Hello everyone! Recently released patch v0.98 - a massive update that touches on driver depthening, negotiation overhauls, and some overall improvements everywhere! I hope you all enjoy as I continue to work on this project!!
# Patch Notes (V0.98)
## Major New Features
### Driver Confidence, Morale, and Personality
Drivers now have expanded personality and psychology systems that affect both on-track performance and off-track negotiations.
* Added **driver confidence** and **driver morale**, both tracked from 0–100, which will fluctuate at all times through every drivers career. These will fluctuate through persistent morale/confidence effects from results, team orders, role status, personality, and team context.
* Confidence can slightly improve or reduce driver performance depending on current form.
* Morale now affects negotiations, contract renewals, team satisfaction, role satisfaction, and long-term team context.
* Added morale and confidence tracking to the **Driver Centre**, a new overhauled UI introduced in this update.
* Added driver personality traits, with each driver supporting up to three traits.
* Added trait effects for negotiations, morale, confidence, result reactions, team orders, and equipment complaints.
* Added home-race advantages when a driver races in their home country (also introduced nationality -- to touch on later).
* Added same-nationality negotiation boosts between drivers and teams.
* Added **career stages** for drivers, automatically evaluated from age, history, achievements, and career position. These will change as drivers progress throughout their careers, and influence prestige requirements, salary expectations, and car competitiveness demands.
### New Driver Negotiation System
Driver negotiations have been rebuilt around a more flexible interest-based system.
* Replaced hard salary yes/no acceptance with an **interest bar**.
* Driver interest now considers salary, contract length, race role, driver priority, bonuses, morale, personality, prestige, team competitiveness, nationality, and career stage.
* Added contract bonuses for points, podiums, and wins.
* Added driver hierarchy/status options:
* First Driver
* Second Driver
* Equal Driver
* Negotiations now allow persistent attempts rather than immediately locking the player out.
* Reworked AI driver signings to use the new contract scoring system while preserving existing restrictions such as academy protection, affordability, age limits, and prestige requirements.
### Staff Morale and Negotiations
Staff systems have been expanded to better match the new driver systems.
* Added staff nationalities.
* Added staff morale.
* Staff morale can slightly improve or reduce staff skill effectiveness.
* Reworked player staff negotiations into an interest-bar system.
* Staff negotiation scoring now considers salary, bonuses, contract length, nationality, prestige, and morale.
* AI staff negotiations now use the updated offer/scoring system.
## Race, Practice, Qualifying, and Simulation
### Team Orders
Team orders are now more interactive and more deeply connected to driver morale.
* Added a **Move Over** team-order button for player drivers.
* Drivers can now naturally slow and allow a teammate through during races.
* Added morale consequences for team orders based on driver status.
* AI teams can now issue move-over orders between First and Second drivers.
### Race Simulation Improvements
Race behavior and traffic simulation have been expanded.
* Expanded race event log retention and made the log scrollable.
* Added dirty-air stacking in traffic trains.
* Added secondary and tertiary dirty-air/braking penalties.
* Added a **completely new** race start quality system influenced by driver control, smoothness, confidence, car acceleration, comfort, and randomness. Different drivers will have different starts. Some will gain, some will lose.
* Added a small constant failure chance for very low-reliability rated engines.
* Improved race-engine performance through optimization and frame pacing work while preserving simulation accuracy. I have removed all lag, at 5x speed the game will instead just run how quick the computer can handle it, adapting either slower or quicker. I will continue to work to improve the pace of the race engine. I have increased speed by about 30%, but lag will disappear as the game will instead now run at the highest speed it can, automatically adapting.
### Practice and Qualifying
Practice and qualifying now better reflect driver comfort, preparation, and execution. Each qualifying lap is now a 1-100 lap quality, based on that drivers consistency, their comfort, track conditions, etc.
* Added **practice comfort/acclimatization** for each driver (viewable by right clicking lap log - to make this cleaner on UI later).
* Drivers gain comfort from clean practice laps.
* Drivers lose comfort from crashes, spins, lockups, and setup changes.
* Practice comfort now carries into interactive qualifying.
* Simulated practice and qualifying also use this new generated driver comfort and hotlap quality.
* Reworked qualifying hotlap execution using comfort, consistency, confidence, skill, and randomness for more realistic variety
* Added stored hotlap execution quality.
* Added qualifying driver radio messages based on lap quality.
* Added qualifying disaster laps, including aborted laps, major mistakes, and crash chances.
* Added event log messages and radio lines for qualifying incidents.
* Added live practice/qualifying timing chips with driver, team, lap timer, reference lap, sector deltas, and rotating/fading display behavior. (one of my favorite adds)
### Track Rubber and Physics
Track evolution is now handled through the physics model rather than flat time bonuses.
* Reworked track rubber so it affects tyre grip instead of applying a direct time gain.
* Added session-to-session rubber variability.
* Rubber accumulation remains, but its performance effect now flows through the race physics model.
## Chassis, Aero, Parts, and Development
### Chassis Development
* Reworked in-season chassis upgrades into a cumulative chassis-development model i.e fixed bug where upgrades were not stacking onto one another. Chassis upgrades now stack correctly over the season.
* Preseason chassis bonuses now correctly apply to all chassis built during that season.
### Aero Development
Aero development has been rebuilt around clearer fixed-budget tiers. Exactly like chassis. It should be easier to manage now.
* Replaced weekly aero spend sliders with fixed budget tiers.
* Added aero development tiers:
* Shoestring
* Standard
* Factory
* Added aero upgrade tiers:
* Shoestring
* Standard
* Factory
* Aero costs now distribute proportionally during design progress, like chassis updates.
* AI development leverages the new fixed-tier pricing system.
* Added AI factory production speed difficulty: I recommend new players for normal, experienced players who can keep up with developing their cars on hard/extreme for both of these. AI Will improve by around a second over a season if they have the funds.
* Normal
* Hard
* Extreme
* Added AI aero design speed difficulty:
* Normal
* Hard
* Extreme
### Parts and Engine Management
* Added emergency aero part purchasing when teams enter race weekends without usable aero parts. This is automatic. Emails and financial penalties for emergency aero purchases will trigger upon this occurring.
* Fixed broken/deleted engine replacement exploits.
* Auto-fit best parts now respects current regulations and correctly evaluates newer part specs.
* Fixed part supplier assignment issues in the roster editor.
* Save editor car performance now reads and edits live fitted car performance instead of stale base values, allowing users to appropriately edit saves long into careers to their liking.
## Sponsors, Finance, Engine Partnerships, and Events
### Sponsors and Finance
* Added sponsor nationalities.
* Added sponsor negotiation modifiers for:
* Team nationality match
* Main-driver nationality match
* Current sponsor renewal
* Team prestige
* Same-industry sponsor conflicts
* Added a Sponsor Negotiation Factors box showing positive and negative modifiers.
* Added sponsorship income projections for current and next season income.
* Reworked season-one team budgets to use previous-season prize money and starting sponsors instead of static active-team budgets. This will require mods to be re-worked a bit, as all team budgets in s1 are organic and in line with how the game treats future seasons
* Inactive and joining teams still use fallback budget values.
### Engine Partnerships
* Added in the missing week-one engine partner guidance emails for external partner teams with negotiated guidance.
* Added optional budget contribution support in the same email.
* Engine deals with 80%/100% partner negotiation terms now receive free engines where intended, rather than only sometimes.
### Driver and Team Events
Added new flavor events for drivers and teams, including:
* Driver Publicly Praises Team
* Driver Criticizes Car Balance
* Teammate Tension
* Factory Visit (if you hire a superstar driver for next season, they will visit factory and provide morale boost)
* Private Test Request
* Driver Requests Status Clarity
* Injury Recovery Return Refreshed
* Injury Recovery Return Disheartened
* Veteran Considers Retirement
Event emails can now include choices, acknowledgements, and progression-blocking required actions where appropriate.
## Nationalities, Data, Rosters, JSON-Galore
Introduced Nationalities as a larger, important part of the game world and are used across several systems.
* Added nationality as a full field for drivers, teams, tracks, suppliers, sponsors, and staff.
* Added nationality keys, three-letter abbreviations, and flag rendering support.
* Assigned nationalities across default 2022, 2024, and 2026 data.
* Added regen driver nationality assignment.
* Added track country/nationality to the schedule UI.
* Added personality traits to default and regen drivers.
* Added career stages to drivers.
* Added starting driver hierarchy/statuses to rosters.
* Added season-one starting sponsors data.
* Added previous constructor position data for active teams.
* Added default 2022/2024 driver history for real-life parody drivers, this is to populate all default rosters career stages.
## UI and Editor Improvements
### Driver Centre
The Driver Centre has been completely rebuilt, and now includes a staff centre within, also built from the ground up.
### Markets, Results, and Statistics
* Modernized all result screens present in game significantly, with included logos, nationalities, etc. Looks a lot better throughout.
* Modernized Driver Market with bold styling, wider columns, team logos, flags, horizontal scrolling, and cleaner layout.
* Modernized Sponsor Market with bold text and nationality flags.
* Modernized Engine Market with bold text and supplier logos.
* **COMPLETE** Statistics UI overhaul with bold styling, flags, and team logos.
* Added Records tab within statistics.
* Added season records for wins, podiums, poles, points, DNFs, and average finish.
* Added Season Review tab with year selector.
* Added season snapshots for standings, qualifying analysis, head-to-heads, wins, podiums, poles, and team summaries.
* Added a *new* neutral row background option while preserving colored team rows, accessible in options. For those who want neutral backgrounds rather than bombarded with bright colors
* Split Options UI into Game, Graphics, and Debug tabs.
* Added new neutral results/timing row toggle to Graphics.
### Editors
* Added sponsor editor tab.
* Added starting sponsors drag/drop tab.
* Added engine creation in the roster editor.
* Added team asset upload, remove, and replace support for logos and car PNGs.
* Added aspect-ratio and file-type validation for uploaded team assets.
* Added searchable nationality inputs.
* Added driver contract status/hierarchy editing.
* Improved editor scrollbars so they can be clicked and dragged, not just mouse-wheel scrolled.
## Fixes
### Race, Practice, Qualifying, and Results
* Fixed player strategy pit-window issue where missed or past pit stops could block future stops.
* Reduced overtake log spam from cars passing pit-lane or pitting cars.
### Chassis, Parts, Engine, and Development
* Fixed chassis upgrades not stacking cumulatively.
* Fixed chassis upgrade cap behavior.
* Fixed preseason chassis bonuses not applying to newly built chassis.
* Fixed deleted/broken engine replacement issues.
* Fixed auto-fit best parts using stale regulation limits.
* Fixed auto-fit ignoring stronger later-spec parts.
* Fixed government reset/preseason chassis overwrite issues.
* Fixed roster editor supplier assignment bugs.
### Editor and UI
* Fixed clickable scrollbar gaps across roster/save editor.
* Added some new team car art (courtesy of @das11)
## Balance Changes
### Driver, Race, and Reliability
* Chassis reliability now matters more, especially at low ratings.
* Rebalanced chassis reliability DNF multipliers to roughly the following multipliers of the base DNF chance in regulations:
* 100 reliability: 0.10x
* 75 reliability: 0.60x
* 50 reliability: 1.00x
* 25 reliability: 4.00x
* 1 reliability: about 8.00x
* Very low-reliability engines now have a small constant failure chance.
* Dirty air in traffic trains is stronger but still subtle.
* Race start effects were reduced after initial testing.
* Negotiation frustration penalties were softened.
### Development and Economy
* AI teams now spend more toward current-season and aero performance.
* In-season chassis development costs were reduced.
* Aero development now uses fixed budget tiers with gain multipliers.
* AI HQ/future development allocation was reduced to keep spending balanced.
* Track rubber gains are now variable and physics-based instead of flat time-based.