News about 0.5 and a small summer break

Some news about the development!

During these 3-4 months, we were able to add a few new things to the game and fix a couple of bugs.
I am writing this article while I am taking a little break from development. But I am excited to share the news with you!
First of all, we introduced a tutorial that should guide new players into the game and teach them how to derby!
We also discovered a bug affecting the user if they opened the network menu before and attempted to launch the tutorial afterwards.

Camera
We disabled the feature, inherited from STK, that allowed the camera to follow the pitch of the car. This way it should be less confusing and nauseating for the players following the car movement. Another nice thing we added is a delayed camera mode that follows the car's movements. It will slowly follow the car as it accelerates, and will follow the car as it turns left or right.

UI
We made big changes in the menu! Changed the default menu theme, the icons and added some new background during the loading screen. As we move on with the characterization of Wasted as an unique game, all the old assets from STK will be removed at some point.


Showcase of the new in-game menu

Networking
With the upcoming new 0.5 version, we finally added back our main server and we created a way to always show a list of official servers to the player.
That means we don't need to worry about manually connecting to any server anymore. When the multiplayer section is loaded, the game will attempt to ping the addresses contained in the official server list displaying some available servers to the player. If you host a server and you want to add it to the official server list, you can just create a new PR on the codeberg page.

Misc
We added the ability to load a custom news.xml file so we can load the news and push them into the game. A nice visual addition was the braking lights. They will light up when a car brakes! We fixed the annoying bug of Windows builds not starting, due to a wrong misconfiguration of the build buing built as "debug" instead of "release". It's also worth noting that now builds will be shared through itch.io only (unfortunately).
Before 0.5, I would also like to work on an upgraded launcher that allows any user to build latest version of the game, balance car classes, enhance physics and release an ARM64 version. The improved radio will probably wait for 0.6 instead. I would also like to make the UI more consistent now and replace the old STK assets. The release is planned to be released on August. I don't have a definitive date yet but stay tuned to know more!

WE NEED YOU!
We need help with managing the blog on the website and writing new articles each once in a while. If you want to help, please reach us out on matrix or via email! We would love to spit out more frequent updates but it's hard since only I (franzo) am writing blog posts.
That's all! See you at the next update!