We're now starting to wrap up the development of 1.3! All small vehicles tracks are now complete and we currently have the campaign for it in testing. It comes in at a total of 67 events!

Don't forget you can also track progress on our roadmap: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

The final small vehicles track! Vega Waterway takes the race back to Vega City with a tight technical circuit that snakes through dense city back streets and drops into a canal where excess water from the nearby river Lyre is drained.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmSaFte4jBU&t=74s






The VB221 is Asters small vehicle spec ship for use in virtual training scenarios, it matches the Barracuda Model S in all stats and is treated the same way in regards to leaderboards.

We've introduced this ship so you can run Survival on small vehicle tracks with a ship that is designed for the scale. As with everything else, this will also be usable outside of survival as a regular ship and can be used for survival on regular tracks.




The small vehicles and Model B / Model C ships now have more liveries.
A huge thanks to Vista for making and providing these!

There are too many new liveries to showcase here, but here's a handful of them:

Maceno Island
We've got the store page for Maceno Island up, be sure to go wishlist it and check out the new Maceno Island liveries!

The DLC will be coming shortly after 1.3s release and it will be a paid expansion. We haven't set a price yet.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1596120/BallisticNG__Maceno_Island/

1.3 Beta 8
1.3 Beta 8 is now available! We've still got a bunch of content to finish over the next few months before 1.3 is finished, but we've got plenty of new features to test beforehand.

This update doesn't include all of the new bike tracks. We're saving those for the full release.

Joining the beta

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
  
• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
  
• From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

What is the beta?
For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.

Unity Tools Notice
While these beta builds ship with Unity 2020.3.5 ready builds of the Unity Tools, they are intended for our internal testing group only. If you want to import the Unity Tools, please make sure you're using Unity 2018.3.8 and import them from the public branch running version 1.2.5 of the game.

Mods built with the 1.3 Beta Unity Tools are not compatible with previous versions of the game and documentation will not be available until the final release of 1.3.

New Ships
Mako and the Aster KA10 are now playable!

Scanline effects now disabled in VR
We've had reports that people were getting motion sick in the menu and in survival mode because of the scanline effect. It's now disabled in VR.

New ship asset mangement system
All internal ships are now built into their own asset bundle files. This allows us to manage internals ships exactly like we have been with custom ships. There's now a slight loading time, but we no longer need to have all of the ships resources loaded into memory, which gives us much more room to cram in more ships and liveries for those ships without worrying about making the game eat more of your system resources.

Redesigned campaign details panel
We have a new campaign details panel! All of the events information is now displayed so you can see exactly what you're about to play.

More options
Custom race and multiplayer now have more options!

For both custom racea and multiplayer you can set custom speed multipliers to go as painstakingly slow or as blisteringly fast as you want. Multiplayer now also has options to control the end of race and return to lobby timers.

We've also added a new graphics option to set the displays refreshrate when using exclusive fullscreen and a new gameplay option that allows Orbitronix and Mako to be part of the game's standard ship roster when spawning AIs.

Game state added for speed runners
We've added an enumeration that speed runners creating LiveSplit Auto Splitter scripts can hook into. NgData.Player.PlayerState is the enumeration and it holds the following states:

• Menu (player is on the main menu)
  
• Pre Race (player is watching the race overview or the countdown hasn't finished yet)
  
• Racing (player is currently racing)
  
• Post Race (the race is finished, the player is looking at the results screen)

Bling Pack is now Steamless
Thanks to big changes we've made to our DLC system recently, we finally have a much better solution for the bling pack. The bling pack is now it's own DLC file to validate that you've bought it. As with all other DLC, once you have that file you no longer need to run the game through Steam for any reason.

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

We've added a new high score game mode. In Stunt your goal is to perform as many barrel rolls as you can before completing all laps. The closer you barrel roll to the floor, the higher the score.

Our approach to this mode was to take barrel rolls and turn it into somewhat of a rhythm game, with the timing of the roll playing an important part in a positive feedback loop to sustain long roll chains.

In this mode barrel rolls are bound to a single button press, however you can still perform them normally if you really hate your controller ;)

The mode works as follows:

• Land a barrel roll to earn points and start a chain. Depending on when you barrel roll you'll earn points for regular rolls, good rolls and perfect rolls. Timing is key!
  
• When starting a chain you'll get 10 points for the 2nd roll, then each subsequent roll multiplies the score by the number of rolls in the chain. A chain is ended by letting the timer run out, failing a roll or hitting the track walls.
  
• Your ships shield energy can be exchanged for an uplift boost. An uplift boost accelerates your ship upwards to let you get airtime, while also freezing your chain and adding some additional time to it. This can be used as a tool to gain air where you would otherwise not get it, be timed on big jumps to keep a chain going through falling or just be used as a way to panic extend a chain.
  
  Straight away you have three uplift boosts in your reserve. Your energy recharges slowly over time, but landing good and perfect rolls give large amounts of the energy back immediately.
  
• If you finish the event while in a chain you enter overtime and keep going. As long as your chain is still going you can go indefinitely to rack up huge scores. Regular rolls however do not count towards resetting your chain in overtime.

Sticking as close to the track as possible is key as spending too long in the air is wasted chain time. Maintaining close proximity to the track is done by pitching down and braking over crests when going at high speeds. The mode is also playable on all speed classes and supports splitscreen!

Stunt will have leaderboards when 1.3 releases. They're currently disabled in the beta.


Ships

• Added Mako
  
• Added Aster KA10
  
• Added more chase camera sensitivity stats (coming to Unity Tools later)
  
• Added Idle Sway stat (coming to Unity Tools later)
  
• Barrel roll success threshold reduced to 180 degrees (from 200) to match with what's happening visually
  
• Reduced various sensitivity settings of the small vehicle chase cameras to improve their feel
  
• Fixed the Barracuda Model B not having an illum map setup

Music

• Added Vonsnake - Mako
  
• Added Vonsnake - Smooth Gliding

DLC

• Bling pack ownership is now verified using a content pack data file instead of a past Steam login validation check

Engine

• Added option to set the monitor refresh rate when using exclusive fullscreen
  
• Added Terrain Advanced Max shader, expanding Terrain Advanced Plus with illumination and reflection maps. This will be available in a future Unity Tools update
  
• Added gameplay option to allow AI to use the post release ships, disabled by default. Game -> General -> Ai Expanded Roster
  
• Player ship selections are now stored as a reference to a content manager entry instead of separate standalone data
  
• Removed a legacy custom ship load time notice message on track load transitions
  
• Small vehicles now have their own camera setting, set to rear chase by default.
  
• Exposed character input speeds to the F1 stats menu (now has a scroll bar)
  
• Implemented lens flare passthrough. Objects with collisions can now be flagged out with a script to not occlude lens flares for cases such as invisible walls and holographics. This will be available to mods in a future Unity Tools update. Some internal tracks will be updated to support this feature at a later time.
  
• Internal ships are now split into individual files and use the ship bundle manager, originally used for CSF custom ships. This adds a noticeable selection load time but reduces memory overhead as all ship resources are no longer loaded at all times.
  
• Fixed the airbrakes for the other splitscreen player rendering when in the internal view if the mesh renderer isn't attached to the transform object
  
• Ship airbrakes can now be configured to render in the cockpit view (coming to Unity Tools later)
  
• Ship characters can now be configured to use their own material and be rendered in the cockpit view
  
• Fixed soft locks that could occur when alt tabed while a track is loading
  
• Fixed survival continuing to think that a custom ship is being used in survival if using the change ship and track option on the pause menu and changing to the Barracuda Model S
  
• Fixed softlocks when alt tabbing on vanilla track loading
  
• Fixed splitscreen pushing a cheats enabled notification
  
• Fixed weather systems not being setup for player 2 in splitscreen
  
• Disabled log events for flare culling

VR

• The scanline effect on virtual skies is now disabled

User Interface

• Added a load overlay which pops up when a ship is being loaded
  
• Fixed menu ships disappearing when changing liveries after every 2nd switch

Tracks

• Fixed transparency orders on Omega Harbours underwater tunnel
  
• Various tracks given water material tweaks to adjust for UV scrolling fixes
  
• Fixed the survival anti-cheat erroneously kicking in on Hydrome Bed
  
• (Neon Nights) Fixed Metro Reverse using the night texture maps
  
• (Outer Reaches) The Project 9 suspension vehicles now use a double sided material

User Interface

• Redesigned the campaign event details panel
  
  • The interface is now laid out in a 2x2 grid
    
  • Event settings are now displayed in the same format that multiplayer lobby settings are. More settings are now listed.
    
  • If a tournament is selected, the track overview title now shows the track number as it cycles through the tracks
• Fixed softlock issue that could sometimes occur when backing out of the game options menu after switching mod tabs
  
• Fixed custom race sliders having their start value being set before the rounding mode is applied
  
• Selector elements now have their arrows faded when there's only a single option
  
• Custom race tournaments no longer have a track limit
  
• The tournament listing scroll view no longer has navigation and can scrolled with the menu scroll input bindings or the mouse
  
• Increased granularity of the audio mixing sliders
  
• The leaderboards menu now cancels previous leaderboard fetch requests before starting new ones
  
• Reorganised the Game -> Camera menu

Gamemode

• Added Stunt
  
• Drastically reduced airbrake slip falloff in Survival (1000 to 25). The intention is to make the airbrake response predictable and in-line with the Model S handling outside of the mode. Please let me know if it makes it too difficult to fly in the higher zones.

Weapons

• Reduced turbo drop chance weighting by 70%

Multiplayer

• Added speed multiplier setting. This stacks with hyper and drag mode
  
• Added setting to control the results screen time
  
• Added setting to control the event finish time
  
• Fixed the speed modifier not being saved into lobby presets
  
• Host handshake packets now pull the hosts ship selection directly from the new content manager reference value instead of running a database search. This should drastically improve host performance when new clients join and lots of custom ships are installed.

Campaign

• Fixed spelling mistakes in the base game time trial custom descriptions
  
• (Outer Reaches) Fixed finale drift and drag events allowing small vehicles
  
• Added support for the drag speed modifier

Custom Race

• Fixed spelling mistakes in the ai roster preset action dialogs
  
• Added a button to reset cheats
  
• Added speed multiplier setting. This stacks with hyper and drag mode

Modding

• Added Mako livery template PSD
  
• Added Aster KA10 livery template PSD
  
• uplift.wav and overtime.wav added for custom soundpacks
  
• The Aster LB221 livery template has been re-exported with no color profile setup. The note txt file explains a better workflow for gimp converted PSDs.

It's been a busy month and we have three tracks to showcase today!

Maceno Islands track roster is now complete and we can now move onto the ship liveries and campaign. We also have one more small vehicles track to finish. Once done those tracks will also be getting their own campaign!

After that the bulk of 1.3s work is done. We still have three additional tracks that are coming on top of all of this and we have a major optimization for Basin and some readability improvements for Kuiper Overturn coming too.

Once all of this content is wrapped up it'll be time for us to finish up feature implementations, get the Unity Tools updated with the new engine features, run one final beta and then we'll be good to set a release date and get this monster update out onto the public branch!

Don't forget you can also track progress on our roadmap: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

A new song has been added to the soundtrack! If you own the soundtrack DLC you'll find Smooth Gliding already in there. You can also stream it here:

https://soundcloud.com/vonsnake/ballisticng-smooth-gliding

The sixth and final Maceno Island track! This one sits at the very top of the island and features tight corner series and lots of verticality to test your skills. This is a track you're going to want to pitch down over the hills on.

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







Running through glass pyramid gardens and a mall complementing them, Skylight Gardens is a tightly packed urban track set in Stockholm that demands a solid racing line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OVGmhyhno4







Brobama's back with another track. Atacama is a completely offroad circuit small vehicles track running through Chilean sand dunes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0wW3MBSMgA








BallisticNG has an artificial limit of 12 tracks for tournaments, with exception to campaigns where you can add as many track as you like.

We've now removed this limit for custom races so you can easily go wild with extremely long tournaments! Multiplayer still has the 12 track limit however as we transfer the tracks display name to tell everybody which tracks to load and it can very quickly pile up into an unreasonable amount of data to send.

We've updated the audio mixing sliders so they jump in increments of 0.05 instead of 0.1, giving you more fine control over the game's audio balance.

After recieving a feature request, we've implemented an enumation that speed runners can hook into to check the players state to automate LiveSplit with auto splitters.

Once 1.3 is out, NgData.Player.State will provide the following states:

• Menu (player is on the main menu)
  
• Pre Race (player is watching the race overview or the countdown hasn't finished yet)
  
• Racing (player is currently racing)
  
• Post Race (the race is finished, the player is looking at the results screen)

Hey everyone. This month we've been focusing on more small vehicle tracks content, which is now getting close to being done.

With Brattelva Circuit finished there is now only 3 small vehicle tracks left to go. We're already working on these last tracks and we're aiming to have stuff to show next month.

We also only have 1 more track to go for Maceno Island: Maceno Peak. The layout for this track is already prototyped. Refinement and then eventually scenery will come once we've made some more progress with the small vehicles tracks.

Don't forget you can also track progress on our roadmap: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

Brattelva Circuit is a somewhat technical track running through the Norwegian countryside, built on top of an old river. This secluded area is primarily used as a small wind farm, and with the track came a pub with open crowdstands to watch the races.

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










There is now an option to allow post release ships to be included with the vanilla ship roster without needing to setup custom AI rosters in custom race.

Right now this includes Orbitronix and Mako. We've opted not to include the Barracuda Model 0 in this as it doesn't have weapons.

The option is off by default as keeping the vanilla roster to 8 teams is part of the game's original design. When turned on it applies to all aspects of the game (campaign, custom race and multiplayer bots).



Turbos have been unbalanced for a while. Since they were originally for a cheat mode or used in Speed Lap where you're given one every lap, we hadn't really thought too much about their drop rate.

As turbos have been a toggle for custom races for a while now, 1.3 will have the turbo drop rate reduced by 70%. This is still enough to give you one per a 20-40 second lap on average, while before you'd easily be getting 3-4 per lap.

These changes aren't necessarily final and we'll gather some feedback regarding it when we run the final 1.3 beta.

It's possible to cause a soft lock if you alt tab out during track loading or rapidly spam the pause button, which is a particular problem for stuff like multiplayer where the person who soft locks would have to alt F4 to allow the rest of the lobby to start the race.

This is now fixed for 1.3!

We've had an issue since initial implementation where player 2 wouldn't have their own weather effects, but could still see the weather effects for player 1.

This is now fixed, with both players having their own weather effects that only they can see.

As a side note we also had an issue where playing in splitscreen would trigger the cheats enabled notification, which is also now fixed.

Whenever somebody connects to a server the host builds a list of ships that everybody is using. For other players this is fine as the host already knows the name of them and can just pass them on, but the host fetching it's own ship requires a database lookup every time. When you start reaching several hundreds of installed ships this can cause very noticeable frame hiccups.

When we first introduced our content database system during early access we had never updated player selections to directly reference it. This is finally addressed, and with a bunch of code updates later the host can finally just pass its ship information on without the costly database lookup.

Hey everyone. We're a little behind posting this one since we were finishing up the content to show off, but here's our 1.3 development progress through May 2022!

Don't forget you can also track progress on our roadmap: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

Alto Overseer is the fifth Maceno Island track. Carving through the islands dormant volcano, this is a dark track with lots of twists and turns. You'll also get a great view of the entire island and its locations in the brief moment of sunlight along the mountains edge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO85HkExeYU









Aster now has an AG go-kart! Built from similar components used to make the LB221 bike, the KA10 is a fast and somewhat nimble vehicle.








We've also been adding more features to custom races and multiplayer.

Speed Multiplier
Both custom races and multiplayer now have a speed multiplier option. It ranges from 0.2x to 2x speed and stacks with the hyper and drag speed options.

This is considered a cheat option and setting it to anything but 1x will disable saving and leaderboard functionality while active.

Custom race now also has a reset cheats option, which lets you disable all of the cheat options in a single button press.

Multiplayer Timers Control
Lobby hosts will now also be able to control the timers for finishing the race once somebody has passed the finish line and how long everybody needs to wait before going back to the lobby on the results screen.

The finish timer can be configured anywhere between 5 seconds to 2 minutes.
The results time can be configured anywhere between 5 seconds to 30 seconds.

Refresh rate in exclusive fullscreen
Based on feedback the game now also has an option to set the refresh rate of the monitor it's being display on if running in exclusive fullscreen. If you're running in a window or in borderless fullscreen this option will be disable and let you know your desktops refresh rate is being used.

Hey everyone! As we had mentioned in our 1.3 Beta 7 release announcement, we're now at a point with the update where the bulk of the work is now content so we're just cracking on with it.

Here's our first progress report. We hope to keep you updated monthly, though it may be more or less frequently dependiing on the progress that we make. Remember you can also keep track of our progress with our public roadmap, which is available here: https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

1.3 is a massive update with a lot of new content and features, and as such we don't have a release date yet. As usual, it'll be done when it's done.

Fun fact: It's been just over a year since 1.3 Beta 1 released!

---

A new team enters the AGL!

If you have the soundtrack, a new song for the team was released. You can also stream it here: https://soundcloud.com/vonsnake/vonsnake-mako


MAKO, short for Maceno Anti-Gravity Kinetics Optimization, is a research firm founded in 2150 after its trillionaire founder, Manu Kanaloa, had developed an obsession with AG technology after the sports first race in 2144. Manu is extensively involved with the Manmade Landmass Project and numerous undersea mining operations across the pacific. The most notable of these ventures is Therma Fumos, the mineral mining project and geothermal powerplant situated off the shore of Maceno Island.

The company develops technology for the AGL, with its flagship contribution being the magnetic lock system integrated into the AGLs more recent circuits.

The MAKO SRK is an agile but sturdy ship inspired by the Mako shark. It isn't impressive in a straight line, but its smooth handling and robust combat systems make it a solid choice for those who want a nimble craft that does well in a firefight.




Freyr Falls is the fourth Maceno Island track. Situated along one of the Islands major rivers, this track tests pilots pitching abilities with numerous bumpy offroad sections and a steep incline above the upper river.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsMOj0z7k-8






The fith Maceno Island track currently in development. This dark cave track provides lots of smooth corners to coast through with the occasional break into the open. Sitting half way up Maceno's dormant volcano, this track boasts an expansive overview of the island with its prestine jungle vista.





We've updated the UI panel that shows a campaign events details. A common problem we've seen over the years is that the icons we used for certain settings didn't clearly communicate what they were for. People would eventually figure them out, but it's not immediately obvious what they were representing.

The new design takes inspiration from our multiplayer menu, where we show a list of every setting available and its value. The additional information we now display should also make it easier to understand how the event will play out when you start it.

The day has finally came for us to announce the most intense, the fastest, and the most graphically impressive racing game ever made in the history of video games.

Today we're unveiling and releasing a pre-release beta for our next game, BallisticHD. The final release will be available April 10th and will be in it's own engine, but for this pre-release we've made it a preview inside of BallisticNG as to not give hackers any way of reverse engineering our cutting edge developments ahead of time.

This demo is so advanced and next-gen that you'll need to be on the BallisticNG beta branch to play. You can do this by doing the following:

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
  
• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
  
• From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

You can then access this preview by navigating to the BallisticHD Preview track category and picking the Future of AG Racing track.

BallisticHD is the next generation of AG racing, powered by the most cutting edge rendering engine ever conceived to achieve the fastest racing gameplay ever created.

This is the greatest, biggest and most visually impressive the BallisticNG franchise has ever been to date in the history of the racing genre.

For this new game we've reduced visual clutter so you can focus on the track without distraction. The decision was made to use a low-poly solid color aesthetic, and as it turns out, sometimes to make a minimilistic style you must first start off with something much more complex.

For this task we have developed a rendering engine capable of procedural texturing and texture stripping. We start off with material descriptors which describe the exact properties of a surface in the real world, like the physical makeup of concrete for instance. In most cases we use 3d scanning to sample the data we need for these descriptors. This information is then used to generate the relevant texture maps to feed into a PBR rendering pipeline. All of this takes place in the background as the game is running, and helps drastically reduce artist development time by up to 1000x. The system is completely dynamic and re-generates the textures every frame so we can modify their properties, which has allowed us to implement never before seen environment destruction technologies.

Now that we have all of this information, we discard it all so we can simply sample the base albedo color of the material, enabling us to achieve beautifully smooth surfaces never before seen in video game rendering history. We call this next generation technology Subtractive Minimalism™.



Remember how we mentioned you sometimes need to start with something much more complex to achieve a minimilistic style? This is also true with our geometry. We understand that gamers continue to demand more and more fidelity out of their experiences, so we have developed a rendering technique that lets us take meshes you'd typically see in movie VFX production and render them in realtime with no more overhead then a current generation mesh. We're pushing 100 trillion triangles per frame, and the results are simply stunning:



BallisticHD is the fastest racing game ever made. Are you up to the challenge to become the fastest racer in the universe?

We aimed to streamline the BallisticNG experience and have spent years improving upon the formula. BallisticHD no longer features weapons or pitlanes. These features add unnecessary complexity to the gameplay which confuse players not acquainted with combat racers and conflict with our new core focus.

BallisticHD is an e-sports ready title. We have stripped all gamemodes but Time Trial from the game, now enforce a single ship and have removed speed pads, as these create a skill gap between players who have and haven't mastered a particular ships handling and its racing lines. The game is built around BalliisticNG's floor hugger physics, enforcing strict racing lines to further close the skill gap for fair, balanced races while also enabling brand new track designs never before seen in the history of racing video games.

We believe that BallisticHD will take the centre stage of e-sports, and with the support of its dedicated fanbase we will continue to provide the most epic moments and wholesome victory finishes captured in competitive video game history.

Racing Seasons
BallisticHD will launch with a single track and we're adding even more through exciting racing seasons which contain skill pushing challenges to further you as a pilot! Unlock shiny new ship liveries and complete your track scenery collection by converting your hard earned Race Points into NG Coins and spending them in the Ballistic Store, or by purchasing NG Coin packs directly to fast track your way to the elite ranks.

NG coins can be melted down into scrap gold and then later pressed into chassis credits, enabling the purchases of chassis part crates to obtain never before seen in the history of racing video games ship chassis designs. We've designed an intricate surprise system powered by the next generation of neural network AI technology to know exactly when to award you with rare and legendary chassis, based on your continued participation in the racing season.

We care deeply about ownership of the content you've purchased, and this is why we use NFTs to handle your game items so you truly own your digital purchases, even if the servers go down. This revolutionary approach to seasonal content provides you, the player, with unprecedented never before seen in the history of every video game ever made methods to economically brag about your play time to your friends and the sprawling BallisticHD community.

Racing Seasons will run for 2 months at a time with new free content dropping over the course of each one. Fill your afterburner gauge over the course of each season to unlock additional content and small offerings of Race Points to put behind your Ballistic Store investments. Our long term plan is to run a total of 60 seasons over the course of 10 years, and that's our promise!

Records will be offline only at launch, Online leaderboards and multiplayer lap boards will be available after Season One has begun.

Only the Zen speed class is available at launch to celebrate BallisticHD being the fastest racing game ever made. More speed classes will be coming as the seasons progress.

A constant internet connection is required to play.

The year is 5000. Aliens have descended on earth, taken over world governments and destroyed our infrastructure to severely cripple our ability to progress any further. Enslaved, we must now race to prove ourselves and reclaim our freedom.

Throughout the epic racing seasons we will see humanity rebuild as it continues to prove its worth and replace our infrastructure, with you and your racing squad at the helm to rebuild it. This is all possible thanks to our new innovative approach to lore mechanics which revolutionizes immersive racing experiences, combining co-op and surprise mechanics into a next generation dynamic experience which allows you and up to 3 friends to individually purchase scenery pieces and chassis designs at 5% off as you restore society to its former glory.

We're very excited to have unveiled our new game to you, and we look forward to seeing you on the track. Stay floating, pilots.

1.3 Beta 7 is now available! This is going to be our last beta build for a while. A lot of work now is content related, so we're going to get cracking on that and drop it all with the final 1.3 release. Stay tuned for content teasers!

Joining the beta

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
  
• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
  
• From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

What is the beta?
For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.

Unity Tools Notice
While these beta builds ship with Unity 2020.3.5 ready builds of the Unity Tools, they are intended for our internal testing group only. If you want to import the Unity Tools, please make sure you're using Unity 2018.3.8 and import them from the public branch running version 1.2.5 of the game.

Mods built with the 1.3 Beta Unity Tools are not compatible with previous versions of the game and documentation will not be available until the final release of 1.3.


Forgotten Coast is a small vehicle track weaving through a mangrove swamp in New Caledonia, made by Brobama. The entire track is off-road, with most of it having you flying over the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do2_lTH4iz8




Maria Tide is set in Port Maria, Jamaica and is mostly off-road, with a small asphalt start grid going through the locations town.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJn3O-wDoSg




To complete the Aster LB221, BallisticNG now supports animated characters! This feature will be available to custom ships for the final 1.3 release.

This is making use of Unity's state machine system, meaning mods will get a whole lot of control using a node graph to drive their animations.



The Model B and Model C has been flattened down into a single ship with liveries. Not only does this allow custom liveries, but we can now add more internal liveries too!

With the drag and drift categories now only having a single ship, we can potentially look at adding more drag and drift ships in the future and really start fleshing out the content for these modes.

We've also reduced how much the Model B bounces, meaning much less micro-pitching will be required to keep it vertically stable.

These changes also mean the leaderboards are no longer populated with different names for each Model B/C livery, and will now show up as just Barracuda Model B and Barracuda Model C

To celebrate the change, we've added the very original Model B livery to the ship! If you've been playing since the early access days, you might remember this as the original survival ship ;)



5 new ships have been added! These are fun extras which are unlocked using the new nanomachines and spacerace cheats, which are typed on the menu. You can also now type funallowed for the game to remember any ships you have unlocked via a cheat.








Tracks

• Added Forgotten Coast
  
• Added Maria Tide
  
• Restored the world hologram on Omega Harbour

Engine

• Implemented support for animated ship characters which can respond to steering, pitching, speed and engine power. This will be available to mods in a future Unity Tools update.

Multiplayer

• Steer and pitch inputs are now sent to apply character animations. With a full 16 player lobby, this adds an additional 960 bytes per second to the required bandwidth.

Commands

• Added debug_logcheats to print all typed cheats and a description of what they do into the console.

Cheats

• Added nanomachines cheat. This unlocks the Scorplet, Omnicom CD-AG32 and M-Tech RD-1
  
• Added spacerace cheat. THis unlocks the Barracuda MT Mini and Wyvern SCC Ares Mk I
  
• Added funallowed cheat. When activated, the state of ship unlocking cheats will be remrembered across game session. Typing again will disable it.

User Interface

• The name of cheats typed on the menu is now briefly displayed for visual feedback

Ships

• Added Aster LB221 livery template PSD and XCF
  
• The Model B and C ships have been merged into a single ship with liveries. Custom liveries will now work for these.
  
• The original Survival Model B livery is now available (named Stealth)
  
• Decreased Model B hover rot power from 25 to 20
  
• Aster LB221 now has pilot animations
  
• Moved Aster LB221s camera slightly closer
  
• Increased Aster LB221s hover damping from 4 to 5.5
  
• Decreased Aster LB221s camera sensitivity from 1 to 0.85

Stats

• Usage stats for the Aster LB221, Barracuda Model B and Barracuda Model C are now tracked.

1.3 Beta 6 is now available! We took a month off over Christmas to refresh and come back with a strong start to the year. We have lots of new modding features and content for you!

Note: We have made major refactoring changes to the game's code base. What we've done shouldn't affect game stability, but code mods will now be broken. See the Codebase Refactored section below for more details.

Joining the beta

• Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
  
• Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
  
• From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

What is the beta?
For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.

Unity Tools Notice
While these beta builds ship with Unity 2020.3.5 ready builds of the Unity Tools, they are intended for our internal testing group only. If you want to import the Unity Tools, please make sure you're using Unity 2018.3.8 and import them from the public branch running version 1.2.5 of the game.

Mods built with the 1.3 Beta Unity Tools are not compatible with previous versions of the game and documentation will not be available until the final release of 1.3.

We now have a public version of our internal roadmap available for everybody to view!
https://trello.com/b/xf49tYpV/ballisticng-public-roadmap

While subject to change, the gist of what we're working towards is:

• Release 1.3 as a major content and modding tools update for PC with some preliminary and fundemental engine changes for the Switch version
  
• Release Maceno Island shortly after 1.3 drops
  
• Begin work on 1.4, a major overhaul to the game's internals to get it ready for the Switch release.
  
• Once 1.4 has dropped, continue supporting the game with new content in 1.5 and beyond.

As you can see from the roadmap we have a lot of free content still to come for 1.3, so buckle up ;)

The first track from Brobama is here! Alice Mountain is a small vehicles track set at the base of a ski resort in British Columbia and features lots of bumpy offroad track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osV1vCeGxHg







We asked Brobama if there was anything he wanted to add to this betas release announcement, and he had this to say:

"When we were first discussing ideas for the bike tracks, the first thing that came to my mind was motocross racing. Alice Mountain takes inspiration from old Motocross racing games on PS2 and Xbox - which I played a lot of as a kid - most importantly the track Hillsboro from MX: Unleashed, which also had a construction site and gondola line. I tried to incorporate the aesthetic of these old games into BNG’s engine, while also staying close to the guidelines given to me by Vonsnake, which resulted in a hybrid between the “standard” bike track style of Ribble Raceway and a bumpy dirt section. This track also has a few sections where the normal road surface gives way to bare rock, which I just did because it looks cool. It’s taken me a long time to complete, but after Vonsnake personally flew to America to physically assault me for not working fast enough, I’ve finally been able to become the first mod-track creator to have a track added to the game officially. also i was the president"

Omega Harbour has had a much needed facelift to bring up to standard with the game's most recent content. The layout has stayed the same, with the only change being the outer wall on the spiral no longer has a gap in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyYUmoi3Tro







When we updated the Model B tracks last year we forgot to enable Eliminator and Team Race on them, since they now have weapon pads, so here's that change!

We've also enabled Survival on the expert tracks. As a side note, Arrivon Peak has had a few scenery tweaks ;)



We've adjusted the balancing of the campaign time trials by updating the bronze and silver requirements to be much more sane for new players.

Previously the times were split by fixed amounts off the gold medal on each event. This worked fine for the shorter tracks, but for longer tracks like Omega Harbour it was a major problem as the game suddenly started demanding a lot more because of the endurance required to reach even a bronze.

The new way we've calculated these times is by taking the gold medal time and adding a percentage of a single laps completion time to it. For bronze this is 50%, silver is 25%. This results in times that scale nicely across the board, and overall the silver and bronze medals are more forgiving then before.

Working on custom liveries? We've got just the thing for you! The ship viewer is a new in-game tool for loading up and looking at any ship in the game, both vanilla and mods.

Using this you can view ships from any angle with varying intensities of light. You can also toggle the different texture maps on and off to see how everything looks individually or all together.



One of our larger requested features over the years has now been implemented! When playing in custom race you now have options to set which ship and livery each AI will use. This supports all ships loaded into the game, both vanilla and custom.

Once you have a roster of AI ships you like, you can save them as a preset to recall at any time. This will save an ini file to User -> Config -> Ini -> Ai Presets so you can share your AI setups with others!

When you have less then 16 ships selected the UI will grey out the ships that won't be used by AI. You can still interact with these buttons however, it's just to signify that the AI isn't using them.



Sever hosts can now save all of the lobby settings as a preset, using the same system as the new custom AI rosters.

The game now has realtime sun rays! These were added to spice up Maceno Interchange, but we've gone back through a couple of tracks to add them there too. These are applied specifically on a per-track basis where they make sense and are designed to be a subtle addition instead of a glaring extra. You can of course turn them off, and they'll be off by default on the games first startup if you select the retro or low modern presets.

Options for sun rays will be coming to custom tracks in the future for the final 1.3 release. We also have an in-game sun ray editor, which you can access from the debug hub (F9 key)

Tracks that have sun rays are:

• Cassandra
  
• Zephyr Climb
  
• Marina Rush
  
• Zephyr Ridge Reverse
  
• Nova Split Reverse
  
• Alantica Reverse
  
• Nova Park
  
• Vega Square Reverse
  
• Route 05 Reverse
  
• Maceno Interchange (Upcoming in Maceno Island)
  
• Alice Mountain Reverse

The track chase camera has gone through a major rewrite to reimplement all of the behaviours in a much more mathematically pleasing way. You'll find the camera feels a lot smoother, more responsive and most importantly, much closer to our source material ;)

Of course you can also continue using the old track chase camera if you want. We've added an option for that. The camera will also be sat a bit further back in the new camera and there is an option to reposition it approximately to where it would be with the old camera if you want to keep it consistent.

Finally we've also got new behaviours for when you're using the new camera in 2280 mode, floor hugger, on a magnetic tile or no tilt lock section. The cameras pitch will no longer be based on the ships orientation to the worlds up direction and instead offset itself based on the ships pitch delta, making it much more manageable when tracks get a bit more crazy then usual.

Code mods can now create their own option menus! Once programmed, players can access your mod options from the new Game -> Mods options menu, where they can select a menu that you've added and configure settings to their liking.

Check out an example here.

Working on a custom gamemodes that needs to display something other then what the vanilla game does? We've got you covered with a new results screen API!

While still a work in progress, this API gives you access to both the meat of the layout building backend and general purpose macro helpers, such as a table builder, to quickly code out a results screen that displays exactly what you need.

Full documentation is not yet available, however you can check out an example here.

There's been some updates to our Blender addons and standalone tilemap builder tool.

First things first, we've moved the tools over to Github:
https://github.com/bigsnake09/Neognosis-Workflow-Tools

The url shortcut included with the game now also points to this repository. Having everything sat here puts it in a public place where anybody can benefit from our tools, even for non BallisticNG use!

Changelog

Blender NeoModeling plugin

• Added Rip Edges to NURBS curve operator
  
• Added Setup Curve Array operator
  
• Added Setup Normal Auto Smooth operator

Tilemap Builder General

• Improved the layout of the new project window
  
• Updated UI design so it's no longer using the default ImGUI colors
  
• Fixed windows not being resizable from their edges

UV Rect Mode:

• Fixed the export button for texture previews only working on the first texture in the list

Atlas Creation Mode:

• Added tooltips to more UI elements
  
• Added button to import multiple diffuse textures. This will also automatically detect illum and reflection maps based on _i and _r prefixes in the file name.
  
• Added per texture button to automatically load illum and reflection maps. Like above, this is based on _i and _r prefixes in the file name.
  
• Added sync sets option. When enabled any changes to a single texture set will reflect across all sets.
  
• Added file repathing options. This lets you select a folder and the tool will scan the root and all sub-directories for the texture file.
  
• Added tooltips that show texture map file paths when hovering over the texture map title in the texture manager
  
• The texture atlas is now only rebuilt when the mouse cursor is moved
  
• Fixed alpha blending of textures

To begin preparing for 1.4, which is where we'll be getting into the meat and potatoes of Switch development, we've refactored the game's codebase so it's easier to start making the changes we need later on.

If you're just playing the game this doesn't mean much, however this change will break code mods. Most of the work we've done for this is just moving, renaming and consolidating some duplicate code, so upgrading code mods to the new code base shouldn't be too difficult.

A lot of the changes made take code mods into consideration, making sure that everything is now organised in a more logical manner that's easier for modders to search through and figure out what's happening and where.

We have a work in progress upgrade document that you can refer to here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c5CXNsjHFzTRJCPeRlr--OHBkCyFCNizPjkK1f8IEDo/edit?usp=sharing

Campaign

• Rebalanced all time trials (DLC included) so the silver and bronze requirements are quarter and half of a single lap lower then the gold

Tracks

• Added Alice Mountain
  
• Reworked Omega Harbour

Music

• Added Vonsnake - Twilight
  
• Added Xpand - Bay Sound. A vocal mix is also included in the soundtrack DLC
  
• Added Shiftdelete - Shockwave

Modding

• Added Ship Viewer to provide an environment for custom livery development
  
• Fixed code mods not loading from the external txt file

Gamemodes

• Increased the upsurge shield time from 1.5 seconds to 3 seconds
  
• Eliminator can now be played on the Model B tracks
  
• Team Race is now playable on the Model B tracks
  
• Survival is now playtable on the expert tracks

Engine

• Major code refactoring
  
• Unified game initialization into a single set of tasks. This will change where the ingame console opens to show errors with things like code mods.
  
• Updated to Steam Audio 2.0.20, fixing continuously degrading performance when spatial audio is enabled.
  
• JSON data for light flares is now always read and written with an invariant culture rule
  
• Fixed custom livery resources not being purged when refreshing the available custom liveries
  
• Fixed soft locks in specific scenarios when speed pads are being disabled
  
• FIxed virtual scenery track illuminations not displaying in 2280
  
• Removed the final bits of the legacy ship importer (.ship and .shp files are still read)

Commands

• Removed the debug_refreshliveries command. This functionality has been moved to the debug hub, under the Content Explorer

Debug Hub

• Added log event/ship packet options to logger
  
• Added sun ray editor
  
• Added loaded CSF bundle list into Content Explorer
  
• Resource references for UGC liveries can not be shown in the Content Explorer
  
• Fixed windows that were closed still being written to disk as being opened

User Interface

• Added Game -> Mods options menu, allowing code mods to add their own options to the game.
  
• Added custom AI roster options to custom race
  
• Moved the VR controls notice to the top of the introduction interface
  
• The selection highlight color now applies to the titles of selectors and slider
  
• All content is now selectable in the campaign editor, even if it's locked
  
• Fixed the mouse cursor still contributing to highlighting UI elements after it's been hidden
  
• FIxed elements loosing their highlight if the mouse cursor leaves it while it's selected

Mac/Linux

• Fixed issues when using Discord Rich presense.

Options

• Added shield display mode option (percentage and absolute)
  
• Added track introduction style option (Track Overview, Start Grid Pan or None)
  
• Added option for sun rays post processing effect
  
• Added options to toggle the old track chase camera behaviour and approximate the old track chase camera distance in the new camera.

Multiplayer

• Added lobby preset options to the lobby host settings
  
• Added option to set whether IP hosted servers will attempt to use UPNP or not
  
• The available weapons handshake is now split into separate packets when the list of weapons is large enough
  
• Optimized the creation of peer ship tick packets
  
• Fixed the back button in the lobby settings menu not returning when clicked
  
• Fixed the server forcing the Aster LB221 when switching to a small vehicles track

Physics

• Forced grounding has been changed so the maximum height is now the minimum threshold for applying the downwards force, instead of the trigger threshold for throwing the ship at the ground.

Camera

• Track chase camera rewritten from scratch to improve its feel. The new camera sits a bit further away from the ship due to changes in how the position is calculate.
  
  An approximation of the old distance can still be used with the Use Legacy Distance setting in options.
  The old camera can also be used using the legacy track chase option.

Joining the beta
Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam

What is the beta?
For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.

Unity Tools Notice
While these beta builds ship with Unity 2020.3.5 ready builds of the Unity Tools, they are intended for our internal testing group only. If you want to import the Unity Tools, please make sure you're using Unity 2018.3.8 and import them from the public branch running version 1.2.5 of the game.

Mods built with the 1.3 Beta Unity Tools are not compatible with previous versions of the game and documentation will not be available until the final release of 1.3.

A livery template for the C.Y.G.O.N tempest is now available. Our friends at Caged Element have given us the all clear, so it's now included!

You'll find the template PSD alongside all of the others in the modding folder. If you're new to custom liveries, you can check out our documentation which covers how they work here.

Here's a livery that community member Vista has already made!



For those of you who have been with us for a while now, carving is back.
The Aster LB221 is a fully realized version of the original cheat, coming back with its own category of tracks!

The bike has a livery for all of the main teams and can be used to set leaderboard times. If you'd like to race other bikes on normal tracks, type carving on the menu to force the AI to also use the Aster with you ;)

To select the bike you'll want to move up to the new Small Vehicles category on the turntable interface.





Small Vehicle tracks are a new type of track which are designed for smaller vehicles, namely the Aster LB221 at the moment.

Currently we have plans for 8 of these tracks, and to help make them are community members Kabelsalat and Brobama!

Small vehicle tracks have lower top speeds but the tracks themselves are much smaller. We're allowing any ship to be raced on them, but ideally you'll want to use the Aster. They're 30% slower then the normal game, so if you want to race them at normal speeds you can use hyper speed to counter the speed reduction.

In the future, custom tracks will be able to be setup as small vehicle tracks. We'll have template layout creator and blender files alongside the final 1.3 release for this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXKQVv4kkv4





Arrivon XI has had a major update. We've made improvements to the pitlane entrances and gave the scenery a fresh coat of paint to bring it up to spec with other tracks. We'll be giving Omega Harbour the same treatment next!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS7-QwnD7LQ





Note: this change adds more events to the campaign. Your campaign rank will drop as a result of this.

The base game campaign has been updated to better space out events, add new events for post-release gamemodes and make tweaks to existing events to make it more fun.

Ascension and Decension have also seen a major update so they introduce and use all of the game's reverse tracks.

The Barracuda events have also been restructured so they're not such a grind, now with only 4 time trial events and the tournament only covering a handful of tracks. The Model B tournaments have also been split out into individual races, with two tournaments at the end to challenge your consistency across the forward and reverse versions of the tracks.

All campaigns have also been updated so you now only need 4 points to unlock the next set of events instead of 6. This means you'll need 2 silvers, a bronze and a gold or a single platinum to progress to the next set of events.

Unlock requirements for DLC liveries have also been reduced to 50% overall completion of the DLCs campaign.

Layout Creator 2 has had a major update, bringing it to version 14. Some of these are previews of features you can expect out of Layout Creator 3! Refer to the in-game hotkey reference window for more information.

• Added tangent rotation snapping. Defaults to 15 degrees and is enabled alongside grid snapping.
  
• Added option to set the track refresh poll rate. Now defaults to 60fps thanks to some major optimizations
  
• Added orthographic camera modes. Refer to hotkey reference
  
• Added node scaling tool, bound to the S key.
  
• Added node orbit tool, bound to the R key.
  
• Added a ship speed option
  
• Implemented a new junction connection smoothing algorithm that deals with geometry much better. The old one can be turned back on in the route editor and will still be used by default when opening files created in V13 or lower.
  
• Added options to copy shape data when appending a new node and interpolate when inserting. Both are enabled by default.
  
• Insert Segment hotkey moved to I key
  
• Move reference image hotkey moved to W key
  
• Grid snapping now defaults to 2 units
  
• Grid and rotation snapping can now be set using a text input field at the top of the editor
  
• Track mesh generation now takes place over three separate passes, fixing numerous issues caused by the original single pass
  
• Improved handling of section transforms near the end of a closed route
  
• The editor no longer responds to play mode toggle inputs until the ship has been spawned
  
• Using the move to cursor tool now supports multiple nodes
  
• The default camera speed is now faster
  
• Fixed an issue where routes with a single note would create connections to sections near the world origin
  
• Fixed input fields not being deslected when ending an edit
  
• Fixed a slow memory leak caused by materials not being purged from memory after exiting play mode

We've added custom color palette support for virtual scenery! For more information, check out our reference sheet below. Once you have a palette, you can enable it in the Game -> General menu.

We've included the game's built in palettes with this release. You can find them in the Modding -> Palette Templates folder where the game's installed.



There's been some minor tweaks to Upsurge to make it more enjoyable, and a major backend change has enabled something new.

• Added obtainable target message and notice sound
  
• Ships no longer lose zones after being eliminated
  
• The shield fill bar now correctly correlates to the shield refill percentage

And the big one:
Upsurge now uses the same dynamic environment colors that Survival does, including when playing in splitscreen!

https://youtu.be/cg3tqvhXMc4

Collisions have seen some major improvements for the first time since pre-1.0 builds of the game. Scraping the backend of the ship against walls is now smooth and in tracks making use of scenery walls, ships will no longer clip through them.

The math that keeps the ship from sliding up sloped walls has also been reworked, fixing issues where ships would stick at the height they were at when entering the collision and even slam into the floor on hills because of it.

The invisible track boundary collisions now also correctly catch airbrake velocity and stop the ship from flying away from the track when above the wall with improved stability.

The complete changelog between Beta 4 and 5 is a chonker so we'll be saving all of the nitty griitty details until the final 1.3 release. But here's some more cool stuff:

Accessibility

• Added an option to disable the Ai player stat sharing. Disable this option and Ai ships will always use the actual top speed of their selected ship. This does not affect campaign progression.
  
  This option will now always be off for AI in multiplayer lobbies.

Campaign

• Implemented support for the event description field. The ingame campaign editor has been updated to support this too.

Custom Race

• Barrel rolls and sideshifts can now be turned on in 2159 and floor hugger physics. Barrel rolls have also had some major improvements that apply to all three physics modes.

Multiplayer

• The lobby settings menu has been redesigned and is now generated on the fly, making it easier for us to add more stuff to it ;)
  
• Implemented bot count option
  
• Implemented barrel roll and sideshift options
  
• Clients are now restricted to the hosts installed weapons. (for custom weapons)

User Interface

• Fixed formatting issues with campaign editor UI elements
  
• Improved the formatting of text on the stats menu

Engine

• Implemented error handling for Survival music visualization. If there's a problem the game will now continue going without music effects instead of softlocking.
  
• Fixed total races with X ship stats not tracking properly
  
• Fixed ships not rendering for player 2 in splitscreen

Assets

• The 3d track pads have updated textures with bloom baked into them for a better look
  
• 3d weapon pads now pulsate their color between pink/yellow like their tile brethren, instead of being a fixed red

Tracks

• Removed the slalom on Luijazui Parks cave exit