Project Overdrive access terms

Project Overdrive, formerly called Rocket Racing Reborn, is our preservation project that keeps the original Rocket Racing playable on our own servers. These terms cover asking for access, the keys that let you play, Meridian, our launcher, and the data the game keeps. They sit next to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Read sections 3 to 5 before you install anything

1. Asking for access

• The game is invite only while it is in development, and access is granted one person at a time. You ask on the Play page of the hub, at /rrr/overdrive, from a signed-in account with an email address and a username
• New requests are closed for now. While they are, the Play page shows a notice instead of the form. Requests already sent keep their place in the queue
• The form asks why you want in, which is required, and optionally where you are, how you heard about the project and whether you played the original. A person at supermod level or above reads it and decides, and we email you an acknowledgement and then our answer. A no comes with a note, so it is never silent
• You have one request. If it is turned down you can ask again, up to three times a day, and the team can see how many times you have asked. Staff can also invite you directly without a request
• What we keep, and for how long, is set out in the Privacy Policy

2. Your keys

Playing takes two keys, and neither is a password you choose:

• Your launcher key. Once you are approved you generate it yourself on the Play page, and that is the only time it is shown: we store only a hash of it, so nobody can show it to you again. Generating a new one replaces the old one at once, so a lost key is never a lost account. You can generate up to five in an hour. This key is how Meridian signs you in, and it is what you paste into the launcher
• Your game key. This lets your computer past the game server's front door. It is tied to a permanent in-game account number, which is what your progress hangs off, and to the name you go by in the game. Because the game server has to check the real value, we keep it encrypted rather than hashed, and send the list of live game keys to the game server, which asks us for it
• Keep both private. Anyone holding your launcher key can sign in to Meridian as you
• How access ends. Staff can pause your access, which keeps your game key and your progress so it can come back, or end it, which revokes both keys for good. We email you either way. A ban or suspension on your Vision Force account stops your keys being accepted for as long as it runs. A permanent ban from a member of staff, or a staff member deleting your account, revokes both keys for good. Deleting your own account stops both keys from being accepted

3. Meridian, the launcher

Meridian is a free, optional Windows program we make for playing Project Overdrive. You never need it to use this site, and nothing here changes if you never install it. When a release is published anyone can download it from meridian.visionforceofficial.com, but it only signs in with a key from an account that has been granted access

Windows only. There is no macOS or Linux build, and there is unlikely to be one: the launcher works by changing Windows-specific things on your machine, and the game itself is a Windows build. It runs on Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit

Meridian signs you in, it never signs you up. Accounts are created here on the website and nowhere else.

It installs the game for you. Meridian downloads the game files from Epic's own content network, the same files Epic's own installer fetches, and no Epic account is needed for that. It can resume a download and check the files on disk against what that network holds

It updates itself. Meridian asks this site whether there is a newer version. An update is only installed if its signature matches the key built into Meridian, so a tampered download is refused instead of run

It runs as a background task rather than on your taskbar, and meridian:// links open it from a browser or from Discord. Its "manage on the website" button signs your browser in to your own account with a one-time link that works once and expires after a minute

Because the game was built to talk to Epic's servers, the only way to point it at ours is to change some things on your computer while you play. All of it is listed below. Closing the launcher normally undoes the changes, with two exceptions named at the end of this section.

What it changes while you play

• A certificate. Meridian creates a certificate authority on your machine and adds it to your user account's trust store, not the computer's. It is restricted to five Epic domains (ol.epicgames.com, ak.epicgames.com, on.epicgames.com, game-social.epicgames.com and epicgames.dev) and cannot vouch for any other site or for any IP address. Meridian refuses to install one that is not restricted. It is removed when you close the launcher
• Your hosts file. Around 119 Epic service names are pointed at your own computer so the game reaches us instead. This needs Administrator, so Windows asks your permission twice per session, once to apply it and once to undo it. The work is done by a small separate program, meridian-hosts.exe, so that the rest of the launcher never runs with those rights
• A local server. A bundled copy of Node runs on your machine and answers those redirected names on ports 443 and 80. Traffic between the game and us is decrypted there, on your computer, so it can be translated for our servers. That includes the sign-in tokens the game uses
• Running programs. When you press Launch, and again when Meridian exits, Meridian closes the Epic Games Launcher, Fortnite, and the anti-cheat helper processes. Any unsaved state in those is lost. Simply opening the launcher closes nothing. It also starts the game with two helper processes deliberately frozen
• The game process. Meridian loads our code into the running game. This is the technique antivirus and endpoint security products are built to notice, so yours may warn you or block it

While that certificate is trusted, Epic's own services will not work on your machine. They come back when the certificate is removed

What it deliberately does not touch

• Anything not on that list of 119 names passes through untouched, with no certificate substitution. Your browsing is unaffected
• Epic's payment site, accounts.epicgames.com, www.epicgames.com and the anti-cheat download servers are on a list that is never intercepted, as is any address whose name begins with ocsp or crl, which is how certificate revocation is checked. That last one is a rule about the name rather than a list we maintain, so a revocation responder named some other way is not covered by it
• Epic's telemetry addresses are intercepted specifically so that your gameplay telemetry does not reach Epic. We do not store it either, it is discarded
• One address, api.epicgames.dev, is allowed through to the real Epic servers for requests we do not answer ourselves. This is on by default and can be turned off in the launcher, at the risk of the game not starting

What it keeps on your computer

Two folders, not one, and deleting one does not empty the other.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\RocketRacingReborn holds your settings, the certificate and its private key, and logs from the local server and from the game. In plain text in those settings are the key the local server uses to reach our backend and the password your game client signs in with. Treat that folder as you would any file containing a password.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\com.visionforce.meridian holds the launcher's own browser storage, and that is where the key you paste at sign-in is kept, along with the email address on your Vision Force account.

One more thing is left outside both: a copy of your original hosts file, saved as hosts.rrr-backup next to the real one in %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc. It is plain text, it holds nothing about you, and nothing removes it.

The game files themselves sit wherever you chose to install them

If it does not shut down cleanly

Before the first change to your hosts file, Meridian asks Windows to restore the original at your next restart. If the launcher is ever killed rather than closed, your hosts file repairs itself on reboot without any of our software running.

The certificate is not covered by that. It is removed only when Meridian closes normally, so a launcher that was killed leaves it in your user's trust store until the next time you run and close Meridian. It stays restricted to those five Epic domains the whole time. You can also remove it yourself at any point with certutil -user -delstore Root "Rocket Racing Reborn Local Root CA".

4. What Meridian tells us

• When you sign in, Meridian sends us your launcher key, and we answer with who you are and your game key. We check your account every time, so a key whose access has ended stops working straight away
• While it is open and signed in, it tells us about once a minute which version of Meridian it is and whether the game is running. We keep one current record per player, holding when we last heard from your launcher, its version, whether the game was running and when you last played, and each report overwrites the last. Staff managing players can see it. It is not deleted when your account is
• Who is racing. Meridian's social panel shows every key holder how many people are in the game right now, the in-game names of those players, as the game server reports them, and when each of them came online. A player whose name the game server does not know yet is shown as "Racer"
• News. Its home screen shows the same news as our /news page, never anything relayed from Discord

5. What you are actually running

Read this part before you install anything.

You do not sign in to Epic, and we never ask you to

Project Overdrive does not use Epic accounts. When the game starts, it signs in against our server with a display name you choose in the launcher, and our server identifies you by that name alone. At no point do you give Epic credentials to us, to the launcher, or to the game, and the launcher closes the Epic Games Launcher if it is running.

Some traffic still reaches Epic while you play: asset downloads, the anti-cheat module download, voice servers, and one address, api.epicgames.dev, for requests we do not answer ourselves. No Epic account is involved in any of it, because there is not one to involve. One thing does travel with those last requests, and we would rather say it than let you find out: they are passed on carrying the sign-in token our own server issued you, and the display name you chose is readable inside that token. If you would rather nothing at all left your machine, that fallback can be switched off in the launcher, at the risk of the game not starting.

The game files are still Epic's

The build you play is Epic Games' software. Your right to have it and run it is whatever your own licence for it says, and this project does not grant you one. We do not distribute Epic's game files: Meridian fetches them from Epic's own content network, as section 3 says, and nothing here changes your obligations to Epic in respect of the copy you have.

Anti-cheat is switched off, and what that means for you

To let our code run inside the game, Meridian starts it with EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye disabled and closes those programs if they are running. That is not a risk to an Epic account, because no Epic account is signed in anywhere in this. It does mean two other things, and they are worth being clear about:

• You are trusting us with code inside the game process. The protection that would normally stop a program doing that is deliberately off, so what runs there is whatever we ship. Our launcher is the only thing that should be loading anything, and you should get it from us and nowhere else
• Do not use anything from this project against Epic's own services, or against other players anywhere else. Playing a preserved game on our servers is the point; taking the parts that make it work and pointing them at a live service is not, and it is the fastest way to end the project for everybody

If that trade is not one you want to make, do not install the launcher. Nothing else about your membership here changes.

6. Game data, and where the servers are

Playing creates data that lives separately from your website account, on a server we rent in London from Fly.io, not in the database behind this site.

Where the racing actually happens, today. That London machine serves your account, your progress and matchmaking, so menus and loading depend on how far you are from Europe. The race itself does not run there. In the current build it runs on your own PC, which is the honest state of a preservation project still being built rather than a live multiplayer game.

That is also why we are not yet asking where to put servers. When racing moves off your machine, distance will start to matter, and running machines closer to more people will be a cost question on a project with no income rather than a technical one. This section will be rewritten before any of that goes live.

What is kept on the game server:

• a player record identified by your in-game display name
• your progress: cosmetics, in-game currency, quests, and gift boxes, which can contain short messages written by other players
• server logs of every request made while you play: the address asked for, the program that asked, and the network address the request arrived from. Because the server sits behind Fly's proxy, that last one is currently Fly's own address rather than yours

Two things you should know about it:

• The game server does not check passwords. It was built to talk to a game client, not to a browser, and a player is identified by their display name alone. Treat anything you put into the game as public, and do not put anything private in a display name or a gift message. Messages other players send you are their content, and the Community Guidelines and Terms of Service apply to them exactly as they do on the site
• Deleting your website account does not delete your game data, because the two systems are separate. The backups, retention and deletion described in the Privacy Policy cover the website only. If you want your game data removed, email us at contact@visionforceofficial.com and we will do it by hand. Once your access has ended, a member of staff can remove you as a player, which deletes your save data on the game server, your keys, your request and the game entries in our event log. That cannot be undone

Staff managing players can see your game profile and can grant items or set in-game currency for you, and those actions are recorded in our event log. The game's settings, such as the week's track rotation, are set by staff on the website, and the game server reads them from there

The Privacy Policy's list of services we rely on includes Fly.io, a United States company, for the game server, its player data and its logs. The machine we rent from them is in London.

7. If something goes wrong

The game and the launcher are provided "as is", like the rest of the site, as the Terms of Service explain. This is a preservation build still being made, so expect things to break, and expect us to change, pause or end access, the game or the launcher at any time