Four of the things in this version are first parts, and they are marked as such below: the AI grid and how
drivers are built and progress, the adaptive difficulty, VR, and seats being disputed. Each one lands finished
enough to play and each one is also the groundwork for what comes after, because until now there was no way to
measure any of it. Expect them to keep improving over the next few versions, and tell us how they feel. On
these four in particular, your feedback is what decides where they go next.

New

You can launch straight into VR. The Play screen has a mode selector under the button (Screen, SteamVR, Oculus) and Settings keeps the same choice. Both VR modes are marked experimental. They are not two names for the same thing: SteamVR launches the game in OpenVR and Oculus launches it in Oculus native, and the same headset falls on one side or the other depending on how you connect it (Link and Air Link go through Oculus, Virtual Desktop and Steam Link through SteamVR), so only you know which one is yours. Until now the launch used whatever Steam had as its default, which is why some people ended up in VR without meaning to, and others in flat. This is the first part of the VR work: getting you into the headset and making the app usable while you are in it. The app on its own panel inside the headset is the second part, and it is being built now.
You can drive the app with a pad or with the buttons on your wheel. Every connected device is read at once, so there is nothing to pick and nothing to activate: a pad, a wheel and a button box all work at the same time. Buttons are configured per device instead of one global mapping, because a sim rig has several things plugged in and one mapping cannot serve them all. Settings shows what the app really sees, which devices under what name and which button you are pressing right now, so a pad that is not being detected stops being a mystery. Keyboard arrows move through the screen too.
The focus marker is visible at last. Moving around with a pad or the arrow keys, the focus is the only thing telling you where you are, and the old thin white ring got lost against the interface (and was hopeless from inside a headset). It is now a red halo with an outline.
Race weather is yours to decide. Settings, Race setup has three modes. Random leaves the roll to the game, the way it has always been, and stays the default. Inherited writes nothing at all, so whatever your Custom Race has is what you get. Your selection is the new one: you tick the weather types you want to see and the race is built out of those alone. The picker shows the game's own weather photos, so you recognise each one by its image rather than by its name. A round or a special event with authored weather keeps it whichever mode you pick.
With Your selection on, the weather of a session is built as a sequence over time instead of one independent roll per slot, so it has an arc: it can be dry and turn, or come and go, but it stops jumping from sun to thunderstorm and back inside the same race. Smackdaddy133 put it best when he said the weather looked exactly the same every time.
After a race, the results screen asks how the AI pace felt on a scale of five, with optional reasons underneath. It takes one click and you can ignore it. Marking the scale is the whole answer; the reasons only refine the why. The effect on your own game is deliberately gentle: only the extremes move anything, only when you repeat one in the same class, and one point at a time.
When your pace and the AI's are so far apart that the app decides not to take the measurement at face value, it now says so instead of quietly throwing the race away, and offers you the AI level it would have set had it believed the number. Declining costs nothing and keeps the cautious value already applied.
You can share your race data, and it is off unless you say otherwise. Asked once, in plain words, with what is sent, what never is, and what it is for. With it on, the difficulty that the app starts from in each class and at each track is corrected with what everyone's races say rather than with ours alone. Your own name is left out of the grid it sends.
Seats are disputed, and you can see against whom. When a team is choosing between you and other drivers, the offer tells you who you are up against and why they are looking at you. Below your level there is always room and nobody is competing with you, so no rival is shown there.
Finishing close to the best of the field no longer means silence. The team keeps an eye on you for three races instead of discarding you, and the app tells you so. You only lose the seat if your rival beats you in every single one of the races they are watching; beat them once and the count goes back to zero, and get ahead early and you take it without waiting for the deadline. They watch you wherever you race, not only in their own series. When it closes, whether you won it, lost it or ran out of time, the team principal writes to you. This is the first half of a larger change to the market: the design that moves signings to a real transfer window, with a decision week and a paddock you have been watching for months, is already written and comes next. How these first disputes feel to you will shape it.
The interface has a size setting (90, 100, 110, 125 and 150 percent) in Settings, and the Ctrl+plus, Ctrl+minus and Ctrl+0 shortcuts. It scales everything, not just the text. Asked for by Thicc William, Phobion, Simple Man [DNR] and Yogurtmaker, several of them playing with the app on a distant or angled monitor.
The app remembers where it was. Position, size and maximised state come back the way you left them, checked against the monitors actually present, so a window is never restored onto a screen you unplugged. On a multi monitor setup it no longer opens on the left one every time. Asked for by Simple Man [DNR].
Under the race length selector you can read the tyre wear and fuel use that will be applied, calculated with the same code that later writes them, so what is announced is what happens. Asked for by ubersquid.
The DLC list now covers the packs that were missing (Lamborghini Dream Pack Pt2, Supercars Pack Pt2 and Brazilian Racing Legends) and works car by car instead of by class. Turning off a pack no longer drags cars from another pack that happens to share a class. Reported by ubersquid, who could not stop a Miura turning up in Vintage Touring 60s.

Improved

The AI grid is built from a model of drivers and cars instead of a single number per driver. Every driver has their own character, their affinity for a family of cars, and, this is the part that shows, a car that belongs to their team rather than to them, so teammates share machinery and a strong team is strong for both of its drivers. The thirteen formula series with a pinned roster now have their real pairings: Alonso lines up alongside Stroll at Aston Martin instead of next to Antonelli in a Mercedes. This is a first model of what a driver is and how they get better, and it is deliberately a starting point: it gives us the dials to tune a field that until now had none. Expect it to be refined version by version, and say what feels off, because that is what tells us which dial to turn.
A class now spreads the way that class really spreads. The gap from the front to the back of the field is taken from real classification sheets, one figure per class, so a one make cup runs nose to tail and a nineties Formula One field does not. Before, every class was handed the same spread, which in the worst cases produced cars that were undriveable slow.
Cars have a straight line and corner character. Two cars with nearly identical average pace used to stay nearly identical everywhere; now power and drag are traded against weight, so one of them prefers Monza and the other prefers a twisty track. The trade is measured in the game, not invented.
The AI makes more mistakes. The setting that controls it was being written outside the range the game accepts, so what the game did with it was anyone's guess. It now maps to the game's own seven options.
Adaptive difficulty was rebuilt. It aimed to leave you about one and a half percent ahead, which is exactly why it felt like you always won once you were near your level: winning was the target. It now measures against the edge of the podium (the average of the AI finishing second, third and fourth) and aims at zero. It also keeps a separate memory per class and per track on top of your global level, so getting quick in GT3 does not turn your Formula Vee races into a wall, and a track where you are historically strong is not read as you having improved everywhere. Treat this as a first pass. The four layers it now runs on are the tools to get the difficulty right rather than the finished answer, and the post-race question exists precisely so the next versions can tune it with real races instead of guesses. If it still misses for you, say so.
Race rules were audited series by series, all one hundred and fifteen of them, against the real regulations. Refuelling is only banned where it was really banned (Formula One from 1984 to 1993 and from 2010 on) instead of everywhere drivers simply do not refuel, which is what left the AI running out of fuel in the middle of a TSI Cup race. Mandatory stops, minimum tyre changes and pit lane speed limits follow their own era too: there was no compulsory stop in Formula One before 2007, 2005 forbade changing tyres at all, a GT3 window forces you to stop but not to change rubber, and the pit limits are the real ones for each championship.
In a multiclass race the results screen leads with your position in your class and shows the overall result as context. Points, money, reputation and experience are settled on your class position, which is what you were racing for.
Skin packs are read from your actual game. The app now asks the running game which liveries are installed in each car rather than trusting a catalogue written months ago, so a pack that renames or replaces liveries is followed instead of guessed at.
When AMS2 throws away our AI file for a car because a livery name does not match, you get told. It used to happen in complete silence: the race ran, every driver in that car fell back to the game's default skills, and all you noticed was that the AI felt bland.

Fixed

Since 0.4.0 the game could run at half the frame rate with the mod attached, around 71 fps where it used to do 143, and on those same starts parts of the mod were dead without saying a word. Both came from the same place: when a hook fails to install, the mod retries it, and that retry was running inside the game's render loop. Eleven failed attempts cost about two hundred milliseconds every few frames, which is the stutter. When they never took, the menu navigation, the car and track setup, the pit rules and the grid builder were all quietly out of service, so anything that did not work had no explanation. The retry now runs off the render thread with a growing wait between tries, there is one deterministic retry at the exact moment 0.4.0 used to install them, and if it ever gives up it says so, naming what is down.
Preparing the game assets could fail on a perfectly healthy PC with a wall of technical text about .NET runtimes and architectures. The tool that reads the game files was demanding one specific old version of .NET that no longer ships with Windows, so machines with a current one installed were turned away. It now runs with whatever current 64-bit .NET you already have, and when there is none at all the app says so in plain words, with what to install, instead of showing the raw error. This applies both to the first run wizard and to regenerating the assets later from Settings.
Races could start at six in the morning no matter what the round said, and it came and went between one run of the game and the next. The start hour was the last value nobody was writing to the session the race actually reads, so on the runs where the game shuffled its two race weekends the hour left over was whatever you had in your own Custom Race. Reported by Smackdaddy133.
The "all set, do not touch anything" notice was given blind. It now checks the car and the track as well before saying so, and when something does not match it says which parts to review instead of assuring you everything is fine. Same report from Smackdaddy133.
The loading screen announced sixty minutes of practice in races where practice never runs. It now lists what will actually happen in each session. Reported by greema on the opening kart race.
The DLC screen could sit on "Waiting for the game catalog" forever. What the game has installed is now saved once it is read, so it survives closing the app, and it stops being erased when a scan cannot resolve it. Reported by ubersquid.
DLC switches all came back on when you reopened the app, because the file they are saved in was being written to a folder that did not exist yet and the failure was ignored. Reported by ubersquid and Simple Man [DNR].
The DLC switches have three states now instead of two, because two could not tell "I have not seen this pack" apart from "you own it". Anything the detection had not found still showed as On, so the screen read as if you owned everything. Each product now follows the detection on its own, and your switch only takes over when you move it yourself, in both directions, until you set it back to Auto. An install that had packs turned off keeps them off.
Packs you do not own were being marked as owned. Detection was done by class, which lies when several packs share one (owning a Lamborghini made the app believe you had Supercars Pt1, since both touch Hypercars), and it defaulted to yes when it could not tell. Reported by ubersquid and Simple Man [DNR].
A pack the app cannot find in your install no longer sits there switched on. Every pack now has three positions instead of two: Auto, which follows what is detected and is where all of them start, and On or Off, which are your own call. Until now a pack you had never touched counted as on, so the list read as if you owned every DLC in the game. Only what you set by hand is saved, so it survives a game update and a change in detection, and anything left on Auto keeps following what is really installed.
Signing up for two championships that clash was announced as no conflict. The check only compared the next pending round of each, and at the start of a season every entry is on round one, on different days. It now compares the complete seasons. Reported by Sid77.
Retiring from a race did not count as a retirement. The game marks whoever drops out as RETIRED rather than DNF, so the app kept treating the race as finished: the standings recorded only the final position and your sponsor programme was not penalised. Reported by Cris_Ace.
An era memory no longer takes up your weekend. Racing a piece of history is free time, so it stops being marked as a clash on the calendar, stops warning you when you launch it, and stops writing off the real race on that date. It works the other way round too: running the real race does not take the memory away from you.
Renting a livery no longer costs reputation. Being a privateer carries no penalty at all, and the flat hit was there for merely racing a car you do not own. What costs reputation is leaving one team for another in the middle of a season, and changing teams between seasons is not that.
The results screen could show the standings of a different championship. It resolved the table from whichever series was selected in the calendar rather than from the race you had just finished, so running a Formula Vee round could show you the TSI table. When the race was a one off, or its series is not one you are entered in, no table is shown instead of borrowing somebody else's.
Launching a race sent no livery at all unless you had clicked a thumbnail, so the game picked one on its own and the car on track was not the one the screen was showing you. It now sends the livery you can see.
With a skin pack installed, cars could get the wrong livery or fall back to the game's default AI. Three separate causes: the game numbers liveries from 51 and our catalogue numbered them from 50, so every rebind landed one slot off; the override folder of a pack is not always named after the car; and one attempt to pair drivers by their real teams overwrote the pack's own slots. Packs are followed slot by slot again.
Weather was asking you the same thing twice and the older control won in silence. With the weather row of the Auto and Inherited block set to Inherited, choosing Random or Your selection did nothing at all, and it also wiped the authored weather of historic rounds and special events.
With two distant weather types ticked and nothing in between, the session almost never changed: measured over a thousand races, 963 of them ran their whole session on the same slot. The walk now moves between the types you ticked instead of over the full scale and getting stuck on the far side of a gap.
Clicking any switch could throw the page back to the top. Every refresh was announced as a load, so the whole screen was torn down and rebuilt, and the scroll went with it. It is noticeable when ticking several weather types in a row, since that block sits at the bottom.
Long screens could not be scrolled with the pad or the arrow keys, so anything that did not fit was out of reach. Focus navigation was skipping everything outside the visible window, which is precisely what you need it to reach.
Moving the focus with a pad or the arrow keys left no mark on screen, twice over. The browser only lights its focus style when you press Tab and not when a script moves it, so the navigation was working blind; and on the diagonal buttons and tabs the marker was being cut away by the very shape that makes them diagonal, so on those it was never visible at all, not even with the keyboard. It now draws inside them, following the wedge.
Floating buttons, such as the one that jumps to next season, could not be reached with the pad.
Setting up a race stalled the game every time the app had to find its way around the menus: each navigation swept the whole of the game's memory, about ten gigabytes and a second and a half, and it did it again on every single move. It now keeps its bearings from the first sweep and looks in a small window around them, which takes milliseconds.
The tabs showed nav.calendar, nav.tree and the rest of their internal names instead of their labels.
Driving could stutter badly with the app open. Once a race was running, the automatic navigation kept trying to reach the game's Custom Race screen, and each attempt cost seconds inside the frame. It now stops the moment a race is live.
The app could reach the game's Custom Race screen and not realise it, which left it clicking around instead of configuring the race. It was choosing a dead copy of the screen over the live one, which is what made it show up in VR.
Two AI drivers with different ability could come out identical because their skill was rounded to two decimals before being written.

Zero to Apex (AMS2 Living Career)

A living career mode for Automobilista 2: real series by era, real grids, contracts, sponsors and a world that ages with you. Single-player only. This page tells you how to install it and what to expect.

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Automobilista 2 installed through Steam

How to install

Download ZTA_<version>_x64-setup.exe from the assets below and run it.
Before opening it, verify the installer SHA-256 against SHA256SUMS.txt in the same official GitHub release. A matching hash confirms you downloaded the published bytes; it does not prove that a file is safe.
Launch Zero to Apex from the Start menu.
On first run the app asks for your AMS2 install and prepares its data: car and track images are generated from your own game files. It takes a few minutes and only happens once.
Create your driver, pick your first series and press Play. The app starts AMS2 through Steam, connects to it and configures each race for you. You just drive; when the race ends, your career updates on its own.

Good to know

Antivirus and SmartScreen: the mod uses a fixed-purpose helper to load its included overlay into AMS2AVX.exe, so heuristic alerts are possible. Unsigned releases can still show SmartScreen publisher warnings. If Windows blocks a file, first check Windows Security Protection History, verify the SHA-256, and reinstall only from the official GitHub release assets. If the hash matches and you believe the block is wrong, submit it to the vendor as a false positive with the release-security evidence. An optional browser-based scan is a manual choice; no release script uploads files or claims a clean scan. Signing can improve reputation, but it guarantees neither safety nor the absence of warnings.
Game files: the mod does not modify the game's original files. Optional real skins are installed into the game's Overrides folder (the same place manual skin installs use) and are managed from the app's Liveries tab.
Game patches: when AMS2 gets an update, the mod may need a few days to catch up. The app checks compatibility with your game version and will let you know.
Mod updates: the app updates itself automatically.
Your save: your career lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\ZeroToApex. Uninstalling the app does not delete it.

Help and community

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Un modo carrera vivo para Automobilista 2: series reales por época, parrillas reales, contratos, sponsors y un mundo que envejece contigo. Solo single-player.

Requisitos

Windows 10 u 11, 64 bits
Automobilista 2 instalado por Steam

Cómo instalarlo

Descarga ZTA_<version>_x64-setup.exe de los assets de abajo y ejecútalo.
Antes de abrirlo, verifica el SHA-256 del instalador frente a SHA256SUMS.txt de la misma release oficial de GitHub. Que coincida confirma que descargaste los bytes publicados; no demuestra por sí solo que un archivo sea seguro.
Abre Zero to Apex desde el menú Inicio.
En el primer arranque la app te pide tu instalación de AMS2 y prepara sus datos: las imágenes de coches y pistas se generan desde tus propios archivos del juego. Tarda unos minutos y solo pasa una vez.
Crea tu piloto, elige tu primera serie y pulsa Jugar. La app arranca AMS2 por Steam, se conecta y te configura cada carrera. Tú solo conduces; al terminar, tu carrera se actualiza sola.

Conviene saber

Antivirus y SmartScreen: el mod usa un helper de propósito fijo para cargar su overlay incluido en AMS2AVX.exe, por lo que pueden aparecer alertas heurísticas. Las releases sin firma todavía pueden mostrar avisos del editor de SmartScreen. Si Windows bloquea un archivo, revisa primero el Historial de protección de Seguridad de Windows, verifica el SHA-256 y reinstala solo desde los assets de la release oficial de GitHub. Si el hash coincide y crees que el bloqueo es erróneo, envíalo al proveedor como falso positivo junto a la evidencia de seguridad de la release. Un análisis opcional en el navegador es una decisión manual; ningún script de release sube archivos ni afirma un análisis limpio. Firmar puede mejorar la reputación, pero no garantiza seguridad ni que desaparezcan los avisos.
Archivos del juego: el mod no modifica los archivos originales del juego. Las skins reales opcionales se instalan en la carpeta Overrides del juego (el mismo sitio que usa una instalación manual de skins) y se gestionan desde la pestaña Liveries de la app.
Parches del juego: cuando AMS2 se actualiza, el mod puede tardar unos días en ponerse al día. La app comprueba la compatibilidad con tu versión y te avisa.
Actualizaciones del mod: la app se actualiza sola.
Tu partida: tu carrera vive en %LOCALAPPDATA%\ZeroToApex. Desinstalar la app no la borra.

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