OUTBRK News

[p]Chasers,
We're excited to bring you the 0.2 Major Update, packed with new core features and other big improvements. At the heart of this update is the highly-requested Passenger Princess feature, enabling collaboration on the chasing field like never before. Get ready to chase storms in style, navigate with precision, and explore all the other enhancements we’ve packed into this update.

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• [p] Added the Passenger Princess Feature allowing you ride as a passenger
  
  • [p]Navigate from the front passenger seat with map pin control (Riding Shotgun)
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  • [p] Capture the action as a passenger using camera and report tools
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  • [p]Lock/unlock doors and eject players from your owned vehicle[/p]
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• [p]Added the new Solstice Vehicle
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• [p]Added new Character Customizations
  • [p]Crop tops, tank tops, punk jackets, and exclusive Severe Studios apparel
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  • [p]Joggers along with shorts with and without leggings
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  • [p]Sport and skate shoes, sneakers, outverses, and western boots [/p]
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• [p]Added new Convex Tower probe
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• [p]Added the new Custom Wheels category with 10 unique wheel models.
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• [p]Added several new bullbars in rally light and soft variants
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• [p]Added a new soft hail guard net for all vehicles
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• [p]Added shorter party codes for easier party matchmaking.
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• [p]Added 10 new scenarios to scenario rotation.
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• [p]Added new vehicle decals including: Sheriff Strafe, NZP, and The Eh! Team
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• [p]Added new Ice Cream Dashboard Ornament
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• [p]Added lightbar/strobe and rally lights to keybind menu
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• [p]Added shared ownership between vehicles for hail cages
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• [p]Added shared ownership between characters for certain items like shoes
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• [p]Updated networking systems for smoother vehicle movement replication online.
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• [p]Improved UI and input handling for the action wheel
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• [p]Fixed an issue where vehicles took 2 seconds to start moving in reverse after pressing the input
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• [p]Fixed an issue where vehicles don't get picked up by tornadoes if the player isn't inside
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• [p]Fixed an issue with the danger effect showing up when tornado is on top of the player's vehicle even though the player is far away from it
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• [p]Fixed an issue where players can see themselves for a brief moment when entering or exiting vehicle
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• [p]Fixed an issue where players with high ping would get stuck between vehicle enter/exit states
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• [p]Fixed an issue where players couldn't see other remote players on foot
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• [p]Fixed an exploit allowing players to walk with the probe by opening text chat
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• [p]Fixed an issue with a background process reducing performance in garage menu
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• [p]Fixed camera input sensitivity not scaled down properly on Y axis when zoomed in
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• [p]Fixed issues with some scenarios having improper tornado behavior
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• [p]Fixed an issue with some French translations messing up the UI
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• [p]Fixed an issue with some camera positions during vehicle customization
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• [p]Fixed an issue where players don't see the shadow of their head
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• [p]Fixed an issue where players couldn't see other remote players on foot
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• [p]Fixed F1 toggle (to hide UI) not hiding probe icon
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• [p]Fixed fuel bar and probe data bar overlapping each other
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• [p]Fixed an issue where the windshield wiper key bind set the speed to maximum instead of cycling through speeds
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• [p]Fixed an issue with mouse not being locked to game window in tutorial
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• [p]Fixed multiple issues with UI elements being accessible when they shouldn't
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[p]
[/p][p]Building the Passensger Princess feature was no small feat. It required significant networking adjustments to ensure seamless synchronization across multiplayer sessions. From designing map pin controls to refining vehicle ownership mechanics, this system expands the cooperative potential of OUTBRK while maintaining the fast-paced thrill of storm chasing. We’ve also improved the vehicle enter/exit flow to better accommodate this feature, enhancing the flow of multiplayer chases.

[/p][h3]What’s Next?[/h3][p]As always, we’re listening to your feedback. Let us know what you think about the Passenger Princess feature and the other updates in this patch. See you in the chase!
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Hello chasers! This month our development work has been focused on getting the Passenger Princess ready for release and continuing the development on the vegetation and performance optimization of the game.



Any new feature that is heavily relying on syncing multiple players together and server events are bound to bring a lot of edge cases, thankfully, our testing team have been hard at work to find and document those issues for us to fix rapidly. If you’ve been following our Trello or Discord, you’ve even seen this work in our work channels on a daily basis ! Since the beginning of the month, we resolved more than 30 bugs or tasks related to this feature alone. We still have a couple more to fix before releasing this massive feature, and you can follow the progress on our trello board here : https://trello.com/b/nsBmMfIa/outbrk-game


Part of this same update we have a new car and new accessories that we have shown last month. This month we integrated new player clothing that will be part of the same update! Here is a preview:



Last month we showed the start of the work on the terrain and vegetation, ending the newsletter on some exploration on the trees. This month we can show how far the vegetation progressed with some animated gifs of the OUTBRK biomes with new trees integrated and rigged for wind:


Follow the progress on the trello card here: https://trello.com/c/MQewzcXc/1219-improve-terrain-and-vegetation-visual-look


Our external VFX team, Catalyst, has made significant progress this month on optimizing cloud performance. Our goal is to completely remove the blue artifacts caused by the "cloud downsampling" setting while retaining its performance benefits. Achieving the performance of a high cloud downsampling value without any visual drawbacks is a major step forward for the game's optimization. While we’ve successfully implemented this internally, there are still some side effects we need to address before we can roll out this substantial improvement to all players.


Our extensive research and development on cloud performance requires a technical artist to be fully dedicated to this feature, working on it full-time. While it’s taking more time than initially expected, rendering full-scale weather model data within a game engine is largely uncharted territory, presenting us with significant challenges at every step. Given that our tornadoes are still in a very early stage compared to our vision, we’ve asked Catalyst to allocate a second full-time artist exclusively for tornado improvements and development. Starting in early 2025 (the soonest possible), a second developer from Catalyst will join the team to focus entirely on advancing tornado technology, while the current developer continues optimizing cloud performance and looks. Together, they will ensure their unified visual and technical solutions meet our goals for both quality and performance.


Development of our weather model is still in progress, with some issues in the current version being actively addressed. We anticipate resolving these challenges soon, which will be an exciting milestone. In the meantime, we’ll continue running new scenarios using the existing model.

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

Happy Halloween chasers! This month we’re sharing a recap of our 0.1 update, new car and car accessories coming soon, an update on the passenger princess feature, an update on the visual upgrade of our terrain and vegetation and welcoming a new member of our development team!



On October 18, we released our biggest technical update to date, the release of the Group Chase and the permanent fix of the memory leak caused by the fix of the infamous lag spike that was present during the first few months of early access. We strongly encourage you to read our patch notes, including our long technical explanation of how we fixed the lag spike and memory management in OUTBRK here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1107320/view/4704662705448429833?l=english


Shortly after, we released an additional hotfix patch to fix a couple of issues found by our community:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1107320/view/4535779621898170404?l=english


[h3]SHORTER LOBBY CODES ARE COMING[/h3]
One of the feedback about the Group Chase feature is that party invite codes are too long to share, so we’re working on a system to generate shorter invite codes. Here is a sample of what new invite codes will look like: thunder-wedge-coast-temperate-99


The new car, the Solstice, has been fully integrated in the game and will be in an upcoming content patch deployed soon.


A whole lot of new car accessories will also be part of this content update. A new hail guard, new rally lights and a very anticipated customisation option; wheel rims. The rims are currently cosmetics only, we’re investigating which kind of impact, if any, we want them to have in-game.



Our next big gameplay feature coming up is the ability to be multiple players in the same car, commonly called the “passenger princess” feature. The task is progressing well and can be tracked on Trello here : https://trello.com/c/nYSdo4pZ/1214-passenger-princess-feature
Here is a first screenshot of two players in the same car, replicated over network (obviously work in progress).



This month we’ve been working on improving the look of our landscape, terrain, grass, etc. This is a very long task and we still have a lot of work to do, but here is some screenshot of the progress so far (All screenshots taken in editor, not in-game, not final).

Landscape Grass


Forest Floor (No trees)


Arid Landscape (3 textures blend, no grass yet)


Coniferous Forest (3 textures blend, no grass yet, no trees yet)


Red Maple Tree (In vegetation modeling software, no representative of final product)


Follow the progress on the trello card here: https://trello.com/c/MQewzcXc/1219-improve-terrain-and-vegetation-visual-look



We reached a fantastic milestone that highlights the success of the release of the game; we hired our first full time programmer to join the OUTBRK development team, Mathieu (Hice) ! Mathieu has been working for us for 3 months as a 3rd party developer already and has done the keybind menu refactor and support on the memory leak fix for 0.1. He is also in charge of the passenger princess feature since the start of development of this feature. Welcome Mathieu !



We’re still working on improving our weather systems with performance improvement and resolution upgrade. We have more customisation option for our character models and more probe models coming soon, and two new car models are in early production. We can’t wait to share more!

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

• Added party matchmaking system with the ability to host private lobbies for larger parties
  
• Added a new comprehensive keybinding system
  
• Fixed memory leak eventually leading to a crash when driving (Long technical explanation about this issue at the bottom of patch notes.)
  
• Added the ability to bind mouse buttons and other special keys
  
• Added the ability to bind actions that were previously only accessible in the action wheel
  
• Fixed all existing issues with the key binding system
  
• Added visual feedback when a player is using their microphone
  

• Added 20 new scenarios to the rotation
  
• Added SevereStudios t-shirts
  
• Added raccoon bobble head cosmetic named Cior
  
• Updated the wording of offline play to solo chase and clarified progression saving
  
• Increased timeout duration when server is loading the scenario for slower computers to still be able to load into a game
  
• Increased previously played scenarios taken into account in matchmaking from 8 to 16
  

• Fixed multiple issues causing players to randomly die
  
• Fixed a rare memory leak occurring on some systems
  
• Fixed an issue causing vehicles to vanish when exiting them
  
• Fixed an issue preventing cars to be started on match start
  
• Fixed an issue causing probes to give points when unintended
  
• Fixed an issue causing errors on vehicle exit
  

• Fixed several floating roads and objects throughout the world
  
• Fixed an issue causing one road to not be drivable
  
• Fixed an issue causing the world signs not displaying the proper town name
  
• Fixed an issue causing the towing feature to spawn players incorrectly
  
• Fixed an issue with exterior being visible through the Magnitude's hood when driving
  
• Fixed DOM3 windshield not displaying proper rain effects
  
• Fixed an issue with the lightning emitter
  
• Fixed an issue with a tornado having the incorrect flow
  
• Fixed an issue causing "enter vehicle" prompt to not display
  
• Fixed an issue causing bumpable objects to be movable by characters
  

When we first launched OUTBRK, we had some frustrating performance issues cropping up during gameplay. Players would experience occasional lag spikes, where the screen would freeze for up to a second—far from ideal when you're trying to enjoy a smooth driving experience. To address this, we cleaned up a lot of our scripts and assets. This helped reduce the amount of data being loaded and unloaded in memory, which significantly improved the situation.

However, as we dug deeper, we discovered a more persistent issue. Unity's default memory management system wasn't releasing scene content from memory after unloading it. Given the vast size of OUTBRK's open world, we had to split the environment into many chunks that would load and unload around the player as they moved. The problem was, the more you drove, the more RAM the game consumed, because the unloaded assets weren't actually being freed. This led to memory bloat, causing further performance headaches like game crashes or streamers having issues with OBS after playing for a while.

[h3]The Solution: Rebuilding Our Streaming System with Addressables[/h3]

To solve this problem, we knew we had to overhaul our entire streaming system. Enter Addressables—a Unity feature that allows us to take control of our memory management. With Addressables, we gained the ability to load and unload specific assets on-demand, releasing them from memory as soon as they were no longer needed. This switch resulted in a much more stable memory footprint, allowing us to better manage resources and improve overall performance.

[h3]The Implementation: A Massive Undertaking[/h3]

Switching to Addressables wasn’t a simple task. We had to comb through the entire game’s assets and reorganize everything to fit the new system. It involved an unbelievable amount of work and debugging, but the results made it all worthwhile. Not only did we stabilize the game’s memory usage, but we also gained the ability to further optimize our memory management down the line.
As a bonus, this massive reorganization allowed us to reduce the game’s size on disk by about 20 GB, making OUTBRK more accessible for players with limited storage space.