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And as for when you can get them? Well, you'll have a long time to wait - they're slated to come out in September. The individual expansion track packs can vary between $10 and $30, depending on which you choose. The starter kit includes 10 tracks - six curves and four straights - which you can use to build up to eight different tracks.
Anki overdrive free#
The Anki Overdrive starter kit starts at around $150, while the mobile app is free as before. The new Overdrive cars are also backwards-compatible with the old rollable mats, so you don't have to throw them out just yet.
Anki overdrive update#
Oh, and if you have the old Anki Drive setup? Don't worry, because your cars will work with the new Overdrive tracks too - Anki will send out a software update to upgrade the vehicles. Last but not least, Anki is introducing a four-car charger setup instead of the jewel case chargers that the cars had before. The new Overdrive cars are also more detailed - Tappeiner tells us they're each individually hand-painted. There'll be more gameplay modes in the future, and though Anki wouldn't tell us all the details, we did figure out one possible option could be a Capture the Flag-style game. In addition to the new modular tracks, Anki is also introducing a new campaign mode so that you can decide to play solo against AI "Commanders" in a tournament setup. Update your settings here, then reload the page to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Some of the optional track pieces include the aforementioned jump track, a four-way intersection and a "U-Turn" module that forces cars to do a 180-degree turn. But Tappeiner tells us that the phone can suppress this if the player wants it to, especially if it's to obtain a certain game objective. So, for example, a curved section would immediately cause a car to turn, while it would drive on as normal on a straight track.
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Anki had to embed an additional layer of "super code" in the track that tells the car to act immediately.
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With the modular track system, the cars now have to figure out where they are and where to go in real time because they have no idea what the track looks like. In the past, because they only had three fixed mats, the ink embedded in the mat's location codes would tell the car where exactly it was and it would know what to do. In order to have this new modular track work, Anki had to reconfigure the car's software. This way, you could build three-dimensional tracks where the cars could climb hills or go in tunnels or even fly off a special jump piece. boxes, shoes, the coffee table or anything you like," Tappeiner says. "We want people to use anything they have at home. Another key aspect of these track pieces is that they're made out of a flexible material so that you can bend and position them to make hills or valleys. They ended up going with a magnetic connector system, where the track pieces attach to each other in the same way the MagSafe charger does with Apple's laptops. The solution, the company soon discovered, was to go back to the modular-track idea, but have it so that it's easy to build up and break down. "One of the most requested features from people we had is, 'We want more tracks we want more tracks.' We started releasing additional ones, but at some point it doesn't become scalable." "But at the same time, it was the biggest limitation we had," he adds. Plus, the rollable mat was just convenient to roll out and roll back up.
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The truth is, he says, the company wanted modular tracks from the very beginning, but just couldn't figure out a way to make them work. "This is the biggest thing we've decided to do," says Hanns Tappeiner, co-founder and president of Anki, on the move away from rollable mats.
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