Liftoff News

Shortly after introducing our community translation tools, we're thrilled to witness the emergence of remarkable community translations. As of now, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese languages are available for subscription on the Steam Workshop. And it seems like Spanish is in the works too. A heartfelt thank you to our dedicated community members whose efforts have made this achievement possible.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168375593&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168901618&searchtext=
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3164843493&searchtext=


Creators, please feel free to reach out to the team. As community pioneers, we are delighted to present you with a Liftoff Community Award badge as a thank you for your dedication!

Our debut Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing update for 2024 introduces a series of quality-of-life enhancements and features, improving the overal Liftoff Pro League tournament experience, adding a much requested race HUD feature and opening up the possibility for community translations.

[h2]Changelist[/h2]

• Added a dedicated lap timer in the drone's HUD. The lap timer will also flash green/red when you're improving/regressing your best time.
  
• Added a community localisation/translation feature.
  
• Added a drone telemetry feature.
  
• Updated the tournament flow. You can now select a drone from within the tournament menu, without having to register a tryout first.
  
• Updated starting tryouts in tournaments. At the start of the race, you can pick whether you want to start a practice round, or a tryout session. You can switch between tryouts and practice from the race finish screen.
  
• Updated ghosts racing with you during tournament practice. If you put down a better score on the leaderboard, it will add that ghost directly as an opponent during the next practice session.
  
• Updated the tournament information panels where everything is available in foldout menus rather than a dedicated menu per section.
  
• Added a multiplayer/community terms of service before entering the multiplayer when not using a Liftoff Pro account.
  
• Updated the 'Show OSD Axis Visualisation' option to be enabled by default.
  
• Updated some French and Ukrainian lines to properly handle plurals.
  
• Updated the drone HUD to be centered correctly.
  
• Fixed issue in the track/race editor where it wasn't possible anymore to edit races of a track that was edited and checkpoints were removed.
  
• Fixed some drone playback issues for ghosts and in multiplayer where it would seem like some are skipping checkpoints or passing through objects.
  
• Fixed netting in Paris Drone Festival on macOS while using Metal rendering.
  
• Fixed the OSD axis visualiser in multiplayer not showing the inputs of other pilots anymore after a drone reset.
  
• Fixed a collider issue of the suppot beams in the Woodpecker environment.
  
• Fixed an issue with loading the tournament leaderboards on older tournaments.
  
• Hopefully fixed an issue where a broken track or race could be selected during a multiplayer game.
  

[h2]Add new translations[/h2]
Motivated by the incredible creativity of the Liftoff community on Steam Workshop, we're excited to support community translations. You're no longer bound by the languages included in official updates, you can check out the Steam Workshop to look for community created translations or create and share your own.

You can access this localization feature in the "tools" section of the game, enabling you to download an existing official language as a template and import and test your own translations. Please note that this feature is currently in the "Beta" stage and is recommended only for translations utilizing the Latin alphabet. In upcoming updates, we plan to enhance this system to be more versatile and accommodating.

For more information, make sure to check out our Steam Guide.

[h2]Drone telemetry feature[/h2]
We are opening up Liftoff to give you access to more data, directly from the game. We have included a Drone telemetry feature that allows you to gather real-time data from the drone, e.g., position, attitude, rates, and processed input. This way, you can analyze flights or diagnose issues with external programs that interface with Liftoff. To enable this feature, visit this guide on the Steam Workshop.


[h2]Happy Valentine's Day, everyone![/h2]
Collect all the hearts in a single environment during the Valentine's Day event and unlock the "Heart Collector" achievement.

Thank you for being being a part of the Liftoff community, we love you all!

Every winter holiday season, Steam holds the Steam Awards. It's a chance to recognize your favorite games for their achievements. However, as Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out, because these awards rely on public voting, they often end up rewarding mainstream games backed by enormous marketing power rather than some indie gems that do equally impressive things yet don’t enjoy the mass media attention.

In the past, we used to actively promote the awards within our Liftoff community. However, we soon realised that we were pressuring you, our community, to participate in a system that couldn't truly recognise the unique and niche games you loved.

To illustrate this sentiment, this year's results are raising eyebrows among gamers and game press alike. Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that hasn't received any significant updates in the past 2 years, has been awarded the "Labor of Love" award. While it is a fantastic game deserving of much praise (we love it), it seems ironic that, as far as the gaming community is concerned, it is an abandoned project. The huge Rockstar fanbase however shows strength in numbers, simply voting for their favorite game.

So rather than just celebrating the popular vote alone, we’ll also reveal our special consideration for the 2023 Labor of Love Award: our community!

Together, our virtual pilots have achieved the milestone of logging over 10 million total flight hours in Liftoff. Nearly a decade after its initial release, they've consistently set new records in growth and playtime. In 2023, their dedication resulted in over 3,700 custom community-made pieces of content, contributing to the more than 27,000 workshop items collectively shared over the years, freely available for any other Liftoff pilot to use. They've shared 11,000 virtual drones online and crafted hundreds of kilometers of virtual drone racetracks to fly them on. For us, this signifies an incredible labor of love, and we deeply appreciate our community for it!




To the thousands of new pilots that joined us the past few days. Please be welcome! Join our community on Discord and Facebook!

Just like the previous update, version 1.5.11 of Liftoff introduces a range of enhancements and bug fixes. All these improvements were made based on player feedback, and we're grateful for your ongoing input!

[h2]Changelist[/h2]

• Added: Camera angle synchronisation in multiplayer while spectating.
  
• Updated: Loading of certain assets should go faster, resulting in faster loading times of maps on systems with slower drives.
  
• Fixed: Multiplayer drone spawn issue where an active player wouldn't have a drone assigned, which could result in black screens when spectating that player.
  
• Fixed: In multiplayer infinite race, it no longer shows a message if the player jumped first in the ranking without having a time set.
  
• Fixed: Drones in multiplayer now spawn at the right location so that they don't appear to glide for a fraction of a second.
  
• Fixed: Several scroll views on Windows and Linux that were extremely slow.
  
• Fixed: Bando City environment collisions with trees.
  

Ticking off a series of items on our list, version 1.5.10 is all about some essential quality-of-life enhancements. We appreciate your valuable feedback and bug reports, these make all the difference!

[h2]Changelist[/h2]

• Fixed drone respawn issue in multiplayer free flight and infinite race for other players. This may also fix some black screen issues if the player was spectating this particular drone.
  
• Fixed main menu or level loading issues where it was trying to show or use the DJI FPV drone while the parts were not available.
  
• Fixed issue with the race checkpoint markers jittering when using the Fisheye lens effect.
  
• Fixed issue with the race checkpoint markers lagging behind the camera's movement.
  
• Fixed issue where the camera would seemingly spawn for a fraction of a second in a remote location of the map before being properly assigned to a drone.
  
• Fixed issue with temporary drone settings being carried over when switching drone setups in-game, e.g. camera angle and flight mode.
  
• Fixed issue with toggling the Fisheye lens effect from the in-game game options menu.
  
• Fixed issue where the leaderboards wouldn't properly load in the multiplayer game lobby when a race from the Steam Workshop was used and the player still had to load in the data.
  
• Fixed issue where it would sometimes try to save an empty flight recording.
  
• Fixed several third person camera issues.
  
• Fixed several missing French and Ukrainian translation entries.