Season's greetings, drivers, and welcome to the highlights blog for our 0.34 update! This release introduces a highly anticipated new vehicle, expands the selection of vehicle parts, delivers a set of fresh gameplay challenges, as well as numerous fixes and improvements. So follow along while we chaperon you through all the details.
NEW VEHICLE: Bruckell Nine
Headlining this season's lineup is the Bruckell Nine, a highly anticipated pre-war vehicle. Carefully crafted to reflect the era's iconic design and historical authenticity, it's a perfect fusion of vintage sophistication and practical functionality.
The Bruckell Nine is one of our most versatile and refined vehicles to date. With nine different body styles – two coupe options, a sedan, a roadster, two van variants, two pickup styles, and a driver seat on a bodyless frame, it offers extensive customization possibilities.
The vehicle debuts with a heap of customization options that cater to both period-appropriate and modern applications. These include a hot rod and restomod parts, glass tint, and mechanical components. While factory variants retain the unique characteristic quirks and "janky" handling of a 1930s vehicle, modernized configurations bring smoother handling with advanced suspension and wheel upgrades, ideal for racing enthusiasts or those looking to test speed limits.
With this release we're also expanding the lighting system to simulate the gradual illumination of vintage halogen bulbs. This improvement introduces smooth transitions when turning headlights on and off, rather than toggling them instantly. For now, this feature is exclusive to the Nine, complete with a slight dimming effect during engine startup.
New Parts, Tweaks, and Fixes
But the holiday fun doesn't stop there! The Gavril Grand Marshall is getting a new widebody kit called the Slider, paired with a distinctive livery not likely to be seen on a big American sedan, it's tuned to take corners in style. The Drag configuration also benefits from several new aftermarket parts, sound tuning, and fixes for known issues.
For our law enforcement enthusiasts, we've upgraded police configurations across the board! We've expanded options to include police, undercover, emergency beacon lights, light bars, and flashers on vehicles that lacked them. Older police models now include antennas and halogen flashers, and some have gained new interior controls for beacon lights and light bars. The modern light bar now features selectable flash patterns, glass colors and accessories, as well as better optimization.
We didn't stop there - fixes, tweaks, and updates were applied to a variety of vehicles, including Burnside Special, Civetta Scintilla, ETK 800-Series, ETK-I Series, Gavril MD-Series, Roamer, and T-Series, the Ibishu BX-Series, and the Soliad Wendover, among others. Dive into the release notes for the full details!
West Coast, USA Improvements
On the environment side, several areas on West Coast, USA received another round of polish.
The Belasco Motorsports Park has been updated with a revamped parking lot and surroundings, along with a brand-new gravel off-road course adjacent to the track. Additional off-road sections have been introduced near the start of the mainland bridge, along with further optimizations on off-road areas throughout the map.
Bus shelters have been redesigned to better align with the aesthetics of the maps on Italy, West Coast, East Coast, Utah, and Jungle Rock Island. These shelters also feature updated bus route map textures.
Other improvements include memory optimizations and various updates to roads, forest, terrain, decalroads, AI decalroads and collision meshes, and more.
Gameplay
Drift enthusiasts, there's a new way to challenge your skills! No need to commit to a full Drift Challenge - we've added seven Freeroam Drift Zones in West Coast, USA!
As you explore the map, keep an eye out for blue road signs signifying drift zones. Start drifting near a sign to activate the system, which tracks your high scores and sets goals for you to beat. Then, drift all the way to the next sign and rack up points to complete the challenge!
We've also revamped the drift scoring system - instead of being time-based, it's now distance-based, so slower drifts will no longer provide better rewards than faster drifts over the same distance.
For drag racing, we've introduced a new precision-based challenge: Dial Racing. Set your target time before the race starts and aim to get closer to it than your opponent without overshooting. On top of that, we've improved automatic opponent selection and added a history feature which allows you to review past results.
Three new challenges join the missions lineup: Bootleg Runner on Utah, Hotrod Club on East Coast, USA, and Vintage Hauler on Small Island.
Alongside these additions, we've implemented a number of fixes and quality-of-life improvements across the gameplay systems. Most major challenges now have an updated UI with new start, end, and detail screens. The "Move to Start" feature replaces countdowns across many missions, and time-of-day settings can now be customized for select missions.
New in World Editor: Biome Tool
For the map makers among you, we're excited to unveil the new Biome Tool, designed to streamline your workflow. By utilizing mask controls and adjustable parameters, it allows you to populate the map with diverse foliage elements effortlessly. Using the Biome Tool, you can do in minutes what used to take days!
We've also improved the Resource Checker's UI, and added the ability to see how materials are used within the map. And last, but certainly not least, we've added a work in progress edit mode for the Traffic Manager, which will allow you to easily place and control traffic vehicles, props, and signals, complete with save-and-load functionality for your traffic layouts.
Naturally, there's so much more packed into this release than we've covered so far. Other changes include improvements for AI and traffic, reworked electrics handling, new and tweaked sounds, progress on our experimental Linux support, updates for the JBeam debugging and visualization tools, and fixes for a wide range of bugs and crashes.
To see the complete list of changes, check out the patch notes here!