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I've decided to turn development towards making a little "remaster" of Lego Racers 1. Racing around cartoony tracks shooting cannon balls at other brick built karts, pretty fun stuff. A bunch of work lately has been UI related and thinking of how the menus should look and feel. More work has also went into the kart/vehicle physics and feeling, there's still work to be done, but they're getting better. https://streamable.com/fmnp4 More work went into AI as well. They actually have a very small brain now! They're just smart enough to drive in reverse if stuck, and to follow a given course. Currently they are insanely good drivers, too good, they're very difficult to pass, let alone beat in a race. Gotta make em a bit dumber. https://streamable.com/q5r10 https://streamable.com/37ti3 Lots of other stuff has gotten work done, such as basic HUD elements, sounds, particles, a simple test-track "ripped from LR1" and more. I also quickly added a screenshot camera last night courtesy of Garry Newman, which allows you to take some super cool screenshots ingame. If ya wanna keep up to date further on this project, I've made a Discord server where I'll be posting development info and taking suggestions, feedback, etc. https://discord.gg/TT5FD5q

What now? An old school rock track featuring my beautiful 99% artificial voice? Yup you heard right. I'm not a songwriter so the lyrics might sound pretty cheesy, but they still do have a meaning. It's all about the depiction of a weird feeling evoked by certain sceneries and situations, and something else. I won't say because I think it's best to leave the analysis to the listener.

There's one particular post from Lunibook that I feel is worth calling special attention to, posted by WBL member Flambridge on late Saturday, November 5, 2011, the day after the closure was announced: It all speaks for itself, though there's one thing I wanna discuss. According to this, LU had 2 million players, only 100,000 of which were paying subscribers. The 2 million figure is backed up by the official press release announcing the closure: There's one other number for paying subscribers I've seen floating around the internet though, 38,000. The source for that seems to be Brick by Brick by David Robertson, which has a whole chapter on the development of LU. I own a copy, here's the relevant part: It seems they meant a few months before the closure was announced (to both the players and developers) on November 4th, 2011, not a few months before the servers shut down (Midnight of January 30, 2012)... There'd have been no cautious optimism at that point, nor a staff to be even be optimistic, besides the few left to maintain the servers. So the 38,000 number probably comes from around the time F2P was launched in August 2011, maybe slightly before. F2P would have then been responsible for the rise from 38,000 subscribers to 100,000 subscribers + 1.9 million F2P players in the few months until it was axed on that morning in early November.