Fiona & Phil here.
Over the last few months some of our Discord members have been giving us feedback on issues they’ve been seeing. As so much work has clearly gone into this we felt it was only fair that we respond with the same thoroughness. Grab a drink, this is going to be a long one!
It's so long in fact we have decided to split it into two Episodes. Episode 1 today responds primarily on videos, whereas Episode 2 will respond on more general feedback.
Lots of people have contributed but most notably Native1 and VoiBeau. The latter posted a staggering 46 videos (thanks again for the hard work here) in this thread. We’ve been through them all and categorised them and then prioritised them.
Part 1 : High Priority list
These are our top 5 things to fix based off videos supplied
Your car colliding with another vehicle in the takedown camera - a large number of the videos shown were down to this one issue, as shown below. Hence it’s our number 1 to improve. This is due to your car being invulnerable at that point. We are investigating a fix to allow your car to take damage during the TD camera but still reset you correctly afterwards.
Slam speed ups as seen in the video below. We have investigated and we can fix this.
AI intersecting each other and then pinging out as seen in the video here. We are investigating.
Traffic going mad when trying to recover. Again we are investigating
AI taking each other out unnecessarily. Investigating.
We're targeting these main areas but that doesn't mean we're ignoring everything else, we just feel they're a lower priority at this stage. Some of it is incremental, some of it is more fundamental.
We don't have a date for when we can get these Top 5 fixed as yet but we will keep you updated!
Now we promised to be thorough so here are the other issues raised that are further down our list of priorities but we want to visible that we are aware of them and give you some extra info about what's causing them where we can.
Part 2 Medium Priority List:
No current plans to fix these but we are aware of them...
Railtracks - We are aware that your car can crash out when landing on railtracks.
Bad shunt reaction - as seen here. We think this is caused by a stutter on the props.
Vulnerability coming out of Takedowns. You can come out of the takedown camera straight into a traffic car/ai car as seen below. We did have more invulnerability at one stage but it caused more physics issues than it solved hence we took it out. It is something we would like to revisit if we get the time.
Clipping collisions while on Sky Track loops as seen here. Has been tricky to track down and solve. We would like to take another look if we get the chance.
Vertical takedown not awarded. We would love to fix this as it should feel amazing when you do it. It’s really hard to test in a real world environment.
We have 2 additional issues on our immediate backlog that were not in these videos but reported elsewhere:
Collisions with very thin objects - not sure there were any of these in this collection but Matthew DiLeva shared this video of the car getting stuck in a telegraph pole for example - we would like to look at this.
Traffic can be checked inconsistently with all vehicles when hit from the side. Couldn't find a video of this one but you know the kind of thing - when you hit a truck head on and it pings off.
Part 3: Low Priority List
Items in this list appear here either because
A) They appear to be quite rare or are hard to fix reliably (or have trade offs with other decisions)
or
B) They are hard to fix without more debugging info - so we would need to catch them with our ‘bad reaction reporting’ tool to diagnose fully and that is very time consuming.
Examples of things falling into Category A include
i) Weird AI air ram. No idea how this happens. Not something we have seen.
ii) The takedown camera can have no space and get too close to the target as seen below. Looks rubbish - only on low priority list as trickier to fix.
(iii) Crash on Sky Track barrier for no clear reason. This one feels hard to repro and therefore fix so it’s on low priority list right now
(iv) AI can sometimes bounce off breakable things rather than smashing them. Originally they were stopped dead by them so it’s better but not right yet.
(v) Crash on timer on Wreckoning checkpoints - we have literally never seen this - is it reproducible does anyone know?
(vi) Bad reset on tracks after hazard hits
(vii) This is rather a special case and happens as a result of the AI not attempting to deal with joins in the road for optimization reasons. Not doing it makes the game run faster. We judged the result wasn't as bad as risking not running at 60Hz.
Examples of things falling in Category B include
(i) Rolled over from AI hit
(ii) Slightly off slam reaction
(iii) Instant Takedown from slam seen in a couple of clips including
(iv) Slightly odd shunt reaction
(v) Getting damaged in results for no clear reason
(vi) Huge sideways ping from slam
(vii) ‘Jumping’ on a road join as seen in a few clips including this one
There are some other areas not shown in these videos that we are also aware of but again would need to catch in a debugger. Things like Spinning with nose stuck, Crashing on ramps up to buildings or generally bouncing on sky track joins.
Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of how we’re breaking things down and deciding what to tackle first. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to capture and share all of this. Tomorrow we’ll follow up with a second post covering the more general feedback from the original Discord thread.