Fans of F-Zero racers should take note if they haven't heard of Redout yet: The futuristic racer is poised to get even better with some new DLC and a large 'livery' patch. The patch will be free whereas the Neptune addition will cost $7.99 USD. Steam is having a early bird sale on the DLC with 15% off until May 19th.

The new paid content includes 5 new tracks and a boss race. A new team has also entered the area with the Buran. These ships are known for being extremely rock-solid and extremely fast. Additionally, new 'liveries' have been added with new content also added to the existing digital artbook and soundtrack (sold as different DLC).

The list of the changes made with patch 1.2.0 are numerous in scope. The most interesting element is the adopting of a splitscreen mode for local two player multiplayer. A lot of work was also put into making the game look better with a complete retooling of the in-game lighting engine and a huge clean-up of the code to make everything faster and shinier.

All of the (many) changes in the patch can be found below:

LOCAL SPLITSCREEN SUPPORT

As promised, Redout now supports two players split-screen local multiplayer! Finally you can look your friend in the eyes as you mercilessly leave him/her in a trail of dust, laughing maniacally. Just as you asked, you sadistic bastards.

COMPLETE LIGHTING REWORK

Some of you know we have been working on the lighting of the game a lot, changing and iterating on something that must be visually interesting but also fundamental to the visibility of the tracks. The lighting for this release has been completely reworked from the ground up, thanks to the Unreal Engine 4.15 update which introduced the new filmic tonemapper.

HUGE PERFORMANCE BUMP

Unreal Engine is amazing, but sometimes we are just too comfortable with some of its features and we overuse them. Blueprints are amazing, but also slower than native C++ code. We rewrote *A LOT* of code to make everything run much faster, also optimizing about 60% of our codebase.

Also:

  • Added LOD4 to track pieces.
  • Audio was slightly compressed, now it uses 70% less memory.
  • Optimised HUD code and rendering, powerup spawning system and the audio implementation has been moved to C++.
  • Tuned culling curves for all actors. This means we are drawing less invisible stuff.
  • Sandstorm and Snowstorms highly optimised!
  • Alaska had some weird fps drop after a portal inside a cave. Fixed.

HDR SUPPORT

More colors. We love colors. It's more about a broader dynamic range, but who cares? More colors.

LEADERBOARD RESET AND TIMER BUG

Yeah, we screwed up the timer. Apparently relativity works really well in computer science and the faster your gaming rig was, the faster you could run in Redout. Well, that's pay-per-win to a complete new level! We fixed it. You rich people are done screwing the poorer folks.

That also means we had to reset the global leaderboards and your local quick race records, you now have a fair chance and can try to beat us. Let the best SRRL pilot prevail!

GAMEPLAY & AUDIO

  • AI difficulty level selector.
  • Fixed many exploits, especially in Europa and Abruzzo.
  • Abruzzo got a couple of smoother turns. And we cleaned a bit the tracks from weird objects. Same for Cairo Ghibli.
  • Sponsorship contract fixed.
  • Golden Chance contract fixed.
  • Volcano Deep Dive had a ghost guard rail.
  • Audio Surround 5.1 didn't work in Europa. Fixed.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented music to be played correctly. Sometimes. But just sometimes. Very rare. It's true. Sad.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented some small audio effects to be played correctly (sandstorm and stuff).

DESIGN & BALANCING

  • Powerups Overhaul. Enhanced Protection now grants a small speed boost, and makes it harder to spin you around. Magnetic Grip speed bonus fixed. Energy Drainer speed bonus granted. Slipstream Enhancer speed bonus slightly nerfed.
  • Great Small Rebalancing Act. Increased boost power Asera (+5), ESA (+5), Koeniggswerth (+15), Lunare (+30), Conqueror (+35). Those numbers may not make any sense from your perspective, but they're actual in-game values.
  • Rear-of-the-pack speed balancing bump: Lunare, increased max acceleration curve value (+2pts). Conqueror, increased max acceleration curve value (+2pts).
  • All ships spin a little less on collision, especially Conqueror (which for some reason behaved like a BeyBlade™) and Koeniggswerth (which is now freakin' unsinkable).

MULTIPLAYER

  • You can now see how many players are currently playing online and how many lobbies are there. You will feel less alone.
  • We said you could play online with 11 friends. We lied. It was just 10 friends. Now it's back to 11, for a total of 12 concurrent gamers in a lobby.
  • Lobby countdown sometimes restarted if the system was close to the lobby minimum life timeout.
  • If you alt+tabbed from the chat lobby and then alt+tabbed back again, you were stuck there. Fixed.
  • This is a funny one, bear with us. If in a Online lobby with an opponent, unstoppable timer has started, and then the opponent left the lobby, the game would start a race and would place a AI as your opponent in place of the missing online opponent. Best workaround to missing AI bots in online play ever. Weird and funny.
  • Upgrading a powerup from the lobby wasn't updating the label for everyone else. How could you brag about it, otherwise? Fixed.
  • When opening the global position leaderboard, you would land on the wrong page. Fixed.

BUGFIXES & STUFF

  • AZERTY control scheme added. Sorry french people. We added this back after the elections :)
  • Settings are now properly saved and loaded. No more changing options everytime you open the game (v2™). This time for real
  • Unreal Engine updated to 4.15.something. Whatever. Updated! It's better now
  • Fixed a bug that freezed the game in Cairo Khamsin during a career race. Maybe. We hope so
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the first ship to be selected if you had already paid for it
  • Apparently TXAA wasn't working in the second, third and fourth event of any tournaments. And you guys didn't notice. Lucky us
  • Sometimes the Lunare GT10 was wearing a very weird Batman-ish dress. Fixed, it's naked now
  • Sometimes the lobby was 50% smaller than the expected size, but only for the host
  • Wrong color in Alaska and Volcano for all black-ish liveries, fixed. But more in general the new lighting and tone mapper gives you a more realistic rendering of all colors in the game, especially about your ship
  • We referred to Khamsin sometimes as Khamsim, lol
  • Race completion percentage is more precise now and maybe meaningful. But less meaningful than life itself, we promise
  • Pure Contract was failing even if you selected a passive power up, which was wrong. The description clearly says not to equip an active one
  • Survival game mode had a pseudo-random description. Now it's accurate
  • The italian translation for some contracts was pretty bad, we fixed it. Shame on us, we are italians, mamma mia
  • More localization fixes all around the game (no more "strafing" as "unleashing machinegun fire", dear French friends)
  • Sometimes the class symbol for the last event was broken and ugly
  • In Career, in a survival event, the time extension message looked a bit weird (4.000000 instead of 4 seconds or something more straightforward)
  • Launching the game in windowed mode sometimes prevented it to get input focus
  • Random crash after photosensibility screen. Fixed
  • VR, change maxfps resulted in a game freeze
  • No ship hud on VR
  • Removed "Tusso17" cheater from global leaderboards. Bad guy. Sad.

Redout is available for the PC via Steam for $34.99. The Neptune DLC and 1.2.0 patch are both available right now as well.