BallisticNG News

Hey everyone! It's been just over a month since we announced Neon Nights so here's an update on progress, plus more.

Currently 3 of the 6 tracks are complete. In the last announcement we showed off Relay and Vega Square, today we're showing you the next two tracks and Vega Square in motion.


Here's a look at Vega Square in motion, next month we'll show off Route 05 in motion too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9kty3WKGnc


Route 05 is a remake of what was originally the 0x001 prototype track in BallisticNG 0.5. The original track was retraced in the layout creator and given some minor changes to make it flow better.




Basin weaves through Vega City's central storm drain and all of its underground components. It's the first track in the game to officially use magnetic track sections and is the first to feature two completely separate routes for the forward and reverse variants, effectively making it 2 tracks in 1!

There's going to be a lot to this track. Scenery wise it's the biggest track in the game to date so we're saving more screenshots until next month when it's much more complete.




Upsurge is a new gamemode we're introducing with 1.1. It's a mode that's been requested a lot throughout the game's development and it's now finally here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnFGlHC8yic


BallisticNG 1.1 will be running on Unity 2018.3, upgrading from 2017.2. There are many improvements the latest version of Unity brings which boosts physics performance and provides many new features that makes future development much more streamlined.

DirectX9 support was removed from Unity starting from 2017.3 so BNGs DX9 support has been dropped and replaced with OpenGL. If you're running on capable hardware the game will still continue to use DirectX11.

Finally this also means that mod creators will need to upgrade their Unity installs to 2018.3 - we're using 2018.3.8f1 specifically. The upgrade process is very straight forward and we'll have a short guide to walk you through what you need to do in order to update projects. Don't upgrade your Unity install prematurely however, the tools will not work if you update without first having the 1.1 Unity Tools!

We're pleased to unveil BallisticNGs first expansion: Neon Nights!

This first expansion will be free and included inside the game's next major update. There's currently no release date, we want this expansion to be something amazing for you to play through so we're taking our time and will be releasing it when it's ready.


Neon Nights takes place in Vega City, a glowing metropolis that's signed away several of its key locations to the AGL. A move heavily funded by Omnicom that's been met with the praise of AG fans and outrage of the local residents.

6 new tracks are being added with this expansion: 5 standard tracks and a drag track. The standard tracks will be available in both forward and reverse variants with the usual time of day and weather alterations.

Easy Vega Square: A short circuit situated in the bustling heart of Vega City.
Relay: A repurpose of an old circuit that is yet to see action in the AGL, situated at one of Omnicoms communication relays.

Intermediate Route 05: Plans for a circuit that never saw fruition were found and fully realized in this familiar circuit that runs along Vega City's 5km highway.
Basin: A long circuit which drops into Vega City's central storm drain.

Hard Thunderhead: A technical circuit passing through Vega City's industrial district.
Metro: A long circuit interwoven with Vega City's metro system.


Neon Nights will come with two new campaigns: Aftermath and the Neon Nights campaign itself.

Aftermath is built from base game content and covers the tracks not included in the original campaigns (Surge, Zephyr Climb, Atlantica and Relay from this expansion).

These campaigns do not count towards total campaign completion so it's not a requirement that you beat them in addition to the original campaigns to reach rank 50.


Keep an eye out as more announcements showing off tracks will be coming!

Here's some screenshots to get started:

1.0.3 has just released! We have some fixes and other improvements that we wanted to get out while we're working on 1.1. Stay tuned as we'll be unveiling what's to come in the games first content update soon!


If you have uploaded a CSF ship to the workshop you are going to need to update your Unity project with the latest Unity Tools package and re-upload them. Changes to how the game handles CSF ships in this update requires all file names to be unique which originally uploaded workshop CSF files do not have.

If you've downloaded CSF ships from the workshop and they haven't updated then the game won't load them and details will be printed to the game's console.

Apologies for the inconvenience.


If you want the quick rundown of what's new, here are the highlights:

• Survival now has leaderboard support
  
• Improved collision detection and made bottoming out more consistent
  
• Updated several of the games sounds
  
• Model B ships now have animated airbrakes
  
• Fixed several issues related to CSF format custom ships
  

User Interface

• You can no longer select Model B tracks when playing eliminator
  

Gamemodes

• Added support for Survival leaderboards
  
• Removed leaderboard support from race based gamemodes
  

User Interface

• Added a close button to the console
  
• Drastically improved the consoles rendering performance
  

Ships

• Added animated airbrakes to the Model B Ships
  
• Fixed each Model B ship now having a default livery name
  
• Fixed ghost ships using the vertex wobble offset in the energy wall shader
  
• Fixed some inconsistent behaviours with heavy wall impacts
  
• Fixed distorted UVs around Caliburns right airbrake
  
• Ghost ships now use the ships frontend mesh when available
  
• Scenery walls not aligned with a track sections right vector now allow heavy wall impacts
  
• The collision sparks now inherit the ships impact velocity
  
• Bottoming out is now handled upon collision with the track floor instead of being triggered by a hover threshold. This provides more consistent floor bounce behaviour across all ships
  
• Ships now use continuous collision detection, this prevents ships with sharp wings like the NX from clipping through walls
  

Tracks

• Fixed the holograms shader ignoring the clipping distance setting
  

Weapons

• Fixed the plasma bolt spawning in the wrong location for certain CSF format custom ships
  
• The spawn position for the plasma bolt projectile is now determined using the ships mesh length instead of a static offset
  

Ai

• Fixed the pitch input not being reset to zero when an AI takes control of a player ship
  
• Rewrote the ship-ship collision avoidance to make it more effective by letting AI react to the player ahead of time
  

Audio

• Fixed the afterburner sound playing multiple times on some inputs and also playing when pressing the input in the pitlane
  
• There is now a delay threshold between playing track impact sounds, sometimes collisions can happen very close together so this prevents sounds from overlapping each other
  
• Update several sounds:
  
  • Wall impacts (now also used for bottoming out)
    
  • Wall scraping
    
  • Start boost
    
  • Start boost fail
    
  • Airbrakes
    
  • Turbo pickup use
    
  • Energy wall bolt fire
    

Engine

• CSF ship bundles are now fully unloaded when navigating the ship turntable and a lock system is now in place which prevents assets currently being used from being unloaded.
  
• Bottoming out on the track now spawns the collision hit particle effect
  

Achievements

• The minesweeper achievement is now achievable if you destroy a mine while the mines destroyed stat is above the achievement target.
  
• Custom achievement unlock statuses are no longer forgotten if you disable the mod they belong too.
  

Multiplayer

• Fixed CSF ships not loading if a player selects a livery that has an index higher then your own local copy of the same ship. The game will now load the default livery if this occurs.
  

Modding

• Fixed the BallisticNG/CustomShipCull shader not being translated to the in-game version upon custom ship loading
  
• If duplicate files are found in the myships/mytracks folders when categorizing root files the game will now replace the already categorized files with the uncategorized version.
  

Layout Creator

• Fixed side snapping to a track route traversing in the opposite direction resulting in vertices connecting to the opposite side of the track
  

Unity Tools

• Updated all video assets to use VP8 encoding, this should fix crashes on Linux once custom tracks have been updated by their authors
  
• When uploading a CSF to the workshop the temp file it generates to upload is now given the workshop ID as a file name
  

Multi-platform specific

• Linux builds now stores all settings in the game's ini file instead of using Unity's PlayerPrefs system. The game now also manually retrieves the desktops resolution to assign on first launch.
  

Happy piloting!

BallisticNG 1.0.2 has just released and we're pleased to announce new tools for custom ship creators to play with!


The Unity tools package originally developed for importing custom tracks is now also a tool for importing custom ships. The old in-game ship importer is being depreciated in favour of these Unity based tools which provide you with more options then ever before and makes future expansion much easier!

The old ship importer is being removed in a future update, make sure you upgrade your ships to the new format to continue updating them in the future.

If you're interested in getting started there is full documentation available here: https://ballisticng.gamepedia.com/Import_Ship_Tutorial


The track uploader is going to be depreciated in a future update in favour of a tool inside of Unity itself. The new tool functions the same as the standalone program but is just inside of Unity, meaning only a single codebase is required for full multiplatform support.

To access the new track uploader import the Unity tools update and then navigate to BallisticNG -> Track Workshop Manager from the toolbar.



Engine

• Implemented support for the new custom ship CSF format
  
• The cockpit camera is no longer available if the ship doesn't have a cockpit
  
• The external chase camera fov is now clamped to a maximum of 115 degrees and reacts to velocity changes more slowly
  
• The width and height of track sections are now calculated and referenced to by individual sides. This fixes many potential issues in tracks which don't have symmetrical sections and in other scenarios like route entrances/exits
  

Ships

• Fixed flares on custom ships with more then 1 engine rendering through walls
  
• Greatly reduced the velocity transfer on rear ship bumps
  
• Duplicate ships in races now use alternative liveries
  

User Interface

• The ship importer option on the menu now has a legacy notice
  
• Ship descriptions are no longer forced down to lowercase
  

Modding

• Added a custom ship module system, more information will be coming about this in documentation updates soon.
  

Layout Creator

• Fixed the virtual floor visualizer persisting if virtual mode was used before entering the layout creator
  

Unity Tools
Reimport the BallisticUnityTools.unitypackage file for this update.

• Added BallisticNG -> Debugging -> Run Initial Open Wizard
  
• Added BallisticNG -> Track Workshop Manager
  
• Added support for setting up and exporting custom ships
  
• Added the Marina Rush tile textures
  
• Implemented Steamworks for the new workshop functionality
  

Have fun modding!

We've just released 1.0.1! This small update includes some bug fixes, gameplay tweaks and quality of life changes. Check out the changelog below for the full list of changes.

Enjoy the update and have a great new year!



Campaign

• Increased the Tenrai Ishtar Citadel Time Trial and Nexus Omega Time Trial targets by 3 seconds
  

Gamemode

• Fixed tournament standings not updating when the player is eliminated on the last race
  
• Fixed the leaderboard overlay being viewable in Survival
  

Ships

• The engine flare and trail now increase in brightness when the turbo pickup is used and when start boosting
  

Audio

• Fixed the event complete line being repeated when finishing a Knockout race
  

Engine

• Fixed the track floor visualizer in virtual environments not being transformed correctly if the track floor is positioned away from the world origin
  
• The video billboards option now works on custom tracks
  
• The game now sets the color of DualShock 4 lights to signify players
  

Weapons

• Reduced the velocity loss from tremors and removed the engine acceleration decrease
  
• Reduced the frequency of tremors pickups
  

User Interface

• Added labels to the livery/livery scheme selection boxes on the ship turntable
  
• Fixed the restart and quit buttons on the splitscreen results screen not doing anything
  
• Fixed the current song being changeable when in the pause menu content turntables
  
• Fixed opening the content turntables when the game is paused preventing you from unpausing the game if you back out of them
  
• The gamemode description is now shown on the campaign event details pane
  
• The knockout results screen no longer lists all of the untracked lap times
  
• Track turntable overlays now use the same wireframe render settings as the main menus track turntable
  
• The scroll wheel can now be used in content selection turntables
  
• The tournament standings list now shows the score increase for each team
  

AI

• Greatly reduced weapon aggression for the higher AI difficulties
  
• Fixed the AI not pitching
  
• The random top speed stat multiplier no longer allows the stat to exceed the ships original top speed
  
• Reduced the rubber banding present in the Elite and Hardcore difficulties
  

Layout Creator 2.0

• Fixed the editor soft locking when you delete every node in a route at once
  
• Fixed the editor soft locking when entering playmode with a separated route
  
• Fixed UVs being flipped on junction walls
  
• Fixed extra sections being generated at 0, 0, 0 when more than 1 route with no connected exit is present
  
• Track shape interpolation now uses a quadratic easing curve
  

Tracks

• Fixed the tile on Omega Harbour that wasn't using the reflective floor variant
  
• Fixed the incorrect wall tiles on Nova Split Reverse
  

Linux/Mac

• Fixed Omega Harbours scenery having the survival windows mesh always enabled using the normal building material
  

Unity Tools
Reimport the BallisticUnityTools.unitypackage file for this update.

• If a prefab for an imported TRM already exists then reimporting the TRM will no longer recreate the prefab and just update the meshes without breaking scenes. If a valid BNG scene is open then the track atlas and lighting will automatically be re-applied to the track once the re-import has finished.
  
• Fixed some major track data generation issues where wall tiles are generated using floor tile references and the atlas painter was also referencing wall tiles when painting and updating wall uvs.
  
  The wall fix will only apply to newly generated tracks, if you want to update your tracks to the new UVing system a button has been added to the Track Data object which will let you do a one-way upgrade.