InfraSpace News

Hello everyone!

It's my pleasure to introduce you to InfraSpace's Train Update!

We have an in-game roadmap where players can vote on new features. Trains have received a total of 12,613 votes, so that's what we focused on first.

To get an overview of all the new stuff, you can either scroll through the rest of this post or check out JD Play's video about the train update!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Let's go through all the new things, shall we? Buckle up!






The main part of the update. Trains are primarily a tool to keep traffic under control in mid- to late-game. However, they are unlocked quite early so that you can plan your city around the stations if you so like!

There are 4 stations available with different sizes from 2 to 8 platforms.






You can set up as many train lines as you want and add trains to them. Train lines and stations can be renamed and you can even choose the train color for each line to keep your train system well organized.





InfraSpace's auto-curve function has been a point of contention, but for rails, nice curves are essential!

That's why we developed a new curving system that makes it much easier to get nice curves and perfect circles without moving any of the neighboring segments If players like this, we'll also apply this to the road system.



As soon as you have trains in a game, collisions and deadlocks become an issue. These are usually solved either through an involved signaling system, which can be fun to tinker with but frustrating if you don't want to deal with it. Or trains just despawn, teleport and drive through each other when they get stuck in a deadlock.

With InfraSpace we're trying a different kind of automatic signaling system.



The game automatically detects collision points (red) and creates rail intersections around them (orange). The green rails are collision free segments of rail. The automatic signaling system deals with collision and deadlock prevention and all you have to do is provide enough space of green rail to maximize your throughput!








InfraSpace trains are quite long, consisting of 1 locomotive and 11 wagons. Also, trains change their look dynamically based on how full they are. The train color is determined by their train line.

We also added some small niceties like trains kicking up dust while driving or sparks flying when they slow down ;)





The train line panel let's you know what your trains are transporting and how full they are. This helps with understanding which goods benefit most from your train line.





Speaking of transport analysis, you can now click on cars and trains and see exactly where they are going. Check out some cars on your most congested roads and you might get an idea of which shortcuts to add or where a new train station would be beneficial!





Our previous line of habitats looked all kinda dull and similar. Now, you get an all new white-blue design with different variations for each habitat level. Hooray!





I have heard repeatedly that neural processors are still too much of a challenge in mid-game. Until we introduce better tools for mass building, this update reduces their nanotubes intake by 25% and speeds up their production by 10%.





Another common gripe of players was that cars would make U-turns instead of taking the intended route. To combat this behavior, U-turns are now forbidden by default except for dead ends.

You can still allow U-turns manually with the lane config tool.





Some players used to have trouble finding out which parts of the power network were disconnected from their power plants. Now you can jump to the disconnected buildings and see them displayed red in the power visualization.





It was a simple issue, but annoying nonetheless! You are now notified when you mess up one way roads by mistake.



We also have a couple of extras in store, the most important ones being:

• Building sounds are off when buildings are not active
  
• Not enough workers message vanishes when you have grown your population enough
  
• Fixed a bug where after loading the game, small rocks were on the roads
  

If you haven't been following InfraSpace since its Early Access release 2 months ago, you might have missed our updates since then!

We're releasing a weekly dev logs and in the last 2 months we also provided almost weekly updates that focused a lot on fixes and quality of life things like road building.

You can check all of them out here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1511460


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There is still much to come for InfraSpace, but we hope you enjoy today's update!

Let us know how you like it and report any issues you find. Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

we spent most of this week getting the trains ready for release next Friday.
Since we're introducing a full new mode of transport, there are a ton of edge cases we need to handle. Examples include what happens when you delete a rail that is currently in use by a train. Or how goods in a train update their pathfinding when you change the road network around them.

Also, we want to make sure trains can be used with some flexibility. Check out this station:



Test goods are produced on the left and consumed on the right. The center train station does not have any connection to the road network, but it can still function as a freight transfer site. Trains on the left loop unload their goods into the station and they stay in storage until they can be loaded onto the train on the right loop.



We've been making some progress here as well. Check out some pics for habitat level 1-5:





We hope you'll appreciate the new variation :)

This week is the first in a long time without a weekly update on Friday (we did a small bugfix update on Wednesday after some players reported issues). Initially, we didn't even plan to do weekly updates after Early Access release, but sometimes I can't hold myself back and release features and quality-of-life stuff as soon as they're done :D

Happy playing and see you next week!

Hello everyone.

Quick mid-week update because I got some bug reports on GitHub.

• Fixed an issue where high-traffic intersections could get blocked in a way that even cars with a free path wouldn't drive
  
• Fixed an issue where at intersections cars could slow down unnecessarily
  

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

Please find the changelog for this week's update at the bottom.



I've seen a lot of people eagerly waiting for the train update, so I wanted to give you a release date:

Alpha 8, the Train Update will come out in 2 weeks, on Friday Dec 10th!

I spent this week getting trains to move on their rails as well as setting up train lines. We're going to need next week to handle train signaling so they don't drive through each other all the time. And finally, we reserve the last week to clean up the feature, add descriptions, localizations, etc. We also need this final week for unrelated community feedback stuff, like preventing u-turns for cars.




We're getting deep into development, so I wanted to share a bunch of progress pics:

First, check out the new auto-curve tool:



The old auto-curve was difficult to use since it always moved neighboring roads in order to make a nice curve. The new tool will make it easier to do well rounded curves as well as perfect circles. We made this for rails initially, but it will also be available for roads.



The train line panel lets you configure which trains should go where. You can create as many lines as you want with as many stations as you want.



We did some experiments and it seems like we'll be able to support long trains with 1 locomotive and up to 11 wagons for a total of 12 carts. It is currently undecided if shorter trains will also be possible at some point. You can connect highways directly with the station for maximum input/output.



The train update will come with new models for our habitats, so it won't look as uniform and boring anymore. The picture above is missing textures, so don't worry if it looks a little grey still :)




While this week was the first one I've been able to spend most of my time on trains, we still release some extras this week. These are not many changes, but each has been really important to a couple of players in this week's feedback posts. Specifically:

• Nanotube and Neural Processor Factories work 20% faster. Once we have easier methods for building a lot of factories quickly, we will revisit this balance.
  
• When you change the road layout, incoming cars no longer stop and teleport through intersections. Instead, they reroute a couple of road segments earlier and seamlessly pick a different route if necessary.
  
• Fixed an issue where cars would stop spawning completely. If you still find an issue like this, let me know, I added tons of debug output :D
  
• Fixed an issue were roads would curve or turn into s-shapes for no reason
  

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

In this week's update we're releasing mostly bugfixes, but also a road building convenience feature as well as the Hungarian translation.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• If two neighboring roads are too close to each other at an intersection, they now auto-bend instead of going red and complaining about it
  
• Elevated roads now also snap to road angle + length and respect the auto-curve button
  
• Added info panel for construction material storehouse
  
• Fixed an issue where the research queue number wasn't properly displayed
  
• Fixed an issue where in cities with over 6k population you couldn't get a "high" immigration rate
  
• Fixed an issue where every second a small lag appeared on some computers when the tutorial was active
  
• Fixed an issue where a part of an overpass would snap to the ground when connecting a road to it
  
• Added Hungarian
  
• Added support for Thai characters
  

[h2]Rail Building System[/h2]

After a bunch of weekly updates since release, we've begin to shift our focus towards the next big feature: Trains. You've already seen some art, but until recently the 2 programmers on our teams have been busy fixing stuff and adding QOL features.

This week, we implemented the rail building system. Check out the results:



Rail building works similar to road building with some minor differences. However, we couldn't simply re-use the road code since the traffic simulation of trains works a lot differently. Instead, we had to go through the road code and carefully separate the road construction logic with the road traffic logic. This took a bunch of time since we had to deal with a couple thousand lines of code. Now that we're done, we can use most of the road construction logic for rails as well and just replace the traffic logic part.

[h2]How trains will work[/h2]

A big question when implementing trains is how complex will they be? We sat down and came up with the following plan:

• Trains will not collide or pass through each other and have to wait for the next part of rail to be free.
  
• You will not have to deal with train signals, the game will handle that automatically.
  
• You will however have to set up train lines from station to station.
  
• The traffic simulation will give train lines a higher priority than all road types so cargo will use train connections if the stations are not too far from the start and destination
  
• All rails are one-way. If you want to go back and forth between train stations you need to use 2 rails or make a loop (this makes auto-signaling way easier)
  

Roads will remain the most convenient type of transportation (just connect them), but they are more susceptible to traffic. The ideal use for trains is connecting industrial districts that ship a lot of goods between them and take traffic pressure off the roads.

Finally, I just wanted to say that I read all forum and discord posts even if I don't answer every time. We have plans for stuff that's frequently requested like grids or grid-like systems for building, but we'll focus on the the trains first :)

Until next time! Happy playing!