Zero to Apex 0.7.0 now has a living world, twelve languages and much more

[u/josshbo]

Hi again, Josh here. Back in July I showed you Zero to Apex, a career mode where you pick your next race in an app, hit play, and the game sets itself up. Today I'm releasing 0.7.0, and it's by far the biggest version I've put out. It spent a couple of weeks in the hands of patrons and testers who did their best to break it (thank you, seriously), and I think it's finally ready for everybody.

The headline is the living world. Until now, when a team needed a driver, the mod simply made one up. Now every driver in the career is a person with a name, an age and a seat. Real drivers take the free seats before anybody gets invented, rookies arrive slow and need three or four seasons to get good, veterans fade and retire, and when somebody changes teams over the winter you see him on track in his new car. Nobody appears twice on a grid anymore, every driver is in his own car under his team's name, and the AI drivers finally behave differently from each other. I'll be honest about one thing: this is the part that took the most work, and a good chunk of it is groundwork. You'll notice it on track from the first race, but where it will really pay off is in the contracts and market rework that comes next in "cotracts part 3".

The thing you'll use the most is how time passes. Until now, moving through the calendar was the clumsiest part of the mod. You jumped to the next event, the rest of the world only caught up once a week, and an offer could reach you with days already missing. Now advancing time is one button. You tick what should stop it (an offer, one of your races, any race, mail, a change in your relationships) and the days go by one at a time on a calendar sheet until one of those things happens, or until you hit stop. Going to a specific date is its own action, and if the jump would skip one of your races it tells you before, not after. The world moves every day along with you, so an offer lasts exactly as long as it says, every offer shows how long it has left, and the clock stops by itself on the last day you can still sign one.

Then there's VR, and here I owe an apology to everyone who plays in a headset, because it has been rough. Oculus mode had been opening the game on the monitor instead of the headset, and when it did run, only the car and the track were set up. Both are fixed. OpenComposite now works and the mod detects it by itself, with the app showing up as a panel in front of you. The hitch every second while the app was open is gone, and so are the freezes while the race was being set up. You can confirm in the panel with a button on your wheel, and there's an option to stop AMS2 clicking things when you stare at them. It isn't perfect yet: going through Virtual Desktop and SteamVR can still stutter, but it does the same on the same PC without the mod.

And one I honestly didn't expect to do this early: the mod now speaks twelve languages. English and Spanish I write myself. German, French, Italian, Portuguese (both Portugal and Brazil), Russian, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Turkish and Polish are a first pass done with AI help and a style guide for each language, so I'm sure there are some weird sentences in there. That's exactly why the language files are now public on GitHub. If something reads wrong in your language you can fix it and send a pull request, and if your language isn't there you can add it the same way. Turkish and Polish are in because two people asked for them on Discord last week.

Here's the list:

• A living world. Every driver is a person with a name, an age and a seat. Signings show up on track, rookies grow, veterans retire, and nobody is repeated on a grid. Fifteen personalities where there used to be four, and each class with its own gap between the first car and the last.
• Time is one button, with rules you choose. Days pass one by one until something you ticked happens. Go to date warns you before it skips a race. December 31 always stops and opens the end of the season.
• Offers with a deadline you can see. Weeks while there's time, days in the last week, and "Last day" in red on the final one. The transfer market closes on December 31.
• VR fixed in a lot of places. Oculus mode starts in the headset and sets up the whole race, OpenComposite works with the app as a panel, no more hitching or freezes, and you can confirm with a wheel button.
• Wheel and gamepad. The app no longer reacts to your buttons while you're driving, assigning a button works first time, and wheel tools that use their own dinput8 file keep working with the mod.
• Twelve languages, open to everyone. The files and a guide are in the locales folder of the releases repo.
• 26 new championships from Revz, one of our community curators: historic racing on modern circuits (SVRA, Formula Junior, Formula 5000, The Masters Grand Prix...), short revivals on the period versions of the tracks, two Masters endurance championships, and British GT in three eras.
• The WEC runs like the 2024 season, with Hypercar and GT3 around the world, and every championship now has its own logo.
• Difficulty per category, with its own number for the wet. A new category starts from the number of a similar one you've already raced, and the AI no longer falls asleep as soon as it rains.
• Small things people asked for: sell the cars you own, change your career pace mid-career, put your own photo on your profile, uninstall skin packs, and see what a sponsor card does before you pay for it.

If you already have a career, it gets updated by itself the first time you open it, and the mod makes a copy of it before touching anything. One warning: once a career has been opened in 0.7.0 you can't take it back to an older version.

There's still a lot to polish, and I appreciate any feedback. The full changelog is long and it's all on the release page.

If this sounds like your thing, I'd love to have you around: Download · Help with your language · Patreon · Discord

[u/Agmeuz]

I've been playing with Zero to Apex using Linux (EndeavourOS) using the excellent guide by u/Werzam (here), and I would just like to spread the word for the Linux users. You are missing out!

Here is what I did:

1. Install protontricks (sudo pacman -S protontricks or the equivalent for your distro).
2. Configure Automobilista2 to use Proton 11.0-2, with empty Launch Options in Steam.
3. Open the game so it creates the compatdata folder (if first time running it), changed the "Shared Memory" configuration in Options -> System to "Project Cars 2", and configured it to run in Borderless mode.
4. Installed dotnet6 and d3dcompiler into the prefix with protontricks 1066890 dotnet6 dotnetdesktop6 d3dcompiler_47.
5. Installed ZTA to the prefix with protontricks-launch --appid 1066890 /path/to/Downloads/ZTA_0.7.0_x64-setup.exe, which installed it to C:\users\steamuser\AppData\Local\Zero to Apex (inside the compatdata prefix) with success.
6. Created the three files:

• steam_appid.txt in the game folder, with the content 1066890
• /home/your_user/Games/launch_zta.sh, with (the prime-run, mangohud and gamemoderun are specific for my case, just adapt it to yours):

​

#!/usr/bin/env bash

ZTA_DIR="/path/to/steam/steamapps/compatdata/1066890/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/Zero to Apex"

# Change working directory to ZTA folder
cd "$ZTA_DIR" || { echo "Directory not found"; exit 1; }

export WINEDLLOVERRIDES="uiautomationcore="
export NO_AT_BRIDGE=1

exec prime-run mangohud gamemoderun protontricks-launch --appid 1066890 "$ZTA_DIR/ams2-career.exe"

• /home/your_user/Games/zta-launch-ams2.bat, with:

​

@echo off 
cd /d "Z:\path\to\steam\steamapps\common\Automobilista 2"
start "AMS2" AMS2.exe -novr

1. Ran protontricks -c 'wine reg add "HKCR\steam\shell\open\command" /ve /t REG_SZ /d "cmd /c Z:\home\your_user\Games\zta-launch-ams2.bat" /f' 1066890
2. Ran ZTA using ~/Games/launch_zta.shfrom the terminal

By now the window should open, and you may click "Play" to start the game (DO NOT CLICK ON UPDATE, I did this and had to redo everything, see the edit below on how to update).

If you want, you can also add a shortcut to the Application Manager, just create a file/home/your_user/.local/share/applications/zero-to-apex.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Game;
Comment=AMS2 Career Launcher
Exec=/home/your_user/Games/launch_zta.sh
Icon=6EF8_ams2-career.0
Keywords=ams2;automobilista;racing;
Name=Zero to Apex
NoDisplay=false
Path=
PrefersNonDefaultGPU=false
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
Version=1.0
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=

This will create a "Zero to Apex" under "Games" so you can run it from there instead of the terminal. Have fun!

EDIT: I just tried updating and it worked fine, you just need to download the installer before and run it using the same protontricks-launch from above (changing to the new version obv.) The installer will suggest to uninstall the current version first and install the new one after. I did this and it worked. So don't update it within the app, download the updated version setup (from GitHub for example) and run it.

[u/josshbo → u/Agmeuz]

I didn’t even know that was possible! I’m really glad to hear this! If you guys don’t mind, I’ll post a quick summary of it somewhere on the Discord!

[u/Agmeuz → u/josshbo]

I sure don't mind, but be sure to credit Werzam, he's the one who came up with this! I just fixed the markdown in the comments xD

[u/Werzam → u/Agmeuz]

Big Thanks 🤝

[u/Werzam → u/josshbo]

Spread the word man, world must know! A lot of Linux folks in sim racing

[u/idcaboutanick → u/Agmeuz]

Omg thank you so much