BallisticNG News

Hey everyone! It's time for another development update.

4 out of 6 tracks for Neon Nights are now complete. Thunderhead has its layout finalized with some scenery already done, and Metro's layout is going to be developed very soon!


Previously we showed some screenshots of Route 05, now here it is in action!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plnfIXMT_go


Basin is now complete, here's some screenshots for you. We'll be showing off the track in action next month!

This is the game's biggest track to date and we can't wait to get this one into your hands in the coming months!




BallisticNG 1.1 is going to be introducing a gliding mechanic. Whenever you pitch up and are fairly close to the track floor you will begin gliding, giving you greater control over your decent!

You glide less as you gain speed. There's always some amount of glide but around the speed of the Barracuda Model B ships is when you'll find it begins to really cut out. This aids in keeping the mechanic balanced so you don't end up being airbourne for extremely long periods of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GIhwSn2l60


Neon Nights is bringing a new set of liveries to the game! These new liveries will first need be unlocked with a 100% gold or platinum run of the Neon Nights campaign. Here's a look at a few ships showing off their sleek new paint jobs!






Custom Campaigns

• Added support for the fallback texture reference. When 1.1 releases you'll be able point your custom campaign to a PNG or JPG file and have that display on the menu instead of an MP4 or WEBM file.
  
• Player and AI ships can now be forced seperatly, you can now also force specific liveries and livery schemes for events.
  

Lower grip for Toxic and Apex

• One problem BNG has always had is the lower speed classes just being a slow Zen. Nothing other then the top speed changes.
  
  1.1 is introducing lower grip for Toxic and Apex, a 20% and 10% reduction in grip respectively. This change makes the two speed classes much more fun as you'll now be able to drift around corners in a similar nature to how you would at Zen. Care has also been taken with the stat modifiers to ensure that the current world records don't become impossible to beat with these changes.
  

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!