RAILGRADE News

[h2]RAILGRADE is now verified on the Steamdeck[/h2]

Hello Everyone,

This patch was a bit unplanned. Our intention was to go straight from Patch #2 to Update #4, but Valve gave as the honor of a verification pass. After some iteration and improvements to meet their standards bar I am proud to announce that Railgrade is now Steamdeck verified!

Changelog wise nothing major to announce. The changes were all User Interface related to ensure text was readable but menus did not overflow. The important bit is Railgrade should now show up in your Steamdeck's verified tab.

Daniel

[h2]New Patch, Changelog, and Sandbox Timeline[/h2]
Hello Everyone!

My name is Daniel. I am the lead programmer on Railgrade. I want to introduce this patch by saying every task, fix, change, or improvement, was motivated or suggested by player feedback. Every day I wake up, check your comments, reply when possible, and make tickets. Those tickets then feed into our work over the past two weeks.

This patch is meant to improve the early game experience, address as many quality of life requests as possible, and fix the high priority crashes and glitches players reported.

What might be most exciting: we've committed to launching Map Maker with Steamworks Integration on November 21st. All to work towards making Sandbox as big as possible!

Daniel

[h2]Full Changelog for Patch #2 [v4.8.43.1][/h2]
Features

• Add branch direction hotkeys on pc
  
• Make main menu song unlockable
  
• Add option to disable screen edge scrolling
  

Regions

• Add 2 new large free form missions which skip the tutorials
  

Gameplay

• Make loaded trains take priority over empty trains
  
• Remove hold & press requirement for tutorial dialog skipping
  
• Speed up Tutorial 2 by removing basic WASD tutorial sections
  

UI

• Make city level up cutscene wait until player has not performed actions for several seconds
  
• Add input bindings for horizontal rotation
  
• Make Overworld panning go faster when moving with momentum
  
• Make it possible to pan while industry or train are selected
  
• Make zeppelin pause during pause menu
  
• Improve translations for traditional and simplified chinese achievements
  
• Remove hotkey input guide from settings screen
  
• Add titlebar to window during windowed graphic mode
  
• Improve contrast of mouse cursor on Arctic maps
  

Bugs

• Disable Raw USB inputs to prevent flight sticks and racing rigs from stealing input
  
• Add deadzone to analog stick inputs before switching to controller mode
  
• Fix typo in loading screen jokes
  
• Make industry build menu evaluate buildability upon menu open not level load
  
• Stop Tooltip from overlaying tutorial window
  
• Fix windows desktop shortcut icon being low resolution
  
• Fix DPI scaling mouse cursors under sized for the scale
  
• Remove Emoji from short description
  

Crash Fixes

• Fix crash reported by some Windows 11 Pro players
  
• Fix GPU glitch reported by M1 Mac players
  
• Fix crash reported by Intel Mac players
  

Hello Builders,

Paired with a new update for their hit builder game Tribe we've had a chance to Bundle RAILGRADE together! This is a chance to get both on discount!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/36017/Management_and_Automation/

Speaking of patches, we're hard on our own large patch. The entire team is hard at work assembling your feedback into a full patch. Expect that later this week.

Daniel
Lead Programmer on Railgrade

Railgrade isn't the game that its trailers and store page led me to expect, and it seems that I'm not alone, given a cursory glance at its user reviews on Steam. Like so many others, I went into this railway management sim expecting something similar to Transport Tycoon, or perhaps an automation-style game in the vein of Factorio...
Read more.

[h2]Hello Everyone![/h2]

For those who do not know me, my name is Daniel and I am the lead programmer. Over the weekend we’ve been collecting feedback and ideas from across reviews, forums, and our discord. We want everyone to be able to enjoy this game. We crafted it with care, and now we want to be earnest in listening to feedback.

This weekend has been an incredible rush. So many players! And so many requests for improvements.

Which is good! I am thankful players care to ask for improvements. As an indie dev the worst thing would be players ignoring our game. Instead players are hungry to see more of our gameplay and even infinite gameplay! That is the highest honour a developer can ask for :)


The elephant in the room is Sandbox Mode. Let me address that straight away: we will push up our development plans for the Sandbox Mode. We will still ship the updates as promised on our roadmap, including mod support. But we will start work on Sandbox Mode concurrent to those efforts.

I do think Railgrade’s campaign is something special, and I hope to see more players get deeper in the campaign over the coming week. Still, I want to acknowledge mistakes I made in the design. Not least of which is the overly long and smooth learning curve. Even today, 4 days in, we are seeing players get to levels which in our play testing we assumed everyone would get to in a single sitting.

Which is to say: oops. Please be patient as we improve the early game experience, reduce tutorial length, and allow short cutting deeper into the campaign.


Now onto the concrete steps.

Our emergency goals are to fix three critical bugs. The highest priority of which was a graphical glitch causing terrain to flicker for players on certain Mac M1 Pro GPUs.

[h3]Yesterday we pushed a build which includes a workaround for the Mac M1 graphical glitches. [/h3]

Our next two critical bugs are a crash reported on Windows 11 Pro machines if they were upgraded from Windows 10. Plus a crash on some Intel Macs.

Emergency Tasks:
Priority #1: M1 Pro Terrain Flicker [Status: WorkAround Mac Build is Now Live]
Priority #2: Intel Mac Crash [Status: Asking friends to borrow an old Intel Mac]
Priority #3: Win11 Pro Crash [Status: Windows 11 Pro has been ordered]

After all the emergencies have been fixed we’ll work on the feedback tickets.


Note: Tickets are in order of creation and not sorted by priority.

• Stop Tooltip from overlaying tutorial window
  
• Add animation for adding engines/freight cars
  
• Improve contrast of mouse cursor on Arctic maps
  
• Fix terrain stutter on M1 mac
  
• Add camera control hotkeys for keyboard only players
  
• Fix DPI handling on windows during windowed or windowed fullscreen modes
  
• Add welcome screen to explain modifiers and choices
  
• Fix crash on Intel Macs
  
• Fix crash on Win11 Pro
  
• Looped trains becoming incorporeal
  
• Remove hold & press requirement for tutorial dialog skipping
  
• Make loaded trains take priority over empty trains
  
• Make train engine details screen open by default with obvious close choice
  
• Remove camera take over from bank, accountancy, and voucher exchange
  
• Make sure hold-to-pan can be bound to middle mouse butotn
  
• Make it possible to pan while industry or train are selected
  
• Fix M1 color corruption influenced by train count
  
• Remove hotkey input guide from settings screen
  
• Animate train wheel rolling
  
• Make Overworld panning go faster when moving over longer periods
  
• Fix typo in loading screen jokes
  
• Remove Emoji from short description
  
• Fix default windows cursor getting used instead of custom game mouse cursor
  
• Fix DPI scaling mouse cursors under sized for the scale
  
• Investigate M1 hydrolic erosion error in terrain generation
  
• Add option to disable screen edge scrolling
  
• Reset designed height to height of existing rail when building off said rail
  
• Remove WASD or basic inputs tutorial sections
  
• Make industry build menu evaluate buildability upon menu open not level load
  
• Improve roundness of water bodies
  
• Make warning for missing stations more direct
  
• Prevent track builder from suggesting loop-d-loops for minor height changes
  
• Make city level up cutscene wait until player has not performed actions for several seconds
  
• Add deadzone to analog stick inputs before switching to controller mode
  
• Add titlebar to window during windowed graphic mode
  

Plus 8 idea tickets which require deeper discussion before we can commit to implementing.


Daniel Dressler
Lead Programmer on Railgrade

PS: For reference I am including our Major Update Roadmap below.