Hello - and welcome to the first community update post of 2026! The year has been quite busy for us, and we've had a lot of behind-the-scenes work and improvements to make to support new features and improvements. We'll cover a few of these in this blog post.
Remember, if you want to participate in the discussion directly with the development team - and the rest of the GeneRally 2 community - you can join us on Discord.
Online Multiplayer - Mid-Championship Joining
Whilst the last major update introduced the ability for you to join a server as a spectator, even when it's mid-championship, we didn't plan to stop there! We now have functioning mid-championship joining, such that you can join a server, and at the start of the next race, be placed on the grid ready to race - this is a marked improvement over needing to wait until the end of the championship to get racing.
There's still some bug-fixing and testing to do, and an amount of UI reworking necessary (which you'll see below, is a bit of a theme at the moment), but we hope to have this in your hands before long - along with server settings to allow hosts to control the behaviour of this feature. We'll keep you updated as we get closer to being able to make this feature available!
Behind this feature there's a lot of work that Markku has put in to reworking our multiplayer client-server architecture, to improve reliability and performance... as well as reduce the number of synchronisation errors that players may encounter!
Replays & Photo Mode
It's long been possible to see the race replay playing behind the result screen in-game, but it hasn't been possible to affect its playback, hide the UI, or move around to get a better angle. Fundamentally, we wanted to allow players to be able to more easily relive and share their favourite moments from a race, and be able to be creative with the camera (instead of having to use clever Track Editor tricks and multiple track versions).
At the moment, in our internal build, it's possible to load and save replays; skip forwards and backwards through the replay; and move the camera around the track. We still need to make some small improvements to this system, and then create a user-friendly interface which would allow for easier control, and application of features more familiar to photo mode in other games: focal length, lens effects, filters, etc.
The steps that have been needed to make replays work, also pave the way for save games in the future!
Other Improvements
Outside of these bigger features, we also have updates on the state of a few of the other features that we're working on:
🎨 Driver Profiles - this one is still in-progress, as we're making some changes to the UI and how driver customisation works, to ensure this is a really worthwhile improvement!
🎮 Controller Support in Menus - we're making steady progress with this and, along with the driver profiles, making a bunch of UI improvements to ensure navigation is quick and clear (even on small screens).
🛣 Road to v1.0 - we have a lot of smaller improvements we're starting to progress on our way to getting GeneRally 2 to it's v1.0 release! These include things like car-livery reworks and improvements; Track Editor improvements and fixes; new sounds; performance improvements; time-trial mode; and more!
As usual, please keep an eye on the blog, Discord and our roadmap to see what's in progress!
Conclusion
For now, though, that's all we have to share. We'll have more updates soon, but if you have any questions or want to discuss further with us, come and find us on Discord.