Latest Zero To Apex 6 hours ago The last one was plumbing. This one you will see. And before anything else: four of the biggest pieces in here are first parts, and I would rather say it up front than let you work it out. The AI grid and how drivers are built, the adaptive difficulty, VR, and seats being disputed all land today in a state you can play, and all four are also the groundwork for what comes after. Until now there was no way to measure most of this, so there was no honest way to tune it either. Expect them to keep getting better over the next few versions, and tell me how they feel. On these four, your feedback is what decides where they go next. The AI and the grid The field is made of drivers now. Every driver has their own character, their own affinity for a family of cars, and a car that belongs to their team rather than to them. Teammates share machinery, so a strong team is strong for both of its drivers. Real teammates. The thirteen formula series with a fixed roster line up the way they really did. Alonso next to Stroll at Aston Martin, not next to Antonelli in a Mercedes. A class spreads the way that class really spreads. The gap from the front to the back comes from real classification sheets, one figure per class, so a one make cup runs nose to tail and a nineties Formula One field does not. Cars have a character. Power and drag traded against weight, so two cars with nearly the same average pace no longer behave the same everywhere: one wants Monza, the other wants the twisty stuff. The AI makes more mistakes, and the setting that controls it is finally being written inside the range the game accepts. Adaptive difficulty was rebuilt. It used to aim at leaving you about one and a half percent ahead, which is exactly why it felt like you always won: winning was the target. It now measures against the edge of the podium and aims at zero, and it keeps a separate memory per class and per track, so getting quick in GT3 does not turn your Formula Vee races into a wall. The race asks you how it felt. Five levels, one click, skippable, with optional reasons. When the app measures a gap so odd it decides not to believe it, it says so and offers you the difficulty it would have set if it had. You can also share your race data, off unless you turn it on, so the starting difficulty of each class and track gets corrected by everyone's races instead of only mine. All of that is a first pass, on purpose. A grid of drivers and a difficulty in four layers are the tools to get this right, not the finished answer. What they buy me is the ability to measure and to turn one dial without breaking the rest, which is exactly what was missing. It will keep moving version by version, so if a class feels wrong, or a driver feels wrong, or the difficulty still misses, say it. That is the input. VR, part one Launch straight into VR from the app. A mode selector under the Play button: Screen, SteamVR or Oculus. Both VR modes are marked experimental, and they are not two names for the same thing: how your headset connects decides which one is yours (Link and Air Link go through Oculus, Virtual Desktop and Steam Link through SteamVR). The app can be driven with a pad or with the buttons on your wheel, which is the part that matters with a headset on. Everything connected is read at once, buttons are configured per device, and Settings shows you what it actually sees, name by name, button by button. The focus marker is finally visible too. Experimental means experimental. This is the first part: getting you into the headset and making the app usable once you are there. Part two is the app on its own panel inside the headset, and it is being built now. If your setup does something mine does not, I want to hear it, because VR is where the number of possible setups explodes. Seats are disputed You can see who you are up against. When a team is choosing between you and other drivers, the offer says who and why. Finishing close no longer means silence. The team watches you for three races instead of discarding you. You only lose the seat if your rival beats you in every one of them, and beating him once resets the count. They watch you wherever you race. When it closes, win or lose, the team principal writes to you. This is the first half of the market. The other half is designed and comes next, and how these first disputes feel to you is what will shape it. If a watch feels unfair, or too easy, or you never see one at all, that is exactly what I need to know. And the rest Weather you choose. Tick the types you want and the race is built out of those alone, with an arc across the session instead of one roll per slot. Random still leaves it to the game, and the picker uses the game's own photos. Interface size (90 to 150 percent, with Ctrl + and Ctrl -), the window remembers its monitor and position, tyre wear and fuel are shown before you race, and DLC works pack by pack and car by car. What got fixed The 0.4.0 stutter. With the mod attached the game could run at half the frame rate, and on those same starts parts of the mod were dead without a word, which made any "X does not work" report impossible to explain. Both had the same cause and both are gone. Setting up a race no longer stalls the game. It was sweeping ten gigabytes of memory on every move around the menus. Now it is milliseconds. Refuelling is only banned where the rulebook banned it, which is what was leaving the AI out of fuel in the middle of a TSI Cup race. The rules of all one hundred and fifteen series were audited against their own era. Skin packs are read from your actual game, so the wrong car stops getting the wrong livery, and when AMS2 throws away our AI for a car you get told instead of quietly racing against nobodies. Races run at the hour of the round instead of six in the morning, retiring counts as a retirement, renting a livery no longer costs reputation, the results screen shows the championship you just raced, and the DLC screen stops waiting forever. What comes next The market, part two: signings move to their real place in the year. A transfer window, a decision week, a paddock you have been watching for months before anyone calls you. The design is finished and the seat disputes that land today are its first half. And the refining of everything above, which is the honest way to describe the next few versions. The drivers, how they progress, the difficulty and the grid are all new enough that the first round of real feedback is worth more than another month of me guessing. Post it in the feedback channel, in as much or as little detail as you like. Nothing is too small. Update from inside the app, or grab the installer from the release page. Full changelog there too: https://github.com/thingsbyjosh/zta-releases/releases/tag/v0.5.0 Thanks to greema, Smackdaddy133, ubersquid, Simple Man, Sid77, Cris_Ace, Thicc William, Phobion and Yogurtmaker, whose reports are named one by one in the changelog. Half of this list exists because of you.
I like this app because the races are set automatically and it is nicely integrated with VR. You don't even have to alt-tab between the app and AMS2. VR controller also works with the app. I couldn't imagine more than this tbh.
I discovered an incredible career mode on Overtake "Zero to Apex 0.5.0" that is fully integrated with the game. You no longer have to manually set up races or input results; the AI is dynamic, and the career mode itself is amazing and addictive. I had grown bored of running random, meaningless races, and online racing didn't really appeal to me either. Plus, existing career modes which required manual race setup and result entry completely killed my motivation. Now, this tool has reignited my drive to race; competing finally makes sense, there’s a clear purpose: winning and progressing. Career mode fully automated, no race setup needed: Zero to Apex
I'm trying it out; it is by far the most integrated and well-made career mode of them all. Let's hope development continues while we wait for the official one.
