Slipstream News

First of all, I want to say thank you, again, to everyone who's supported the game since launch. May 21st was the third anniversary of Slipstream, and I'm really happy to have all of you here. I hope you enjoy the news.

It took me a lot longer than expected, as expected, but the 1.2 version is now playable. It's not complete (more on that later), but it's good enogh to advance to the next phase of testing, and you're all invited to try. It is currently in an optional beta branch, and only windows builds are available, but I'll eventually add builds for other platforms. (Also, let me know if you can run it with Proton, it didn't work on my computer but maybe it will for some of you.)

So... what's new? First, let's get the negatives out of the way:

• Only 3 game modes are available: Grand Tour, Cannonball and Single Race.
  
• No achievements, the secret tracks are unlocked by default but the whole progression system is disabled for now. Also no leaderboards.
  
• No post-race information screens, game goes straight from gameplay back to the main menu when the race ends.
  
• No tutorial.
  
• Some of the settings, like difficulty and traffic density in cannonball mode, have no effect.
  
• The game is completely unbalanced in terms of difficulty, some races are too easy, some are impossible. I will try to fix this soon.
  
• In general, remember, this is BETA software, it's not finished. There are bugs, some things don't work yet, some parts of the audio and UI are missing, don't judge it based on polish right now. I guarantee it will have at least the same level of polish as the original.
  

Now, the fun part:

• New mechanic: Time rewind. Hold SPACE (Y on gamepad) to rewind up to 5 seconds. There is currently no limit to this mechanic, other than the rewind time resetting after use, and this will probably be changed eventually. Also expect bugs, since this is a new mechanic, and a complex one from the programming side.
  
• New AI. The AI cars have been completely changed in all their behavior. They are now almost exactly equivalent to a player car, having access to the same mechanics, like the slipstream, and crashing/spinning like players. Also, all of the rubberbanding has been removed, the AI cars are exactly equal to the ones available for the players. The AI is still not 100% finished, so it will do some funny stuff now and then. The collision system has also been greatly improved and the physics of the game feel better now, at least in my opinion.
  
• New art for all the rivals, thanks to my talented friend Victor Leão, and new dialogue for most of them. I took the liberty of writing new lines for the kickstarter backer characters. If you are a backer and want to change something on your character, email me.
  
• Modding. The skeleton of the modding system is already implemented, but there is no documentation and no tools yet. If you want to poke around, take a look inside the assets/content/ folder. I will elaborate on this in the future, like making tools available and adding steamworks support.
  
• Some technical changes. You now Alt+Enter to switch fullscreen on/off, the camera tilts, and the settings menu was changed in some ways (no more 'apply graphics settings').
  

I don't expect it to take much longer for the final release, but I wanted to do a beta period first so I can take your suggestions and gather more data to help me balance the game. I hope you enjoy the new version. Thanks for your patience and see you soon!

Hello everyone, I hope you're all doing fine.

As you can probably see, the Slipstream 1.2 update I promised at the beginning of the year is not available yet. My initial deadline was the middle of the year, but with all the stuff happening around all of us, the plans had to change. I decided then to set the deadline for the winter sale, but again I couldn't make it in time. I'm really sad for that, because the winter sale is a huge deal for everyone on Steam and it would be the perfect opportunity to present an upgraded version of the game and hopefully get some extra sales, but unfortunately it didn't work.

That said, I have a lot of new stuff to show you guys. If you are still interested in Slipstream, I hope this update will be worth the wait. I'm working very hard to polish the game as much as I can, and solve the problems in the current version. Here's a short summary of the new stuff that's coming to the game shortly.

• A Full Rewrite
  Just to give you some context before I get into details, the 1.2 update isn't just an update, it's a full rewrite of the whole game's code. Of course the game will still feel almost the same, I "translated" all the player-facing parts of the code using the same exact values, so for the player it will feel like a normal update, but under the hood everything has changed. That's why it's taking so long, basically.
  
  
• New & Improved AI
  I think this is the most critical issue in the game in its current form. The AI is just not good. The races aren't thrilling enough. It was, for the most part, the result of me not being a good enough programmer when I wrote the original version. For the new version, the AI is 100% brand new, and it's a lot smarter and more interesting than before.
  
  Getting a little bit more technical, the AI cars and player cars used to follow different rules. You can notice, in-game, how the AI is kind of stuck on a railroad path, breezing through the curves without any trouble. The AI and the players are exactly the same now. Instead of the AI being a special kind of car under special rules, it is functionally equivalent to a player, so all the rules apply: the AI can crash, use the slipstream, make mistakes, bump into each other, etc.
  
  It's impossible to stress how much this changes the gameplay, you have to play to understand. it feels like an entirely different game now, and it's probably the biggest new feature in the update. It's not completely finished yet, but here you can see it in action. A positive side effect was me being able to remove all the rubberbanding from the game, which was another thing that always bothered me a lot. In summary, the single player races are now closer, more consistent, more thrilling, better in every way.
  
  
• Modding!
  The second biggest new feature is modding support. There's been interest in modding the game since the original release, but there was no official support for it besides adding music to the in-game radio. The new version will support user-provided tracks (including scenery props, backgrounds and textures) and cars, which will open the opportunity for unprecedented customization and creativity. It will also allow me to easily add more content to the game in the future, if necessary. Here's a demonstration.
  
  
• Time Rewinding
  The last of the big new features is an entirely new mechanic, time rewinding. Slipstream used to be very... uh... intolerant of error. If you crashed a single time in a grand tour mode run, for example, it was pretty much impossible to beat the rival car. Now the player can go back in time for a few seconds and maybe undo the mistake that led to the crash. The fact that the player can now undo their mistakes, combined with the fact that the AI now can make mistakes has flipped the game upside down. There is now a more strategic depth in how the player has to think about the race. The time rewinding ability will be a limited resource, I still haven't decided on a precise value yet but I'll make it so the player can undo one mistake per lap at most (more in easy mode, less in hard mode) and managing the resource will become an actual gameplay feature. There's also a short demonstration of this feature in the video linked above in the AI section.
  
  
• Other Minor Changes & Bug Fixes
  The most noticeable visual change is that the camera now tilts on curves, which adds a more dramatic look to the whole thing. It's optional of course but it will be enabled by default. The entire game will be rebalanced, some cars will be nerfed/buffed because, without rubberbanding, having all the cars equally balanced becomes a lot more important. There will be entirely new leaderboards for the new version because it wouldn't make any sense to compare the new, post-balancing times with the old ones.

The current version of the game will be kept as a separate 'legacy' branch on Steam so you can still play it if, for some reason, you like it better. The old leaderboards will also remain in place. I'm working very hard to bring this to public as soon as I can, I'm realistically expecting it to be finished by the middle of january 2021. It will probably also take some testing as a public beta before the full release.

So... that's it for the news. I wish you all a happy holiday season, stay safe and thanks for the continued support, you are a wonderful community and I'm trying my best to make you all happy with my game. If you want to follow the development of Slipstream (and future projects) more closely, follow me on twitter.

Thanks a lot, see you soon.

Hello everyone.

First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of maintenance on this game in the past few months. I had personal problems and couldn't get the right amount of time and energy to do much productive work. I hope it's all settled now and I can resume my usual activity.I have received lots of bug reports lately but didn't respond to any. Again, I'm sorry for this.

I said on the last update that some compatibilities may break, and they indeed broke. From what I could gather, the game isn't working anymore on older generations of Intel HD Graphics processors. Even though HD4000 and below are not oficially supported, as per the minimum requirements page, the game did run on those previously and stopped with the last update. I'd like to restore that, if possible.

However, it isn't possible. At least not in the current state of the game.

Slipstream was programmed in Java, and that has always been kind of a liability for the game. When I started the project, it was intended to be a mobile game (where using java makes more sense), and as it transformed into a PC game I never had a chance or really needed to rewrite it. LibGDX performs very well on PC, is cross-platform and had everything I needed to complete the project.

However, after release, the weaknesses of the Java dependency became more apparent. It is very portable across PC platforms, but it's PC-only (that's why Slipstream was never released on consoles), it requires a huge runtime package to be shipped with the game and has an gigantic dependency chain: my code uses libgdx, libgdx uses lwjgl, lwjgl uses glfw and a bunch of other C/C++ libs. If any of those parts breaks compatibility, all the others break too.

For all those reasons, I've decided to port Slipstream to a new software platform. This will give me more control over the code, hopefully less problems and more stability. I haven't made a definitive choice yet, but the more likely candidate is FNA. It's been used in lots of succesful games, proven its quality and stability, and is similar enough to the current Slipstream code to make the job of porting not too hard.

That will hopefully fix the current issues and maybe other bugs along the way. But it will also take a while, a couple of months at least. If the game doesn't run on your PC after the last update, there isn't much I can do in the short-term, but I will work on a definitive long term solution.

Finally, if you have issues with the game on officially supported hardware (Intel HD 5000 and above, any Nvidia/AMD GPU with OpenGL 3.3+ support), please send me an email detailing the problem. If you sent me an email in the last 3 or 4 months and I didn't reply, please send another.

TL; DR:

• Active maintenance on Slipstream is now resumed, sorry for the downtime.
  
• The game will be ported to a new software back-end to avoid the java runtime dependency. It's gonna take a while but I hope it's worth it.
  
• If you have issues, contact me. I will respond now.
  

Thanks, see you soon.

PS: I'm sorry for not being very active on the forums. I have a slight anxiety problem and reading too much stuff about this game makes me very nervous. I'm always available to talk on twitter or e-mail.

Hello everyone.

After a silent update from 1.1.9 to 1.1.10, which was just a bugfix release, here comes another one.

The only change made to the game itself was:

• bug fix on time trial mode that failed to register your best lap if it was not the last lap (how did I miss this one for so long? I'm sorry!)
  

Other than that, I updated pretty much all the back-end software runtimes used by the game, so I expect that some people might have compatibility issues. If you have any problems, please send me an email: me at ansdor dot com

Another important notice is that I raised the minimum linux compatibility version from ubuntu 16.04 to ubuntu 18.04. I tried my best to keep the compatibility with older versions but some libraries used by the game (specifically Jamepad, the input library) do not support any linux version with glibc lower than 2.27.

If you are running ubuntu 16.04 or older, the only option is to run the game on SteamPlay, which I heard works well enough.

Hello everyone, I hope you're doing fine.

Slipstream's 1 year release anniversary is coming soon and I wanted to update a few things before then. Here's version 1.1.9.

The biggest change is the addition of a new control option: Automatic Drifting. It's similar to the 'simplified controls' that were already available on the multiplayer mode, but now it's a lot more intuitive and responsive. It's also available on all modes, single and multiplayer. That's probably the biggest quality of life update this game has ever had, and I hope it improves the experience for people who didn't like the drifting controls. For those who did like them, manual drifting is still the default option and works the same way it has always been.

Other changes:

• difficulty has been adjusted across various modes, most notably cannonball and battle royale
  
• the game camera is now a little closer to the ground than it used to be
  
• the visibility in Mystic Cave was increased. I went too hard on that track, sorry.
  
• signs indicating curves have been added to a few tracks (neon city, mystic cave)
  
• assorted bug fixes, collision changes, all the usual stuff
  

The game will be on sale on its anniversary week, so if you have friends who might be interested in Slipstream, let them know.

That's all for today. Thanks for playing, I hope you enjoy the game. Any problems, send me an email at support [at] ansdor [dot] com.