Northstar Radio 1.2

• New 3D ambient radio: the radio heard from passing cars is now spatial. The sound pans between your speakers following the car's position relative to the camera, the muffling opens up as the car gets close (a distant radio is all bass; the actual music emerges as it approaches), cars behind the camera sound duller, and a doppler effect shifts the pitch as the car drives past — like real life. Toggle with AmbientRadio3D in [SETTINGS] (on by default; set 0 for the old flat volume-only fade). Requires AmbientRadio = 1.
• Ambient radio reliability: the car a broadcast belongs to is re-checked against the game's vehicle pool every frame, so a car despawning mid-broadcast can no longer leave a stale broadcast behind, and a car that despawns just as its broadcast starts is skipped safely.
• Ambient radio is now silenced during cutscenes and scripted scenes, like the main radio (it previously kept playing underneath them, and could even start mid-scene).
• The radio now switches off the moment you begin exiting a vehicle (or are pulled out of it), like the original game, instead of playing on until the exit animation finishes. Holding exit at speed keeps the radio on until the car is slow enough to actually get out, also like the original.
• Fixed the mouse wheel not working for other menu mods (for example map zoom in menu-map mods) while the pause menu is open — the radio no longer consumes the wheel while the menu or a cutscene is up.
• The car radio is now disabled during the stadium events (Hotring, Bloodring, Dirt Ring), like the original game: the radio stays silent while you're in the event vehicle inside the stadium (this also stops the stadium's own music carrying on outside after the event) and works normally again once you're back on the street. Missions that turn the radio off through the game script are honored too.
• Fixed the station-tuning static getting stuck in a loop when changing stations: switching again while a station was still loading dropped the new station entirely, leaving the static playing with nothing to stop it until you changed station again. The switch is now retried instead of dropped, and the static always stops if a station fails to load.
• Fixed a crash-to-desktop (no error dialog) when a story announcement finished while the radio was turned off on an install with no MP3 PLAYER station (empty mp3 folder): the finished announcement stream was mistaken for a finished MP3 track and the plugin tried to play the next track of a playlist that doesn't exist. The radio now stays cleanly off after the announcement, and invalid station loads are rejected and logged.
• Fixed an uninitialized field in the ambient radio's muffle-equalizer setup.
• Fixed a random crash when getting into a vehicle: the on-screen radio cleanup could read a stale vehicle reference during the split-second the game is seating the player. It now reads the live vehicle and checks it first.
• Fixed the radio still changing station while the pause menu (or a cutscene) is open — the change button and mouse wheel are now ignored there instead of firing the moment you close the menu.
• Fixed the station name briefly showing the previous station when scrolling quickly — the button/wheel is now read in the same frame it is acted on, so the on-screen name keeps up with the dial.
• Fixed a rare silent crash-to-desktop (no error message) when using very large radio files: loading a station that runs out of memory now simply skips that station and keeps the game running, and stations load using less peak memory. Tip: converting large ADF stations to MP3 streams them from disk and avoids the memory cost entirely.