Summer tends to slow things down, but I managed to squeeze in a solid sprint at the end of the month. So here's Hanaa 0.5.0, landing with a surprising number of visual improvements.

Here are some of July’s highlights:

I finally tracked down the source of those stubborn lighting glitches. What started as a simple cosmetic fix turned into a deep dive into Unity’s inner workings—caching, addressables, and other dark corners I wasn’t planning to visit just yet. But now, darkness looks as dark as it should. Hopefully I didn’t break too much in the process.

Cars now kick up dust trails as they move, and there's early support for other particle effects too. Chassis collisions still need some tuning, but they're on the way.

Car materials now adapt to the track environment. Right now, only wetness is implemented, but the groundwork is there for more. This helps cars visually blend better into different surroundings.

Looking back at the 0.4.0 release notes, I had planned to do a round of refactoring. That mostly didn’t happen. Maybe next month—at least I’m writing properly again as my thumb is getting healed.

I’d still like to clean up the UI code, maybe even make some visible improvements. And since I now have the base systems in place, it’s time to actually use them to improve audio and graphics meaningfully. We’ll see how that goes in a month.

Thanks for reading! Here’s the full(ish) feature list:

New / improvements:

• PERFORMANCE: Completely rewrote track handling because caching doesn’t work well with baked lightmaps without extra hassle. This may cause small loading times when browsing tracks.
• UI: Added a track load progress bar during track browsing (related to the above).
• UI: Track selection is now preserved between races.
• UI: Added timestamps to ending photos — after all, they should tell a story.
• UI: Smoother track diagram mesh with no overlaps or other glitches.
• UI: Removed timeouts for racer selection when using the universal controller.
• GRAPHICS: Added dust particle and common spray effects for car tires.
• GRAPHICS: Introduced track-specific car materials reflecting wetness and iciness.

Fixes:

• Corrected terrain layers on the "Maaliskuu" track to better match the actual track.
• Fixed occasional lighting issues caused by overlapping lightmaps.
• Prevented adding or removing racers during transitions.

Known issues:

• Post-processing causes lens dirt to overshoot in "Syyskuu." I have some new ideas to improve this and will try adjusting it soon.