Greetings, drivers, and welcome to our first update of 2025!
Version 0.35 shifts into high gear and delivers a long-awaited vehicle remaster, several revamped user interface components, brand-new missions, expanded modding tools lineup, and countless other optimizations, fixes, and quality-of-life improvements.
REMASTERED VEHICLE: Hirochi Sunburst
First up on the vehicle side, we’ve fully remastered the Hirochi Sunburst!
The community has been requesting this one for a while, and we couldn’t be happier to unveil it at last. The makeover comes with a bunch of features, including a Flat-4 drivetrain, a wide variety of both factory and custom configurations, and, finally, that wagon body everyone's been craving for.
The vehicle model has now been revised with increased detail and all-new textures. And to top that off, the lineup also offers a good deal of new customization options, including body kits, interiors, as well as striking new liveries.
Beyond the Sunburst's remaster, we’ve also added new parts, configs, and liveries for a number of other vehicles!
The majority of our vehicles also got slight revisions on suspension, as well as fixes and upgrades to materials, textures, and handling.
3D Mesh Loading Optimizations
In this update, we’ve substantially improved vehicle loading speed by transitioning to a new, optimized .cdae file format. Leveraging cached data and compression to streamline the process, it drastically reduces vehicle loading times while also curbing performance hiccups when swapping parts. Please keep in mind that, as always, this is still ongoing work.
Level Upgrades
As part of the ongoing improvements for West Coast map, we're rolling out another set of updated areas. These include the drag strip and the dirt track area, and a brand new drift track. To complement these changes, a round of optimizations was done to collisions in the city area and the overall drivability around race tracks.
But improvements don't stop there, Hirochi Raceway has gotten a new drag strip area and foliage libraries were updated across several maps.
Gameplay
The Freeroam Drift Zones catalog was expanded with new additions that will put your drifting skills to the test – four in Italy, two in Utah, and one in Automation. We’ve also added a Freeroam Drag Mode to Hirochi Raceway.
Drift enthusiasts can now gain better insights into their performance from the newly implemented Drift Statistics, which can be found inside the Drift Challenge end screen. Additionally, two new Drift UI apps were added - one to show the total score, and another to show information about the current drift.
The scoring system has been revamped, and now features Tiers. The more points accumulated - the higher the Tier. A couple of multipliers received a balancing pass and we’ve improved the crash detection logic. Combos now have a soft cap at 10x and a hard cap at 25x.
Two new missions—Strut Brace Loop and Garage Gauntlet—round out the list of gameplay improvements.
User Interface
Meanwhile, the UI team has been hard at work to bring you a new Radial Menu! The new menu was built from the ground up, and will be replacing the legacy one. Tailored for seamless user experience, it comes equipped with full gamepad support and refined layouts.
Feel free to share your feedback in the dedicated forum thread, we'd love to hear your thoughts!
Vehicle Systems
As part of the development process for the new rally vehicle variants, we are introducing two long-awaited vehicle systems in v0.35.
Anti-lag system (ALS): in turbocharged applications, lifting the throttle pedal will lead to a loss of turbo pressure, and the engine will take longer to respond to later throttle inputs. To prevent this increase in response time under competitive conditions, turbocharged rally cars often feature an ALS. Our air bypass anti-lag system attempts to maintain a defined target turbocharger RPM utilizing delayed combustion events taking place in exhaust manifold combined with an intake bypass valve to further increase the efficiency and control of the system. Our current ALS simulates an automatic arm/disarm logic - it'll kick in when needed, and it will also disarm automatically when it detects that you're no longer pushing hard.
Active center differential: in all-wheel drive vehicles (such as those in our newly introduced top rally category NGRC1) a traditional, passive, center differential can leave a lot of time on the table. In comparison, an active center differential can raise the performance ceiling, while also improving drivability at the limit. This new system takes into account multiple sensors and parameters from the vehicle, and with the help of internal maps, will instantly and continuously tune the behavior of the differential. This allows the differential to adapt to the driver's requests and to the current car attitude. For example, the rear axle can now automatically disengage when pulling the handbrake, progressively lock the differential to extract grip when necessary, and so on.
Modding & Tools
And last, but certainly not least, we got several exciting changes for the modders among you!
Please welcome our new experimental Building Architect Tool. This procedural tool will be able to generate and modify buildings directly in the World Editor. Head over to this documentation article to learn more.
Further updates include several new features for the Biome Tool, a new Roof Crasher Tester prop, changes to the JBeam workflows, and much more.
To see the complete list of changes, check out the patch notes here!