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Carmageddon: Reincarnation – Latest Update Brings Performance & Rendering Improvements

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Stainless Games has released a new update for Carmageddon: Reincarnation that improves the game’s performance and visuals. As the team noted, with this patch there is a 15-25% increase across the board on 1080p, standard settings.

Stainless claimed that the main boost has been from the first stage of multithreading the game engine, and stated that further multithreading work is ongoing and will result in future performance benefit.

This patch will be auto-downloaded from Steam, and here is its full changelog.

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
The techies have continued beavering away, and we’ve been diligently testing the results of their labours. Here’s the average results that we’re seeing by testing the Career Mode in normal gameplay conditions:

Minimum Spec
20-35% increase across the board on 720p, standard settings
15-20% increase across the board on 1080p, standard settings

Recommended Spec
50-60% increase across the board on 720p, standard settings
15-25% increase across the board on 1080p, standard settings

Please note that these results are from comparing the new build to the current Steam build (i.e. Update #1).

The latest gains have come (as before) from a lot of general optimisations and bug fixes, but the main boost has been from the first stage of multithreading the game engine – a much-needed engine upgrade that’s been in the pipeline for a long time, and is now under way. The initial stage, “decoupling the renderer” is in this update, and led to significant framerate improvements. Further multithreading work is ongoing and will result in future performance benefits.

GENERAL IMPROVEMENTS
Rendering
You may notice that Carmageddon: Reincarnation looks very different from the last update! We’ve made numerous rendering improvements to give Carmageddon its sexy new look.

Peds
We’ve been improving the ped audio, they should now sound far more terrified!
The peds have been given some attention to sort out some of their dodgy behaviour.

Levels
We’ve added some extra ramps and bridges to the city levels, which should help some of the heavy vehicles navigate the rooftops.
Many of the gaps in the Snow levels have been filled in, this was done to help reduce the frustration of driving around these areas. And in the Rig Wreck level, some snagging issues on ramps have been fixed.

Multiplayer Balancing
We’ve made several tweaks and changes to car to car combat, as well as changing some of the caps on some of the PUps to make the overall multiplayer experience more balanced and fair. Offensive PUp barrels will now give you a random (offensive) PowerUp. This levels the playing field, so that more experienced players can’t go and farm the most powerful PUps.

Car Crusher Rule Changes
Car Crusher Repair and Recover costs are now far more expensive to balance the game mode.

Fox ‘n’ Hounds Rule Changes
We’ve tweaked the Fox ‘n’ Hounds rules in regards to Recovery, based on feedback we’ve been getting from the Community on how to make the MP games even more fun. Now, if you’re the Fox and you recover, either by recovering yourself or from an automatic recovery such as being flung out of the world, you will lose the Fox and it will get transferred to the player closest to you. This change eliminates the “exploit”, where a player can gain an advantage by recovering in various circumstances. (The old rules of the Fox going to the player currently last when wrecking the Fox still stands). And finally, the amount of time lost due to being wrecked in Fox n Hounds is reduced.

Wobble Recover
As a general improvement (and to avoid the Fox ‘n’ Hounds rule change leading to unfairness), you can now “Wobble Recover” at any speed, including when you are in the air! (You still need to be upside down in order to do this.)

Save Slots
There are now multiple save slots! This means you can now restart the Career should you so desire to.

Action Replay
There is a new extra slow modifier for the Camera movement in Action Replay. Press Alt + direction to use it.

Steam Controller
Good news! We have partial support for the Steam Controller, so if you have one, give it a go! The controls all work, we just haven’t set up Haptic Feedback yet.

Localisation
We’ve fixed lots of localisation bugs, especially for German and Russian.

Game Menus
We’ve been improving the overall look and feel to the Frontend menus.