OUTBRK News

Happy holiday chasers! This month we released OUTBRK version 0.2 that contained the very anticipated passenger princess feature to allow players to ride in the same car, a new car: the Solstice, a lot of new car and character cosmetic options, and more !


0.2 was our most successful release to date! Our testers did a fantastic job to help us release a very stable feature right from day 1 and we’re extremely happy to see how our community engaged with the feature. This was a colossal amount of work to get this feature ready but seeing all the crazy moments that emerged from players sitting in the same car is definitely worth it.



Part of the 0.2 update, we dramatically increased the amount of customization content in the game, with a brand new car, new wheels, new bullbars including rally lights, a new hail guard, a new bubblehead, new shirts, pants, shoes, and an accurate replica of the Tower probe from CONVEX.


We’ve been working on this mega pack of content for a while and it feels fantastic to finally see it everywhere in the OUTBRK world!

[h2]INTRODUCING THE HAMMERHEAD![/h2]
We’re now happy to show the next car to come to OUTBRK: the Hammerhead!




Our social medias are buzzing with amazing OUTBRK content on a regular basis, and one of the great things we started doing more is showcasing the incredible content made by our players. Take a look at what we shared recently and drop a follow if you haven’t already!
https://www.facebook.com/outbrkgame/videos/462760986622854

https://x.com/OutbrkGame/status/1872663695613894942

https://www.instagram.com/p/DDxn3EnzdYd/

https://www.tiktok.com/@outbrkgame/video/7453115790154403077




The team has been taking some very deserved resting time with our loved ones and preparing for a strong 2025 for the game. We cleaned up our Trello and prioritized our next developments for January. We’re excited to see our game grow, our team grow and our amazing players supporting us through this crazy journey.

Happy holiday from the OUTBRK team!


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

[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.

[/p]

• [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)
    [/p]
  • [p] Capture the action as a passenger using camera and report tools
    [/p]
  • [p]Lock/unlock doors and eject players from your owned vehicle[/p]
  [/p]
• [p]Added the new Solstice Vehicle
  [/p]
• [p]Added new Character Customizations
  • [p]Crop tops, tank tops, punk jackets, and exclusive Severe Studios apparel
    [/p]
  • [p]Joggers along with shorts with and without leggings
    [/p]
  • [p]Sport and skate shoes, sneakers, outverses, and western boots [/p]
  [/p]
• [p]Added new Convex Tower probe
  [/p]
• [p]Added the new Custom Wheels category with 10 unique wheel models.
  [/p]
• [p]Added several new bullbars in rally light and soft variants
  [/p]
• [p]Added a new soft hail guard net for all vehicles
  [/p]
• [p]Added shorter party codes for easier party matchmaking.
  [/p]
• [p]Added 10 new scenarios to scenario rotation.
  [/p]
• [p]Added new vehicle decals including: Sheriff Strafe, NZP, and The Eh! Team
  [/p]
• [p]Added new Ice Cream Dashboard Ornament
  [/p]
• [p]Added lightbar/strobe and rally lights to keybind menu
  [/p]
• [p]Added shared ownership between vehicles for hail cages
  [/p]
• [p]Added shared ownership between characters for certain items like shoes
  [/p]

• [p]Updated networking systems for smoother vehicle movement replication online.
  [/p]
• [p]Improved UI and input handling for the action wheel
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where vehicles took 2 seconds to start moving in reverse after pressing the input
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where vehicles don't get picked up by tornadoes if the player isn't inside
  [/p]
• [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
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players can see themselves for a brief moment when entering or exiting vehicle
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players with high ping would get stuck between vehicle enter/exit states
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players couldn't see other remote players on foot
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an exploit allowing players to walk with the probe by opening text chat
  [/p]

• [p]Fixed an issue with a background process reducing performance in garage menu
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed camera input sensitivity not scaled down properly on Y axis when zoomed in
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed issues with some scenarios having improper tornado behavior
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue with some French translations messing up the UI
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue with some camera positions during vehicle customization
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players don't see the shadow of their head
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where players couldn't see other remote players on foot
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed F1 toggle (to hide UI) not hiding probe icon
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed fuel bar and probe data bar overlapping each other
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue where the windshield wiper key bind set the speed to maximum instead of cycling through speeds
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed an issue with mouse not being locked to game window in tutorial
  [/p]
• [p]Fixed multiple issues with UI elements being accessible when they shouldn't
  [/p]

[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!
[/p]

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