It's been a while but a lot has been updated in the latest patch and the car is pretty much completely finished. There is of course a whole list of features and big improvements I could still add to the car because I'm a damn perfectionist but I've got to call time on this project.

I might come back to it at some point and I shall continue to offer support if any major bugs appear but for now the car is in a good state of completedness and I want to move on to some new projects.

Ok, on to the patch notes:

Probably the biggest change is that I've now separated the clean and dirty versions of the car into 2 individual models that can be spawned separately. This is due to a Source Engine limitation that I can't work around.

However I've decided to make the best of the situation by giving the clean and dirty versions separate handling and lighting setups. The dirty version has softer suspension and slightly less power to simulate years of neglect as well as discoloured and faulty lights. The clean version handles pretty much as before with a few very minor adjustments.

I've also added alternate license plates to the car, you can now pick between 8 different states ( I had a lot of fun making these ). You can switch between them by right clicking the model, going to Bodygroups and looking under 'License_Plate_Geo'.

Other materials on the car have been improved and optimized, the metallic paint is probably one of the biggest improvements and should look a lot better than previous versions. The transparent areas now have improved reflections as well and I've rolled out the refract effect to all the light casings, not just the rear ones.

I really like the way the refractions look however it did have an unintended side effect which affected the VCMod lighting, I've mostly fixed this too but the new lighting effects might not look quite as good as they used to. [Tech Speak]The Source engine cannot display a $translucent material behind a refract material, this means that 3D lights VCMod uses won't display if you use the refract shader in front of them. There may be a way around this but for now I've just removed the 3D lights from the car and I'm just using sprites for now.[/tech]

The last thing to mention about the materials is that I have decided to lower the resolution of a few textures to save space, overall the visual change is minimal but you will probably notice if you look at the dashboard very closely. This was necessary to keep the file size of the whole addon below 215MB, anything above that and the gmpublish refused to upload it. If you happen to know a way around the "Compression Failed" issue I'd love to hear about it.

Other small changes I've made include adding all sound effects to a precache script so this ought to help reduce stuttering when using the car for the first time. The sounds should load before the map loads rather than just before they're meant to play. I'm not sure how well the "sound.Add" lua function works but it's not a major issue either way.

Okay that about wraps things up, if you have any bugs to report you can leave them here or on the main comments as usual. Be aware though that I'm probably going to have to ignore most "feature" requests, I'm not going to be adding any big things at this stage. It's just mopping up the last few bugs and making simple additions. So I'm not going to be modelling any new parts for the car or completely remaking anything that's already there.