Welcome to Finland!

Hello drivers and welcome to Finland!

Finland map

This update brings the second map for Shakedown Rally, a little fast, jumpy and gravely Finland stage to the paid version of the game!

Over the weekend, during the real life Rally Finland, I've made a little Finland track. I reused the assets I had from Infinland, and also procedural roads made with blender that I developed for the (yet unreleased) Sweden map, so making it was relatively smooth and I could make it in a short time.

I hope you'll enjoy it :)

Btw, you can try to beat my record, which stands at 154.13 right now

I've made most of the map live on streams over the weekend, which you can still see on my Twitch channel

Note that the map is still WIP and this is only the initial release, it has a few known issues:

• The edges of the "land" end abruptly. Tree wall will be added.
• Some vertices don't match up perfectly yet
• Lighting on crossroads is incorrect and is missing grass
• The grass meshes are baked into the road meshes, which makes the track have 50+mb. It's not ideal, I wish it was smaller, so will work on getting grass to render in a better more space efficient way (and more of it).
• The road surface was supposed to have a splat map with multiple surfaces (gravel, mud, stones). But I'm having a little bit of difficulty with exporting second vertex color layer from new version of blender, so will add it in a later update

Moddable Maps

Finland is not only a second map in the game, but it also introduces a moddable map system. Similar to how the cars have been split from the main config (that I wrote in the last post), I've done the same thing with maps. All their corresponding parameters like model path, environment colors, etc have been moved to .map.ini files, and are located in "res/maps/". This makes making map mods for Shakedown much easier

Btw, I used to use words "track", "world", "scene", "location", but from now on, I decided to use the word maps. It does sound very FPS-game, but I like it primarily because it has 3 letters, just like "car", so it's a little bit more consistent :D

In the future, maps will be able to have multiple "stages", so that one loaded model can be played with multiple layouts. You could for example have one gigantic road-networked map, with many stages. (but right now each stage requires a separate model)

For the full changelog since the last post, click here

Modding Corner

Rubén just shared today work he is doing on his own mountain road. Looks cool!