After Monday’s ride, I have decided to do a bit of indoor activity for a while. Can’t get run over indoors, I hope.
Last month MyWhoosh dropped a huge new update, adding in a whole new world (credit if you didn’t sing that in your head in Disney mode). Well, I think they added in two whole new worlds, but certainly California got the bigger of the two launches.
There are many new routes along with a whole slew of other features. I’m not going to cover everything, only the bits directly related to this particular ride.
From MyWhoosh Go to MyWhoosh, and MyWhoosh HD
As part of the 3.7.0 release, there was a bit of a switcheroo regarding the naming of MyWhoosh.
One of the bigger complaints by users of MyWhoosh has been around the game crashing. I’ve had a few myself. I think a large part of this stemmed from their use of the Unreal Engine. It’s very common practice now for games developers to ‘use’ another companies ‘engine’ to run their games. This means developers can focus on building the game, rather than building the underlying mechanics to enable a game to be built. Unreal Engine is a popular choice for big budget titles (Fortnite being the big one), and is even used in TV (Star Wars Mandolorian) and movies (Star Wars Rogue One).
Anyway, that is all quite interesting, but it does mean the typically expected computer than runs Unreal Engine games is going to be a full powered, fairly modern gaming computer.
Which, if my experiences with chatting too, and watching many Zwifters over the years, is far from the reality of the bargain bin tech used in most pain caves. Yes, trying to run Unreal Engine games on an ex-corporate laptop, or 2010 era iPad is going to lead to a bad time.
All this is a long winded way of saying that MyWhoosh released MyWhoosh Go late in April 2024.
MyWhoosh Go was a lightweight variation of the full MyWhoosh game. I don’t know all the specifics, but the idea was – basically – strip down all the graphics to make it look like Zwift.
Zing.
Or, to look like a computer game from around 2005.
This meant dropping all the spectators, a lot of the extra ‘ambience’ on the sides of the road, massively reducing the draw distance (how much you see stuff randomly pop up when you get close to it), and so on. Like I say, I don’t have the full list of changes. But the gist is it was ‘optimised’ to run on very low spec computers. Much to the delight of the virtual cycling community, because since then, MyWhoosh has had a lot fewer crashes (and angry / vocal critics).
And then in v3.7.0, in a bid to confuse the hell out of everyone, MyWhoosh rebranded MyWhoosh Go to MyWhoosh. They then made the original MyWhoosh become MyWhoosh HD. In order to make all this work, we had to delete MyWhoosh and reinstall it.
Honestly, it was a user experience cluster.
But there was no other way to do it from a technical point of view, and – in some ways – it was the perfect time to do it.
So that’s the history.
Oh, and to finish this off, I will say that I now run MyWhoosh (aka MyWhoosh Go), not MyWhoosh HD, because my cycling computer (not my gaming computer, nor my work computer!) is a pretty garbage spec machine by today’s standards.
Can I Read About Alcatraz Now, Please?
What, you mean you don’t enjoy my rambling?
Very well.
MyWhoosh Alcatraz is one of eight new routes on the California map. It’s not the shortest, but it’s also far from the longest. It’s 9.9km with 108m of climb per lap.
The actual Alcatraz section is fairly small. I’ve never been to California, so I can’t say how realistic or ‘to scale’ any of it actually is.
I deliberately picked a workout for this one, opting for the Steady Climbing #2 workout. There are, strangely, multiple variations of this workout (by name), so that is confusing.
Setting off, I was dropped into the inner loop of Alcatraz. As covered above, I am using MyWhoosh (Go), so a lot of the detail is likely lost here. There are no spectators, no planes flying round (thank God!), and so it feels a little desolate, like cycling through a bad neighbourhood.
We continue around the lap and find ourselves in the prison cells. I wonder how this might look with people on the map – sadly I cannot find any videos of this on YouTube.
After a parade around the prison with its concrete walls, graffiti, and off-putting wire fences, we head across a selection of white arched bridges into downtown (I assume) California. I’m guessing this must be based on San Francisco, but I have no way of saying whether it’s realistic in any way.
What I will say is there are some … peculiarities.
Amongst the American flags, donut shops and high rise office blocks are an array of palm trees. OK, I don’t think those palm trees fit… but again, I will concede to not knowing San Francisco at all. Maybe they do have palm trees plucked straight from the Arabia map asset pack, who knows?
Whilst I can say I doubt myself with the palm trees, I am like a strong 94% certain that massive flags full of Arabic writing dangling from those high rise office buildings, and on banners at the side of many of the roads totally destroy the illusion of riding in America.
I don’t mind them being there. I have absolutely nothing against celebrating the Arabic new year – had no idea it was even a thing, honestly until I saw those flags. And as MyWhoosh is a product of the UAE in some capacity, it’s neither surprising that they want to celebrate this, nor out of fitting with their (assumed?) target audience.
But on the America map?
A bit weird.
However, I will say it makes a refreshing change from having the MyWhoosh logo slapped across my face every 50 metres.
From the city we head out into the hills. At this point it’s very, very hard to distinguish between MyWhoosh and Zwift. Things looked practically identical from my point of view. If you removed the HUD, and didn’t know any better, you would think this was the same game.
Not a bad thing. Just an observation.
My favourite part of the woodland area was the giant wooden bear statue at the top of the climb. Looks nice, even in the low tier graphics mode I was / am running.
From the top of the woodland climb it’s a descent back into the city, and a turn on to the bridges back to restart the lap.
As I say, only 10km so I did this one three times.
As I completed it as a workout, I didn’t get the full experience of it.
My takeaway though: it’s solid. Very well designed, graphically interesting, and the new client / v3.7.0 release runs really well.
There are noticeably more people online now. And I think those people are going to be having a good experience.
Yes, there are things that could be improved. But the progress made this year alone is huge. The game is in a much, much improved state and the rate of improvement should be deeply worrying to Zwift.
If you have put off trying MyWhoosh, I strongly urge you to give it a shot. It’s really, really good.
