VETTE! 2026 0.10.0

Traffic that keeps going

The original's city cars could vanish right in front of you. Its traffic is a small set of cars repeated across the city, its turn rules hide a car whose street has no road its way, and its small drawing window rebinds the cars as you move. With Traffic: Smooth (the default; the launch menu row was called Freeway traffic), the Enhanced view now keeps every car it draws. When the original drops one, it drives on by itself along the roads, in the original's own lanes: straight on where the road goes on, otherwise a turn the roads and one-way rules allow. It only goes once it is far away or well out of view.

Traffic also sits on the ground and tilts with it everywhere it is drawn. Before, a car could ride a storey up on a raised block, or keep a hill's slope after reaching the flat.

These cars are a picture only: collisions are still with the original's own cars.

Lombard Street

Lombard Street's bends are drawn whole in the Enhanced view. They no longer show spikes and notches, and the hillside no longer shows through them. Lombard's bends were the only shapes in the city with this problem; three faces on two 3D models got the same fix.

Dithered colours

New launch menu row, Colours: the original shades a few things in two colours as a checkerboard (the Transamerica Pyramid, some pavements, the odd sign). Dithered (original) draws that checkerboard in the Enhanced view too, each cell one of the original's pixels, in the mirror and on the opponent screen's car as well. Blended (the default) draws each pair as one flat colour, as before.

The opponent screen's car

With the Smooth frame rate, the turning car on the opponent screen no longer shows a tail light through its body as it turns.

VETTE! 2026 0.9.0

The object editor, laid out like 3ds Max

The object editor (launch menu > Objects, Enter) has a new layout:

• Menus along the top (File, Edit, Tools, Create, Views, Help) and a toolbar of icons: undo and redo, Move, Turn and Size, Snap, Symmetry, picking vertices or faces, new vertex, new face, extrude, turn round, mirror copy, delete, and four views.
• Four views at once: Top, Front, Left and Perspective, each with a grid and an axis tripod. Click a view's name to change it (Perspective, Isometric, Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, flat or not). Q switches between four views and one. The keypad works too: 7 top, 1 front, 3 right (Ctrl: the other side), 0 perspective.
• A command panel on the right. Create adds a cube, cone, sphere, cylinder, pyramid, plane, wedge or roof to build with, in the middle of the view and picked, ready to move. Modify adds vertices and faces, and extrudes, turns round, mirrors and deletes them. It also sets whether a face hides its back, is outlined or is hidden. The EGA palette sets colours in both.
• A status bar with the picked vertex's x, y and z (click to type them), what's under the pointer, and the view controls: the whole object, zoom, slide and turn the view.

New tools

• Move (V), Turn (T) and Size (S): drag what's picked. X, Y or Z keeps it to one axis. Ctrl turns in 15-degree steps or sizes in quarters. The arrow keys work too.
• Snap (Shift+Tab): while you drag, a point lands on a vertex near it or lines up with other vertices along x, y or z, with coloured guide lines showing which. Hold Alt to move freely.
• Symmetry (Shift+M): whatever you do on one side of the middle (east-west) happens on the other. That covers moving, adding vertices and faces, extruding, colouring and deleting.
• Extrude (E): pulls the picked faces out, with sides; drag them further from there.
• Box picking: drag on empty space. A click on one of several picked things picks just that one.

Everything can still be undone, F1 lists every key, and sets made with earlier versions open as they were.

VETTE! 2026 0.8.0

The city's buildings in the object editor

The object editor (launch menu > Objects, Enter) now lists the city's ordinary buildings and street objects below the original's models, under City objects. That's 31 of them, from the tall office towers down to the street lamps on the corners. Reshape them like any model: move, add and delete vertices and faces, recolour them, mirror them, and undo every step. Ctrl+R puts one back as the original had it.

The original draws these with program code rather than as models, so the editor turns each one into a model. When a set changes one, the game draws that model in its place everywhere the city has it, in both the original's renderer and the Enhanced view. Left unchanged, they look exactly as the original draws them.

Good to know:

• Collisions follow the map, not the shapes. The car drives through whatever a building gains, and one made smaller still stops you where its walls were.
• A change shows everywhere that object stands. Some appear in hundreds of places (the street lamps in 400).
• Two-player races still use the original's objects.

VETTE! 2026 0.7.0

Traffic on Marina Boulevard

With Freeways: Off, Marina Boulevard now has traffic. The Bay Bridge's cars drive along it in the boulevard's own lanes: eastbound, as on the bridge, and westbound on course 3. You can bump into them, the computer opponent steers round them, and both the original's renderer and the Enhanced view draw them.

The city's own cars couldn't be used there. The game's traffic rules hide a city car and stop it where a street allows only east-west driving, so on the boulevard they'd have appeared for a moment and then frozen. The Bay Bridge's cars drive straight on and ignore those rules.

Nothing else changes: the dashboard's road signs in the Marina are the original's, the police behave as they did there, and the computer opponent finishes every course in the same time as before.

VETTE! 2026 0.6.1

Name tags and an arrow in two-player races

• Name tags. Each player's name floats in a small tag over their car on the other's screen.
• An arrow to your friend. From the driver's seat, a small arrow at the top of the view points the way to steer. It points straight up when your friend is ahead, and slides to the left or right edge (pointing that way) when they're to that side or behind you. In the helicopter view (F4) it lies on the ground and circles your car.
• Tab shows or hides the tag and the arrow during the race. The original game doesn't use Tab in races.
• Pixel style in Classic. In Classic (and in the Enhanced view at the original resolution), both are drawn in the game's own 320x200 pixels and colours, with the tag in a small pixel font.

Names and maps in online races

• The online screen has new Your name and Tag and arrow rows. A LAN race is listed under its host's name, and the window title shows who you're racing.
• An online race is now played in the host's map: if the host plays a map made in the map editor, it's sent to the friend's game as the race begins. Both players still need the same version of VETTE! 2026.

Fixes

• Launch menu clicks. Clicking a row in the launch menu while the window wasn't the active one did nothing (Windows used the click only to bring the window to the front). It now counts.
• Online screen. It now works with the mouse, and Enter on Back goes back.

VETTE! 2026 0.5.0

The object editor

The launch menu has a new Objects row. Press Enter on it to open the object editor. The game's 3D models (the traffic and the opponents' cars, the police car, your Corvette, the pedestrians and the landmarks from Coit Tower to the Ferry Building) are shown one at a time in a 3D view you can turn round and zoom.

• Pick vertices or faces with the mouse. Tab switches between them, and Shift adds to the selection.
• Move what's picked by dragging it, or nudge it with the arrow keys and Page Up/Down. X, Y or Z keeps a move to one axis, and Enter lets you type a vertex's exact position.
• Build: A adds a vertex, F makes a face through the picked vertices in order (two make a line), M mirrors what's picked across the middle, and Delete removes it.
• Colour faces from the original's 16-colour palette: click a colour, press 0-9 (Shift+0-5 for colours 10-15), or press C for the next colour. R turns a face round.
• Undo and redo everything with Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y. Ctrl+S saves your set, and F1 lists every key.

Choose your set in the Objects row to play with it. Both the original's renderer and the Enhanced view draw your objects, so they appear in races and on the opponent screen. The game's own files are never changed. Two-player races use the original's objects.

The editor covers the game's data-driven models. The ordinary city blocks are drawn by program code and aren't in it yet.

The opponent screen at full resolution

With the Enhanced view (Extended or Maximum draw distance), the turning car on the opponent screen is now drawn at your display's resolution. With the Smooth frame rate it also turns smoothly rather than in the game's own steps.

VETTE! 2026 0.4.0

Traffic and pedestrians on the new roads (Freeways: Off)

The roads that join the city with the freeways off now have traffic that belongs there:

• The coast road is busy both ways. The Golden Gate's own cars carry on past the bridge's approach: over the causeway, through the Marina and down the Great Highway to the Zoo, in their own lanes. They come and go along the whole road instead of appearing out of nowhere.
• No more cars on the water or the grass.
  • The causeway and the Marina crossing are a real road now, with lane markings. Before, they showed the bay underneath.
  • The Marina's street is a proper boulevard, carried on through the park into the city.
  • Cars stay off the Marina Green.
  • The water beside the causeway is open bay again, as along the Great Highway.
• The city's own cars turn back where the coast road begins, as they do at any dead end. They no longer vanish onto the causeway.
• The new diagonal street before the Bay Bridge has traffic like the old diagonal next to it.
• Pedestrians walk the Marina, which had none before, and keep off the water and the coast road.
• The computer opponent still finishes every course at every difficulty, with the same times as 0.3.0.

Your settings are kept

Whatever you choose in the launch menu is saved for next time, even if you quit from the menu without playing. Full screen or window is remembered too, including when you switch with Alt+Enter in the game. Command-line options still apply to a single run only.

VETTE! 2026 0.3.0

Freeways: Off — one connected city

In the original VETTE!, the city is really several separate pieces joined only by freeways. Every course needs at least one: Zoo → Presidio freeway → Golden Gate; Golden Gate → Doyle Drive → city → 480 → Bay Bridge; Bay Bridge → 280 → Zoo.

The launch menu's new Freeways row can switch them off. With Off:

• New roads, built from the game's own pieces, join the city into one:
  • a causeway runs up the coast from the Great Highway to the Golden Gate;
  • the Golden Gate's road deck continues down to the Marina;
  • Golden Gate Park and the Marina open into the central city;
  • the barrier in front of the Bay Bridge becomes a street.
• The on-ramps lead nowhere. Driving over one does nothing.
• The computer opponent drives city streets wherever it used to take a freeway. It finishes every course at every difficulty level, and it gets there sooner than it does with the freeways (course 1: 3½ minutes instead of nearly 5), so it's harder to beat.
• Online races use the host's setting.

The default is On, the original game, and the Classic preset keeps them on. To switch them off for a single run, use --freeways off.

Also

• When the window is short of room, the launch menu now lists the versions found (DOS, PC-98, Macintosh) on one line, so everything fits.
• For developers:
  • vette_world --drivable [--no-freeways] draws which parts of the city connect.
  • vette_run --freeways off --opponent-log follows the computer opponent around a course.

VETTE! 2026 0.2.0

Map editor

You can now edit the city and race in your own version of it.

The launch menu has a new Map row that picks the city you race in: the original, or a map you've made. Press Enter on the row to open the map editor. It shows the whole city from above, north up, and you edit it cell by cell using the original game's own 161 cell types: streets, city blocks, parks, water and bridge pieces.

• Left-click paints with the brush. Drag to paint a line.
• Right-click picks the cell under the pointer as the brush. Right-drag moves the view, and the wheel zooms.
• 0-3 set the brush's height.
• [ and ] change which design a big tile uses. W switches a big tile between water and land.
• Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y undo and redo, and Ctrl+S saves. F1 lists every key.

The city is 5 x 5 big tiles of 16 x 16 cells. Some big tiles share one design, such as the water around the city, and these change together. The editor outlines them when you point at one.

Your maps are saved in VETTE! 2026's own maps folder, next to save. The game's original files are never changed. To play a map for a single run, use --map NAME.

Not yet

These are next on the list:

• The original's traffic, pedestrians and computer opponent still follow their fixed routes, which can run through what you change.
• Street names and dashboard signs are still the original's.
• Online races always use the original map.
• An option to remove the freeways, with roads that connect the whole city.
• An object editor.

VETTE! 2026 0.1.9

Smooth freeway traffic

Freeway cars no longer appear out of nowhere in front of you or vanish up the road.

The original game puts each new freeway car on the road a few hundred yards ahead of you. It removes cars once they get too far ahead. In its own small 320x200 view you barely notice this. With the long draw distance, it looks like cars popping in and out.

The new Freeway traffic option in the launch menu is set to Smooth (no pop-in) by default:

• New cars come onto the road at the far end of what the original shows.
• With Extended or Maximum draw distance, cars fade in as they arrive. A car the original removes keeps driving along the road while it fades out.
• Everything else about the traffic is still the original's: speeds, lanes, how often cars come, and collisions.

Choose Original in the launch menu, or the Classic preset, to get the 1989 behaviour back. For a single run, use --freeway-traffic original.