

Turbo
The turbo is a 2280 mode exclusive pickup that gives you a sudden boost in speed for a brief moment.

Wormhole
The wormhole is a pickup that teleports you to the place ahead of you. The wormhole takes a moment to charge, when you come out a autopilot will very briefly take control of the ship to stablize you but this should be used with caution as technical track sections will make this very hard to use.

Tremor
The tremor will send a ripple down the track which throws ships into the air and slows them down, the tremor covers a long distance which makes it an ideal weapon for catching up if you're behind.

The track creator is a new modding tool that can be found in the modding tools section on the main menu. It's still in heavy development but right now you can easily create your own tracks and instantly play test them! This tool is now being used as the offical tool to make tracks for the game, so you can expect this to get much more powerful in the future.

Goto Help - Open Documentation in the editor for information

The multiplayer is not quite ready yet, but it's in a good enough state that we'd like to get it out to people to test and have a bit of a fun with. If you're on the game's unstable branch then you'll have access to it, it's still rough around the edges but you should be able to race with your friends without any major issues!

Let us know how it goes, the more feedback we get the sooner we can get it out of it's beta state and into the stable version of the game! There is a new multiplayer dicussion board where you can talk about and report issues.

For the past month I've been working on two DLC tracks for the game to celebrate that today (30th of September) is the 20th birthday of Wipeout 2097. These two tracks have been designed to look and feel like tracks that could have been in Wipeout 2097!

Download: https://github.com/bigsnake09/BallisticNG/releases/download/DLC/BallisticNG.DLC.-.2097.Anniversary.zip



And as always, here's the list of changes:
Notice: All leaderboards have been reset
Engine:
- Added performance and ship stats listing (press F1 to cycle these)
- Weapon prefabs are now loaded into memory to stop hiccups when loading them
- Updated game to Unity 5.4
- AI rotation is now much smoother

Audio:
- Added 2 new songs from ShiftDelete
- Added 4 new songs from Shem
- A bunch of existing songs have been updated
- Mp3 support for custom music has been added, .wav files will still continue to work
- Music playback is now continuous across tracks
- Updated menu music and added more music that can be chosen to the menu
- All voice lines have been rerecorded
- Survival mode now has an ambient background sound that increases in pitch the more zones you pass

Gameplay:
- Added splitscreen
- 2280 changes:
* In time trial your shield energy will now constantly regenerate
* The afterburner and pitlane is now disabled
* Dropping an item will absorb it and give you a small amount of shield energy back
* You will respawn instantly
* E-Pack pickup is disabled
- Nerfed hyperthrust
- Added Turbo Pickup (2280 mode exclusive)
- Added Wormhole pickup
- Added tremor pickup
- Added drag ships
- Added Cassandra
- Remade 0x001, 0x002 and Ishtar Citadel
- Replaced Aciknovae with new WIP version (old version can be found in the vault section)
- 2097 ship handling is now much more accurate
- The surival ship has had a number of performance tweaks, primarly removing drifting from the airbrakes to allow for precise steering in

higher zones

Visual:
- Updated Tenrai Livery
- Added categories to the track menu
- Cockpits now flicker when ships take damage
- Added notification to HUD to tell you which song is currently playing
- The HUD will now show you how far in front or behind you are in seconds when passing checkpoints
- Updated leaderboard design
- Survival mode now has a death animation

Other Additions:
- Added Track Creator

Fixes:
- Fixed not being able to pause after rebinding controls
- Fixed infinite menu loops
- Fixed transparency issues in Marina Rush
- Fixed race position being wrong when in junctions
- Prototype ship textures now work