Drift Stage - October 2026 Progress Report.

Drift Stage – October 2026 Progress Report.

Post Gamescom, Drift Stage has entered the final phase of the 2026 development timeline. Storm Electricity, Super Systems, and Scene World have been pursuing diverging task lists; with the month of September culminating in a scheduled progress check-in last week.

With October now beginning, and the summer season finally coming to a complete close, Super Systems and Scene World have completed their September tasks lists – with only new media remaining - planned for the next wave of updates. Development builds don’t make the best demonstrations for media / videos – so everything recorded from the current build has limited use.

The majority of work during September focused on clearing the remaining pre-Gamescom tasks relating to social media administration, bug documentation, and assistance with physics value tuning and testing. Establishing a functional footage recording pipeline has been completed; and multiple hardware revisions and additions have been made.

The following footage was taken directly from internal development records during the second pass of "Arcade Physics Mode" tuning. The tuning menu can be seen on the left side of the image.

The goal of this alternative control / physics mode is to bring the game closer to the feel and initial skill ceiling of the 2014 pre-alpha. Reduced friction values on the guard rails and an added "bounce" allow for less lap wrecking crashes - one of the main criticisms of the 2016+ builds.

Testing the result of the first pass of tuning - the "rotation" during a drift is too slow, making corner entry difficult.

After adjusting the "Turn Angle Rate, and "Turn Torque Speed" - drifting became much smoother; but contacting the guardrail causes the car to bounce off.

Negotiating the last corner with slightly adjusted values, taking a more cautious entry on the final lap by modulating the accelerator.

Impacting the wall producing a more dynamic reaction, versus grinding to a halt.

Greater degrees of "grip" based turning, and "drift chaining" are possible while using the "Arcade" settings.

With Super Systems and Scene World on stand by, efforts are now focused on debugging the build for the forthcoming Steam release. 

Fixing the "out of bounds" clipping bug, and iterating the “reset” feature have been the focus of Storm Electricitys efforts following Gamescom. 

A “clipping” bug causing cars to fall through the track due to an impact has been a reoccurring problem with Drift Stage since the 2014 pre-alpha. This type of bug is a common issue in physics engines, but the cause is usually related to a value overflow. Investigation into the problem has eliminated that possibility – and the issue seems to be tied to elevation changes. 

Drifting is initiated by holding the brake in "Arcade" physics mode, as opposed to "tapping" the brakes to initiate a drift in the "Legacy" mode.

A sudden change in speed and angle caused by an impact causing the "clipping" bug. Note this is occurring on an incline.

The new "respawn" feature automatically kicking-in after detecting an "out of bounds" instance.

Diagnosing the physics clipping issue required understanding exactly how Drift Stage’s physics engine operates. Storm Electricity did not initially write this code, as it is part of Drift Stage’s "legacy code-base"; so time was needed to properly review and understand what was happening with this specific segment of code. 

After reviewing the script handling the vehicle’s individual wheel colliders – the method used to “scan” the road surface was found lacking in an ability to accurately account for sudden changes in elevation. The wheels weren’t “seeing” far enough ahead to accurately interpolate the roads data. This caused the cars wheels to pass through the surface of the road – not taking in the correct height data due to a limited “view cone” from the wheel. 

This effectively caused the wheels to not be able to see what was coming. This is crucial, as the physics engine uses this data to calculate the cars direction, and “physical” interactions with the simulated road surface.

In order to fix this issue – the point where the “view cone” is cast from the wheel collider was changed.  Initially, the center axis of the wheel was used as an origin point; however this did not provide enough coverage to “scan” the incoming road. 

Moving the origin point of this “view cone” above the center axis allowed for a wider view area – and has so far proven successful in eliminating the issue. More testing is required, and the changes have caused some minor variances in the control and “feel” of drifting / driving; as the physics engine is now taking in more data and the car is now “gripping” the road more accurately; leading to the actual polygons that make up the road segments acting like bumps. 

Storm Electricity is actively debugging this revision; and multiplayer stress-testing commenced as of this week. Adjusting for the “bumpy” over-precision in the handling is a minor issue compared to the “clipping”, and will be mitigated once the fix is committed. 

With only three months left in 2026; most non-development related task lists are complete; and all focus has been placed on producing a viable release candidate for the end of Q4. 

This next build is extremely important - as the future of the project depends on the ability to monetize Drift Stage - and offer a legitimate early access build on Steam.

What can be completed and polished enough for a preliminary Steam release will depend on how much progress is made by the current internal deadline.  Considerations for Mac and Linux versions are being taken into account; as Unity makes this process generally easy. 

Switching to Unity Pro as soon as it is deemed necessary is also in the planning stages.

As we move closer to Halloween and Thanksgiving, a clearer picture of what build will be released, its contents, what features still need to be debugged, and how we move forward with the project as whole will be possible.

** Current Features being addressed:**

• Restored Ghost Car.

• Out-of-Bounds Reset.

• Fixed Clipping.

• Functional Lap-Counters.

• Physics Tuning Menu.

• Photo-mode with saving.

• Manual transmission.

While a new build release is technically possible based on the Gamescom build – the process of compiling and releasing iterative development builds would be slow and inefficient. Full development on Drift Stage has only begun as of June, with the Unity version porting and “mystery bugs” requiring months of work that ultimately did not result in new additions to the game. 

All above features have been successfully prototyped - but their final implementation is dependent on time, so what features will be in the next release, and what features will be saved for consecutive updates is undecided as of now. As work continues and features are deemed "complete" enough for release, finalized release plans will be announced.

The Computermuseum Cologne has published an article on their experience assisting Scene World hosting the booth at Gamescom 2026. 

You can read the article here, highlighting Scene World Magazine's 25th anniversary - and get a better look at the show floor during Gamescom 2026 and the Drift Stage demo presentation:

https://www.computermuseumcologne.de/cmc.blog/gamescom-2026/

Progress made in August, and the conclusion of Unity version porting has allowed for a focus on fixing major, long standing bugs that disrupt the gameplay experience and are otherwise not acceptable in a retail release. Troubleshooting and finalizing iterative features requires time and concentration; making projections difficult – but prioritizing these bugs now is important for future builds – building on broken or incomplete features can cause lots of conflicts and issues later, something Drift Stage has suffered from in the past.

We are working towards more media and social media content as new builds become available for testing – but as of now the Gamescom 0.5.0.9+ related builds have served their purpose and are considered archived.

Despite minor delays due to outside obligations, this progress report is two weeks late; this is a minor delay given the proximity to Gamescom, and only impacted the documentation and publishing window - development continued unaffected.

Focus has moved to the current development versions – and the next Steam release itself.

As of this update, a new development build - Drift Stage 0.5.0.12 has begun testing, focusing on debugging and stress testing the fixes made to the wheel colliders and out of bounds "respawning" mechanics, as well as further refinements to the physics engine itself - based on the new tuning values from Septembers testing efforts. 

Release projections will be given next progress report - based on available Q4 windows and remaining release candidate milestones.

- Super Systems Softworks