Closed Alpha 0.2.6 — Opening Ceremony, Race Debrief Rebuild, and a Big Polish Pass

Hey everyone — 0.2.6 just landed on the closed-test channel. It’s the first update built mostly around what testers (huge thanks to antonio.m8729, xplicit57, Kido) actually reported, and we used the opportunity to give the career a real presentation layer: an FIA-style opening ceremony, a race debrief rebuilt from scratch, and several key panels (Drivers / Sponsors / Suppliers) finally speaking the same visual language as the hub.

Here’s what changes in your saves.

The career now has a real opening

Before the first GP, a full-screen opening scene plays with an official message from “The World Automobile Sporting Federation”. Two choices:

Participate — the team presentations roll worst → best, all the way up to the reigning champion,
Skip Ceremony — jumps straight into the career menu.

Keyboard: Enter/Space to participate, Esc to skip.

The team presentation card has been reorganised at the same time:

Drivers always render in Primary → Secondary → Reserve order (before, on the player team, the Secondary could appear before the Primary depending on sign-order),
The livery moves below the driver row, full inner width,
On the right, two new blocks: Suppliers (Engine, Fuel, Tires — in that order) and Sponsors (Principal, then the two Secondaries),
A Media Predictions badge top-right — Back Marker, Middle Field, Front Runner or Championship Contender — laid out like a press verdict,
A horizontal stats footer: Budget / Infrastructure / Sponsor Income / Reputation.

Small but nice: hitting ← (or the Prev button) now slides the previous card down from above — the opposite direction of Next. It reads better when you’re navigating the grid.

Race debrief rebuilt from scratch

The post-race was one of the least-finished screens — fairly pointed out in closed test. It now matches the hub visual language (purple section headers #3a3a5a, beige panels with bottom-right shadow).

What changes in practice:

Race Standings — helmet + flag + driver code + team logo + team name + points, on a single clean line, with DNFs in their own dimmed strip,
Your Drivers — helmet and flag inline in front of the name,
Championship — the constructor row now carries the team logo,
Partner Reactions — name + happiness bar (colour-coded by level) + bonus/malus delta on its own line. No more overlap.

And three new panels appear under Season Progress:

Race Stats — overtakes, mistakes, DNFs, safety cars, counted from the sim’s full event log,
Driver of the Day — picked automatically (2 × positions gained + overtakes done), must have finished, with a short reason like “+6 places, 12 overtakes”,
TV Rating — 0-5 ★ heuristic on overtakes/car, mistakes, SC presence and DNF count. Labels go from “Dull” to “Instant classic”.

Simulate Race / Simulate Quali

Next to the Start button, two new ones: Simulate Race and Simulate Quali. The session runs to completion, your strategy is played by the AI, single-thread (collisions live), speed-capped at 254×. The screen reuses the free-practice renderer, so you keep live standings, gap and DNFs.

Designed for the long weekends where you just want to nail strategy before the GP, or for those running a whole season in pure management mode.

A calendar that breathes

The hardcoded 30-track pool is gone. The calendar is now drawn from a GDP-weighted city database:

The 15 largest economies can host up to 3 GPs each (their 3 biggest cities, with the 2nd/3rd city far less likely),
The next 15 countries: 1 GP max in their largest city,
Higher GDP = higher chance.

(Country, city) pairs are unique, and so are the circuit layouts (seeds). Names are procedural: “Grand Prix of {Country}” by default, or “{City} Grand Prix” when a country hosts several rounds, so no two rounds share a name.

In the same pass, title sponsors on GP names (“Heineken Grand Prix of Italy”) are finally reliable: three stacked bugs were making them essentially never appear. All fixed. You should see them regularly on new pre-seasons.

The cosmetic Test Circuit (Infrastructure) is also relocated into your team’s country via the same city DB (“{City} Test Circuit”).

Drivers / Sponsors / Suppliers: finally a coherent look

The Status tabs of all three panels have been rebuilt around the same model as the hub: cream cards with border, purple header, country flags, colour-coded rating badges, stats as chips. No more floating text spilling out of cards, no more pending offers placed by a fixed offset that overlapped drivers during pre-season.

And every tab now has its own market activity feed:

Driver Market — Signings: every driver signing across every team,
Sponsor Market — Deals: every sponsor deal,
Supplier Market — Deals: every supplier contract.

Your pending offers appear as “Under Negotiation” cards. The point: at a glance you see what’s happening behind the scenes, not just on your team.

All tabs (Standings, R&D, World Data, Sponsors, Drivers, Suppliers) now use the same colour — active tab full purple, inactive tabs recessed purple. No more visual drift between apps.

Race Debug Dumps — for your bug reports

ON by default (Settings → Display). At the end of every career race, a lean folder is written to debug/race_<ts>_gp<NN>/ with everything we need to diagnose an issue: AI decisions, overtakes, collisions, lap-by-lap positions, events (mechanical-trouble lines included), per-car reliability snapshot, and a race summary. No replay, no visual diag — it stays tiny. Only the last 3 races are kept.

Hit a bug? Zip the folder and drop it on Discord. Massive quality-of-life upgrade on our debug side.

Important gameplay fixes

R during a race no longer crashes the career. The Restart key regenerated a default 22-driver grid and blew up your career telemetry buffers. Restart is now disabled in career (and replay).
Safety Car that never came in in Simulate Race — could stay deployed all the way to the flag if the field stayed strung out. SC now reliably retreats once its minimum-duration lap is reached.
Artificial DRS-train: cars no longer stick in fake trains. Overtake boost and dirty-air accumulation retuned.
Engine map applied to the wrong driver when switching cars via Tab / D1 / D2 — sim write ordering fixed, each driver keeps their map.
Sim Race/Quali: gap updates correctly, DNFs displayed correctly, standings no longer reshuffle every lap, the loop is time-boxed to stay smooth.
Non-QWERTY keybindings (AZERTY / QWERTZ): &, é, " and friends can finally be bound and triggered. Existing configs stay compatible.
Display failsafe at launch: if Windows ignores your fullscreen = 1 (yes, it happens), the game re-applies fullscreen on the first rendered frame and persists the effective window size if it was clipped. No more HUD spilling off-screen.
Windows “Not Responding” when switching tabs: three causes addressed (release build now runs windowed without console, per-thread DB cache, and a full crash report now written to crash_log.txt next to the exe).

Balance: player / AI symmetry + tuning

A tester reported an absurd case in GP6: both their engines stuck at the 0.500 cliff while every AI team kept restarting each weekend with fresh engines. Diagnosis: the AI had hidden advantages the player didn’t.

The “no part finishes better than where it started this weekend” cap was applied only to the player. The AI silently saw its engines restored to initial_perf every weekend.
The AI could replace a cliff-destroyed part for free when budget didn’t allow. The player had no equivalent.

Both gone. The AI now pays for new parts like you do; if budget can’t cover it, the part stays destroyed. As a consequence we rebalanced the parts cost ladder so small-tier teams can still afford an engine swap — engine 1.5M (was 2.5M), a full car rebuild down from 12.8M to 4.07M.

To absorb the new realism on the money side: end-of-season prize pot bumped to 82.5M (+10 %) and the sponsor income multiplier to 1.575 (+5 %). Both values are auto-propagated to your config.db on next launch (one-shot forced-migration system — applied exactly once per save).

The big one for your GP health:

Engine thermal target lowered 125 °C → 105 °C. A tester finished a GP with only 8 / 24 cars classified, mostly engine. Cause: the natural high-speed target sat 15 °C above the heat-damage critical threshold. Every car ran in the danger zone its entire race. Re-simulation of the same GP after the fix: 5 DNFs (0 engine), 15 / 24 engines finish at perf ≥ 1.0. A config.db migration re-seeds the value for every existing save.
R&D Dev Rate × (default 2.0) — new slider in Settings → Career → Balance (0.25 to 5.0). Doubles perf gain per Work Unit. A top team maxes a part in 3-4 GPs instead of 6-9.
Perf→Fiab Cost × (default 2.0) — new slider. Doubles the reliability cost paid per perf-improvement step (0.003 → 0.006). At 0.0, no reliability cost at all.

The rest, in short

Cornering → Aero: stat renamed (it actually maps to aero efficiency = wings + floor); tutorial explanations rewritten to match what the sim really reads.
Credits menu entry added, with a dedicated Testers section thanking the closed-test crew.
Website / Discord buttons at the bottom of the main menu (Steam overlay browser when launched via Steam).
Welcome popup at game launch thanking testers for their feedback.
External “Read more” devlog links now open the browser cleanly — Steam overlay if available, OS browser otherwise.
AI team flag bug fixed: the flag DB is ISO-keyed but AITeam.country was storing the full name (“Malaysia”). Conversion added on both sides.
R&D tutorial extended: after the car presentation, you’re walked through assigning perf and improving a part.
Podium scene: floating text under each portrait removed; the purple cards (helmet + flag + name / logo + team) are now the only labels. The podium_backgroud.png backdrop is used in career.
Emergency-signed suppliers were paying the team +1000/GP instead of charging the normal Client rate. Fixed — both for you and the AI. The algorithm now picks the cheapest supplier instead of the worst-rated / a random one.

Known bug

In race, cars can still show a lateral snap crossing the start/finish line and during certain overtakes / lane locks (visible via F11). The anti-overlap is being rewritten as a predictive model to remove the snap entirely. Landing in a future update.

As always, if you hit a bug:

Keep Race Debug Dumps ON (default),
Reproduce the issue,
Zip the matching debug/race_<ts>_gp<NN>/ folder,
Drop it on Discord with a short description.

Thanks for the feedback — it’s what’s making the game move fast. See you very soon for 0.2.7.

— Staz