OUTBRK News

Hello, Chasers! This month, our efforts have been focused on squashing bugs for the upcoming major update 0.3, laying the groundwork for the new Daily Contracts feature, completing the repainting of terrain textures to support the new vegetation, and more.


Releasing a major update is always a significant undertaking. This month alone, we've resolved nearly 90 bugs identified by our Quality Assurance team. While a few issues remain, we're making steady progress. Our QA team will continue conducting multiple review passes to ensure that our fixes don’t introduce any unexpected side effects.


We've been working closely with the Catalyst team to eliminate all remaining visual artifacts caused by cloud downsampling, while also delivering the significant rain visual overhaul we previously teased. Throughout this process, we're carefully tracking game performance across various situations to ensure a smoother and more immersive experience.

Overall, we're on track and confident that this highly anticipated update will meet our players’ expectations for quality and performance.



Between testing sessions, we've been providing the Catalyst team with a steady stream of real-world tornado footage to inspire the next major step after update 0.3: enhancing tornado behavior and visuals. The current tornado system is still in its early stages and lacks many of the complex details, shapes, and dynamics we ultimately aim to achieve. While our main focus remains on polishing and delivering update 0.3, planning for the next phase of tornado improvements is already well underway.


We’re excited to introduce a new way to earn currency: Daily Contracts. This feature, coming in an update after version 0.3, allows players to complete bite-sized challenges in exchange for currency rewards, helping them progress toward their next garage unlock.
Players will receive one new Daily Contract each day, with the ability to store up to three at a time. If a particular challenge doesn’t appeal to them, they’ll also have the option to reroll one contract of their choice each day.
Here’s a sneak peek at the feature currently in development:




We’ve made tremendous progress this month on the vegetation repainting pass. The entire world map has received a fresh layer of terrain texture painting, and new vegetation is currently being regenerated.
Once the regeneration process is complete, which takes time but runs automatically, we’ll review the results in-game to ensure they align with our creative vision. After that, we’ll fine-tune the technical data for each vegetation asset and prepare everything for in-game destruction.
We’re excited about this major visual upgrade and can’t wait to bring it to the world of OUTBRK.


To finish the newsletter on a high note, here are the latest screenshots of our work in progress TIV2 interceptor:




All our resources are currently allocated on releasing a quality 0.3 update, debugging all critical issues found by our Quality Assurance team as fast as possible in order to release this massive update to our players. We are also onboarding a senior character artist on a 3 months mandate to produce more customisation assets for our in-game characters. Exciting stuff ahead!
You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game

That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team

Hello, Chasers! This month we started to build the next major update for OUTBRK, which will be our 0.3 version. We’re also showing a preview of new character customisation to come in the future and showing some progress on our update to our weather model.


This month, we welcomed a new full-time member to our development team! Angeline is joining us as our newest programmer to help accelerate the development of gameplay features and quality-of-life improvements. She’s already proven to be incredibly skilled and a great fit for the team. Say hi to her on Discord!



[h2]PERFORMANCE UPDATE PROGRESS[/h2]
Performance and visuals upgrade of the weather is the main core of the 0.3 update.

Our VFX team is putting the final touches on a major visual upgrade that eliminates nearly all rendering artifacts—like the blue or white pixels you might have noticed around trees, small objects, or distant geometry. These improvements also resolve pixellisation issues around objects, regardless of your cloud downsampling settings.

On top of that, they've contributed to a major refactor of our weather data packaging system, resulting in a reduced memory footprint for scenarios and what appears to be a significant overall performance boost.

With these changes—plus enhanced rain visuals and improved volumetric lighting—the storm chasing experience is about to look better, run smoother, and feel a whole lot scarier.

(Screenshot taken with cloud downsampling set to its maximum value of 2)


[h2]VEHICLES ON THE MAP[/h2]
We're adding new icons to the map to display vehicle locations, along with small info cards that show each vehicle’s occupancy in real time.


[h2]SEAT INDICATOR[/h2]
We’re adding an indicator to show in which seat the player is sitting in and how many passengers are sitting in the car. This will be a crucial piece of information for drivers in sticky situations waiting for passengers to get back in their car before taking off as fast as possible.


[h2]REMOVAL OF “LOOK BACK” ACTION[/h2]
We're removing the "look back" action and replacing it with a fully immersive free-look system, giving you the ability to look around naturally in any direction.


[h2]VEHICLE LIGHTS[/h2]
We’ve completely overhauled the engine’s lighting system to define our own custom falloff rates. This results in more realistic illumination of roads and objects ahead of vehicles. Lightbars now cast light properly as well, adding to the intensity and realism of the chase experience.


[h2]TOW AVAILABILITY AND MAP ICON[/h2]
Since not every gas station is a location you can get towed to, the map will show a slightly different gas pump icon where towing is available.

To prevent players being towed directly to their inevitable demise, we’re adding a status on the gas stations to disable towing when inside a tornado warning. This new feature comes with an icon and a description on the map.


[h2]DESTRUCTION[/h2]
We’ve improved the precision and timing of destruction to eliminate odd offsets or delays when tornadoes impact objects in the OUTBRK world.


We started working on getting hats into the game. This is not planned for 0.3 but here is a preview of what's to come:



We're making great progress on our high-resolution weather model to deliver more detailed and visually stunning storms. The first major step is complete—we've successfully run our initial simulation. Now, we're moving on to the next phase: running the model on a massively powerful computer setup. This will drastically speed up processing times and even open the door to generating playable scenarios based on real-world upcoming weather setups.

Here’s a comparison of the same setup showing the radar simulation before and after—an incredible improvement!




We started looking at integrating daily contracts for players to gain more currency by completing various challenges. This will hopefully help players get currency faster and also help new chasers have some sort of short term goals early in the game while learning the game systems.
You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game

That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team

• Changed "radio voice chat" from d-pad down to LB, for a more enjoyable driving + radio experience
  
• Changed "toggle action wheel" from LB to d-pad down
  
• Changed "toggle advanced products" from LB to left joystick click
  

• Fixed an issue with UI showing the wrong button for certain actions when using a controller
  
• Fixed an issue causing sudden death when stuck between gas pump and vehicles
  

We forgot to mention that we made small changes to the dominator.
increased the dominator's weight, and slightly increased the torque and brake strength

• Added a functional CB radio to all cars in online matches
  
  • A total of 5 car-to-car communication channels with a default muted channel
    
  • Ability to adjust channels in the driver and copilot seats
  
  
  
• Added an official community guidelines agreement to foster a safe and welcoming environment
  
  • Every update going forward will prompt this agreement
    
  • Enforceable by new moderation features to ensure compliance
    
    
    
  
  
• Added functional anti-aliasing
  • Available in FXAA & SMAA

• Updated the scenario pool to incorporate 15 brand new scenarios
  
• Updated the F9 menu to support reporting players and removed feedback category to remove noise from the reports. Keep sending feedback via Discord and Steam!
  
• Changed controller bindings of Probe to DPad up and Camera to Dpad right to accommodate Car Radio being on Dpad Up.
  
• Removed some actions being replicated on the server to boost performance
  
• Removed voice chat icon displaying in offline mode to prevent confusion
  
• Removed the option to view game credits while in a match
  
• Removed all preexisting anti-aliasing options
  

• Fixed multiple issues causing the players screen to freeze after exiting vehicle
  
• Fixed an issue causing some servers to crash
  
• Fixed an issue causing a scenario to crash half way through
  
• Fixed an issue with a tornado appearing out of nowhere in a single scenario
  
• Fixed an issue with solstice wiper blades not clearing rain
  
• Fixed an issue causing players to get stuck in vehicles if opening camera while entering
  
• Fixed an issue causing terrain to not unload after driving long distances resulting in flying grass
  
• Fixed an issue causing the credits menu to not open while on title screen
  
• Fixed index errors on tornado calculations
  
• Fixed some logging at the end of scenarios
  

Hello, Chasers! This month we prepared the content of the imminent new car radio feature and community guidelines update, started integrating and preparing to release the massive performance and storm visual update that will follow, and progressed on two new exciting unique chaser cars.


We’re in the final stage of testing our upcoming patch that will include a new multi-channel car radio feature that will allow players to voice chat with each other from car to car.


We’re also implementing community guidelines that all players will see the first time they launch OUTBRK and have to accept it in order to play the game. This code of conduct outlines general online rules surrounding text chat, voice chat and general behavior. Breaking the community guidelines might result in different disciplinary actions such as getting prevented from using text and voice chat, or playing in multiplayer games for a limited time.






Right after this update goes live, we jump right back to work into preparing to finally release our biggest update to our volumetric weather since launch. This will include not only a notable improvement on performance, but also significant improvements on the visuals of the rain shafts, tornado blending, anti-aliasing, fog and lighting all around the environment. This is a massive one and we’re very excited about it!
Here are few teasers, captured in editor, about what to come:



We're not done with cool news. Here are some cars that are currently under development, in partnership with the car owners and our 3d modelers.
First of all, the PredaTOR from Prairie Storm Chasers https://prairiechasers.com/vehicles


And we're very pleased to announce that we're bringing the TIV2 (https://stormofpassion.com/) to OUTBRK! The TIV team sent us a large amount of reference pictures and we're building the car as close to the reference material as possible. Here is a work in progress picture.





With the progress made on the clouds and performances by our VFX team, they are now ready to start working on upgrading our tornado technology to bring bigger and more realistic tornadoes to OUTBRK.
On the vegetation update side, we keep progressing on technical tasks to accelerate the deployment of the new grass and trees while improving rendering performance. We also hired a freelance vegetation modeler to create the broken version of all those new trees to have a more realistic depiction of damaged vegetation after tornado damage.
You can follow our progress on all our tasks here: https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game

That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team