Turns out I didn't get the leaderboards right on the first try. Dang. The champ boards were storing the points, cars, and wheels from the last track instead of the sum of those from the championship. It was a minor error in the secondary data, but it was worth a patch update sooner than later, especially since the other WIP could take some time to complete.

• Champ boards now store points, cars, and wheel sums from entire championship instead of just the last track.

• The share image now shows the laps total from the championship (because it may not be the max laps possible), and also now changes the text for an endurance race.

Because some weren't "getting" the perhaps-too-humanlike oddball A.I.s built into the game, and/or just thinking the A.I. was not well done because some of them crash around a lot (due to their intentional and varied personalities), I had the idea to use a couple of these personalities to create a couple more "wods" (Wacky Wodifiers/Leader Lamifiers) for the game. Because the needed personalities were already built, it just took maybe only an hour or two to add and test these wods. There was already a speed racer personality for the "Bring it on" racing wod. And there was already a heat seeker personality for the "King of the hill" leader-lynching wod. With a tweak of some of their settings to make them more interesting for their particular wods, and they were good to go. I can always tune them a bit more later if needed.

I must admit, it is sometimes more enjoyable, when playing alone, to race against four racing A.I.s instead of just the one in the default group of A.I.s. Although... they are pretty easy to beat on the tri-oval if you get an early lead and don't crash. They do, however, get more interesting and challenging on more interesting tracks.

• Added the "Bring it on (Racing A.I.)" wacky wodifer. Turns all A.I.s into racecar drivers.
  
• Added the "King of the hill" leader lamifier. Turns all A.I.s into leader lynchers (and, otherwise, overly aggressive drivers).
  
  • If both "Bring it on" and "King of the hill" are turned on, they spit the A.I.s between them.
• Added text to the leaderboard pages that shows which leaderboard you are looking at.

• Minor menu changes and other code changes.

One of the few remaining major basic features has finally been added to the game. Leaderboards! (Yeah.. only local leaderboards... sorry if you were hoping for online global as well. Those will arrive only once enough sales come in to justify the expense.) As you will see once you get into them, adding leaderboards to such a broad game primarily targeted at a variety of party play, was no small task. I could have made a more simple (and rather lame) first attempt... but I'm a data engineer by day and couldn't help myself by doing it right no matter the complexity of it all (just like how I, perhaps over-zealously, tackled the physics, skidmarks, audio, and wacky A.I.).

With leaderboards also comes bonafide co-op play (we hear small cheers in the distance). That is to say, part of the array of leaderboards is a 2-player time-trial leaderboard. It follows basic team-time-trial rules of recording the laps/time of the second player to cross the line, instead of the first player. So, in other words, work together to get both of you across the finish. This is automatically tracked in 2-player games, whether you like it or not; ignore it or not. If you like this feature and want to see it expanded to 3 and 4 players, let us know.

Also, besides Championship and Endurance leaderboards, there are also overall leaderboards for race times and fastest-lap times (regardless of game mode they were set in). Furthermore, the game also tracks what I'm calling "Maximum Mayhem" or not. That is, if you always add a "wod" and never remove one, it knows that and rewards you with a separate leaderboard for it. And, finally, it also keeps separate boards for novice steering (for when I add that feature). Basically, too-many-thousands of records to manage in the database. We'll see if I handled it all correctly on the first try (I did test, but it's a lot to test).

With leaderboards finally done, I can now hopefully get back to filling out the content (tracks and wods) and upping the art, etc.

Oh, yeah, the "Wods" (Wacky Wodifiers) on the leaderboards are still cryptic. Sorry. Not sure when I'll get around to displaying the wods better. So, until then, here's my code that shows what those numbers translate to:
Also note that I cannot guarantee that scores set during "early access" will still be displayed once a final release is made. With tracks still being made and tweaked, it wouldn't be fair to contest scores from one version of a track (or tracks) against another. Some scores might even disappear during early-access development (such as when I make two more tracks and add them to the 8-track champ lineup [which currently runs 8 tracks from 6 in this order: 1,2,3,4,5,6,1,2]). Outdated scores won't be deleted from the database -- it's that I will likely not bother to find a way to display such multiple versions of scores even though I do indeed store them separately. It would be too confusing for the players most likely, and a lot of work for little payoff.

Similarly, note that the demo version of the game uses the same database as the full version, and that demo scores from the "Overall Leaderboards" will indeed cross over. Because, however, the demo's 4-track championship repeats the first two tracks twice, scores from this will not be displayed in the full version's 4-track championship boards (which uses 4 different tracks). If you really want to see those demo scores after moving to the full version, run the demo and they'll still be there in the db.

• Local leaderboards including breakouts for: overall, solo, 2-player team time trial, championship, endurance, max mayhem, race laps, fastest lap, and novice steering.

• Updated Unity from 2017.4.30f1 to 2017.4.40f1.
  
• Updated Rewired from v1.1.39.1 to v1.1.41.5 (which reports as v1.1.39.3 for some reason [likely due to Unity 2017]). No new controller support to report here.
  
• Very, very minor performance improvement along with a bit of game code refactoring.
  
• Various minor menu tweaks along with some menu code refactoring.

These last two releases focus on Steam's feature: Remote Play Together. At first, a long long time ago, that feature seamed to work with GRITS Racing. Then, it didn't work so well. Then, it didn't work at all, except with keyboard input. With some updates from both Steam and Rewired, we finally took a dive back into this. Turns out, the biggest problem was that one of us was running Steam's beta channel. Anyhow, with that corrected and some of these other fixes in place, Remote Play Together seems to be working great. (This, of course, was all on Windows and I suspect the Linux and Mac builds are easier to work out with Steam.) Remote Play Together appears to be limited to 4 players... and we haven't tested this limit yet... or if more can be jacked in locally plus the 3 remotes (depending on controller types and Steam Input settings).

The car is a bit harder to control in low gear with the extra 0.1 to 0.2 seconds of lag with remote play, but the game is otherwise surprisingly playable. This was with Steam's quality set to Auto or Fast. It didn't work so well with higher quality settings.

IMPORTANT: As part of this fix, to update for Steam Controllers and Steam's virtual Steam Input controllers, go into the Controller Settings menu and select the Restore Defaults button. Well, that or map the car's Eject Wheels and Horn actions yourself to the Right and Left Stick Buttons yourself for each remote player connected (and/or for each Steam Input player or Steam Controller connected).

These were quick-fix releases. If all goes as planned with "real work," I hope to get back to working on new features and content soon.

• Rewired wasn't mapping the two stick buttons correctly for the Steam Controller. Fixed internally -- the fix will be sent to the Rewired dev for inclusion in future updates.

• Various menu wording and order changes. No significant new content.

• Updated Rewired from v1.1.29.4 to v1.1.39.1. Most critically, this brings in some Steam virtual controller hotplug fixes. As usual, this also adds support for more controllers.

• Enlarged the spark particle sizes to make the sparks effect more visible. Any larger and it starts to look more like flame than spark.

​It's been quiet here for a few months so I wanted to update everyone on the status of development on GRITS Racing. First, the project is not dead even though I can't say there has been a lot of interest in GRITS. I get it, I haven't given anyone a game worth talking about yet. Rather than trying to compete with all the other games in this genre, I tried finding something new. I own the failures there. There does, however, seem to be a tiny fan base and sales do trickle in. Not enough, however, to pay any bills with. Thus, much of my time lately has been spent looking for work and/or working small contracts. That is also where I'll be for the next few months. Considering that I don't do well in tech interviews and tech quizzes (I'm just not geeky-cool enough), finding work is no small task. No one looks at the work you actually do or your references anymore. They certainly don't care about how productive you are with real-world challenges. So it seems the occasional freelance work is all I'm good for these days.

Those who know my other game-dev work (mostly found on itch.io) know that I also often spend time on weekend side projects (currently, Sendit Soccer -- too early to show off yet). I will continue to do so, as well as maybe putting some of that weekend time into GRITS.

Other than that, the current plan is to come back to GRITS full time for a few weeks here and there to get bigger updates and new tracks out. I am also putting some serious consideration into what a single-player spinoff of GRITS should look like. Bigger tracks, no playground rules, serious racing, stuff like that. There's some solid physics modeling here that shouldn't go to waste. The hope is that maybe these two games (weird party game and semi-serious racing game) could help promote each other as a bundle. Regardless, I need to finish the single-player features of GRITS first (such as leaderboards) before I can jump into that.

Prison Dodgecar minigame is back! The best 6-8 player couch minigame on the planet!

Was it gone? Well, sort of. While working on adding the team-selection feature, I noticed I had broken the primary feature of Prison Dodgecar some time ago. Apparently, it broke when I added the feature that allows drivers to fall out of their cars in collisions (which is not used in Prison Dodgecar). The feature I broke was the attachment of the Tesla Shields™ to the car. Without that, Prison Dodgecar is a pretty lame bumper-car game. Boo! Now, it's a TS-powered bumper-car game again! Yay!

In other news, I was wrong in my prediction that the next feature added might be the leaderboards. That one is a huge push as the leaderboards are not simple for this game. Having a team selector for the minigames was another gaping hole in basic features and, being a much smaller feature to add, I chose to do it before getting to the leaderboards. Bummer, eh?


Fixes:

• Car-mounted Tesla Shields™ in Prison Dodgecar are working again.

New features:

• Team-selector menu for the minigames.

Features or content? That is a tough question at times when choosing what to work on next. This time, I chose features since many features that should make this game more attractive are still missing. At long last, you can finally enter your own driver names. Most of the Western European accent characters are also supported (use the X and Y buttons to change the keyboard key). Names are saved for later easy selection. 100 names can be stored. Saved names can be deleted with a tool found under the Game Options menu.

This was also a significant hurdle in the way of getting to the leaderboards feature. I suspect I'll get to the leaderboards next as it is pretty important to those solo players. Still so much to do.

I had hoped to get to name entry sooner but it was no small amount of work to do it right. Building menu features in Unity is a lot more work than just about any other tool. Building menu features for the player punch-in windows is even more work since you lose what little help Unity gives you when building UI for simultaneous players and you have to build the event and focus system yourself. I had a good foundation in place from the early punch-in windows... but it was still maybe 60 hours of work. Time like that is hard to find in a world where you are desperate for work but somehow not cool enough to be hired by anybody anymore.

New features:

• Name selection and new name entry and storage.

With 6 of the planned 24 tracks now built (well, prototyped) it seemed time to start fiddling with Endurance Racing mode so players can select their favorite track and hit it harder. This is not really Endurance Racing as planned but it is sorta close. The biggest missing feature is the yellow-flag one. Currently, Endurance Racing is just a single-track championship run with more laps. The yellow-flag feature is intended to take that one step further by pausing the race every 10 laps or so to allow one of the trailing players to change up the rules with the usual Wacky Wodifier selection. Working out how to reconcile such changes mid-race, however, will take some time. Thus, I chose not to wait for that before allowing entry into this mode. (Besides, the menu work alone to get this working was a big enough lift [UI work in Unity is about 100x more work than it should be... and why we don't have better menus yet].)

A quick A.I. cheat was also added to Endurance Racing until I have time to build the real solution (whatever that may be). A.I. cars cannot (under most circumstances) lose more than 2 wheels in enduro mode. This is to help keep them relevant longer. Considering the A.I. smarts that still need to be built, this doesn't feel like much of a cheat yet.

It's tempting to call this a bigger update than I am calling it, but I don't want to call it bigger until I have time to build more interest into Endurance Racing.

Changes:

• Wandle track redux with traffic cones replacing many of the large tires
  
• A lot of menu code refactored under the hood (it all looks the same)

New:

• Endurance Racing pre-apha introduced

This update doesn't bring much many will care about but it brings something important for us: It allows us to the check the "full controller support" box in Steam for better exposure. Previously, Unity's default game launcher window was disqualifying this tag because it requires a keyboard or mouse to navigate. Thus, I finally added in-game screen and graphics settings to the Game Options menu and set the Unity launcher to only appear on request. (If you are running on Mac and it is already set to appear from before this update, you can turn if off yourself with this checkbox in that window: [x] Only show this dialog if the option key is down.)

Our massive Linux community will also be happy to be caught up on updates (namely, the new Italian Mini Prix track).

This also puts us in a better position for when the Atari VCS finally launches. While console builds do not need graphics options like this, it is not yet clear how we may first launch on the Atari because they are being annoyingly quiet in communicating with developers. So, if we can only run on the Atari through side loading, well, we're now set for a keyboard/mouse-free experience there (after install, I hope).

New features:

• Screen and graphics options added to the Game Options menu.

Changes:

• Rewired updated to v1.1.29.4. As far as GRITS Racing is concerned, this adds support for the Stadia controller, and some other minor fixes to a few other controllers.

On the heals of the last release which brought a small but fundamental change, here comes another small but fundamental change. I have kicked the AI NPC cars out of the race when you are playing with several friends. After all, playing against friends should be about playing against friends and not the AI. And, well, it seems 6 cars is chaotic enough, which makes 12 cars just plain absurd. This also allowed me to find a simple solution to the AI UI problem: the AI now have trucks with the usual lap counters (I had not done this previously because space is reserved for only 8 players here). This also has the nice side effect that single-player mode feels more interactive. AIs are still limited to 1 car each. Anyhow, here's the rundown of when AI cars will appear:

1-2 players = 4 AI cars
3 players = 3 AI cars
4 players = 2 AI cars
5 players = 1 AI car
6-8 players = 0 AI cars

The more aggressive AI personalities are eliminated first.

0.3.5 changes:

• Player count vs AI count changes.
  
• Trucks and lap counting for AIs added.
  
• Checkered flag added on win.