Rigs of Rods 2022.12 Released

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Rigs of Rods 2022.12 Released

Rigs of Rods 2022.12 has been released! This version has been 8 months in the making since the release of 2022.04.


Video made courtesy of @Gibbzy.

Download Rigs of Rods 2022.12
Directly from the itch.io launcher

If you've been playing Rigs of Rods 2022.04 through the itch.io launcher, you will be automatically upgraded to the latest version. If you installed Rigs of Rods 2022.04 through the Windows installer, we strongly encourage you to uninstall any previous versions of Rigs of Rods before installing 2022.12.

Note: This version of Rigs of Rods only supports RoRnet 2.44, it is not compatible with 2.43.

Changelog​

Added
Changed
Removed
Fixed

What to expect next

Upgrade to OGRE 13

It's been a stated goal since 2016 to use OGRE 2+ (not to be confused with OGRE 1.x or 13.x, see the differences) which provides eye candy out of the box. However, while trying to update our current (and outdated) version of OGRE, we came across many conflicts that made updating to OGRE 13 nearly impossible without rethinking our graphics situation. We evaluated the eye candy that OGRE 2 provides with the capabilities of OGRE 13 and found that the real bottleneck is the use of legacy components of older versions of OGRE without truly exploring the capabilities of the latest version of OGRE 13.

With OGRE 13, it provides a powerful and robust shader pipeline Run Time Shader System (or RTSS) that allows for realistic lighting and next generation shading capabilities such as PBR which we have yet to fully explore. You can track our progress here. You can expect to see even greater results sometime in the spring or summer.

screenshot_2022-12-03_15-12-06_1.png

RTSS with PBR. Photo by @CuriousMike. Click to enlarge.

Upgrade from OIS to SDL2

Since the beginning we used OIS as our input handling component. At the time it was the go-to solution for OGRE, nowadays it's an abandoned piece of 90's which we must manually package and map to modern game controllers. The world has moved to SDL which is a proven (game giant Valve relies on it) and de-facto standard solution with a comprehensive community-maintained database of controller mappings. OGRE itself moved to SDL several releases ago. We already have a proof-of-concept dev build with SDL and are ready to move onwards.

Port to macOS

We last had builds for Apple computers more than a decade ago, in the 0.3x version era. Since then, we lacked a macOS maintainer and those who volunteered reported issues with the OIS component. OGRE itself moved to SDL and runs on Apple computers smoothly, and with the latest developments described above, we're prepared to follow the example. You can see a full report on a recent macOS port attempt here.

Customizable characters

Throughout the time we used several character models, but always one at a time, hardwired into the game. Not long ago our main character artist (@Vido) wanted to provide extra animations and our project leader (@only_a_ptr) wanted to grant him the most freedom possible, and so a fully generic character definition system was born. This system allows binding any character model to the game situations and makes characters a full-featured asset, installable from our content repository.

50B_ROR_simulation_with_poseutil_UI.png

Custom character model. Photo by @only_a_ptr. Click to enlarge.

You can follow progress here. You can also read the tutorial by @only_a_ptr on how to create a character mod from scratch. The content repository now supports the new character mods but will not work outside certain development builds.
 
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