Little Racers STREET 1.1 now available!
The Little Racers STREET 1.1 update is now available for download. You should receive a notification the next time you start the game.
It features the following changes:
- New feature: Online multiplayer (over Xbox LIVE and System Link)
- Play over internet with your career mode cars.
- Earn money on these races.
- Includes quick join, party invites, host migration, etc. All to ensure the game keeps going on, no matter what happens!
- New section: Lap Records (shared online)
- Your car is highlighted in crowded situations (this can be disabled in settings).
- Reduced difficulty for Medium level.
- Increased number of AI players in Career mode to 300 (only applies if you delete the career mode).
- Reduced car braking power.
- Changed the way reverse works now (you don’t have to release and press the brake to use reverse).
- Improved race selection screen: Added an event title and times you raced / won the event. Also it should be properly shown on SD TVs.
- Fixed minor issue that caused to incorrectly show your place in the mountain part.
See you in the online races!
Many thanks for the update! I didn’t test the new braking much, but it seems better (together with the reverse technique). I have to look out for the car highlighting (BTW: What is smooth turning?). And now it’s more clear, what kind your are driving 🙂 – and yes, it’s properly shown on SDTVs.
Multiplayer: Yeah, what a easy fun. After your tweet about players being online, I was able to make some races against a few real players. Cool!
Menu issues? In the Multiplayer menu, the Back button is used, but not shown (so I first thought: And how can I leave now a MP lobby?). It seems A for players’ gamercards does not work? And if you search a game, does “Searching” end when no games are found (otherwise X for Search again would make no sense)? Also it seems that B for Back doesn’t work while searching, only Back. A friends notify option for lap records would be nice, but I probably won’t use the game for record hunt that much (it’s no MotorHeat ;-).
Anyway, a great update! Now I will try to get my friends to buy it (because to be realistic/pessimistic: You probably won’t find public matches anymore soon 🙁 ).
Loving the update . I have only come across one problem .
When hosting a game I invited 2 other people but as soon as one of them joined the timer started ticking down and the game started before the other player could join . Would it be possible to have a player ready button or have a longer timer with a quick start button .
Keep up the good work .
Thank you for reporting the menu issues. We were aware of some of them (such as the Show Gamercard option not working properly), but not all of them (specially the Find games issues).
And, sad but true about the public matches thing 🙁
We removed the ready button to ensure no one could prevent the match from starting (it was a rather annoying thing in the first LR), but I understand it can be a pain when waiting for someone. Not sure about how to please both ends, but we’ll increase the wait time between races to 10 seconds.
So, two of my friends brought to LRS – and yesterday there were even other players online (incl. WaaaghMan himself) :).
I don’t know what we can ask for a roundabout 1€ game, but here some feedback/questions:
1.) JOINING a game (Andy’s point)
a) A workaround is that after one race, you can keep up one of the two results screens. In this time, you appear with a (in the beginning irritating) start/finish symbol in the player list and the countdown won’t start and your friend has more time to join.
b) A hint in the result screens that the next race won’t start until you press A (I guess) could be helpful.
c) Is the waiting time between races not 10 sec already?
d) If a race is going on, this game won’t show up in the game browser?
2.) Bunch of COURSE things:
a) The courses for MP are totally random?
b) Is the amount of lap of each course designed by you or random, too?
c) When hosting a game, I can set one time the lentgh of a race (in percent) – does this mean the amount of laps?
d) It is possible to show the next course in MP (not that important)?
e) I guess in favour of quick action and because of the many courses, course selection is not practical in MP?
3.) It is be design that you can’t CHANGE YOUR CAR between races without leaving the match? (If the next course would be shown, it could be tactical: “Oh, next course with straight roads, so I choose this tuned car”).
BTW: I am still not sure how much impact the tuning can have. In the E class I can give a mediocre car more power than the most expensive E car, but still have quite bad other stats.
4.) The graphical (non) effect when a car is FALLING of a cliff etc. is not very good/clear. Maybe add some car zooming or some dust when a car hit the ground?
5.) A quite difficult point: Especially with lesser cars, only one driving error usually destroys all your winning chances in MP. What about some “rubber band effect” at least for the last player(s)? E.g. give the last player more/faster (regenerating) boost until he reaches his man in front.
6.) What’s smooth turning?
4) When the car is falling, when it collides with the floor some sparks are thrown and a crashing sound is used, but I agree that the effect could be better. We’ll try to address it in future updates.
6) Smooth turning changes the way turning is handled. Without it, if you push the stick to the right, the car turns right all at once. With smooth turning, it turns slowly to the direction you moved. On early classes there’s not much difference, but on higher classes it may make turning easier (it works for me, at least).
More answers to come 🙂
1)
We’ve added a timeout on each results screen for the next update, so that “trick” won’t work for much longer.
There’s some clash here between people that want to race and people that are waiting for friends to join. We’re not sure as to how to proceed yet, but we’ll probably do the following: The first race won’t begin until the host decides to start, and after that everything will be as it is now.
c) The time was 10 seconds already, for some reason I thought it was 5.
d) Not sure if this is a question or a suggestion. The game will appear right now (and it should – there are not enough games going on to have the luxury to filter some out). We’ll see if there’s a way to show if the game is in the lobby or not.
2) Not exactly. A random event for the car class is selected, and then all events are chosen sequentially. The number of events depends of each class, but there are between 20 and 40 events per class.
Each event has a set amount of laps, more or less fitted to the car class and track length. The “Race length” parameter applies a modifier to that number (so that 120% means a 4 laps event will be
raced for 5 laps instead). I can’t remember how the rounding is performed though.
d) Not yet. Could be added in the future, it’s more an issue of screen space than technical difficulties.
e) Course selection would be hard to do and probably it’s not worth it.
3) Mainly the reason to not allow you to change car is, again, to not stop the flow of the game, having to wait for other people to reselect their car. We could force a game start, like Call of Duty does, but it can have technical difficulties. We’ll look into it for future patches.
5) The original Little Racers had a Handicap setting (it reduced speed for players in first positions ) , but it wasn’t quite popular. That’s why we prefer to do short races, so you can make up for mistakes in the next race 🙂
Thanks for your extensive answers, guys!
1.d) A friend told me once that he didn’t see games, although I was driving in Multiplayer at that moment. Maybe it was an error on his side (ergo: lobby and ongoing matches should and seems to be shown in the game browser).
3) Car reselection shouldn’t pause the start of the next race – if you are not fast enough, you stay with your actual car :-).
hello WaaghMan and the rest of the team
first things first, stunning little game, i and many of my friends say they would have been happy to pay 320msp not the 80msp !….we all have cod elite, new maps lastnight, and we all played on this for 4hours lastnight..i use seamless texture tiles, and play most of my time on Trackmania P.C.
and beta game test, testing new game called ACR for pc right now..right now get back to what i am was going to say..hope you’s release another one of these call it Little Racers Rally X, i can see in my head, good mix of tarmac and dirt tracks, i have made over 6000+ for trackmania, i have so many ideas,this game of yours could go huge, if you’s make mix of dirt as well,please contact me by my email addy for new idea’s