Patch Notes v0.98 - Large Content Update

# Patch Notes (V0.98) ## Major New Features ### Driver Confidence, Morale, and Personality Drivers now have expanded personality and psychology systems that affect both on-track performance and off-track negotiations. * Added **driver confidence** and **driver morale**, both tracked from 0–100, which will fluctuate at all times through every drivers career. These will fluctuate through persistent morale/confidence effects from results, team orders, role status, personality, and team context. * Confidence can slightly improve or reduce driver performance depending on current form. * Morale now affects negotiations, contract renewals, team satisfaction, role satisfaction, and long-term team context. * Added morale and confidence tracking to the **Driver Centre**, a new overhauled UI introduced in this update. * Added driver personality traits, with each driver supporting up to three traits. * Added trait effects for negotiations, morale, confidence, result reactions, team orders, and equipment complaints. * Added home-race advantages when a driver races in their home country (also introduced nationality -- to touch on later). * Added same-nationality negotiation boosts between drivers and teams. * Added **career stages** for drivers, automatically evaluated from age, history, achievements, and career position. These will change as drivers progress throughout their careers, and influence prestige requirements, salary expectations, and car competitiveness demands. ### New Driver Negotiation System

Driver negotiations have been rebuilt around a more flexible interest-based system.

• Replaced hard salary yes/no acceptance with an **interest bar**. * Driver interest now considers salary, contract length, race role, driver priority, bonuses, morale, personality, prestige, team competitiveness, nationality, and career stage. * Added contract bonuses for points, podiums, and wins. * Added driver hierarchy/status options: * First Driver * Second Driver * Equal Driver * Negotiations now allow persistent attempts rather than immediately locking the player out. * Reworked AI driver signings to use the new contract scoring system while preserving existing restrictions such as academy protection, affordability, age limits, and prestige requirements. ### Staff Morale and Negotiations Staff systems have been expanded to better match the new driver systems. * Added staff nationalities. * Added staff morale. * Staff morale can slightly improve or reduce staff skill effectiveness. * Reworked player staff negotiations into an interest-bar system. * Staff negotiation scoring now considers salary, bonuses, contract length, nationality, prestige, and morale. * AI staff negotiations now use the updated offer/scoring system. ## Race, Practice, Qualifying, and Simulation ### Team Orders Team orders are now more interactive and more deeply connected to driver morale. * Added a **Move Over** team-order button for player drivers. * Drivers can now naturally slow and allow a teammate through during races. * Added morale consequences for team orders based on driver status. * AI teams can now issue move-over orders between First and Second drivers. ### Race Simulation Improvements Race behavior and traffic simulation have been expanded. * Expanded race event log retention and made the log scrollable. * Added dirty-air stacking in traffic trains. * Added secondary and tertiary dirty-air/braking penalties. * Added a **completely new** race start quality system influenced by driver control, smoothness, confidence, car acceleration, comfort, and randomness. Different drivers will have different starts. Some will gain, some will lose. * Added a small constant failure chance for very low-reliability rated engines. * Improved race-engine performance through optimization and frame pacing work while preserving simulation accuracy. I have removed all lag, at 5x speed the game will instead just run how quick the computer can handle it, adapting either slower or quicker. I will continue to work to improve the pace of the race engine. I have increased speed by about 30%, but lag will disappear as the game will instead now run at the highest speed it can, automatically adapting. ### Practice and Qualifying Practice and qualifying now better reflect driver comfort, preparation, and execution. Each qualifying lap is now a 1-100 lap quality, based on that drivers consistency, their comfort, track conditions, etc. * Added **practice comfort/acclimatization** for each driver (viewable by right clicking lap log - to make this cleaner on UI later). * Drivers gain comfort from clean practice laps. * Drivers lose comfort from crashes, spins, lockups, and setup changes. * Practice comfort now carries into interactive qualifying. * Simulated practice and qualifying also use this new generated driver comfort and hotlap quality. * Reworked qualifying hotlap execution using comfort, consistency, confidence, skill, and randomness for more realistic variety * Added stored hotlap execution quality. * Added qualifying driver radio messages based on lap quality. * Added qualifying disaster laps, including aborted laps, major mistakes, and crash chances. * Added event log messages and radio lines for qualifying incidents. * Added live practice/qualifying timing chips with driver, team, lap timer, reference lap, sector deltas, and rotating/fading display behavior. (one of my favorite adds) ### Track Rubber and Physics Track evolution is now handled through the physics model rather than flat time bonuses. * Reworked track rubber so it affects tyre grip instead of applying a direct time gain. * Added session-to-session rubber variability. * Rubber accumulation remains, but its performance effect now flows through the race physics model. ## Chassis, Aero, Parts, and Development ### Chassis Development * Reworked in-season chassis upgrades into a cumulative chassis-development model i.e fixed bug where upgrades were not stacking onto one another. Chassis upgrades now stack correctly over the season. * Preseason chassis bonuses now correctly apply to all chassis built during that season. ### Aero Development Aero development has been rebuilt around clearer fixed-budget tiers. Exactly like chassis. It should be easier to manage now. * Replaced weekly aero spend sliders with fixed budget tiers. * Added aero development tiers: * Shoestring * Standard * Factory * Added aero upgrade tiers: * Shoestring * Standard * Factory * Aero costs now distribute proportionally during design progress, like chassis updates. * AI development leverages the new fixed-tier pricing system. * Added AI factory production speed difficulty: I recommend new players for normal, experienced players who can keep up with developing their cars on hard/extreme for both of these. AI Will improve by around a second over a season if they have the funds. * Normal * Hard * Extreme * Added AI aero design speed difficulty: * Normal * Hard * Extreme ### Parts and Engine Management * Added emergency aero part purchasing when teams enter race weekends without usable aero parts. This is automatic. Emails and financial penalties for emergency aero purchases will trigger upon this occurring. * Fixed broken/deleted engine replacement exploits. * Auto-fit best parts now respects current regulations and correctly evaluates newer part specs. * Fixed part supplier assignment issues in the roster editor. * Save editor car performance now reads and edits live fitted car performance instead of stale base values, allowing users to appropriately edit saves long into careers to their liking. ## Sponsors, Finance, Engine Partnerships, and Events ### Sponsors and Finance * Added sponsor nationalities. * Added sponsor negotiation modifiers for: * Team nationality match * Main-driver nationality match * Current sponsor renewal * Team prestige * Same-industry sponsor conflicts * Added a Sponsor Negotiation Factors box showing positive and negative modifiers. * Added sponsorship income projections for current and next season income. * Reworked season-one team budgets to use previous-season prize money and starting sponsors instead of static active-team budgets. This will require mods to be re-worked a bit, as all team budgets in s1 are organic and in line with how the game treats future seasons * Inactive and joining teams still use fallback budget values. ### Engine Partnerships * Added in the missing week-one engine partner guidance emails for external partner teams with negotiated guidance. * Added optional budget contribution support in the same email. * Engine deals with 80%/100% partner negotiation terms now receive free engines where intended, rather than only sometimes. ### Driver and Team Events Added new flavor events for drivers and teams, including: * Driver Publicly Praises Team * Driver Criticizes Car Balance * Teammate Tension * Factory Visit (if you hire a superstar driver for next season, they will visit factory and provide morale boost) * Private Test Request * Driver Requests Status Clarity * Injury Recovery Return Refreshed * Injury Recovery Return Disheartened * Veteran Considers Retirement Event emails can now include choices, acknowledgements, and progression-blocking required actions where appropriate. ## Nationalities, Data, Rosters, JSON-Galore Introduced Nationalities as a larger, important part of the game world and are used across several systems. * Added nationality as a full field for drivers, teams, tracks, suppliers, sponsors, and staff. * Added nationality keys, three-letter abbreviations, and flag rendering support. * Assigned nationalities across default 2022, 2024, and 2026 data. * Added regen driver nationality assignment. * Added track country/nationality to the schedule UI. * Added personality traits to default and regen drivers. * Added career stages to drivers. * Added starting driver hierarchy/statuses to rosters. * Added season-one starting sponsors data. * Added previous constructor position data for active teams. * Added default 2022/2024 driver history for real-life parody drivers, this is to populate all default rosters career stages. ## UI and Editor Improvements ### Driver Centre The Driver Centre has been completely rebuilt, and now includes a staff centre within, also built from the ground up. ### Markets, Results, and Statistics * Modernized all result screens present in game significantly, with included logos, nationalities, etc. Looks a lot better throughout. * Modernized Driver Market with bold styling, wider columns, team logos, flags, horizontal scrolling, and cleaner layout. * Modernized Sponsor Market with bold text and nationality flags. * Modernized Engine Market with bold text and supplier logos. * **COMPLETE** Statistics UI overhaul with bold styling, flags, and team logos. * Added Records tab within statistics. * Added season records for wins, podiums, poles, points, DNFs, and average finish. * Added Season Review tab with year selector. * Added season snapshots for standings, qualifying analysis, head-to-heads, wins, podiums, poles, and team summaries. * Added a *new* neutral row background option while preserving colored team rows, accessible in options. For those who want neutral backgrounds rather than bombarded with bright colors * Split Options UI into Game, Graphics, and Debug tabs. * Added new neutral results/timing row toggle to Graphics. ### Editors * Added sponsor editor tab. * Added starting sponsors drag/drop tab. * Added engine creation in the roster editor. * Added team asset upload, remove, and replace support for logos and car PNGs. * Added aspect-ratio and file-type validation for uploaded team assets. * Added searchable nationality inputs. * Added driver contract status/hierarchy editing. * Improved editor scrollbars so they can be clicked and dragged, not just mouse-wheel scrolled. ## Fixes ### Race, Practice, Qualifying, and Results * Fixed player strategy pit-window issue where missed or past pit stops could block future stops. * Reduced overtake log spam from cars passing pit-lane or pitting cars. ### Chassis, Parts, Engine, and Development * Fixed chassis upgrades not stacking cumulatively. * Fixed chassis upgrade cap behavior. * Fixed preseason chassis bonuses not applying to newly built chassis. * Fixed deleted/broken engine replacement issues. * Fixed auto-fit best parts using stale regulation limits. * Fixed auto-fit ignoring stronger later-spec parts. * Fixed government reset/preseason chassis overwrite issues. * Fixed roster editor supplier assignment bugs. ### Editor and UI * Fixed clickable scrollbar gaps across roster/save editor. * Added some new team car art (courtesy of @das11) ## Balance Changes ### Driver, Race, and Reliability * Chassis reliability now matters more, especially at low ratings. * Rebalanced chassis reliability DNF multipliers to roughly the following multipliers of the base DNF chance in regulations: * 100 reliability: 0.10x * 75 reliability: 0.60x * 50 reliability: 1.00x * 25 reliability: 4.00x * 1 reliability: about 8.00x * Very low-reliability engines now have a small constant failure chance. * Dirty air in traffic trains is stronger but still subtle. * Race start effects were reduced after initial testing. * Negotiation frustration penalties were softened. ### Development and Economy * AI teams now spend more toward current-season and aero performance. * In-season chassis development costs were reduced. * Aero development now uses fixed budget tiers with gain multipliers. * AI HQ/future development allocation was reduced to keep spending balanced. * Track rubber gains are now variable and physics-based instead of flat time-based.