v.20.0 Weather & Time of Day Update

Excited to launch the long-awaited weather and time of day update to Sunday Rivals!



Time of day runs continuously through the game, start a game in the early morning dew and finish in the heat of the afternoon. As the the setting sun dips below the horizon, the blinding stadium lights flood the field.



Dynamic weather systems bring rain showers that evolve into muddy down pours. Snow dusted grass transforms into a frozen, winter wonderland. Howling winds blow well-aimed kicks off the uprights and rolling fog strains field visibility. Mother nature at her finest!



To implement all these changes, I've made a host of adjustments to team customization screens, so you'll absolutely want to update your teams' weather, grass, and stadium settings before you start checking out the new weather!



Finally, this update brings with it a host of graphical improvements that may have an impact on lower end hardware (especially laptops). Please let me know if performance suffers after this update so I can get started on some solutions for those cases.

As always, there's a ton of bug fixes, gameplay tweaks, and overall improvements in this update, so check out the release notes below and thanks for playing!

ART

• Added dynamic weather and time of day
  
• Added rain and snow particle systems
  
• Added impact particle systems
  
• Updated field, sky, and stadium art
  
• Added field degradation and footstep imprints
  
• Increased total of custom field colors to 16
  
• Added customizable grass quality
  
• Updated stadium lighting, reflections, and support for night games
  
• Updated scoreboard to support background animations
  
• Added stadium and upright flags
  
• Added chain gang to sidelines
  
• Added collision to endzone pylons
  
• Added field goal camera
  
• Player uniforms show wear from heavy weather
  

GAMEPLAY

• Kicks are now affected by wind direction and strength
  
• Increased likelihood AI teams will kick field goals to win the game
  
• Improved AI kicking aim
  
• Ball bounces significantly less in thick snow
  
• AI teams will use CPU set of slider values in watched games
  
• Decreased odds of kicks being blocked
  
• Increased time before a held down button is registered as a kick
  
• SEASON MODE
  
• Added weather forecasts and game start times to season schedule and pregame screens
  
• Removed preseason hiring screen
  
• Decreased frequency of ticker showing streaks over player stats
  
• Sim engine uses all QB ratings to determine success of running plays now
  

SEASON MODE

• Added weather forecasts and game start times to season schedule and pregame screens
  
• Added start times and player of the game stat line to game results screen
  
• Removed preseason hiring screen
  
• Decreased frequency of ticker showing streaks over player stats
  
• Sim engine uses all QB ratings to determine success of running plays now
  

UI

• Updated and added new customization options for weather, stadium slogans, and grass quality
  
• Added options to set time of day and weather conditions on game setup screen
  
• Added wind meters to kicking interface and play call screen
  
• Added long text support to multiple screens
  
• Improved UI support for 21:9 screens
  

AUDIO

• Added ambient weather sound effects
  
• Added new sound effect for a kicked ball hitting an upright
  
• Rebalanced audio mix
  

BUGS

• Fixed a critical bug where pressing the 'sync league' button would fail and create junk data
  
• Fixed a critical bug where players with blank first names could cause a series of cascading crashes in multiple areas of the game
  
• Fixed a critical bug where pressing the 'sync league' button would silently crash the game
  
• Fixed a bug where the defense would not pursue the ball carrier into their own endzone
  
• Fixed a bug where incorrect data would be shown for the player of the week in the postseason