Back when Rise was first in development it was very flight-centric ... the idea that we could go from orbit all the way down to the ground (without cut-scenes, etc) was pretty revolutionary and quite taxing on the technology of the time (almost 20 years ago!). The surface detail, while resolution of the texturing increased over the years, never really kept up with the times (AKA other games).
While we added high-resolution city streets and bump/elevation layers to simulate the vertical displacement of the curbs, the curbs were never visualized as three-dimensional which always caused confusion and frustration as to why people were flipping their cars, grunting, and dying.
Other changes in this version:
- Refactored the way that we build/store/sort city/colony buildings
- Additional character voices
- Deois Port District parking lot/street design issues fixed
- Curbs raised from 6" max to 8" max
- Refactored and centralized collision (vehicle/weapon to building) detection
- HOT (holdover time) for deicing operations
- New ice accretion rates and tracking airfoil ice vs. surface ice
- CAS message for surface de-icing
- Menu option to de-ice at airfield colonies
- Player generated roads are now rendered at a greater distance
- Fixed a bug with key bindings getting intercepted by dialogs
- Fixed a bug with the null pitch trim to computed target upgrade
- Fixed a bug with the initialization of the localizer/glide-slope deviation
Changed files in this update