Weekly Update #4 - Let Me Level With You

Hi how are ya? This week has been a focus on end user experience (and fixing a lot of bugs!) for both FUNG and Drift King. Yes, I said in the last update that we wouldn't touch Drift King for a while but we ended up working on it in our spare time, and fortunately y'all get to enjoy the fruits of our labour (that, and there were some game breaking bugs that I didn't want to leave in the public build!)

For Drift King, we've added replays/ghosts! Now you can see exactly how to improve your times on the time trials. In terms of driving physics, a massive change to suspension has been made to vastly improve handling at high speeds over bumps, now the cars will stick to the road over crests, making it much easier to drive over hilly terrain. The change to the suspension made the cars grip the road TOO well however, so all the tyres have been rebalanced to match old times. My current record on the new tyres on Jumps is a 56.2, if you manage to beat this, let us know on the Discord!

Record Ghost files are saved as .dkr files in %localappdata%low/Mellow/DriftKing/ghosts (put this into File Explorer on Windows). If you send these files to the Discord, I'll record it as a video add it to the impromptu leaderboards!

Drift King - Changelog:

• Reworked suspension compression, suspension strength increases linearly with downforce
  • This is a small departure from reality, but in the real world most cars don't have enough downforce to drive on the ceiling!
• Reworked tyre friction curves, reducing lateral friction to account for the suspension compression, but increasing longitudinal friction when at a high drift angle, accentuating acceleration deep in drifts
  • I'll be posting a deep dive soon on how these grip mechanics work together to encourage drift racing over grip racing
• Added automatic replay saving for record times
• Added perfect interpolation replay playback (varying framerates in saved/playback will not affect timing!)
• Load ghosts when racing time trial events
• Replay option added to race events to view previous records
• Drone works in this mode, you can create your own cool clips of your races!
• Show record times in the player garage
• Fix event end bug where the results screen wouldn't unload
• Moved garage spawn point to make replaying races a bit quicker
• Disabled unnneeded processing on the server (now sips a cool 0.4% at idle)

And that's all. I'd apologise for working on Drift King when we said that we wouldn't... but I'm not sorry. Have fun!

- George