NIMBY Rails News

January has been a productive month and all the major new features of v1.4 have been started, with varying degrees of completion. Curved platforms are finally possible, but this is actually a minor aspect of the changes. Platforms have been stripped bare bones as a concept, and all their cosmetic or visual aspects are now customizable in the form of a entirely new game object, named buildings. Buildings will eventually power new game features, since they can be constructed independently of any track.

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-january-2022/

Development for v1.3 finished in December, and v1.4 started, with some new features and changes meant to lay the groundwork for the main v1.4 feature, the station review. It will still be some time before v1.4 appears in public beta, but its scope is quite focused, so I don't anticipate a long private development cycle.

I wish you a happy new year 2022!

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-december-2021/

v1.3.14 and .15 were focused on improving the multiplayer experience. The game now consumes an order of magnitude less bandwidth for big builds.

- Improved simulation state streaming for multiplayer, now based on state hashing and selective transmission. A conservative estimate is multiplayer now supporting 3x trains and stations compared to previous versions, and potentially many more.
- In the signal editor, traced paths from path signals now stop at opposite direction one way signals. This is a purely visual change and has no gameplay impact.
- Track editor: page up/down to change selected track layer when no tracks are selected and outside of track append mode
- Validate tracks on game load
- Speedup track and station validation
- Speedup multiplayer synchronization of station state
- TSV export: separate name and code fields
- TSV export: longitude and latitude fields for stations
- TSV export: line_id field for trains. This is the line ID of the first line order in the train schedule.
- Fix: some text related to train alerts wasn't applying translated strings

v1.3.15 marks the end of the v1.3 series. Development is already underway for v1.4. Stay tuned for more v1.4 news in the December dev blog!

After nearly two months of beta development v1.3 has reached all scheduled roadmap features and it's ready for the default branch. The main impact to v1.2 saves is the new population layer, which has a different distribution and population density compared to v1.2. And the new path signal and path reservation rules, which are more strict.

The original v1.3 announcement post includes a list of changes from v1.2. The main new features are:

• Private train track pathfinding
  
• New population layer
  
• New elevation layer
  
• Administrative regions
  
• User defined tags
  

More info at:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1134710/view/3035981384853388654

Additionally the v1.3 beta series included some post-release feature milestones:

• Tagged balises
  
• New rules for path signals and path reservations
  
• Alert system for trains
  
• No way signals
  
• Accounting charts and data export
  

More info at:
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-october-2021/
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-november-2021/

v1.3 matured during November, with all the planned features implemented and made available in the beta branch. Highlights of the month were alerts, no way signals and charts. The old buffer leak issue appears to be at least identified, and a promising new optimization for multiplayer started development. v1.3 will soon move out of beta into the default branch.

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-november-2021/