Mar 11

iRacing - OverdriveAlex

2025 Season 2 Release [2024.03.10.03]

The iRacing 2025 Season 2 Release Build has rolled up to the starting line! This release has new content, features, improvements, and fixes for 2025 Season 2, which officially starts on March 18th at 0000 UTC! The iRacing vehicle garage expands with three new bays for three brand new ARCA Series racecars: ARCA Chevrolet SS, ARCA Ford Mustang, and ARCA Toyota Camry. The Legends Ford '34 Coupe has received a stem-to-stern performance and physics overhaul, with a few art updates and all-new audio for good measure. The iRacing landscape also grows with the addition of Portland International Raceway. The Track Art Team has also completed multiple full art overhauls of SEVEN classic NASCAR tracks including: Bristol Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway, Dover Motor Speedway, Homestead Miami Speedway, Iowa Speedway, Kansas Speedway, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

We are excited to launch the Official Series Redesign, which transforms the way you can browse, learn about, and join Official Series within iRacing - the new full-page layout provides more space and more info than ever before. A new Connectivity Black Flag system has been implemented, which will place participants with connections that are detrimental to others in a type of time-out until their connection quality reaches a satisfactory level. The track debris refresh system has been expanded with the addition of informative local course debris caution flags. The new Adaptive AI Difficulty system is almost ready to debut with this initial release, but we have decided it needs a bit more time in the oven to get extra crispy. With this system, AI Drivers' racing skill will automatically adjust during the event based on the driver's lap times to keep the racing exciting. This feature will be released during a 2025 Season 2 Patch.

Our vehicle engineers have completed work on updates to the GTP Class Cars and the LMP2 tires, providing substantial improvements to the changes from 2025 Season 1, ultimately resulting in greater realism. The Ray FF1600 has received an improved suspension geometry model, which improves accuracy across all four contact points and will be the pioneer for changes to other vehicles to come. Six additional tracks have been updated with the 3D modeled curb system (with more coming soon), making the racing experiences there more real-to-life than ever. The entire iRacing Simulator has also received significant lighting updates that transform the appearance of cars and tracks.

The Legends Ford '34 Coupe has been updated to be water-ready and may now equip rain tires. The updates to this car have been so substantial this season that the Legends Ford '34 Coupe - Rookie car is being retired. AI Drivers have received updates for a variety of rain racing tracks and have adapted to the updated NASCAR tracks that now feature SAFER barriers. The Dallara iR-01 and seven new track configs, including Portland International Raceway, are AI-racing ready. Finally, our vehicle dynamics team has recalibrated hundreds of vehicle setups to take advantage of the gamut of changes to all cars included in this release. Get ready to jump into all that the 2025 Season 2 has to offer!

Season highlights include:

ARCA Chevrolet SS
ARCA Ford Mustang
ARCA Toyota Camry
Legends Ford '34 Coupe vehicle overhaul
Portland International Raceway
SEVEN NASCAR Track Art Overhauls (Bristol Motor Speedway, Darlington Raceway, Dover Motor Speedway, Homestead Miami Speedway, Iowa Speedway, Kansas Speedway, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway)
SIX Tracks with New 3D Curbs (Circuito de Jerez - Ángel Nieto, Kansas Speedway, MotorLand Aragón, Rudskogen Motorsenter, Sandown International Motor Raceway, and Winton Motor Raceway, with more coming soon.)
Official Series Redesign
Connection Black Flag
Local Course Debris Cautions
Universal Lighting Updates
GTP and LMP2 Tire Updates
Ray FF1600 4-Bar-Linkage Suspension Model
The Legends Ford '34 Coupe is Rain-Ready!
AI Racing with the Dallara iR-01
AI Racing at Portland International Raceway (both configs), Daytona International Speedway - NASCAR Road Course, Moto, & Short, and Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course - Chicane & Short
Hundreds of meticulously improved new iRacing vehicle setups

Visit our 2025 Season 2 features page here: https://www.iracing.com/seasons/2025-s2/

Full 2025 Season 2 Release Notes can be found on the iRacing Forums here:
https://forums.iracing.com/discussion/75906/2025-season-2-release-notes-2024-03-10-03#latest

Mar 11

Dev Update #4

Rebel Duet - ionDivvy

The next major update (v0.12) is now approximately 30-35% complete! You can expect to play v0.12 sometime in April.

I've decided to adjust the order of some events for the next few updates. Previously, I planned for the flashback of the protagonist's past to be the main focus of v0.12, but I felt this would be a better fit for later in Act 3. Instead, the next two updates will continue to focus on the romance, adult content, and vampire storyline— much like v0.11.

Your cute elf friend - Annestria - will come to visit again in this update. This time, however, you and Ann will be alone at home.

Now that your relationship with her has taken a romantic turn, you'll have the choice to make love to Ann in your bedroom. Of course, if you'd prefer to save this special moment for later on (or otherwise wish to just stay friends), you can hold back in this scene and pursue her at a later time.

Ann's sister, Ellania, has fully recovered and will now start appearing more frequently in the story.

I've decided to give Ellania shorter hair to help distinguish her from Ann. Though she isn't a main heroine like Ann, there will be a few sex scenes with her later in the story, including some threesome fun with the two elven sisters.

Meanwhile, the vampire threat in Rothagen is brewing in the shadows, and the player will set out to cautiously investigate their encounter with the monster. Be careful, though, because investigating too deeply at this stage could have deadly consequences.
_

The v0.11b patch, which includes new training scenes and minor improvements, will now be combined with the v0.12 release. This is mainly due to some personal events which made releasing a smaller patch a bit tricky. My apologies for the slight change in plans.

Thank you for reading this dev update, and for supporting Rebel Duet! The next dev update will be posted in 2-3 weeks. I hope you look forward to it.

Mar 11

New Player Body: Movement, Hands, Leaning. Updated Slow Motion Jump.

HARD BULLET - JukSteelfly

Hey everyone, we are back with another new update! We have successfully completed the Public Beta stage for this one - so thank you so much for all the feedback!

Without further ado, let's jump into the details!

Updated Player Body

🖐Hand Drift Eliminated

We’ve finally eliminated the annoying hand-drifting issue that used to happen whenever players changed movement direction. It might even mess with aiming and shooting.

The new Player Body is much more stable, and we’ve added a few extra tweaks to improve overall hand movement for a smoother experience.

OLD HANDS WITH NOTICABLE MOVEMENT WHEN CHANGING DIRECTION:

NEW STEADY HANDS:

Leaning and Peeking

New Body, New Possibilities! You can now lean over objects and peek around corners in arenas! This not only adds more strategic depth but also makes interactions with objects feel smoother and more intuitive.

📝How It Works:

Leaning happens naturally as you move in your real-world space.
Your in-game body adjusts to your head position only after you press the Movement Stick.

You can disable Body Leaning in Player Settings.

Movement Overhaul

We've reworked how the player moves through arenas by adding acceleration and even some body drifting, making movements feel heavier and more realistic.

This change brings a more natural flow to navigation, enhancing both immersion and control!

Slow Motion Jump

Reworked slow motion during jumps to make it more cinematic and give you extra time to admire your shots. Long press Jump to rise into the air and put the world into even more slowed-down state, letting you unleash deadly shots and watch enemies fall in full detail.

Added a time limit for this powerful jump — extra slow motion during jump now lasts for 3.5 seconds or until you land.

You can disable Slow Motion Jump in Player Settings.

Main Menu Access

New Main Menu access method with no need to use controller’s Menu Button. Now you can hold the Eject Magazine button a bit longer to open the Main Menu. To close it, just tap Eject Mag again.

🔹 Why this change?

Prevents accidental menu openings during fast dual-wield reloads.
Different controllers and Streaming Apps may use the default Menu button.
No need to press both buttons anymore — just any Eject Mag button will do.

Good speed, killers! 🔥💀

Other Bugfixes & Improvements

Optimized Performance – Bullets and explosives now use raycasting for better efficiency.
Snake Charmer — Limb Kill achivement fixed.
Enemy Spawning Fix – Resolved remaining issues that could prevent enemies from spawning during RIDE.
Black Suit Bug Fix – Fixed a problem where switching between Full-Body and Hands-Only mode could cause hand models to disappear.

Small Update from March 14th

Menu Call UI Adjustments – The Menu Call Circle no longer appears during regular magazine ejections. It will now show after a brief delay, with the same appearance time as before.
Explosives Fix – The Big Oil Barrel now properly deals damage to enemies. 💥
Tip added – Added SlowMo Jump information to Player Settings.

Current game version: EA 0.7.8.12

Public Beta Ended

Thank you all for your support! We have been digging into your feedback and we must say they were all really helpful and we really appreciate it! You guys are the best. <3

And that's all for now folks! We'll see you on the next one, let's end this patch notes with something relatable. 😅

Also HARD BULLET is currently 20% OFF for Steam Spring Sale - let your friends know about it!
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1294760/view/499441143215294345?l=english

Check out our Socials and have a chat with us!
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1294760/HARD_BULLET/

Mar 11

2025.3.11.1347 - Gaussian Splat VRAM compression & performance boost

Resonite - Frooxius

Hello everyone!

I've got another chunk of Gaussian Splats support work for you, significantly improving their performance! Resonite and the asset variant system now supports generating VRAM compressed variants - these use significantly less VRAM (up to 18.62x times less), load faster (the files are smaller) and render faster too (less memory bandwidth usage on the GPU).

This also means that you can now import bigger splats than before without them killing your VRAM and performance as a result. My own 3 million splats render quite noticeably faster with this and make my computer die less.

And the best part, it all fits into our asset variant system - you don't need to do anything extra! Any already uploaded gaussian splats benefit from this automatically as well as any new ones you upload - our system will generate the variants as needed.

You can select the quality of splats (and how much VRAM they use) in settings - the system should pick a good value based on your VRAM amount by default though, so most of the time you might not need to change anything at all.

There's some other extras! Because some of the compression variants use k-Means Clustering algorithm, I've also adapted it as a texture processing method! You can paletize/stylize your textures with a new processing option as a small bonus!

There's also some privacy oriented features - you can now selectively disable/allow platform interfaces like Discord/Steam thanks to @probableprime's work.

New Features:

- Added support for VRAM compression for gaussian splats to improve their performance
-- This is a lossy compression that reduces the size of the gaussian splats in the VRAM (as well for download)
-- This also significantly improves rendering performance at lower quality levels due to less GPU bandwidth usage
-- Quality levels are: Very High (uncompressed), High (2.94x smaller), Medium (5.14x smaller), Low (14x smaller), VeryLow (18.62x smaller)
-- You can set your quality level in the Graphics settings
-- Default is automatically determined by amount of available VRAM in your system
- Added "Minimum locally compressed quality" setting
-- For locally imported splats, the quality will never go lower than this setting
-- This is due to the very low qualities being very heavy and time consuming to compress and they should only be compressed in the cloud
-- The VRAM compression implementation is a port based on this project: <https://github.com/aras-p/UnityGaussianSplatting>

- Added GaussianSplatAssetMetadata for providing stats for a Gaussian Splat assets (requested by @raidriar796, issue #3871)
-- Those stats are visualized on StaticGaussianSplatProvided in the inspector for currently loaded splat
-- This currently provides: Number of splats, VRAM usage (raw value + formatted) and actual loaded variant

- Added KMeansCluster method for processing textures
-- This will cluster the colors/pixel positions using K-means clustering algorithm.
-- This can be useful for stylizing & creating various effects

- Added `disallowedPlatformInterfaces` and `allowedPlatformInterfaces` to Config.json (requested by ko-tengu, issue #3780, implemented by @probableprime)
-- This allows disabling/allowing platform interfaces by name
-- This can be used to completely disable Steam and Discord related functionality by specifying the value `["Discord", "Steam"]`
-- The disallow list will specifically block particular platform interfaces, but allow all others
-- The allow list will disable all interfaces other than specified ones. Specify `[]` if you want to disable all of them. Specify `null` to allow all of them (other than explicitly disabled ones)

- Provide `universePublicDashOnly` which allows universes that only want to use the default dash layout

Tweaks:

- GaussianSplat Quality Settings is now per-machine
- Rendering Quality Settings are now per machine

- When in a Universe, the Universe's primary group ID is used in the world browser for filtering (implemented by @probableprime )
- When in a Universe, the `appName` in locale strings now uses the universe name (implemented by @probableprime)
- Added filter preset name to buttons' slot name within the filter facet (implemented by @probableprime)

- Renamed GlowingSphereToggle to LegacyGlowingSphereToggle (based on report by @dustysprinkles, brecert, issue #3886)

Locale:

- Merged French locale update by @j4.lc
- Merged Chinese locale update by modimobeikete
- Merged German locale update by @muppeq
- Merged English locale fixes by @muppeq
- Merged Japanese locale update by @.aesc

Fixes:

- Fixed SPZ gaussian splat imports being inverted on the X axis (reported by @shininghero, @anquietas_sys, @bredo, @dustysprinkles, issue #3872)
- Fixed SPZ files not being decoded fully in some cases (e.g. when running under .NET 9)
- Fixed bug that prevented worlds from being opened when in a universe and not using port restrictions (fixed by @probableprime)
- Fixed deleted user accounts not being removed from groups on wipe (reported by @ardescar, @dantetucker, issue #3867, fixed by @dantetucker)
- Ensure that additional metadata (supporter, entitlements, old username changes) are wiped when accounts are deleted
-- All previously-undeleted data for wiped accounts has now been deleted with the above changes