Late Sunday letter (Patreon)

New version is coming together. I was optimistically planning to add some trails and/or roads to new map but after fighting against mapping tool 14h on Saturday it was clear that I can't make it. Also I had entirely different map in mind as new map but couple of community member have request old map back form 0.2. I test played it a bit for a long time and liked it actually more than the other. So in this release no entirely new map but old one is back and updated it to current tech. New trees models and placement patterns, removed trees from lakes and optimized terrain a bit.

Current mountain map is completely procedural but this older one is based on real height data from Idaho Alpha:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Alpha,+Idaho+83611,+Yhdysvallat/@44.4117568,-116.0604691,11z/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x54a8aaa702ea67bb:0x8d5738db9246e84e!8m2!3d44.391005!4d-116.0079062!16s%2Fm%2F048z1qz

However since original data was 1px = 10m and game requires 1px = 0.5m resolution to be detailed enough it had to be shrinked by 20x which is very brutal ratio. Therefore it's no mountain area like in real world but more like bit hilly flat land. There is no much hard challenges like steep hillclimbs but still you can forget yourself driving there for hours. At least I did.

All gyroscopic effects are readjusted. Sled pitch by break and throttle is greatly reduced. Gyro effect of track is otherwise greatly increased. Gyro effect was in the pass calibrated to good level but it relied on unrealisticly high track speeds. Track speed were fixed 0.3.2 but gyro effect was left as is and therefore accidentally changed to nearly meaningless.

So new skies stabilized sled quite much. That removed increasing left-right oscillation effect and allowed to have stronger steering effect without causing unwanted side effects. Also gyroscopic effects have increased stability even more. As result sled stays on direction very well especially on high track speeds and it's much easier to drive. While old version had unwanted and unrealistic hardeness due stability issues but now I am wondering is it too easy? Time will tell.