im asking on behalf of this forum if you guys could give us a good xmas surprise /something special of AUTOMATION. 
anyway how are things going with the sound guy?
is there anything us folks can help you with yet?
ive got my new pc by the way,graphics card ive got the nvidia
geforce gts250 will this be fine?
Yes a GTS250 should be more than fine my Radeon 5850 gets about 200-250fps.
The AO shader which makes things very pretty is very expensive. On my slowest computer (Geforce 8400GS) is reduced currently to 8fps, with AO and Shadows off takes it up to 30 fps.
This is currently without any optimisation/profiling to take a good look at what is causing slow downs etc. I am sure we can get better performance than we are currently.
XMAS surprise? We may be able to sort something out for our dedicated fans.
Sound and stuff, daffy can talk about
Sound is waiting on me getting my other car down here to record, and some other general organization work to get some recording done.
Stephan has been playing with the sounds we recorded to see what we can do, and its come out sounding OK - haven’t integrated it with the game at all yet though.
And yes, as Zeussy says performance should improve, we have not done much performance tweaking yet.
We will see what we can do to Xmas, we are flat out working on the engine designer at the moment, so we’ll be posting a fair bit of stuff over the next few weeks 
As Daffy has failed to mention, the other car should be down shortly after Christmas. Though it may take somewhat longer after that to get around to recording it.