Thumb surgery went well, but recovery is still ongoing, and typing is a bit of a struggle. Even so, I managed to squeeze in a few smaller tweaks, and made some progress on a bigger change that’s been looming.

• Lighting issue solved (mostly). The lighting glitch from last week turned out to be caused by tracks being loaded additively and cached, which resulted in multiple lightmaps being active at once. As a temporary fix, I’ve disabled track caching. This might cause slightly slower track switching, but hopefully doesn't lead to anything more serious. There’s still a lot to untangle here, and I’ll likely write a separate post about it.
• Prevented racer list changes during transitions. You can no longer add or remove racers in the middle of transitions. This is part of some ongoing UI cleanup—there are probably other similar edge cases still lurking around.
• Improved controller timeout logic. There’s no longer a timeout after player selection when using the universal controller. In the future, timeouts will only apply when players use their own individual controllers.

Next week I plan to clean up the new track handling and refine the UI further—especially the track selection screen, which I’ve received feedback about being unclear. I’ll likely poke around with a few other things too, but development will remain tricky until the cast comes off next week.