Mashinky News

6 epoch is shaping up nicely, but since there are tons of other changes, I will soon release a separate update with electrification and all improvements and once stabilized, the 6th era will follow ;)

New electrification mechanics will be added to let you electrify your current map (since the 5th era). Thanks to zour successful power distribution management, some industrial building upgrades will get a whole new meaning having the power supply.

There are also improvements for the user interface, and I've also improved the map icons, which are now more responsive (and less annoying :))

The graphical side of the game will also be nicer, especially in the construction mode, where many of you are spending most of the time.

Stay tuned, there are a lot of cool changes we are already testing!

Best,
Jan

Today, there is a new update available. This time it is rather small one, but may please some of you :)

I've been working on next era and suddenly the amount of flickering and visual noise on rail frets and electric overhead wires hit me :) So I decided to spend 2 days improving rail rendering and the result is this smaller update.


To be more specific, here you can see the list of changes:

[h2]Overhead wires redesign [/h2]
Thinner wires and some shape changes.

[h2]Wires anti aliasing shader[/h2]
Wires in a distance do not produce aliasing (pixels visual flickering), but instead, wires became transparent and slowly fade out with a distance

[h2]Rail frets antialiasing shader[/h2]
Also rail frets are improved and visual noise in a distance (so called moire effect) has been fixed.

[h2]Rail frets specular highlights[/h2]
It is rather my experiment (not based on any real world observation), but I've added specular highlights on rail frets and it looks a bit better in my opinion.

[h2]Gravel border improved[/h2]
I've done several changes to make the gravel border softer (fading out normal and glossiness map, continuing with gravel more under the ground, bending vertex normals to mimic ground around it, etc.) So it could be a bit better now.

[h2]Less gravel on the ground[/h2]
Also mask that determines surrounding gravel texture on the ground has been updated. Now it is a bit less intense, so there is less gravel around rails.

[h2]Rail rendering optimizations[/h2]
It is a bit weird, but while having better visual quality, as a side effect, I've optimized out around 50% of rail geometry polygons. The reason is because I've removed solid geometry from overhead wires and rail frets and replace these assets by planes with special texture and shader effects. The result is less flickering, better visual quality and improved rendering speed :)

[h2]Depth of field effect on rail frets and overhead wires[/h2]
I've also implemented depth of field effect on transparent objects (rail frets and overhead wires in this case). It is a bit tricky and with slightly lower quality than solid geometry DOF, but instead of bluring the result image, I am using lower mipmaps according to coc (amount of of-focus) for that pixel when rendering it.



[h2]Soft shadow filtering[/h2]
Also shadow filtering has been improved by implementing better random sampling noise (more koherent and blur friendly).



[h2]Shadow quality[/h2]
By selecting shadow quality, you can now affect also shadow resolution (not only update frequency as in previouse version). So now you can have double precision shadows or faster shadow rendering on low spec HW.



Thats all for this update...
Hope you will like the new wonder look of our railroad network! :D

Have a nice weekend!

Best,
Jan

Today, there is a new update available.

This time, it is all about road vehicles! I've choosed another 11 vehicles we need to have in the game (which makes the sum of 21 vehicles available). Those are mostly from 2nd and 3rd era and allows you to deliver more cargo types - iron ore, iron, crude oil and oil and most important - goods. There is also one new bus available.

While listening to the community, I know we need food trucks as well, but since these are in later eras, we have to add them next time ;)

To support new vehicles, I've added also new road type - asphalt. It is a bit more expensive, but support higher top speed and some of new vehicles will benefit from it. The new road type also have more road signs just to support the feeling of advanced eras.


There are also small improvements and bug fixes, for example now you can release all vehicles from depot by a single click, there is finally fixed shading (applying of normal map) of animated objects, fixed texture on porter's tender and so on.

Detailed changelog:

• New Crude oil truck
  
• New 2 Oil trucks
  
• New 2 Iron trucks
• New 2 Iron ore trucks
  
• New Wood truck
  
• New 2 Goods trucks
• Fixed all Normal maps and tangent space shader logic (shading on surfaces)
  
• Fixed shading on animated objects
  
• New Bus
• Removed signal arrows from realistic view
  
• New road type - asphalt
• Fixed missing "Wait on signal for too long" message
  
• Fixed vanishing of forest when placing farm nearby
  
• Small rebalance of road vehicles

Thats all for now, we are working on 6th era so stay tuned for next update ;)




Best regards,
Jan

I am excited to introduce you the next upcoming update. There will be:

• 11 new road vehicles! These are mainly for 2nd and 3rd era, so you will be able to transport also iron ore, iron, crude oil, oil and goods, and there is also a new bus included.
  
• new road type - asphalt - which finally allows some vehicles to reach their maximum speed.
  
• some minor fixes as always
  

All will be added to your game on

Best regards,
Jan

While working on another content (several new vehicles and the next era), I want to improve the gameplay and tools as well to make your play sessions a bit more pleasant. Thats why I am introducing what I call Usability update for you.

Aside to huge optimizations (especially when running game with maximum speed), there are several new features, so let's go through them briefly:


This feature is a bit similar to what tunel tool or stamp tool are already doing: When you lay rails where the terrain is not suitable, the tool will offer you small terrain changes to satisfy needs for that track piece.

It uses only small terrain changes and only when there is no possible path available, so the challenge is still there. You can't just lay track over the mountains without thinking about terrain. At the same time, it saves a lot of time switching to terrain tools and back to rail while "trying" to find situations where it allows you to do what you want.

Thanks to this feature, I've added also new tab into setup window so you can turn off/on these features at any time while in game.




I've seen for so many times and in many youtube / twitch streams that using our signal types (block / chain, one way / two way) is not always that easy so I am still trying to make it more intuitive.

There are several great tutorials, like for example the one from Psojed https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1160952202, but this is unfortunatelly not enough.

The next step I wanted to try in regards to make using of our signals easier, is to detect situations where some specific signal type (block or chain) is needed and either show some warning or even better: help the player with choosing the proper signal type directly. So there is this Automatic signal type tool available.

I know this will kind of polarize our community the same way as it polarized me and Walking Wad (who helps me with the design and scripts). Originally he was strongly against it, but since he tried it, he now supports this idea a lot as I do.

As always, you may enable / disable any time while in game.




If you decide to not use the Automatic signal type, do not worry, there is one feature that may still helps you with signals. It is another overlay, this time it shows signal blocks (under the cursor) and it also detects if this block is either occupied or if it has some issue to solve (like there is no exit or entry to that block etc.)

You can activate this overlay by selecting any of signal type and hovering over the existing track. In the future, I would like to add special window controlling all overlays easily.




Another new overlay shows industry type as well as wagon cargo type. It works with any zoom level and easily highlights what you are looking for. It also highlights specific industry type name in bottom screen edge while hovering over the building.

I will keep improving overlays but let me know any related ideas so we can make it the most useful together.




Another overlay is focused on terrain shape. While zooming and rotating terrain, you can easily lost sense of actualy terrain shape or you may wonder in what height is the town you are laying track to etc. For making this a bit more intuitive, there is a new overlay showing terrain altitude via colorization.

You may (as all other overlays) enable / disable this directly in toolbar.




Another improvement I wanted to do is to show where the train wants to go. AI path finding in my game is very dynamic, not binded to any sort of fixed routes, and each vehicle decide on each junction where it should go to reach destination as soon as possible based on actual situation, signals state etc. (while also checking it can continue to the next destination easily).

This caused a lot of confusing when train picks different path than player expected, so to help us understand the vehicle's "plan", the game will now show you the actual path of selected vehicle. This works also for implicit routelists (empty routelist so the train decide according to wagon types).
It is also animated and only destination stations are highlighted. It also shows the next destination path using a bit darker color.

When path cannot be found, it shows red path and the train / road vehicle automatically stops at the end of this red path.




Last but not least is the new feature which visualize ends of rails or specific places where track electrification ends.

It helps to identify for example when you place junction, but the track end is misplaced so this junction is not connected. Originally you needed to zoom closer to find reason why train cannot find path.





Thats all main improvements, but overall list would include pile of fixed bugs - hope I haven't introduced many new ones :). Sorry for writing such a long text, but this update deserves it I guess.

Thanks a lot for supporting the game, enjoying it, spreading the word about our trains and trucks world and for helping me by bug reporting. I am so much enjoying working on this game for the best community ever!

All the best,
Jan