Mashinky News

Hello respected community!

Today, I've updated EXPERIMENTAL branch with the City update!

Feel free to switch to public experimental branch and let me know in case of any issue. I will be adding more content and fixing bugs meantime, so we can finally release City update to public branch soon.

Just to sum all news up, here is the list:

• You are now able to affect cities, encourage them to grow and help local ​representatives with urban plans. With your care, cities can become really satisfied and beautiful metropolises, where everyone wants to live.
  
• To achieve this, you will be shaping cities by placing city upgrades, laying roads and deciding where city should grow having more needs satisfied or where to restrict the urban development in order to protect new inhabitants from pollution of industrial areas.
  

• 50+ buildings for your towns (different levels of residential buildings, decoration tiles, functional upgrade buildings)
  
• New mechanics for cities: Zones around city upgrades. Including new overlay, icons, tutorial
  
• Each residential building has 3-4 different levels based on the combination of zones present at the building location.
  
• Different buildings appearance also through ages
  
• Added sidewalks within some city zones helping you understand where are advanced parts of your city located
  
• City now has a city square (with several levels based on city size)
  
• Added city decoration buildings
  
• New city generator able to use bridges, tunnels, rotate building towards the street or modify terrain
  

• Added more buildings color variations (8 -> 16)
  
• Rail type upgrade now possible also by drag & drop whole area
  
• Fixed Town size counter. Now only residential buildings are taken into consideration
  
• Improved no-shadow rendering (mostly shading trees)
  
• Added deferred decals shader (used for crosswalks now)
  
• Windows properly align to the empty space as close as possible to prefered position when openned
  
• Added Ramp terrain tool
  
• Fixed crash when close window while placing industry upgrade
  
• Added blinking UI highlighted items now use an arrow to make them more visible
  
• Added town message when unable to grow, also do not reset counters, only freeze them
  
• Fixed electricity overlay and electricity distribution
  

Hope you will like it! Once this update is uploaded to public branch, I will switch back to multiplayer to finally reach MP first alpha stage. Wish me luck :)

Best regards,
Jan

For last 6 weeks, I've been focused on multiplayer implementation and it progressed a lot. Soon there will be first internal test of basic game mechanics. Still this update is far in the future, so last week I switched to the City update instead which will be probably the biggest content update so far, and it is far closer to the release than multiplayer, so this is my highest priority atm. to deliver you new content and make the waiting on MP a bit more acceptable :)

Meantime, several bugs have been reported and I can't let you play such non-perfect game, so today I'm releasing these bugfixes only.

Here is the list:

• Added: Vignettation postprocess (a small detour, where I try to solve long-term comments on a gray and dark world). A pleasant palette of colors is definitely needed for relaxful playing with trains. Plus, it cost me about an hour of my work :)
  
• Modified: POEditor latest localization text
  
• Modified: More snow everywhere
  
• Modified: Cost of Aries vs Lok
  
• Modified: Lowered Steam API version from 151 to 150 due to Proton crash (SteamUGC from 15 to 14) - Linux Proton fix
  
• Modified: World towns list included in build
  
• Removed: Christmass gifts from buildings production
  
• Removed: Chromatic aberation postprocess (It is not my favourite any more :)
  
  
• Fixed: 1x1 towns in new game
  
• Fixed: Number of towns and town building. Now the city size is the same on all map sizes
  
• Fixed: Disbalanced town sizes (they are more even)
  
• Fixed: Quest Limits
  
• Fixed: Crash when game interacts with invalid building (somewhere in one of 100+ mods)
  
• Fixed: Lod baker issue (also potential optimization)
  
• Fixed: Set params in wagon xml
  
• Fixed: Camera positions in Azakase/Isuzumo engine
  
• Fixed: Script for quest visit 10 cities
  
• Fixed: Electricity overlay update
  
• Fixed: Crash when using stamp near map border
  
• Fixed: QC script callbacks
  
• Fixed: Blured wires when DOF turned off
  
• Fixed: Snow was missing on flat land maps (snow level reacts more on max map height)
  
• Fixed: One way road upgrade
  
• Fixed: Glassworks building rule
  
• Fixed: Mud when generating new map
  
• Fixed: Wrong road crossing generated when starting new map
  
• Fixed: Editor generates industry from all eras
  
• Fixed: Editor regenerating towns / industry now correctly remove roads
  
• Fixed: Draining money tokens when starting new era
  
• Fixed: x86 Steam API libraries version
  
• Fixed: Cost when placing shop
  

Hope this helps to make the game experience a bit smoother, I will meantime go back to City update so I can deliver to you as soon as possible ;)

Thank you all for such an amazing support and patience.

Best regards,
Jan

Hello respected community!

I have another good news for you!
I've just released one very special update today. Since There are holidays comming and winter nights are long and calm, I think we all have a great opportunity to enjoy huge maps and some winter quest full of magic.

Also there are even better possibilities for such a great community and talented modders to release their imagination and create even better custom maps as well. New map size unlocks more than milion tiles you can tweek to perfection and spend dozents of hours later to create our bigger-than-ever railroad network.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h2]Update content[/h2]

• Supporting map size up to 1024 x 1024! But be aware, only those having x64 operating system and more than 8GB ram are able to use these maps (maybe some future optimization unlocks them for all players)
  
• Having this opportunity I've dusted off my brushes and create the new map for you: 1024_h_uk. It is based on real data not only for elevation and town locations & names, but also forest coverage mask, grass wetness mask, industry locations (some of them are having real world names) etc. This map is rather hardcore due to low industry density, but could be a nice challenge for your long winter nights ;)
  
• Having large maps I've also added one new station upgrade able to unlocks you +2 station size.
  
• Last, but maybe the most interesting, is Christmas quest. You will need to utilize your railway network / road vehicles even more to serve good things. There are unique visuals and very rare reward for you.
  

Just to mention an awesome way how to solve the new holidays-limited quest, I have to mention JTrucker. He creates a long train, loads it untill full and drives it himself to each destination. Each time he waits at the station for a moment and continues to anothe one. Once the train is empty, he jumps out and since the train hase only one destination with full load command in his route list, train gets back automatically, loads full and waits on JTrucker to be driven to other destinations. I love it, very elegant and roleplay-full approach.

[h2]Vouchers[/h2]
For the very last minute gifts and for all of you who is not following me on social media (fcb Mashinky page), I just reminds you the possibility to get your gift voucher and steam key directly on www.mashinky.com. You may print voucher, buy the game directly there or on humble store (steam woun't give you the key directly), write the key onto the printed voucher and you have beatiful gift in just a few minutes ;)

[h2]Enjoy holiday season and big Thank you![/h2]
I just want to thank you for another (and awesome) year. You are the best community I could ever wish and it is a great pleasure to work on this game for you. I am so looking forward to the next year having some major updates almost reaching its public testing phase.

Please have a beautiful holiday season, stay safe and health and wish you all the best for the upcoming next year!

Best regards,
Jan

Hello respected community!

While preparing for some upcoming changes (like bigger map or more simultaneous players), I've sit and spent some time on optimizations. Also reacted on some community requests on making one way road stations, fix several reported bugs (and probably adding some new ones :D), improved walk mode and drive mode usability (mostly visibility of signal from driver seat).

[h2]Performance optimizations[/h2]
The biggest difference is in construction mode, where I've basically completely replaced the way how the sharp construction terrain is rendered.
For realistic mode, terrain changes its geometry based on a distance from camera. All details like for example rock mask need to be baked into the texture.
With this update, the same optimization is used also for construction terrain. In this case, the shader needs to mimic polygons and proper shading, textures etc. So I've had to replace the whole terrain shader and the way how construction terrain is rendered.



There are several other optimizations as well, so basically whole game should run a lot more smoothly. Here is the list of areas

• Construction terrain rendering performance huge improvement (terrain loding and polygons fake rendering)
  
• Better vehicles rendering early out
  
• Better shadow CSM levels rendering order / management
  
• Time budget for terrain tiles texture update
  
• Mud fading out performance improved
  
• Raycasting full terrain improved
  
• Rect list merging optimized (cause new era freeze)
  
• Script callback OnConstruct once per tick as maximum (cause new era freeze)
  
• Dirty rects update after era change
  
• Terrain and map objects change
  
• CSM Shadows ranges reacts on visibility range
  

[h2]Ultra zoom out[/h2]
Thanks to so many successful optimizations, I was able to finally prolong view distance and introduce full zoom out distance. You can finally see the whole map, no matter what.

[h2]One-way road stops[/h2]
I've added one-way road stops and modified AI to properly use them. There are still some situations, where it may not utilize one-way stations to full potential, but hope I will soon identify every last of them and solve them.

[h2]Improvements[/h2]
There are several other improvements, just to mention some them

• Walk mode allows you to enter tunnels, collide with trees, proper collision with ground around buildings, sand and limestone quarry on sloped terrain and proper reaction when player falls through terrain.
  
• Improved physics for engine acceleration (air friction was wrongly affected by actual power, not actual speed)
  
• Reworked all train cameras to allow you to see the signal from cabin in most cases, also scaling down signals to further improve visibility
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Fixed construction terrain visual glitch on linux, mac and some Intel GPUs fixed
  
• Fixed FPS Limiter value save/load
  
• Fixed crash when loading (one way stops flags misused)
  
• Fixed vehicles are turning around at stations even when no valid path exists
  

There are some other updates close to be released, stay tuned ;)

Best,
Jan

Hello respected community!

Today I have rather bigger update to keep you entertained if you're stuck at home as I do :)

With this update, you can finally dive fully into your world and enjoy it by walking, jumping, running, colliding with objects. You can also enter / exit vehicles / building cameras using this mode.

Once you are in a vehicle, you can control it as a driver! Try to fulfill every day routine as one of your bus or train driver or drive on your own.

To make driving easier, I've also implemented yellow signals, that warn you when approaching red signal. At the moment, yellow signals are treated as a green signal for AI, but may be crucial when controlling the train manually. And it looks great :)

Last but not least, one way roads are now possible to place. You may change existing one or even "paint" one way limitations into each direction of crossroad.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]First Person Mode[/h2]

• Put on your shoes and hurray out
  
• New Walk mode including collisions, sprint, jump, sounds, ... :)
  
• Every object enterable directly from walk mode
  
• Cameras inside vehicles and buildings are visible and usable easily
  

[h2]Driver mode[/h2]

• Now it is possible to drive your trains!
  
• You are the driver, so you can change actual engine power, use bakes
  
• You control also each junction so you may go anywhere or just follow the automatic navigation
  
• You need to avoid collisions and follow signals as well or stop the train before station ends (proper positioning on a station affects speed of loading/unloading)
  
• And this applies to your road vehicles as well ;)
  
• You have the possibility to counter loading / unloading when driving the vehicle.
  
• Also you can re-stop on station and continue loading / unloading.
  

[h2]Yellow signals[/h2]

• Based on community feedback on driver mode, I've added yellow signals warning you that red signal is ahead so you can slow down and prepare to stop
  
• For AI, this acts as an ordinary green signal for now
  
• For chain signal used as an entrace for multiple exit signals, it is yellow if any of following signal is red
  

[h2]One-way roads[/h2]

• You may easily place one-way roads!
  
• Road vehicles will respect the direction and may use overpassing easier
  
• Within road crossings, you decide on each line if it is bidirectional (no arrows there) or one way
  

[h2]Other[/h2]

• Added Possibility to place HQ from company window
  
• Added Possibility to rename company (HQ)
  
• Fixed Depot tutorial
  
• Added Sorting mods by alphabeth order
  
• Added Filtering mods by type
  

... and just to mention great event on Steam, you may check Czech & Slovak games week and celebrate 102 years of Czechoslovak independence! ;) I am super proud to be part of such an amazing game dev community producing so many awesome games. Just take a look!
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/SCSsoftware/sale/czskgamesweek

Hope you will like the new update.

Stay safe & stay at home & play Mashinky :)

Best,
Jan