What is already running
Available today-
Cars on an engine that has none
A composite RDR object with a real physical bound, authored mass, inertia tensor and centre of gravity, driven by a C# controller that solves wheel contact, drive torque, gearing, steering and braking every frame. The rdr3 engine has no car class; this is the replacement for one.
-
Three transmission modes
Automatic picks direction near zero speed, simplified adds an explicit reverse, manual puts the ratios on E and Q. Gear count and ratios come from each car's own handling.
-
Seats, panels and lights
Server-owned seats claimed by door proximity, hinged doors, hood and trunk on their own pivots, and authored lamp groups for front, tail and brake, with the tail pair burning brighter under braking.
-
Paintwork
Repainting a car from its authored palette, primary and secondary chosen separately: up to seven presets per channel and forty-nine explicit pairs. The choice is instance state, so a garage script can store it and put it back on a later spawn.
-
Number plates
A readable plate on every car whose model carries one: up to eight characters and a plate style for all five states in the game. New Hanover, Ambarino, Lemoyne, West Elizabeth and New Austin, each in its own colours, from the warm white of Lemoyne to the yellow of New Austin. Set through the API and replicated like the rest of the car's state, so a plate can be logged, checked at a roadblock and written into your roleplay.
-
Damage, bullet marks and flooding
Body and engine health derived from measured velocity change on impact, bullet marks on the bodywork, prepared dent and crushed stages on real bumpers, lamp groups that fail with the car, and flooding that kills the engine until repair.
-
Engine sound
A C# mixer driving RPM and load transitions through positional Web Audio, with a shared sound-pack registry. No xSound and no third-party audio resource.
-
Quick tuning
Engine levels of +10 to +40 percent over each car's own baseline, a separate custom top-speed preset from 20 to 200 mph, and suspension firmness and ride height. Server-authoritative, never written back to config on its own.
-
Modular fleet
Every car is a standalone resource with its own model, collision and complete profile. Adding a correctly authored car means one array entry, not a rebuild of the core.
-
Integration surface
A Lua JSON API and a typed C# SDK covering spawn, seating, engine, tuning, damage and state, with events for every lifecycle step, on a stable protocol.
-
In-car radio
A separate add-on: five stations on a shared server clock, HRTF panned audio with separate cabin and outside gain, and a HUD that gets out of the way.
Being worked on now
Next release-
Tyre marks
Rubber left on the surface behind a car under load, so a hard corner or a standing start leaves something behind instead of a clean road.
What comes after
Order not fixed-
Proper animations
Getting into a car, sitting in it and climbing back out, animated the way a player expects rather than handled as a seat transition. The same pass covers how the driver actually sits behind the wheel instead of occupying the seat. This is the piece that most changes how the whole system feels, and it is the one being lined up next.
-
Better synchronisation
A pass over how a moving car reaches everyone who is not driving it: who owns the simulation at any moment, how that ownership changes hands when a driver leaves or a player drifts out of range, and how position, velocity and rotation are corrected on the clients that are only watching. A composite object is not a native vehicle, so none of this comes from the engine for free. It is the difference between a car that looks the same on two screens and one that jumps on the third.
-
A deeper damage model
Extending what impact does to a car beyond the current health, stage and bumper system. The architectural limit is that a composite object does not deform freely the way a purpose-built vehicle body does, so this is about depth within that, not a promise of arbitrary dents.
-
Powered windows
Windows that raise and lower as their own moving part, on the same server-owned state as the rest of the panels.
-
A wider sound library
More recordings across more of the fleet so cars stop sharing a voice, covering the events currently marked as unavailable rather than faked.
-
Better collisions
Refining the collision bounds and contact behaviour of the composite bodies, which is where the difference between a car that feels solid and a car that feels like a prop actually lives.
-
Police vehicles
A law-side set for servers running a sheriff's office or a city police department. Not a civilian car in a different colour: its own lamp group for a beacon, so the light behaves as a separate system your scripts can switch.
-
Aircraft
The same approach applied to something that leaves the ground. A different flight model on top of the same controller, object and sync foundation.
-
Airships
Lighter-than-air craft, the period-correct way to put players above the map without a propeller plane breaking the setting.
-
More boats
Broadening what floats beyond what the base game gives you, using the same module format as the cars.
How to read this page. Items in the first section are running in the build you can buy today. Items below it are not, and no order or date is promised for them. Something moves up when it works on a live server across two clients, not when a calendar says it should.
The planned list is not closed either. If your server needs something that is not here, the Discord is the place to say so: several things on this page arrived that way.
Build notes go out in the Discord
Every release, what changed and what broke, with the road-test items written down rather than quietly fixed.