I had a bit of a weird week because I was coming off the RoguelikeCel, but after the feedback I got I knew just what to focus on for this new update.

Enemy Cars

• Enemy cars can shoot again!
  • Yeah sooooo I recently added some infrastructure so that player vehicles can have unique loadouts that are independent of the model of car itself.  ...annnnd while I got it all working for player vehicles, I broke the ability of enemy cars to have their own weapon loadouts too.  So they didn't actually have any weapons mounted. :-P  Fixed!

Health Bar

• The existing health post attached to vehicles in the world was straight up and down, and hence blocking the view of important info such as the state of the front weapon, or your speed when reversing.  The style of the health bar is now adjusted to be a bit less disruptive.

Speed UI

• The speed indicator was pretty rough, hard to see, and clunky to look at.  A few things were done to improve this:
  • Smoothed out the speed indicator angle so it rotates more gracefully.
  • Improved the speed chevrons (both the green and red) to be more visible.
  • Added grip indicator for the player on top of the speed indicator, for the player car only.
  • Speed arrows and grip indicator grow in a more visually pleasing way.

Skidding functionality

• So the previous model of vehicle skidding either gave you complete control or zero control.  It never felt good since people's instinct is to push against a skid in various ways to try to influence it.
• I wanted skidding to be fun and also kind of do what you expect.  So, it got a heavy overhaul:
  • The speed indicator now has a display of "hazard levels" beyond the speed itself.  A broken chevron means that you are skidding more out of control.
  • The "hazard skid" levels supplement the standard "grip down to zero with a red speed indicator" style of skidding.
  • If you have a hazard skid, you can turn but can't influence your movement.
  • If you are skidding but do not have any hazard skid levels, you can influence your movement by 45 degrees by accelerating to the side.  Thus a skidding vehicle can still trace wider arcs.
  • You can accelerate or decelerate your skid by pushing towards or away from the direction of skid.
  • Skidding and grip now recharges more reliably based on whether you are facing in the direction of the skid.

So that's it for now.  I'm adding a little more info on the Itch page about the systems that Auto Fire (in its current state) will support for now.  I've been asked for a 32-bit version, although I'm not sure I'd recommend older machines until I slim down some of my meshes.  I can build one but it is not yet included in the archive.  In the future I'll put more work into optimization and alternate OS'es like Linux.