Worldwide Rush | Blogpost 3

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p][/p][p]We are excited to share v.0.2 build with you all, and we're especially thrilled to announce that the v.0.2 build will be participating in the upcoming Steam Next Fest! As you saw in previous blog posts, it was mostly about addressing feedback and adding AI. It is not finished, and we will keep updating it, that way our development will not feel as lonely. In the future, v.0.2 will also have things like hub managers, more task types and some graphs to view and compare statistics. But most importantly, I hope with your help and feedback we can bring gameplay with AI more fun than playing solo.[/p][p][/p][p]Note, that this and previous updates are available. You can opt in the Steam Betas tab.[/p][p][/p][h2]Current Changelog[/h2][h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

[p]Fixed holding Ctrl still closes new route UI if accept UI pops up[/p]
[p]Fixed double same task bug[/p]
[p]Fixed UI zoom hotkeys not working the same as the settings slider[/p]
[p]Fixed game using an integrated GPU instead of the dedicated one[/p]
[p]Fixed game not remembering window position[/p]

[h3]Changes[/h3]

[p]Removed viewports tab[/p]
[p]Removed tooltip saying that vehicle needs to start route from the hub as it is false[/p]
[p]Removed city names collision in road/rail build mode[/p]
[p]Removed showing tasks for fulfilling demand to just leveled up cities[/p]
[p]Made road vehicles and trains drive on the correct side of the road[/p]
[p]Made vehicles show their whole route when selected[/p]
[p]Made fully bought out vehicle to increase its inventory at the end of the month[/p]
[p]Made UI hide unneeded parts if playing only with one vehicle type[/p]
[p]Adjusted how some cities show their names to not overlap[/p]
[p]Increased roads and rail prices[/p]
[p]Increased planes ticket prices[/p]
[p]Increased grant amounts by x2[/p]
[p]Reduced train station time by half[/p]
[p]Doubled planes airport time[/p]
[p]Improved countries shading in grayscale mode[/p]

[h3]Additions[/h3]

[p]Added vehicles UI route scroll support for long routes[/p]
[p]Added full vehicles routes to company vehicles sheet[/p]
[p]Added full vehicles route to its tooltip[/p]
[p]Added colors to routes[/p]
[p]Added the ability to name vehicles with icons[/p]
[p]Added Add/Subtract for default Increase/Decrease game speed hotkeys[/p]
[p]Added ability to relocate floating UI's with MMB[/p]
[p]Added roads and rails remove mode[/p]
[p]Added multi-vehicle route management system[/p]
[p]Added routes tab[/p]
[p]Added route panel with vehicles management[/p]
[p]Added company trust system in cities[/p]
[p]Added vehicle company country information in the tooltip[/p]
[p]Added a rule that a hub can only be bought 50% of the price if a company owns majority of the trust[/p]
[p]Added a rule to allow buying a competitor's hub at a not fair price if player has 55% of trust in the city[/p]
[p]Added a rule for cities to shrink if their fulfillment is below 30%[/p]
[p]Added a rule to change the last city destination if its fulfillment is below 30%[/p]
[p]Added infrastructure to the company value[/p]
[p]Added notifications for important events[/p]
[p]Added destination demand price system[/p]
[p]Added camera sensitivity slider[/p]
[p]Added camera pan alternative options[/p]
[p]Added real-time clock option[/p]
[p]Added option to color your cursor based on company colors[/p]
[p]Added Katakana and other relevant typing support[/p]
[p]Added a system for vehicles auto-balancing distance between them[/p]

[p][/p][h2]Vehicles Spacing[/h2][p]I was thinking long and hard about how to properly space vehicles. They can take different paths, have different speeds. Making it an option would feel pointless, as there are basically no cases where you would not want that. But forcing it from the start might introduce some further issues. At the end, I made it always on, but not forced. It works by distributing vehicles over time without limiting their speeds or paths. Adjustments happen every time a vehicle enters the first route city, forcing the vehicle to stay longer or less time in the station, based on how much off it was from the desired interval. Moreover, routes will be separated by vehicle type, which means that spacing is also by vehicle type, as it does not make sense otherwise. It raised some internal questions when thinking about limiting a plane to 20km/h so that the little boat could have a fair chance.[/p][p][/p][h2]Dev Mode[/h2][p][/p][p]Here is how Worldwide Rush dev mode looks like. Here we can edit the world, jump into the demo or full version and test our changes. The Worldwide Rush engine is built using MonoGame, which offers a great foundation. When working with a custom game engine, there are some downsides, like lack of tools. Today I wanted to share some of the tools we had to create to make the game. I will not go into the rabbit hole of making a custom engine itself, but if there is interest, we can talk about it as well.[/p][p][/p][h3]Roads and Rails[/h3][p][/p][p]Currently, there are 68900 hand placed road and rail nodes. We use real-world data to place these nodes, so that when you press build road, it will resemble real highways. A custom overlay loads and paints roads (from OpenStreetMap pbf files) on top of the map for us to trace. You can always place your custom roads, but for AI these prebuilt roads are the main tool for connecting cities.[/p][p][/p][h3]Sea Nodes[/h3][p][/p][p]It is a similar story for the sea nodes. In comparison, there are only 7048 nodes for our seas and rivers. Ships use these nodes to search for available paths using A* search algorithm and travel within defined bounds. We use Shipmap to reference how real paths look like, and we try to create nodes based on that.[/p][p][/p][h3]Landmass[/h3][p][/p][p]This view shows where there is land and where there is water. Loading pixel by pixel data directly to RAM would require an additional 16GB if optimized. This could limit our potential audience, but we still wanted for custom roads and rails to determine if they are on land, water or how steep the slope is there. So again, there is a tool that generates this data at a custom resolution and right now, it only requires 100MB or so more RAM.[/p][p][/p][h3]Demo[/h3][p][/p][p]There are even tools for Demo area. It might have been expanded a bit for v.0.2. We can add or remove countries, individual cities and just define the general play area. Our Worldwide Rush dev mode then generates a full game data and demo game data separately, allowing us to keep updating the demo without any overhead.

There are so many more tools like creating world data, combining height and satellite imagery, water tools, localization tools, creating country landmass and river meshes, many different generation tools and so on. Most of the development first half was about creating these tools to make development easier and faster for the long-run.[/p][p]

Now you have had a peak at how Worldwide Rush is being developed.[/p]