Progress Report 9

Oh do we have a little bundle of surprises for you today. Let's get right into it.

Let's start off with the first surprise!! 🤩 It is clear to us that we won't be able to deliver the offline patch by December. (Hey, not all surprises are good.) This upsets us as much as it upsets you because reviving the game on it's 10th anniversary would've been the most amazing shit we could've done. Sadly, by now it's clear to us that this is not going to happen. Instead of getting defensive and reiterating that we never 100% promised December, I'd like to just point out that we ran into some real life difficulties since the end of September up to November, that really took a ton of time away from us. Our big brains behind the programming username_snipped_for_safety_reasons has took by far the hardest hit from life, how about we give him some love? 🧡 I'm still positive that if we would've kept up the same pace as before, we could've released by 2nd December, but sadly things didn't turn out this way. For now - let's just call it Early 2025.
However, let's cheer up a bit now, as the next news are much more uplifting. Some of you may get to play The Crew before 2025.

Beta Testing

We are planning to host 2 beta tests, starting in December. First phase will be purely for technical testing and most certainly involve bugs, errors, and all sorts of technical inconveniences, therefore we will manually pick a few select testers. Second phase should be a lot more fun and smoother and will involve more testers. A tester application channel will be opened for phase 2, but until then, please don't spam us about wanting to be picked for beta testing. PLEASE 😢 😢 😢 The new release date should be clearer by the time we get to phase 2 or shortly after it.

I really, truly wish I could've personally done more for the 10 year celebration of my favorite, beloved game, OUR beloved game, but my time is simply stretched too thin between working on the server emulator and my personal work. However, we thought it's a good idea to host the next community get-together on the game's 10th anniversary, most likely right on 2nd December (I'll confirm a bit later). We will talk about the game, why we love it, what it means to us, reflect a bit, and we will livestream up-to-date gameplay throughout.

I will also post Roadtrip: The Sequel on YouTube, this time with commentary to make it more interesting (gonna reflect a bit on everything personally), and I will show off the WIP overhaul mod in action, which I first mentioned in the last progress report (that I also occasionally post WIP pictures of in the #tcu-game-photos channel!). Overtime, I want the mod to truly be a community effort, and I'm hoping to include the best of the community's efforts in it (within reason of course, I still perfectly remember what I myself said about unfaithfully changing the game instead of faithfully improving it).
A bit of an early glimpse of what I've done so far: https://imgur.com/a/OwK0dXS. Hoping to get into handling-editing territory soon, at least get rid of that horrid Wild Run gyroscopic hovercar alignment nonsense.

We still have some features left to add, hardest of which being the Summit. We have implemented FD Stunts and FD Challenges (except for the route saving/favoriting - that's a bit of a challenge of it's own, we may have to do it post-release). Summit calendar is also now 1:1 matched on the server-side. Otherwise we've been mostly optimizing code and functionality of the server itself to prepare for the upcoming beta tests!

I've been putting in some work in the Launcher too of course. I'm currently working on the Save Manager (to import/export saves for offline mode). I can finally show a screenshot of the Launcher now [still WIP of course].

TCU Launcher Example

The server list is version-specific, and will include our public server(s) in the future, and... (who knows what else 😶‍🌫️)

That is all for now. Once again I want to thank you all for being a wonderful community.