WeatherFX: option to increase conditions limits allowing for controllers to set temperatures and wind speed outside of safe ranges;
New experimental option in General/Development (at the bottom) enabling instant replays online;
New apps switcher appearing with Ctrl+Tab (Tab button no longer shows leaderboard if any modifier is pressed);
New taskbar: desktop icons are replaced with previews (use settings to select icons instead if needed);
Default WeatherFX style:
New upper clouds layers;
Falling stars at night (pretty small chance to see them though)
Auroras look slightly improved;
All extra effects are now optional;
Physics experiments:
Early collider activation is enabled by default again, this time much safer and uses number of wheels touching ground instead;
New experiment for tweaking car collider meshes: makes sure early collider activation won’t have any problems like before;
New experiment for expanding collider boxes vertically: decreases changes of a box phasing through the ground and, as a result, whole car passing through if falling flat;
New experiment for smooth transition to 0° steering angle when AC is paused (to make sure nothing would break because of sudden change like that);
Radio update (in case you were missing music in AC, thanks to badradio.nz for the idea):
List of stations and the actual playback are now handled on CSP side, while Lua scripts can connect to it and control things;
Default list of stations updated, including more up-to-date ones;
CSP uses advanced API provided by radio.co and laut.fm to collect extra information about currently playing music;
Android Auto: playback moved to CSP side, support for new features such as album covers and track info (if available);
New Internet Radio app on App Shelf: automatically resumes playback on launches (optional, enabled by default), convenient UI to manage list of stations;
Photo mode app:
Use mouse wheel for zooming when viewing a complete screenshot;
Screenshots with resolution multiplier use FSR for downsampling (unless zoomed in);
Hotkey for preview shot is working again, now switched to Alt+F8 (apparently Ctrl+F8 toggles mouse);
Smart Shadows:
Option to compute splits automatically based on distance for simpler adjustments and better splits arrangement;
Option to draw shadows around camera instead of drawing them in front;
Shadows stabilization is greatly improved;
New AI Spline Editor app: load an AI spline and tweak its trajectory and sides by dragging them around;
New CPU optimization preventing loading of certain audio samples for other cars (might help a bit with 30+ car servers);
New option in Small Tweaks to increase GPU priority of web browser backend processes (enabled by default, should prevent issues with HAGS in Windows 11);
GUI: option to draw AC apps together with IMGUI UI for better interoperability and similar blurred backgrounds;
ExtraFX: options to only use effects in replays;
CSP Debug app: option to render car colliders;
New pause: admins can restart or skip sessions from there directly;
Traffic planner: copy a lane with an offset, specify vertical offset when exporting splines.
Textures deduplication no longer freezes AC if one texture has failed to load;
Cosmic suspension no longer crashes with AIs and custom track physics active;
30 FPS background limit should work now;
Linear color space:
Heating materials glow properly;
Distant headlights glare is no longer affected by brightness multiplier;
Brake disk lights intensity adjusted;
Bounced light for headlights and brakes (non-ExtraFX one) works properly;
License plate lights are a bit dimmer, fallback emissive fixed;
nePBR shaders should look closer to how they looked before LCS;
Disabled LCS no longer should draw debug lines overly bright;
Issue with rendering breaking on some reloads with LCS enabled (and things turning blue) fixed;
Skidmarks with SkidmarksFX disabled should look a bit better;
Default WeatherFX style:
Enabled LCS no longer affects lights range;
Tunnels brightness fixed, shouldn’t jump around anymore;
Fog above (hiding upper parts of tall buildings on some tracks) fixed;
RainFX:
Drop hits no longer disappear for a frame from time to time, intensity is now adjustable;
Rain AI splines no longer created on tracks with splines longer than 50 km or with more than 100k points;
AIs can handle cars with street and semislick tyres, no longer spam logs if a Lua app stops AIs from visiting pits to change tyres;
AIs no longer change rain tyres on the last laps;
Issue with RainFX misbehaving if other cars are driven in areas unvisited by player before causing all sorts of problems fixed;
Fallback data in areas with no puddles computed has also been fixed (was using water instead of wetness often resulting in increased slipperiness);
ExtraFX works again with MSAA disabled;
SSLR should work better, especially with LCS active;
[PITS_SPEED_LIMITER] SPEED_KMH=… no longer breaks ERS and such;
Extra G/J in replays fixed;
Look of Earth from space fixed, free camera no longer jumps around in space on smaller tracks;
GPU constant buffers data is now 64-bytes aligned to work a tiny bit faster;
Raycasting static meshes checks AABB as well for a slight speedup;
Win keys stop Ctrl-based AC shortcuts as well;
AI-activating shortcut working without Ctrl held down fixed;
Hood/bumper cameras shaking adjusted;
Advanced chunks optimization leading for tyre grooves to turn black on some tracks fixed;
Fixing tyre grooves option that was causing them to turn black on some tracks fixed;
Missing material variable warnings in log.txt should be muted now (pretty pointless warning anyway);
Fix for a handshake for custom online servers;
Cars should no longer spawn on roofs with aligned teleportation of custom tracks physics;
Shadows not working properly on a distant square when sun is low fixed;
Removed broken Python shared library option (it wasn’t of much use);
SkidmarksFX: fading on loading fixed (config wasn’t respected), fading values are now printed in CSP log with Skidmarks fading prefix;
Spotify music detection removed (wasn’t that reliable or informative, and everybody has moved to Windows 10 with much better music status system);
Logic for disallowing overlapping of AC forms updated, now shouldn’t cause apps to jump around too much; overlapping highlight is fixed too;
Users with non-latin usernames can be tagged by typing first latin symbol or digit instead and pressing Tab;
CSP should be able to handle files in UTF-16/32 BE/LE with/without BOM encodings (might lead to change in behavior if you’d be using a car with some config incorrectly saved in UTF-16 and failing to be parsed before);
App Shelf: main lua file is extracted last and renamed after extracting, should ensure there’ll be no failed installations;
As seemingly proven to not cause issues, AABB for reflections option is hidden and enabled by default;
GrassFX transitions are smoother;
Collapsed apps with automatic sizing load their previous sizes properly;
Mouse steering should work properly with pause menu;
VAO-only and normals views are working with linear color space now (by switching to old shaders sets);
New driver tags no longer stop working with paused race or replay;
IMGUI glow in transparent areas fixed;
GPU priority increased by default;
Smoke interaction with fast driving cars adjusted;
Skidmarks, grass and fake shadows should be better clipped for interior cameras;
AC should no longer crash when a mesh selected in Objects Inspector has been removed;
Distant lights can pair with associated meshes with a new [LIGHTS_DISTANT_LAYER_…] meshes list and DISTANT_LAYER lights option stopping them from contributing to overall lights limit (docs are coming soon);
Lights with large radius or fade-out distance now will end up in a separate 4 km chunks thing (previously it was only 800 m chunks, and fade-out distance wasn’t taken into account at all);
Lights with fade-out or range larger than 4 km will count as dynamic and remain outside of chunks;
New online option: CUSTOM_MOTION = 1, RESET resetting interpolation when car teleports (once tested and verified, will be enabled by default for all servers);
Tracks: add alternative splines named ext_alt_fast_lane_?.ai to ai folder and CSP would use those for random cars for something like alternative paths NFS5 Porsche style (not used by track day car respawning for now);
Use MATERIAL_FLAG_1 = 1 on MultiMap_emissive shaders to switch to UV2 for txEmissive;
Use MATERIAL_FLAG_2 = 1 on MultiMap_NMDetail shaders to use alpha of txDetail as a multiplier for reflectivity as well;
UV2 patches no longer load if generated from non-triangulated meshes (CM update filtering things on its side is coming soon);
emSkipDiffuseMap for emissive shaders now takes values in-between of 0 and 1, allowing to limit txDiffuse contribution;
Set emSkipDiffuseMap to -1 (or use CustomEmissive_UseDetailInsteadOfDiffuse mixin) to switch emissive shaders to use txDetail as a multiplier to txEmissive (instead of txDiffuse);
Add a second argument 1 to CLUSTER_THRESHOLD for lights and such in track configs to switch to clustering in 3D (slightly slower);
New [BASIC] INTERIOR_CLIPPING = … option for cars specifying if grass, skidmarks and fake shadows should be clipped for interior views (by default enabled for non-open wheelers);
New FORCE_MINUS_TWO_LOD_BIAS thing for shader replacements (please don’t use unless really have to);
New trees: AO baking now can be adjusted;
Hidden experimental option general.ini/DEV/NANORT_SCENE_RAYCAST to build accelerating structures for faster mesh raycasting (might increase memory consumption and make first raycasts slow);
Hidden experimental option general.ini/DEV/VIRTUAL_REPLAYS_ALLOCATION to use a magical VirtualAlloc function for replays instead of allocating small bits of memory and increasing them as more frames are being recorded;
Trees Inspector now shows more details about selected tree;
Volume peak: devices are filtered based on regexps in small_tweaks.ini.
New string.pack(), string.packsize() and string.unpack() compatible with Lua 5.3 behavior;
New string.urlCheck(), string.urlNext() and os.parseDate() functions;
New ac.StructItem.explicit() modifier for preserving order of items passed into structure constructors;
New ac.onTrackPointCrossed() for measuring custom sectors;
Functions to work with view and projection matrices, including getting matrices from ac.GeometryShot;
ac.OnlineEvent() got an option to receive messages that could have been sent before app has loaded (also, issue with messed up data when receiving two messages at once fixed);
Time spend on executing Lua callbacks callbacks time set by functions such as render.on() is measured;
Calling ac.store('key', false) clears out a value to fix compatibility with some cars (please keep it mind it’s only meant to store strings or numbers though);
WeatherFX:
ac.setWeatherLightsRangeFactor(): override default range multiplier based on lights intensity multiplier;
ac.useMinDepthResolution(): change the way depth buffer MSAA is resolved depending on what you want to use it for;
State API:
Cars timing and sectors related info in car states online fixed;
ac.getSim().currentSessionTime and ac.getSession().hasAdditionalLap fixed in online races;
New ac.getCarPhysics().wheels[].discCoreTemperature for custom physics brakes;
New ac.getSim().isLinearColorSpaceActive for active linear color space fix;
New ac.getSim().currentVAOMode for current VAO debugging state;
New ac.getSim().cameraJumped will be set to true for a first frame after camera has been teleported;
New ac.getSim().isMakingScreenshot will be set to true if currently accumulating frames for a screenshot;
New shared libraries (to avoid standard library to grow too massive and slow down scripts loading, extra functions are being added like this instead):
shared/sim/ghost: create new ghosts, reload them live and more;
shared/utils/chat: share setups in chat, change car color;
shared/utils/steam: access some of Steam API functions;
shared/utils/appshelf: any script can use it to ask user to install a trusted app;
shared/utils/binary: effortless and fast reading and writing binary data;
shared/utils/playing: override info about currently playing music, for example, if your app is playing something;
Lua apps:
New ac.setWindowBackground() for changing background color and optionally painting titles black;
New DARK_HEADER flag for windows if background used is white (title text and icons will be black);
New itemValues: number[] field for ac.getSetupSpinners() for CSP entries using LUTs;
UI & scene API:
ac.SceneReference:ensureMaterialsUnique() shouldn’t leak or cause crashes anymore;
ui.renderShader() respects IMGUI clip area;
ui.addSettings() uses name if ID is not set, for more reliable state saving;
New ui.onChat() allowing to replace entire chat app;
ui.onExclusiveHUD() can return 'apps' to let CSP know it can draw IMGUI apps;
Experimental functions ui.pushAlignment() and ui.popAlignment() for aligning UI without usual complications;
Dumped shader replacements, or replacements collected from a KN5 file, no longer affect CSP functional shaders (such as wipers) by adding a new LEAVE_FUNCTIONAL_SHADERS=1 parameter to config entries;
ui.MediaPlayer: FMOD integration improved (but the option is still hidden), unloading media works better;
New render.BlendMode.OpaqueForced (overriding disabled opaque blending for transparent passes) and render.DepthMode.WriteOnly values;
Physics AI API: assign a new spline for a certain AI car (experimental);
FFB post-processing scripts: new ac.disableLowSpeedFFBReduction(), just in case;
ac.ControlButton:setDisabled(): AC hotkeys can be disabled as well (at least some of them);
car::kn5::… textures should work fine with encrypted cars now;
Encoded Lua canvases should be readable by ImageMagick;
Small chance of a fatal crash on Lua script unload (if it was using logging or something like that in any disposing functions) fixed;
Car physics scripts are better compatible with AC locking car controls.