v0.4.0 preview

Hello there! It has been a while.

I've been busy working on a big update: v0.4.0! And it will probably take a while before it's finished, but I'd like to tell you what I've done already:

- 2 new modes: Cruising and Turbo OutRun. Cruising is meant to chill out and just drive. There is no opponent, no time limit, you can choose if you want damage or not and the stages and corners are randomly generated. (It's not infinite though.) I'd like to add fuel consumption, but I need a sprite of a gas station.
Turbo OutRun is actually a "lite version" of the current original mode. It has pretty much all the original stages and opponent, but there is no damage and you get the upgrade screen from the original Turbo OutRun game.

- The original mode itself will be expanded with double the amount of stages, divided into 2 divisions. (Still working on the new stages.)

- I'm working on 2 new sceneries:
The snowy stage

A Belgian highway stage

It looks better in-game. ;-)

As you're looking at the screenshots, you may have noticed a couple of things:
- New gauges that resemble the ones from the original game! It has been requested before, but I didn't want to put the time in it... Until I started working on a side project for work. It needed gauges as well, and the code wouldn't work in the new project, so I had to program new gauges anyway. (There is still a little bug in it though.)
- New engine temperature bar, like in the original game!
- A big Chase HQ-like arrow above your opponent.
- All other UI stuff can now be activated/deactivated in the options menu.
- And I've made a new shadow system for the cars!
- Those guard rails are also something new. I wanted to make it look like superscaler sprites, but that meant that the sprites had to change depending on the angle. I took another approach and made them full 3d.

- For those who don't have a clue about car mechanics, I've added warnings like the ones in the Mega Drive version of Super Hang-On if there's something wrong with your car.

- Up next: you can change the difficulty and driving aids independent from the transmission. Choosing the automatic transmission or enabling the driving aids will lower your top speed. The 2 speed manual however is now much more fun, because I've boosted the amount of torque in the low gear.

- And while we're at it: you can also choose a song!

- Another addition is a progress screen before each race in the original mode. It shows you your current division, race, the amount of points and continues.

- You'll also be able to choose a resolution. For widescreen users there's an option to choose whether you want the UI spread across the whole screen (or 3 screens), or limit it to a 16:9, 16:10 or 4:3 ratio.

- Certain objects that previously didn't have a collider will now interact with you if you hit them. Like the arrow signs, they will fall down if you hit them.

- Oh and slipstreaming is now a thing. Don't expect some magical boost like in the game Slipstream. I've experimented with it and I don't think it's fun because it ruins the close racing.

- I've also fixed some stuff in the algorithm of the AI cars and made the rubberbanding of your opponent less obvious. I'm still about to overhaul the lane changing system.

So I guess I've pretty much covered most of it! Maybe I'm going to upload a test version of the current build so you can try it yourself.

Now I'm going to finish some of the stuff I've mentioned, add more stages for the original mode, and add some more sceneries.

Stay tuned!