The Undercut: Racing Manager · published
The most visual update so far — and the last major one before our Steam Neo Fest demo.
The track used to be lit flat. Now there's a real sun. A full time-of-day system drives a sun direction and global tint curve — cool dawn, neutral noon, golden afternoon, orange dusk. Everything on track reacts to it:
Cars get dynamic body shading and metallic specular highlights that rotate as the car turns through corners
Tyre walls, grandstands, and trees are shaded the same way — canopies brighten toward the sun, shadows stretch and rotate with the time of day
The asphalt gets procedural normal-map micro-relief — surface bumps catch the light, crevices darken
Warm racing-line strips, soft edge shadows, and a 1-pixel relief shadow under the white border lines
Morning races feel different from sunset races. Not just in the data — in the way the track looks.
Cars are no longer single-colour shapes. Every car's texture is now baked from a procedural livery — multi-zone designs with fills, stripes, diagonals, and rectangles painted in each team's colours.
In Career, liveries are deterministic — your team's look stays consistent across seasons
Every car on the grid looks distinct. No more guessing who's who by colour alone.
The area behind the pits finally feels like a real race weekend:
Per-team transport trucks parked behind the pit lane, tinted with each team's primary colour
Paddock perimeter walls — concrete and Armco wrapping the area
A start-lights gantry over the start/finish line — cars pass under it with a sun-tracked drop shadow
Grass shade variation — the flat green is gone, replaced by a natural three-shade palette
Every car's top-down helmet is now recoloured to match the driver's real helmet hue. No more identical yellow dots from above.
Straight from closed-test reports:
Bankrupt AI teams no longer ghost-race the next season
Lapped cars are now classified in correct track order
Cars can no longer overtake under Safety Car
Free Practice now honours your tyre plan
Podium and team suits match your chosen colours
Qualifying mini-sector bar colours correctly on first flying lap
Audio settings now actually save between sessions
Dozens more fixes from the closed-test crew
This is the version the demo is built on. In less than two weeks, you'll be able to play The Undercut for free. All of the above — dynamic lighting, procedural liveries, the living paddock — will be in the demo. Wishlist now to get notified when the demo drops Full technical breakdown: Read the complete devlog Thanks to our closed-test crew — every fix above started as one of your reports. Join the Discord if you want in on the next wave. See you on the grid in June. 🏁