Pretty Fly DLC, Racetrack Map and Physics Changes

Gooood afternoon everybody, this one is a big one! ːsteamhappyː

After working day and night for the last two months, without any sleep or eating, we now have one of the biggest updates ever. And not only that, we also added airplanes to the game. Since the Steam Workshop is already flooded with airplanes, we finally added proper airplane physics to the game. With our new DLC “Pretty Fly” we added a huuuuuuge map to the game with airports and floating islands. You will have airplane wings, propellers and turbines to craft your own airplanes and challenge all the six monarchs of Pretty Fly:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3500960/Screw_Drivers__Pretty_Fly

If you rather wanna stay on the ground, we also released the huuuge “Rennpisten Insel” to the main game. It’s the biggest non-aircraft island ever, and it contains an immense amount of roads and racing challenges.

On top of all of that, there are a bunch of new building blocks, changes in downforce and physics, looots of bug fixed, some new bugs you can discover and some more changes.

We hope you enjoy all the new stuff, as always please let us know your thoughts and feedback on everything, be it in the Steam discussions, in the comments below or on discord. We’re happy if you’re happy, and we cannot wait to see you on the Rennpisten Insel or in the skies!

So here is a list with all the additions/changes/fixes that come with the update:

[h3]Rennpisten Insel (German for “Island of great and big race tracks suited for high speeds and excellently engineered race cars“)[/h3]

The new island is finally here! With the Rennpisten Insel we added a huge new island with a million kilometers of roads. There is a lot to discover, all roads have dedicated and special names, the roads are wide and open with lots of space to reach high speeds.
The island also comes with a bunch of new challenges ruled by our three new monarchs: The Turbo Knight, Nitro Princess and the Tarmac Tyrant. As you probably guessed because of the name of the Nitro Princess, we added some new building blocks as well: Correct, we added super chargers and a brand new V-engine!
The super charger consists of two building blocks, the base and the extension. You can attach the supercharger base to the PW-Blaze engine, or to the new V-engine. Then you can attach the supercharger extension to the base, to increase the power gain even more.
The V-engine weighs a lot due to the size and its two cylinders. It has a lower RPM range than the other combustion engines, but a lot of power in return.
On Rennpisten Insel there is also a new gems system. Instead of having to beat bronze in every race to challenge a monarch, you now have to collect a certain amount of gems.

[h3]Gauge Blocks[/h3]
We added small attachment blocks for the driver seat. You can use those to customize the UI elements while driving. By placing gauge blocks onto the attachment block, you can determine which gauges you want to have displayed and where.

Speed Gauge
This is the normal speed gauge. It shows RPM, the current gear and speed.
Power Curve Gauge
This gauge is also not new, but you can place it now wherever you want. It displays the current power curve of your powertrain.
Car Status Gauge
This gauge was also already in the game. It shows your current weight, how much damage your car has taken and whether you’re missing some wheels or downforce.
Gyro Gauge
This gauge is new. It shows the current lateral and longitudinal forces on your car. It also shows the maximum forces that affected the car since you last repaired it. This could be used to evaluate your cars’ performance in terms of acceleration, brake speed and how fast you can go around corners.

[h3]New Building Blocks[/h3]

V-Engine: A strong and heavy combustion engine with a low RPM range.
Supercharger Base: A supercharger base to slot onto the PW-Blaze or the V-engine. It increases the power in low RPM ranges.
Supercharger Extension: Looks damn cool, and also increases the power in low RPM ranges even more.
Smoll Suspension: An extremely small and compact suspension. In comparison to all other suspension, it doesn’t have a hole for axles, so it can just be used as a wheel to steer and roll.
Keybindings Panel: A small panel you can attach anywhere to your vehicle. Then you can configure it and describe all the keybindings of your vehicle. This will then be displayed while driving if you press F1 to open the controls hints. This helps with vehicles having many or complicated keybindings.
Star Connector: Similar to the ??? connector, but with four pins sticking out.
Gauges and Seat Extension: We added four gauges and a seat extension block where you can attach them to your seat.
3-states Piston: We added a piston having three states. This piston starts in a half extended state, and can be contracted with one key, and extended with another one.

[h3]Minor Changes[/h3]

We improved challenge loading times. The big loading time came from loading the ghosts (Bronze, silver, gold and personal bests). This should happen much faster now.
The small wooden poles of the checkpoints don’t damage or slow down the car anymore. They’re like butter now.
Engine extension gadgets now contribute to the overall horse power of the vehicle.
You can now assign controller axis like left/right stick or the triggers to stepper motor and piston keybindings.
When hovering over the car stats with the mouse cursor, the car used to do an explosion animation. This was bugged in the last update, and should now be fixed again.
The dynamic camera is now a little higher and further away from the car. This should make it easier to see the track and road ahead.
Added a leaderboard button to the career tab, where you can inspect the leaderboards directly in the menu.
A couple of months ago we updated the whole damage system of the game. We reverted the changes, where light weight parts took significantly more damage. Now battle bots should be possible again.
You can now look around when sitting in first person in your seat. You can also use the scroll wheel to adjust your eye height.
You can now unsubscribe from Workshop vehicles by right clicking them in your garage. So you don’t have to search for it in the workshop tab.

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

Fixed the effect turbos and capacitors have on engines. Their added power curve is now scaled correctly, so they can be used properly with all types of engines now.
Fixed that the “Loading” circle of challenges did not disappear, although the challenge was successfully loaded.
Three cage parts weren’t configured to be unlocked in the ranklist career. This should be fixed now.
I tried to fix the PS5 controller. You can now switch to PS5 controller input mapping in the controls settings. After that, the mapping will be changed and hopefully matches the PS5 controller properly.
Fixed the leaderboards again.
There was a problem with some cars, where their brakes would not work. That’s due to the ABS system I coded. I tried to adjust it, so it doesn’t prevent those cars from braking at all.
Fixed a problem with the center of mass calculation. When repairing, the game sometimes recalculated the center of mass wrongly. This should now be fixed.
When lowering the texture quality in graphic settings, the UI texture resolution got also reduced. Now most of the UI should be unaffected when reducing the overall texture resolution.

[h3]Physics Changes[/h3]

It wasn’t possible before to build an engine, which goes directly to a planetary gear and then powered a hinge joint. This should now work properly.
The game now correctly calculates the rotation direction of gears and axles for everything that powers hinge joints. The game still doesn’t care about the rotation direction in the powertrain for wheels. But for everything else, you can now determine the rotation direction with the gearing. (There is a bug tho with worm gears still)
We completely changed the forces and speed of hinge joints. Before, no matter which engine used, hinge joints sped up to insane speed almost instantly. Now the game actually uses the power curve of the attached engine and powertrain to determine the power and top speed of hinge joints. This means, that you can now use multiple engines and/or gearing to power hinge joints with the speed and power you want or need. This also means that hinge joints in general are now much weaker and slower. If you want to spin something heavy, it will probably take some time to accelerate to speed. Likewise if you try to spin something that doesn’t weigh much, it will spin up much faster. Hopefully this makes the whole game much more realistic and makes it much more fun to play around with hinges, since their physics and forces now also use the same forces that are used to power the wheels of cars.
We changed the downforce physics. The wings now use a much more realistic force calculation. In general, they now produce less downforce than before, which should result in more realistic behavior. Due to those changes, we will reset all leaderboards of the game, so you can freshly start to conquer them.

Drive and fly safe, friends!
Marc and Simon / Creactstudios

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1279510/Screw_Drivers/