Alpha 0.41: 20-Player Drift Servers, Festival Grounds, Editors & Characters

PATCHNOTES SUMMARY:

• DRIFT MODE — 20-player multiplayer servers. Host your own drift server or join one from the server list. Drift scoring from angle, speed and streaks pays real prize money, banked to your profile when you leave. No death, no fatigue — just driving.
• The festival grounds. The drift pit lane is a whole festival site now: fuel island, BAILOUT bank machine, parts tent with 69 goods, snack stand, PIT PATCH medic post, DJ stage, pavilions, a truck rig with a ramp, registration office and the top-10 board — plus grandstands, a 20 m viewing tower, crash barriers and a swing gate for your own layouts.
• Track editor and pit box editor. Lay out your own drift tracks from 53 pieces and build and decorate your own pit box — both fully controller-capable. A standard track ships with the game, and tracks now survive saving and reloading.
• New playable characters. Bryce and Megan — real skeletons, full-body animation, a ragdoll when a car hits you, and Megan speaks with her own voice. Create your character in the main menu; name, look, profession, skills and inventory live in your player profile and travel with you through every world.
• Also in this build: CAR RECALL (call your car to you for 150 $), inventory doubled to 16 slots, registration offices at four story locations, drift scoring past 90 degrees no longer fails, and other players can no longer open your car.

Note for testers: your profile is upgraded to v6 on first start (one-way — an older build will show an empty-looking profile afterwards, nothing is lost). On first start you create a character in the main menu; the profession start kit is granted once per character.

Drift mode — the 20-player server

• Host or join. Start a server with your own name, player cap and settings, or pick one from the sortable server list (name, player count, settings preview). Up to 20 players on one server.
• Scoring and money. Angle × speed × streak. Over 90 degrees is no longer a failed drift — the angle score peaks at 90 and falls off towards sideways-and-backwards. Prize money is paid as cash on the server and banked to your account when you leave.
• Your car is yours. Nobody else can open your driver's door or your trunk, use the lift or the workshop mode on your car. Every car and box is registered to its owner.
• Tools on the pit board: CLEAN UP SPILLS, RESET to your pit box, SWAP your car for another of your registered cars, a player list with box numbers and Steam profiles, and the top-10 board.
• No death, no fatigue on drift servers.

The festival grounds

• Services along the pit lane: fuel island (2.00 $/l), BAILOUT bank machine, parts tent with 69 goods including oil, coolant and the other fluids, snack stand for eating on the spot, PIT PATCH medic post, registration office.
• The show: DJ stage, three pavilions, a truck rig with a ramp, the top-10 board.
• New pieces for the site (15): grandstand start/straight/end with concrete steps and a roof, a 20 m lattice viewing tower, modular 1.5 m steel stairs, a drift swing gate with a return spring, galvanised crash barriers with a sponsor tarp (knockable), a concrete pillar adjustable from 0.5 to 3 m wide and 0.5 to 5 m tall, and a workshop kit (wall, window wall, shop window, roller door, roof, roof plate, wrench sign).

Track editor and pit box editor

• Track editor. Lay out your own drift track from 53 pieces — roads, connectors, kerbs, barriers, grandstands, buildings — on any of the three surfaces. Connect road pieces and the connectors follow. A standard track (147 pieces) ships with the game so every server has one ready.
• Pit box editor. Build and decorate your own pit box; your box choice travels in your profile and is yours on every server.
• Controller everywhere. Button hints with real button pictures, a catalog key, proper focus in every menu.
• Saving is safe now. Connected pieces no longer fall apart on reload, a broken list is never written over your file, a backup of the last good state is kept.

New characters

• Bryce and Megan. Two playable figures with Mixamo skeletons and one AnimationTree: walk, run, jump, sit, aim and shoot with pistol and rifle, swing bat and knife, reload, push, wrench, kneel down to inject. Every held item sits properly in the hand. Megan has her own voice (34 lines).
• Character creation in the main menu. Press SOLO or MULTIPLAYER without a character and you land on the creation screen: name (Steam name pre-filled), profession, figure, colour, voice and language, with a LISTEN button. GARAGE › CHARACTER shows your character on a turntable with skill cards, lets you change look and voice, and offers RESET (new profession, skills to zero). The wardrobe in game is the changing room for the same things.
• Your character lives in your profile (v6). Name, look, profession, skills and inventory are yours across all six save slots — a slot is now just a world you visit. The profession start kit is granted once per character.
• Death and damage. Solo: your character survives, the inventory goes into a loot crate where you fell. In a friend's game you are knocked out instead of dead and get up on your own after 60 seconds. Getting hit by a car throws you as a ragdoll for 5 seconds — no damage.
• Money display. Your account is shown in the HUD and in the menu; a red screen edge pulses like a heartbeat when a vital value drops below 35 %.

Also new

• CAR RECALL. Every car line in the registration window (and MY CARS in a phone booth) has a RECALL · 150 $ button: the car appears 4 m behind you — solo, in your own co-op or in a friend's world (one car there, a second recall swaps it). Leaving a friend's game takes your cars with you; after a disconnect the host keeps your car for 10 minutes.
• Registration offices at the motel, the parts store, the workshop and the small town.
• Inventory doubled from 8 to 16 slots (22 with the backpack), the inventory menu is six tiles wide.
• Adrenaline syringe as a work tool — kneel down and inject to revive.
• Melee timing — hits land in time with the swing.
• Ground plates at the parts store, small town, drive-in and restaurant are visible again.
• UI scale now applies to the speedometer and the drift HUD.
• Sandbox difficulty and selling in My Cars are disabled for now.

Fixed

• Drift → Story: your car came back in the wrong state — the world now reads a registered car's condition from the car file.
• Standard track was missing from the package (0.401).
• Solo: colour and voice changes at the wardrobe were never written to the profile.
• Held items were rotated the wrong way — bat, pistol and wrench now sit right in the hand.