Liftoff News

17th December is a date to remember!

IUDRO - The University Drone Racing Company has been preparing for pure awesomeness! Check out the amazing IUDRO eSport Series stream announcement trailer below 😲

The Liftoff team is extremely excited about these upcoming competitions and we look forward to sharing this adventure with you all. We can't wait!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT0Nmy-ROms

Joshua Bardwell asked the Liftoff team if we could fix his fence. We were not entirely sure what he meant by that, so we potentially fixed it by breaking it. ;) 

Hopefully that can't be said of the other aspects included in this update, as we continue to work on improvements and fixes for the game. Here's what's included: 

• Updated: The replay selection now shows the freestyle score instead of the time value when looking for freestyle recordings.
  
• Updated: Score values per stunt are now also saved in the recording.
  
• Updated: When watching a recording in which stunts were performed, the score per stunt is now shown as well.
  
• Updated: When watching a recording, the drone LED and trail color are now set to the color as it was on the drone rather than a predefined color.
  
• Updated: Fence in Bardwell's Yard lost a rail as shown in this video.
  
• Updated: The manual controller calibration panel has been updated visually to be more consistent in style.
  
• Updated: The manual controller calibration panel now shows the current axis value, so you don't have to guess it's values anymore.
  
• Updated: The personal ghosts opponents during race now show their name along with their race time, so you know which is which.
  
• Fixed: Drone selection in multiplayer is now visible again after having a level being loaded.
  
• Fixed: The LIFTOFF! message now correctly disappears in multiplayer infinite race when spectating a player when the countdown wasn't finished yet.
  
• Fixed: The drone didn't spawn properly in the Getting Started menu when calibrating your controller.
  
• Fixed: An input binding popup was visible by default when entering the input binding phase in the Getting Started menu.
  
• Fixed (potentially): Black screen issue after leaving a level. Looking for confirmation! 
  

Additionally, Liftoff: Drone Racing has just released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, check out our launch trailer below!

[previewyoutube]https://youtu.be/2g91uxK6p6k[/previewyoutube]

Our yearly Halloween tradition has started, 10 pumpkins can be found in each Liftoff environment!
This year we are awarding 10 in-game gift boxes to 3 fans who make the most creative Halloween screenshot in Liftoff. Want to participate? Create one or more fun Liftoff screenshots, share them on Facebook and tag Liftoff in your post, alternatively upload your Halloween screenshot on the Steam Community Hub and add the tag #HalloweenHunt as a comment.

You have until the 6th of November to submit your screenshot. A free Liftoff Pro Account is required to win the in-game gifts. Have fun!


On top of that, we are releasing a small quickfix update for the game. For those worried about big downloads, its only 15mb in size ;)

[h2]Changelist[/h2]

• Fixed: The Liftoff dude not being visible.
  
• Fixed: Sharing your drone didn't properly save the Steam ID to the file after leaving the Workbench. This prevented selecting the 'Fixed drone setup' game modifier in multiplayer rooms.
  
• Fixed: In multiplayer free flight, when sending a chat message would send you to walking mode with the default keybindings.
  
• Fixed: some missing French translations for added messages since the 1.3.0 update.
  

Third time's the charm, take two. After the massive 1.3 milestone update, we'd already done a lot of work patching up little oversights and glitches. Of course, as always, some stuff got overlooked or was so crazily specific it couldn't immediately be reproduced. 1.3.4 has another load of fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

Once again, thanks for every one's diligent reports! They're a lifesaver!

• Fixed multiplayer color picker not saving the selected color.
  
• Fixed issue where player level in Multiplayer waiting room was displayed as "0".
  
• Fixed multiplayer chat messages being stacked on each other.
  
• Fixed black patches on terrain with OpenGL rendering on macOS.
  
• Fixed drone swarm animation in Hannover (Night Fever variant) where it wasn't oriented properly.
  
• Fixed battery charge indicator UI not showing when starting a Multiplayer room with the 'Force battery simulation' option turned on.
  
• Fixed issue in the Workbench that would slow it down incredibly when selecting parts too fast.
  
• Fixed issue with certain tracks not being able to load. Invalid track items are now silently ignored.
  
• Fixed several track items not being placed under the same category in the Track Builder.
  
• Fixed several checkpoint highlight effects in the Track Builder.
  
• Fixed drone in the input calibration menu not being shown properly when entering the scene without a controller connected.
  
• Fixed issue where drone selection screen would show an empty lineup in certain circumstances
  
• Updated: the drone selection screen will now default to your currently selected drone, if it is found in that lineup.
  

V1.3 was a massive internal update for the entire Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing project. As anyone who's ever worked in software development can testify, one huge fix tends to create three small bugs. Thanks to the many reports, support messages and forum posts we received from all you over the past few weeks, we managed to pinpoint (and fix!) a whole host of issues.

Because we wanted to return to a completely stable experience as fast as possible, we have been rolling out these fixes gradually, starting with the most pressing issues. In fact, if you've played Liftoff recently, you've already been playing 1.3.1 or 1.3.2, because we're sneaky like that. However, since we didn't want to swamp you in technical update news, we decided to bundle several of these small bug fixes into one post, along with the release of the latest 1.3.3.

Note: apart from bug fixes and some improvements, these updates also allow you to pick a more modern rendering API if your system supports it. Read all about it here.

• Added Vulkan rendering mode for Windows.
  
• Added a search bar to the level, Multiplayer leader board and Tournament selection screens, to quickly search through content.
  
• The blackbox tuning tool is now active by default when doing a Test Flight from the Workbench.
  
• The blackbox tuning tool has been given a facelift and is now properly visually integrated in the Drone HUD.
  
• Updated the personal leader boards in the level selection menu for race and freestyle game modes.
  
• Reduced standard build size from ± 17GB to ±12GB.
  
• Reduced operational memory footprint.
  
• Moved Night Fever content to a different folder to prevent file name issues on non-case sensitive file systems.
  
• Fixed: level selection, Multiplayer leader board selection and Tournament selection screens are now properly populated again after having been in an environment before.
  
• Fixed: when entering the Workbench to open gift boxes, not having any boxes now correctly sends you directly to the drone editing mode.
  
• Fixed: the loading indicator in the Replay selection screen would sometimes remain visible, even if it wasn't loading anymore.
  
• Fixed: scroll speed in many dropdowns on Windows and Linux has been sped up and should be usable now.
  

• Resolved multiplayer stuttering issues (a default drone is now visualized when another player joins in the game. Assets of other drones are only loaded once you reset yours.)
  
• Correct representation of actual room environment variant (We were wondering why Night Fever was suddenly SO popular.)
  
• Internal rework of Multiplayer in-game activity. It should better represent the other players' statuses.
  
• Updated the loading status bar to include a new state and added actual loading progress of each individual step.
  
• Fixed: Multiplayer Free Flight walking spawn positions are now properly patched through to other players.
  
• Fixed: the player's level was visually cut off in the Tournament selection menu.
  
• Fixed: Couldn't take off in multiplayer race.
  
• Fixed: Night Fever label being visible in the replay selection menu when it shouldn't be.
  
• Fixed: Screen flashing during loading.
  

• Custom music player preference is now toggled off by default.
  
• Added some extra information in the game log file. Knowing which version of the game is running should make support requests easier.
  
• Fixed: removed a floating grey box in the level selection screen.
  
• Fixed: the player's level was visually cut off in the level selection menu.
  
• Fixed: Incorrect depth of field effect while flying in third person.
  
• Fixed: third person camera smoothness.
  
• Fixed: black screen issue in multiplayer when spectating a player that quit to the main menu.
  
• Fixed: Night Fever toggle being visible in the multiplayer room creation when the player didn't have access to Night Fever content.