Worldwide Rush News

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p][/p][p]This week we would love your feedback. Mainly about infrastructure, but any feedback is welcome. Like what do you think is the weakest part of the game currently? These blog posts tend to attract some good and lengthy feedback that we can test and implement. I tend to distance myself from these discussions because developer opinions and views usually steer the feedback, and it becomes less accurate of what players want. I loved the idea of Discovery mode without timers as a more natural way of expansion, but adding more game modes is a bit too late. Instead, we added a no-lose condition with achievements intact, so if you enjoy playing in a certain way, you should be able to. Achievements are tied to managing difficulties either way.[/p][p][/p][h2]City Infrastructure[/h2][p][/p][p]City infrastructure is meant to improve your company operations in one way or another. Important cities will have more slots for potential buildings, and smaller cities will have less. Every 5 levels a new slot will unlock until all available slots are unlocked. Only companies with a hub in the city can buy additional buildings. These buildings have various effects, and there can only be one of each in a single city. This provides more reasons to buy a hub and increase city level.[/p][p][/p][h3]Hotel[/h3][p]Hotels will increase passengers indirect capacity in a city, allowing you to create real hub cities that can handle huge amounts of traffic. Additionally, it will increase city trust generated by your company vehicles. Hotels will have several levels.[/p][p][/p][h3]Fuel Depot[/h3][p]Fuel depot will decrease vehicle operation costs, making your vehicles profitable with fewer passengers. New profits should offset fuel depot maintenance costs.[/p][p][/p][h3]Support Center[/h3][p]Support centers will increase your company vehicles trust generated in a country. This bonus will not be huge alone, but constructing this building in multiple cities will greatly improve your odds against competition.[/p][p][/p][h3]Marketing Agency[/h3][p]Marketing agency will increase passenger generation from the city it exists in. This is like a double edge sword. You get many more passengers to make a profit, but your lines will be overcrowded much more easily. Marketing agency will have several levels.[/p][p][/p][h3]Wholesale Vehicle Broker[/h3][p]Wholesale vehicle broker will search for additional vehicles that your company uses. This will increase the amount of new vehicles in inventory manufacturers have once you use all of it in a month. This resolves a problem that appears later on with low-quantity higher-tier vehicles and big profits.[/p][p][/p][h3]Headquarters[/h3][p]Then there is headquarters. There can only be one such structure per company in the whole world. Right now it increases trust generated in a city and country. Then we wanted to add a monopoly aspect to it, disallowing competition from entering the city, making your safe haven. But implementing this would require a lot of code rewrites. We would like to avoid introducing a new collection of bugs so close to the release.[/p][p][/p][p]There is still time to suggest new buildings. What problem do you tend to have, and do you have a building with a buff in mind that would fix it? Please let us know in the comments. At the end of the day our goal is to make the game enjoyable for you all.[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p]
A new demo build is live! The main features are:[/p]

• [p]Improved hub managers[/p]
• [p]Improved tools to manage indirect traffic[/p]
• [p]AI optimization and improvements[/p]
• [p]Crash and bug fixes
  [/p]

[p]Some localization is missing and will be updated closer to the release.[/p][p][/p][p]This will be a shorter blog post as we are polishing things up and adding graphics these days. There is still infrastructure that we did not share which we are planning to fit into the demo build. More features in the demo mean more testing done, which is always good.[/p][h2][/h2][h2]AZERTY[/h2][p]We got feedback a few times about the AZERTY keyboard not being supported. People needed to manually bind keys. That is finally added together with German and Polish variants and should work for the first-time launch and when pressing on the reset keys to default button. Are there any other types of keyboards that should be added?[/p][p][/p][h2]Vehicles by Longitude[/h2][p][/p][p]Most of the work in the past week was regarding vehicles and balancing. One of the main features is 120 vehicles in total. Planes and ships are global. You will be able to buy any kind anywhere in the world. But road vehicles and trains will be region-locked, or more accurately, longitude-locked. In general there are 3 regions: America, EU + Africa and Asia + Oceania. Available vehicles will be based on where your hubs are located. You can cheat the system and buy hubs in all regions, but the import cost will not be worth it.[/p][p][/p][p]Here are some of the new vehicles:[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Here is a nice screenshot with more than 8000 vehicles worldwide going about and making profit. A good stress test to see if connecting the whole world and getting the hardest achievement is possible. At this point import costs and other trivial financial problems are in the past. The main challenge is make sure everything is running smoothly and cities are not overcrowded. Good time to experiment as well.[/p][p][/p][h2]Some Statistics[/h2][p]Thank you all who share analytics with us. It really helped with the first AI addition, seeing how people tend to turn it off. Not it seems in the middle, some turn it off, some make it harder. Our statistics are basically just counters. Someone buys a vehicle, the server gets a signal and increases the amount for a specific flag or just registers a max value. I would not say that it is the most useful thing to have, but at least there are trends that can steer us and allow us to evaluate feedback. Now to share some interesting stats from the demo start:[/p]

• [p]There have been 111,212 new games started[/p]
• [p]47,748 hours played by 20,747 people who shared statistics[/p]
• [p]Someone reached 2860 year in a game[/p]
• [p]1,004,414 tasks completed and 2,968,008 tasks failed[/p]
• [p]2,240,656 vehicles bought[/p]
• [p]Someone had 17,022 vehicles in a single session[/p]
  • [p]Max road vehicles was 3,728[/p]
  • [p]Max trains was 15,504[/p]
  • [p]Max planes was 4,023[/p]
  • [p]Max ships was 1,834[/p]
• [p]The most popular road vehicle is Arcalod, bought 265,438 times, the most despised one is Hochkalter with 52,248 orders[/p]
• [p]The most popular train is Class 3700 with 308,422 orders, but the younger brother, Class 2663, was least liked with 99,489 orders[/p]
• [p]The most popular plane is the 390 Transporter with 155,325 orders, and the least bought one is A-180, sitting at 24,756 orders[/p]
• [p]The most popular ship is Little Explorer with 98,797 orders, and the least popular is Roer with 20,780 orders[/p]

[p][/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p][/p][p]There is a lot of happening these days. We have added new game modes, achievements, constant internal playtesting, and, in general, just game improvements. Last Friday I was so overworked that I completely forgot about the blog post. I finished around 9 PM because it was time to take the dog for a walk and put my son to sleep. Once outside, I remembered that the blog post was today. But at that time I was too brain-dead to write something. In my defense, it was a very productive day that brings us closer to a more fun thing than a blog post - the 1.0 release.[/p][p][/p][p]Note, that this is not yet in the demo build.[/p][p][/p][h2]Discover Game Mode[/h2][p][/p][p]Looks like a demo, but you can actually buy other countries. In Discover game mode, you will start with a single country, two cities, and a timer that requires you to buy a new country. If certain destinations reach maximum passenger capacity, then another timer will popup requiring you to resolve that issue. If not, then game over. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Shoutout to Fly Corp and Mini Motorways that inspired this game mode. If you are reading this, then you probably already know about them. It is definitely difficult to balance and find the sweet spot. Can't wait to see you all try it.[/p][p][/p][h2]Sandbox Game Mode[/h2][p][/p][p]Let there be cheats! This is basically the classic game mode with cheats. For those who want to experiment, create scenarios, pit AI against one another, or just play like you would in classic mode with the benefit of changing rules at any time you want. Tools will be added constantly here. It feels like there are always 10 more tools that are fun to have.[/p][p][/p][h2]Achievements[/h2][p][/p][p]In the past week, achievements were added. I am an artist originally, and it was fun working on more high-end graphics for a change. For the programming, it was also fun how to solve massive achievements without using the precious frame time. All vehicles that are locked have an achievement for unlocking them. If you will want the best the game has to offer, then it will be time for achievement hunting. This was definitely the more fun little project. Currently we have 32 achievements.[/p][p][/p][h2]Hub Managers[/h2][p][/p][p]Hub managers are proving more useful as you play. For this reason we are also constantly improving and testing it. What we would like to avoid is having a manager that invalidates the player, but players still were complaining that it only produces planes and ships. Apart from other logic improvements, we added the ability for hub managers to buy roads and rails if the goal is to expand a city. Distances will be short, but now they are much more reliable if left alone. [/p][p][/p][p]Also, for those who are wondering, hub managers actually perform actions only once bought, at the beginning of the month, or when the goal is changed. This big window between updates is because there is not enough data for the manager to make valid choices. When managers start to think, they will evaluate all vehicles in the hub, looking at their performance, destination fulfillment, and travelers. Then, if requirements are met, the selected route will be either upgraded or downgraded. Downgrading can be selling the worst vehicle or downgrading a vehicle by tier. Upgrading can be upgrading a vehicle by tier, upgrading a vehicle by tier and selling another vehicle in the same route to make the higher tier viable, or duplicating the best-performing vehicle.[/p][p][/p][h2]Indirect Traffic[/h2][p][/p][p]We are constantly trying to resolve indirect traffic. How should we help the player, and what information should the game provide? It is the core feature problem that has many different causes and solutions. Solving this problem should be fun and rewarding. That means that we can't provide the answer of what to fix where. AI companies, city-level ups, and destination changes are potential reasons the indirect traffic overcrowds a city.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]What we settled for now is an improved destination tooltip. It will show if any company has a direct route. If there is no direct route, then the tooltip will show all companies that have indirect routes that take these passengers. If none of the above is true, then the tooltip searches for potential company routes that would be available if all cities had 0 passengers. If there is such a route, then you will get the potential route that should work and a city that is the problem. Moreover, cities will have overcrowding meters, allowing you to solve this problem before it happens. This alone allows for much faster problem solving.[/p][p][/p][h2]AI Optimizations[/h2][p][/p][p]There are many different optimizations happening, but probably the most interesting one to talk about is AI optimizations. I follow the golden rule: optimize only once there is a problem. The code I write is never rushed, and I keep to my standards, and this is usually enough for the game to run fast. But as the game grows and rules change, some systems start to fall behind in performance. Not because it was written badly, but because requirements were different. Generating saves with AI I noticed, that when playing with 100 different companies, I was unable to fast forward without fps drop on the year 2013, which is not that much of playtime. The problem was mostly AI searching for new investments.[/p][p][/p][p]Now the game is deterministic. This is a requirement for us to make the multiplayer in the future. But different computers have different hardware, and when a host creates 100 AI, some might not keep up. So I decided to offload all AI calculations to the host in the future, and it will simply share commands that AI generates. All others will simply have dummy companies that will only apply commands. This resolves a future problem and opens up numerous potential optimizations. First of which was adding a timer to AI think logic. If it was planning for more than 1 ms, then the game force stops him. This removes determinism for AI, but because only the host will send AI commands, we do not care about that.[/p][p][/p][p]Another problem was that AI was constantly searching for expensive routes. Trying to plan a train from Portugal to Brazil or just inventing its own 60 stop Silk Road. It is definitely cool to see but expensive to have when it is constant and repeated for every company. The fix was to limit how far and for how many stops AI will plan a rail route. Having once checked for straight distance between existing cities and modifying the A* search algorithm to have a max distance was all that was required. Once that was added, multi-stop train planning was cheap, and therefore, I added multi-stop planning for road vehicles and ships to make sure that AI has more chance to find an optimal route. [/p][p][/p][p]Now going past the year 2025 with thousands of vehicles should be possible even with minimum game requirements, as it should be.[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p][/p][p]As promised, a new build is live. More and more work is shifting to the full release, but there should be bigger demo builds apart from fixes going live until then. I feel that the game got more substance and weight without adding complexity. Our goal was always to provide an entry title to the transportation tycoon genre, not too difficult, but complex enough to be engaging and attract new people who hopefully will fall in love with the management these types of games offer.[/p][p][/p][p]Note, that this and previous updates are available.[/p][p][/p][h2]Visualizations[/h2][p][/p][p]New visualization graphics are finished. The last bubble visualization was much more performance heavy and it lacked features. Now having a ship do Magellan (or more accurately Juan Sebastián Elcano), the game will create a visualization with almost 0 performance hit. In the above example, we can clearly see who wants to go to the city and where people are leaving, thickness and color show traffic and fulfillment respectively.[/p][p][/p][h3]Indirect Passengers[/h3][p][/p][p]Cities and vehicles will now show all indirect paths people are taking and are going to take. No more guesswork if passengers will use another city when wanting to reach their destination. Just hover over a destination, and it will show the closest possible path passengers can take.[/p][p][/p][h3]Items of Interest[/h3][p][/p][p]If you are hovering over something in the UI, then the game will show where in the world these things are. In the above example, I was hovering over a route, and the game shows me destinations together with vehicle locations. No more lost vehicles inside a city. Cities will also now have a button that shows all vehicles and routes in that city.[/p][p][/p][h2]Custom Road and Rail[/h2][p][/p][p]No more straight roads. From now on, roads will adjust to go alongside rivers and mountains, searching for the cheapest and most natural-looking road, based on where you are building it. At this point, I want more detailed roads to make this system even more fun, but oh well.[/p][p][/p][h2]Some Planes[/h2][p][/p][p]Here are some planes that were made, with a demo plane to compare. Sadly, we can't linearly scale them up because the biggest vehicles will be too dramatically big in the game. But it looks alright. The plan is to have 30 different planes in total, 24 are done at this moment.[/p][p][/p][h3]Vehicles Balance[/h3][p]All vehicles have been rebalanced. Some have more significant changes, while others smaller ones. Basically, our main goal was to make them more different, for example, some vehicles generate more profit, but require more passengers and are more expensive initially. Nimbus planes are better in general for low tiers, but only go up to tier 3 and so on. Now we are balancing everything with the whole vehicle collection in mind.[/p][p][/p][h2]Changelog[/h2][h3]Bugfixes[/h3]

• [p]Multiple crash fixes relating to AI[/p]
• [p]Fixed vehicles jiggle[/p]
• [p]Fixed ram usage issues[/p]
• [p]Fixed all indirect passengers are being marked as going back home[/p]
• [p]Fixed connect the whole nation task not working[/p]

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• [p]Made a dropdown with a text box, always focus on the text box for instant type support if using a keyboard[/p]
• [p]Made cities remember their starting level and not go below it[/p]
• [p]Made traveler's traffic button more visible[/p]
• [p]Reduced passenger generation per destination[/p]
• [p]Reduced destinations max level from 20 to 4[/p]
• [p]Reduced city destination level up threshold[/p]
• [p]Reduced easy and normal AI difficulty[/p]
• [p]Reduced train station servicing cost[/p]
• [p]Reduced train stop time from 15 minutes to 5[/p]
• [p]Increased max zoom in by 3 times[/p]
• [p]Changed how city names are drawn[/p]
• [p]Improved vehicle camera tracking to account for height[/p]
• [p]Updated how destinations are being chosen, prioritizing capitals and randomly marked cities[/p]
• [p]Rebalanced vehicles to make vehicle companies more distinctive[/p]
• [p]Rebalanced trains, allowing them to be more competitive at the beginning[/p]

[h3]Additions[/h3]

• [p]Added rolling average for destination fulfillment[/p]
• [p]Added city destinations animation[/p]
• [p]Added new paths visualization[/p]
• [p]Added a system for custom roads to auto-adjust to the terrain[/p]
• [p]Added ability to change vehicles route in the UI[/p]
• [p]Added a city button that shows all vehicles and routes in the city[/p]
• [p]Added route visualization when opening a route UI[/p]
• [p]Added list hover visualization for countries, cities, vehicles, companies, hubs and routes[/p]
• [p]Added more cities[/p]

[p][/p][p]It is getting more and more tricky writing changelogs, what goes to the demo and what does not. Only a few more months to go.[/p]

[p]Hi everyone! [/p][p][/p][p]Last week I mentioned the new gameplay meta, and today I want to tell you what is being added. It is quite exiting seeing how the game evolves with the feedback. [/p][p][/p][p]Note, that this is not yet in the demo build.[/p][p][/p][h2]Zoom In[/h2][p][/p][p]First things first, you will be able to zoom in 3 times more than before. We needed to make the world bigger to fit our new meta.
[/p][p] [/p][p]This little change required changing how world chunks are being drawn. Before, they were big sprites with parallax occlusion mapping. This unfortunately breaks downs the more you zoom in. I made the whole world 3D to resolve this issue, instead of sprites per chunk, I opted in for instancing varying-quality planes. Overall, it became faster for the CPU because the GPU does all the calculations. Hopefully, it will not impact lower tier GPU's too much.[/p][p][/p][h2]Cities[/h2][p][/p][p]The main reason for the zoom in is adding more cities. The demo was great for testing densities and overall perception of what feels right for players. We figured out a nice "formula" for cities quantity per country accounting for population, visual country size, development and for now, it works nicely. In general, city count will be probably tripled from the initial plan, but with destinations generating fewer passengers it does change performance impact.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Adding more cities means more clutter and for that city names are drawn differently. Capitals and important cities will be drawn first, while other ones will be less prominent with smaller size. With more zoom in, we can make these names smaller, which helps.[/p][p][/p][h2]Destinations[/h2][p] [/p][p]Look, there will be indications of where to and from where passengers want to go once a city is selected. It will also show fulfillment with color and traffic amount with thickness. The look is not finished. [/p][p][/p][p]Destination generation was improved once again. Now capitals, manually marked, and some random cities will be marked as important. These important cities will be much more likely to be chosen as a destination. Cities around the important one will prefer to go to it as the first destination. And finally, cities around the important city will mimic most destinations choosing of the important city. This will create natural hubs and incentive to drive people to the important city from the surrounding ones and use big and profitable vehicles between these important cities. Like always, there is more logic and variation to this, but the main idea should be clear.[/p][p][/p][h2]Fulfillment[/h2][p][/p][p]And the final thing to mention is fulfillment. Now it will use a rolling average calculations instead of resetting fulfillment to 0 each month. The logic is simple, calculations are reusing past results with diminishing returns to get the current value. The only problem here is that the value now goes both up and down, not sure how that will be received. Personally, I find it much more clear, some arrows would be great to show the trend and it should be complete.


Next Friday we will push these changes to the steam build.[/p]