Mashinky News

Just a small update to hopefully make your day better :)
I've just released one special update today. Holidays are coming and winter nights are prolonging, I think we all have a great opportunity to enjoy some magic in our game.

[h2]So, there is a new Santa quest! [/h2]
Several children in the game are missing from Santa's list. Lets hope we still have some time to fix this, and ensure that every single child, especially those living out of towns in poor old houses will have truly happy Merry Christmas.
Hurry up to find Santa somewhere on the map and fill his (route)list with poor buildings all over the map!

And to be honest, such an update with identifiable flying objects can help me test some basic functionality of one of the next big updates ;)

[h2]Vouchers[/h2]
For the very last minute gifts, I just want to kindly offer you the possibility to get your gift voucher and steam key directly on www.mashinky.com/#Mpurchase. You may print voucher located there, buy the game directly in the same place or on humble store webpage (steam won't give you the key directly), write the key onto the printed voucher and you have beautiful gift in just a few minutes ;)

[h2]Holiday season and big thank you![/h2]
I just want to thank you for another awesome year with the best community I could ever wish for and it is a great pleasure to work on this game for you.

Please have a beautiful holiday season and I wish you all the best for the upcoming next year!

Best regards,
Jan

Hello dearest community!

Today Mashinky got an unexpected update and was expanded with waste management.

What had started as a side idea to support the upcoming 7th era, has quickly become a fully functional and balanced update, and we had so much fun testing it.

The idea was simple - to create some twist, some cargo that is treated differently than all other types of cargo. In this case, the cargo "Garbage" is produced by each building on the last level (skyscrapers), and it has a negative effect: Filling the station with it turns off the production rule of these buildings (they will stop generating passengers).



You need to transport this cargo away from the cities and get rid of it somehow.

You cannot remove the garbage easily, but you may either
- transport it far from town centers and use landfills (station upgrade)
- extend the Coal power plant with the Waste burner so you can burn the garbage and produce electricity out of it (but coal power plant will gain larger pollution zone, so be aware)
- or you can invest to the Waste processing facility and either get rid of some amount of the garbage, or extend with the Incinerator and produce electricity while burning it. This facility will have way more upgrades in 7th era once released.
- extend your station with sorting containers to lower the garbage catchment area



To better understand where trash affects your cities, I've not only added a new city overlay color, but trash can be seen over the city, littering the streets and buildings.

Once a building loses its ability to generate new passengers, it will appear dark and abandoned. This way you can easily identify the problem and start thinking about how you can make your cities clean and fresh again.

If you want, both visual guides can be disabled in the settings.



You'll have a wide range of options for transporting garbage, either by rail or road, because there are new types of garbage wagons and cars in the game.

Garbage will been around since Era 6, so for those who haven't reached that era yet, the update also brings a lot of improvements and fixes. Let's put the complete changelog here:

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

[h3]Garbage[/h3]

• Highest building levels produce garbage
  
• Station having too much of a garbage produces garbage area around
  
• Garbage area limits some town building functionality
  
• Player can transport garbage out of a town (and either stack it in the land fills or use it in the recycling plant or in the incinerator upgrade near the coal power plant)
  
• Added 2 garbage trucks and 2 garbage wagons
  
• Garbage area is also visualized over buildings and infrastructure (littered trash all around). This can be turned off in setup.
  
• Disabled buildings are now visually abandoned. This can be also turned off in setup.
  

[h3]Quality of life[/h3]

• Disabling rules in buildings (in multiplayer, it affects only your company so others can still benefit from these rules)
  
• Rotation / movement cursor (compass and relative position in the map tile)
  
• Filters in industry overlay, showing producers and consumers easily.
  
• Stars where new items (buildings, wagons, locos, track types etc.) appear
  

[h3]Rendering[/h3]

• TXAA, temporal antialiasing improves edges and screen noise
  
• Anisotropic filtering, this makes textures appear sharper, more detailed.
  
• Sharpening post effect, automatically applied to compensate some TXAA smoothness. Also makes screen appear sharper
  
• Shadows in construction mode. This gives construction mode a lot more plasticity and eye candies :)
  

[h3]Optimizations[/h3]

• Precaching shadowing objects for render thread
  
• Improved Terrain frustum culling
  
• Caching signals interconnections for faster update once cached
  
• Better frame profiler marks (allowing search for script peaks as well)
  
• Speed up loading a bit (by skipping reloading mods when not needed)
  
• Crash and performance wasting solved in building-rules-enabled checks
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Vehicles stuck together
  
• Floating point in vehicle window engine running costs
  
• When station cargo rating drops to zero, no draining is applied until either: User disallow station from producing cargo or there is another station around having positive cargo and allowing station to produce the cargo
  
• Anisotropic filtering also for vegetation
  
• Possibility to skip mod requirements when saving scenario in editor
  
• Improved trains path-finding ignores signals behind first destination (still need valid path to the second destination)
  
• Derailed trains / vehicles without reason
  
• Rare multithread crash when watching create or join company window while company value updated
  
• Crash when interacting with depot window
  
• Building rule is automatically disabled if no station around accepts products (this way you can selectively enable / disable building rules)
  
• Fixed missing map icon when train has no name
  
• Sometimes placing signals tool doesn't show arrows properly
  
• Showing cargo amount in building/stop part
  
• Electric wires rendering
  
• "Useless vehicle message" can be aggregated
  
• Wall under the food shop
  
• Snow mask consistency between hipoly and lowpoly
  
• Added possibility to skip Splash window forever
  
• Default first signal is one-way (except easy difficulty)
  
• Path highlight on proper road side (mostly on bridges)
  
• Road sharp step issue when road connected to a bridge
  
• Snow mask on road suspension bridge and rail steel arched bridge
  
• Building model also change when limited by garbage to visualize the issue
  
• Icon above building (in town overlay) and building info window showing limitation by garbage
  
• Luxury upgrade tip not visible until proper era
  
• Loading of stations not having a single tile will disable them (some rare mods on/off circumstances)
  
• Highest level of city buildings and luxury areas moved to 6th era
  

Again, thanks a lot for your patience and support!

After the summer - partly in the woods with my family - I am again full on development. We are finishing some airplanes assets & mechanics, 7th era is shaping great (having some of industries and monorail fully functional), steam workshop has 400+ totally awesome items and community is growing... Thank you for the possibility to be part of such awesomeness :).

Have a great day,

Jan

[h2]Hello dearest community![/h2]

Mashinky is being upgraded with the Multiplayer Update today!

[previewyoutube]WATCH THE TRAILER[/previewyoutube]

After several months in open beta testing, Multiplayer is finally available for everyone in default game version.

• You can start a new game for up to 8 players now.
  
• Companies and players are decoupled in the game logic, so you can join other players in their companies or start your own anytime through the gameplay.
  
• Multiple companies can cooperate on quests (some quests are shared by design), fight for resources, or cooperate on supplying the industry buildings and split the rewards. You can also protect your company by password, so no one can join your transport imperium freely. You can also share your whole rail network with another company or set boundaries by placing owner-only signal.
  
  
  
  
• Companies have their performance ratings, which show on the score board (including detailed graphs) from 0 to 1000 points. It basically shows how successful the company is, and headquarters changes its visual appearance according to the company rating.
  
• You can use a chat window (by ~ or icon) to communicate with your co-players, and easily add a map location or object into your messages by clicking on it when typing a message. Everyone can easily click on these hypertext links later and see for themselves; which makes the strategy planning with your friends way easier.
  
  
  
  
• You can also see "cursor" of each player in the world and if anyone enters the first person mode, their appearance in the game world changes to show not only their position, but also the view direction. This way you can easily walk, drive, chase each other while jumping over buildings or even derail the train together. Fun is not only delivering the cargo anymore, but the multiplayer opens brand new possibilities :D
  
• To support multiplayer gameplay, cargo distribution rating has been added into each station. It is important to pick up your cargo frequently to keep your station's rating high now. Otherwise, the industry may prefer another station or, when your rating drops to zero, redistributes your cargo elsewhere.
  
  
  
  
• Thanks to several huge optimizations done not only for multiplayer, the game runs smoother even in single player mode. In multiplayer, the fps increase could be even bigger due to the fact, that only the server computes paths and game logic, and evaluates scripts. This helps not only smoothing the gameplay, but it also prevents anyone from cheating or modifying the game locally.
  
• On the other hand, mods are allowed in multiplayer and clients automatically check & update list of used steam workshop mods when connecting to the server.
  
• Aside from many bugfixes also included in this update, yellow chain signals finally work the way that each train checks its path to ensure it can enter junction block without risk of not being able to exit it.
• There are also improvements to shadows, fixed editor brushes, FPS limiter, not loading trains, rare crashes and more than 200 other minor bugs.
  
  
  
  
• Start the multiplayer by enabling this option in the new game setup window, or start the server while playing one of your old save files. You can also protect your server by password, join friend's server from steam friends list, start your own server without public IP and have fun together with your friends. The preset stays in the savefile, so next time you load this game, the server will be online again.
  

With this update, Mashinky game is closer to adding the very last historical era, planes, more content regarding to vehicles and buildings variability, more special events and finally heading to the full release of version 1.0.


Have a great day!
Jan

[h2]Hello dearest community![/h2]

For the past few days, I have also been following the news of the horrific act of Putin's aggression in Ukraine, the shelling of civilian buildings, hospitals and the threat of weapons of mass destruction.

I feel sadness and deep respect for the Ukrainians, who are heroically fighting against the numerical superiority. I was in this beautiful country a few years ago, walked for 2 weeks in their charming mountains, met friendly people and tasted their excellent cuisine. They have a lot to fight for.

I feel also sad for these unnecessary losses on Russian side.
War should never be the answer in a civilized society.

Last weekend, I sent 2 months of average income from the Russian and Belarusian regions to Člověk v tísni (People in Need), a non-profit organization that will use the money to help the most vulnerable people in Ukraine.

I condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I stand behind Ukraine.
I stand behind Russians that are against these actions of the Russian government.

If you can, please help this war-afflicted country.
Take care,
Jan



Edit1: Some of my Russian friends are asking me to provide sources for these reprehensible events.

To be honest, I don't fully trust any media article in my or any other country, I don't even have a TV at home. What I trust is testimony of people there, without any political bias, just video footage by their cellphones.
You may check https://liveuamap.com/ which is gathering some of these observations.
Like this one for instance https://twitter.com/StahivUA/status/1499291604212924416
Or this one https://twitter.com/OstrivGame/status/1498632975797338117

This is simply not acceptable for any cause on any side of conflict.

I am just a game developer living several hundreds km from this war, having friends in Ukraine and Russia. I am trying to help people in need. There is no political nor propaganda background. Just sadness for all unnecessary victims...

[h2]Hello awesome community![/h2]

After latest performance update, I've realised there were accidentally several
new bugs added as well. Right after incoming reports, I started to work on these
issues and keep releasing fixes once I finished each of them.

So, after one week, I decided to write down more details to let you know about all these small recent updates:

[h2]What has been fixed:[/h2]

• Fixed pass destination functionality, visible destinations in stop window, several related optimizations
  
• Fixed ghost trains (dislocated train and icon)
  
• Fixed overflowing stations with cargo / people
  
• Fixed unlock new era payment stored properly in save file
  
• Fixed draining of cargo when rating drops to zero. Caused by hidden feature cargo rating in cases where rating drops to zero. This fix also heals broken savefiles on load.
  
• Fixed town growing ability
  
• Fixed coming of passengers / mail to stations even before first vehicle arrives
  
• Fixed removing of bridge above a road caused road removal
  
• Fixed removing part of crossroads properly keep the rest untouched
  
• Fixed hobby market and food shop captions (funny how long the issue avoided my attention)
  
• Fixed new face in multiplayer properly generated on connect
  
• Fixed train movement desync in multiplayer
  
• Fixed filters in company assets window
  

That's all for now :)

Have a great weekend!
Jan