Thanks very much for these detailed notes and testing, it's incredibly valuable in making this game better. I pretty much agree with most of what you have written.
- Those stutters look horrible and something must be spiking to cause the issue. I will look into it.
- Upgrade points are intended to be like that for lower down teams. Once you start finishing higher in a season, you'll notice you'll start with more upgrade points. Emulates real life a little, where lower teams have less money, higher teams have more money to continue bringing upgrades all season. But I do think these mechanics need to be clearer to understand. So I plan to have a breakdown in the upgrade panel for this information. Sponsors will be implemented with this (some sponsors will give teams bonus upgrade points). Risk and safe upgrade values probably do need some balancing from testing, plus keen to add more perks too.
- The damage system will be looked at to make it matter more, it's a tricky one because the damage modifier feels too high on some tracks and too low on others.
- I think Brazil was one of the few tracks with very little AI change in the latest update, so there's still room for improvement. The arenas have admittedly had very little time spent on the AI due to their less serious novelty nature. But I definitely want to look at making the AI smarter on these in the intersections.
- AI in rain has been completely reworked this last update, and so I'm still perfecting their thought process on all the varying situations. It will get better from continued testing. Inter tyres would be great, but as you can see, the AI need to be perfected first with the 3 tyre options before throwing another into the mix.
- Spectator mode has been requested before. It's certainly the next feature to go in. There will be the option for spectator mode once the player finishes a race or DNFs. Also I will implement an option for fully AI races to spectate. Plus, I'm looking at the option for speeding up time to finish a race sooner.
- There are some known issues with the physics over track elevation. I reckon it has to do with the cars collider having sharp corners. Will look at a more rounded car collider to prevent these issues, fingers crossed.
- More options in custom seasons will be available soon, this includes enabling upgrades and setting initial upgrade points.
- I plan to look at alternative tracks layouts and such once the game has reached a nice even 20 tracks (only 4 to go!). Having them in reverse is a great idea as it's less work to implement than entire new circuit.
Thanks!