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Hey Racers!

Bloody Rally Show has online multiplayer. It only took me six years and change, but here we are. You host a Custom Race, you invite your Steam friends, and you all find out how much those friendships were worth.

The game also costs half as much now, the AI cars finally got some driving lessons, and everything got a fresh coat of paint. More on all of it below.

Online Multiplayer

Go to Online in the main menu, pick Host a Game, and hit Invite Friends. Your friends accept the invite or find your game in their own Online menu. It all runs through Steam, so there are no ports to forward and no servers to rent.

A game holds up to 8 players, and the host picks the track, the laps and the AI opponents. Everyone picks their own car, paint job and upgrades, and there's a chat for telling your friends what's about to happen to them. The race starts when everyone is Ready, or 30 seconds after the host is, so nobody can hold up the whole party by going to make tea.

What you can play online:

• Races and Car Battle
• Weapons, if the host turns them on
• The director's car, helicopter weapons and missions
• Racing on foot, because somebody had to make that work over the internet
• The host's custom tracks and Workshop cars. Friends get them automatically for that game, no subscribing needed

Half Price, For Good

Bloody Rally Show now costs $9.99, half of the old $19.99 (or about half of what it was in your currency). This is not a sale, it's just the price now.

On top of that there's an extra 20% off for a limited time (starts at Nov 11, 10 AM PST), to celebrate the update. If the game has been sitting on your wishlist for years, this would be the moment.

If you paid full price back in the day: thank you, and sorry, that's how time works.

The AI Got Driving Lessons

The code that drives the AI cars is called CarIntelligenceRaceIdiot, and for years the cars lived up to it. So I rewrote how it drives:

• AI racers plan their speed for every corner and stay within the grip of their tires
• They recover when they get thrown off their line
• They plan a way past the cars in front instead of bouncing off them
• They have the same car physics as you at every difficulty, so they no longer push you harder than you can push them
• Each difficulty is now clearly faster than the one below, and it comes down to how well they drive

The old classics are fixed too: cars driving in circles, cutting across the infield after a slide, spinning after a reset, and missing the finish line on long point-to-point tracks. If you'd rather race every opponent at their true pace, there's a new Rubber Banding setting in Gameplay settings.

The brakes also respond faster and keep working at low speed, and there's more grip on snow, gravel, dirt and wet tarmac, so your own driving should feel better too.

They are still idiots, just less often. Now and then a car still gets lost, and the game puts it back on the track as a last resort. It's rare, but I'm not going to promise you'll never see it.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

While the AI was in driving school, the game itself got a makeover:

• Every surface has its own look, and some tracks race in golden hour or overcast light, with shadows to match
• Trees, bushes, buildings and walls stand up from the ground, so you see their sides as you drive past, and the trees stir in the wind
• Cars lean into corners, dip under braking and catch the sun as they turn
• Races wear the track down: racing lines darken, mud spreads, and blood and scorch marks stay where they landed
• Rain darkens the ground and ripples across it
• Sparks, fire, explosions and nitro glow, explosions and railgun shots send out a shockwave, and hard hits jolt the picture
• Dust and smoke look like soft clouds, and smoke from wrecked cars and chimneys rises into the air
• Every car leaves tire marks, even in big races

It's the same game, it just looks like somebody finally cares.

The Fine Print

I'd rather tell you now than have you find out on the start line:

• Online is friends-only for now. There are no public lobbies and no matchmaking. If your friends are busy or you've run over the last of them, you can find people to race with on Discord.
• You can't join a race that's already running. If you arrive late, you wait in the race setup for the next one.
• The campaign stays split screen. To play it with someone over the internet, use Steam Remote Play Together.
• If the host leaves, the game ends for everyone, so maybe don't let the sore loser host.
• Everyone needs the same version of the game, so let Steam finish updating first.
• The Time Attack and Daily Challenge leaderboards start over. The brakes and grip changed and some cars were rebalanced, so old times can't be compared with new ones. Every record is up for grabs again.
• The game now needs 64-bit Windows, and the Mac version runs on Apple Silicon only, so Intel Macs can no longer play it.

Can't see a friend's game in your Online menu? The host's Steam privacy settings may be hiding it. An invite always works, so ask them to send you one.

If you tried this early on the Online branch: thank you! You can switch back to the default version now.

Under the hood the game moved from Unity 2020 to Unity 6, and the "Made with Unity" badge of shame is finally gone from the startup.

Thank you for sticking around all these years, and see you on the track!

Spajus

Full list of changes

v2.0.0

• Add online multiplayer for up to 8 players: host a Custom Race and invite your Steam friends, or join a friend's game from the new Online menu
• Add Car Battle, weapons, racing on foot and the race modifiers to online games
• Set up online races together: the host picks the track, laps and opponents, everyone picks their own car, paint and upgrades, with chat, pings and a Ready button
• Bring Workshop cars into online races: friends who join get the host's Workshop cars for that game, no subscription needed
• Keep the world the same for every player online: road obstacles, exploding barrels and the crowd
• Show your Steam friends whether you are in an online lobby or racing
• Rebuild the AI racers: they plan their speed for every corner, take racing lines that use the whole road, and recover when thrown off their line
• Give AI racers your car physics at every difficulty, and make each difficulty clearly faster than the one below
• Make AI racers race the field: they plan their way past slower cars instead of pushing them, draft, ram now and then, and get round a car stopped on the road
• Give AI racers personalities: some drive tidy, others take risks, and weaker racers are bolder but sloppier
• Make AI racers drive like rally drivers: throttle on through slides, slide-braking into snowy corners, and nitro saved for the right moments
• Make AI racers learn each track as they race it and drive around what other cars crashed into
• Add a Rubber Banding setting to Gameplay settings: turn it off to race every opponent at their true pace
• Overhaul the lighting: golden hour and overcast tracks, sunlight on car bodywork, a color treatment for every surface and a sharper picture
• Make the world stand up from the ground: buildings, walls, silos, trees and bushes, with trees swaying in the wind and banners and weapon flags hanging over the road
• Let races wear the track down: racing lines darken, mud spreads, blood and scorch marks stay, and every car leaves tire marks
• Make rain look wet: darker colors, shiny roads, standing water and ripples
• Give the ground natural color variation, blend the road into it, and make crossing roads meet like real crossroads
• Add a glow to sparks, fire, explosions, nitro and the railgun, shockwaves to explosions, and soft dust and smoke clouds that rise
• Make car bodies lean into corners and dip under braking
• Add a picture jolt on hard hits and a speed effect on nitro (follows the Camera Shake setting)
• Add a tilt-shift TV look to the menu background and to Photo Mode with the UI hidden
• Make the brakes respond faster and keep working at low speed
• Add more grip on snow, gravel, dirt and wet tarmac, and a little more off the road
• Make drafting work from a few car lengths behind another car
• Start every campaign race with a full nitro tank, for you and the AI alike
• Support a steering wheel and pedals on separate USB ports: assign up to 3 controllers to one player in Settings, Input
• Rewrite the Simplified Chinese translation, make Chinese and Japanese text sharper, and translate the online menus into every language (machine translation for now, corrections welcome)
• Update the Custom Race setup: smaller track cards, and three random tracks under the track list
• Keep racer names upright and readable instead of turning with the car
• Upgrade Unity to 6000.6.8f1 and remove its splash screen at startup
• Drop Windows 32-bit support
• Fix AI racers behind you getting no race results when you leave a campaign race early
• Fix AI cars cutting across the infield, spinning in circles or missing the finish line
• Fix cars respawning outside the closing wall in Car Battles and getting wrecked again
• Fix cars sometimes starting inside trees or buildings in random battles
• Fix trees standing on the road in some tracks, and stop the Track Editor from placing them there
• Fix the position counter and race ranking at the start, when a car is still on the grid or leads from first place
• Fix the Inflicted Damage message counting each hit twice
• Fix the Homing Hedgehog hitting the car that released it
• Fix on-screen notices never showing in the DRM-free version, such as difficulty unlocks and track load failures
• Fix the main menu news showing formatting codes from Steam posts
• Fix missing and broken text in translations, and Chinese Windows players getting the game in English by default
• Fix the blurry Language icon in Settings
• Fix the mouse not clicking menus on laptops with a touchscreen and on some Linux laptops
• Fix the Mad Fax covering your own car with its papers
• Fix Track Editor shortcuts that stopped working the second time you opened the editor: leaving a test drive with Esc, and clicking the road or an object to edit it
• Rebalance the Campaign economy: AI racers no longer get rich beyond the player's reach in later seasons, which made the third season of Hard and Hardcore nearly unwinnable
• Make AI racers shop once per race, no matter how often you visit the garage
• Keep extra XP when you level up, so the season's final rewards can give several levels at once
• Make the "next car" Challenge reward and the lucky donations go toward the next faster car, not a slower one
• Make car prices rise with every required level: the Akuno Hinode no longer costs the same as the faster Kantz Ritter
• Make the Tatsuya Arashi a bit slower and easier to control, now unlocked at level 23 and cheaper