My thumb is healing, and I’ve returned to my paid work alongside a solid sprint before the next release. This week brought a delightfully visual set of updates—it’s always nice when progress is easy to see.

• Improved track diagram mesh generator finalized. It now supports both circuit and straight tracks. I’ll keep improving it as new use cases emerge, but it’s already a solid foundation for future visual upgrades.
• Automatic spray/dust effect system. The game now dynamically pools and applies ground effects based on surface type. At the moment, it supports various dust types, but the system is flexible enough to handle water splashes and more in the future.
  
• Fixed visual gaps in dust trails. This turned out to be an interesting little challenge. I’ve included a screenshot of the VFX Graph’s particle initialization. The key was setting PreviousPosition from C#—the rest runs smoothly on its own.
  
• Track-specific car material effects. Cars now visually respond to the track—appearing wet, dusty, etc.—which helps them blend more naturally into the environment.
  
• Track selection now persists between races. I received feedback about this and was surprised, as it should have been implemented already. Well, I guess you can’t remember everything.

Next week is a release week—we’re heading into version 0.5.0! I’ve got two weeks of vacation coming up, and a long list of graphical experiments and plans for the next version. Let’s see how much I can get through.