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.

• 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.

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 ;)

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).

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

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.

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.

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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

Hello respected community!

Although this update is marked as smaller one here on steam, it is kind of lifechanging for me :)

Several days ago, my beloved family has grown by a new member, a son named Filip Zelený! I am once again the richiest guy on the planet, having beautiful doughter Eliška, amazing son Filip, charming wife Hanka and two dogs Kiwi and Chilli.

To celebrate born of this little guy with you, by this update I am adding new engine Philip into the game. It is not the fastest one, nor the biggest one, nor the strongest one, but maybe the cuttest one and hope you will like it :)

Changelog

• Fixed track next to road visibility
  
• Added Continue possibility in main menu
  
• Fixed removing road from crossroads issue causing FPS drop (includes autoheal when loading this issue saved into savefile)
  
• Added Philip diesel engine

Best,
happiest Jan

Hello respected community!

You haven't heard from me for a long time and you deserve to know more and get a new update :)

Since May, I have been working on 3 different updates:

• Passenger destination (released today)
  
• City update
  
• Multiplayer

[/i]
[/list]

The first of them is released today in the basic version of the game (it spent a long time on the experimental version to test how well it will work for you)

It is all about Passenger destination

• There is a new optional feature where passengers knows exactly what they want to go and can smartly decide what vehicle to use, where to switch to another line and how to reach the destination as soon as possible
  
• This applies also to mail
  
• Each passenger leaving the train pays for the actual distance traveled and waits in the station for his next train
  
• Olny passengers reached its destination counts into city growing
  
• Passengers prefere faster vehicles with less stops before the destination
  
• This also work with out-of-town transhipment station
  
• To give you the real time and easy to understand data about each passenger waiting or going by train, each map icon has information about number of passengers heading here
  
• Also each train or stop window shows clickable details about destinations
  
• To make it even more interesting, new overlay showing lines occupancy is in the game!
  
• To keep your save file compatible, the game detects old save format and offer you turning passenger destination on. Otherwise, this can be choosed only when starting a new game

Overlays

• There is a new window helping you to control the overlays
  
• It is an auto-hide top right corner fixed window with plenty of useful data
  
• Overlays are automatically triggered, but now you can force any specific one
  
• New and very interesting overlay is the Occupancy overlay, able to show you each line where something is delivered as well as its occupancy, also occupancy of each station and even occupancy of each wagon
  
• You can easily identify bottleneck lines or not-fully-utilized vehicles
  
• This works for all cargo types and you can filter each cargo type

Fixes

• Fixed track/Roads/Stations/Bridges/Tunnels on map border
  
• Fixed red signal in a depot when placed into existing network
  
• Fixed textures streaming (lodbaker issue when parts of map empty until zoomed in)
  
• Fixed crash when window rescale while generating / loading the game
  
• Fixed placing road over rail with signals
  
• Fixed flickering Vehicle / Stop icon when using autorouting
  
• Fixed road Depot red signal when placed
  
• Fixed crash when placing depot to the map border
  
• Fixed "Camera icon" functionality
  
• Fixed missing 2 road vehicles icons
  
• Fixed UI proper removing of item when also async adding it in the same tick (potential crash cause)
  
• Fixed autorouting pass dest when using out-of-town transhipment station
  
• Fixed wrong window tab openned when hitting bottom right corner icons
  
• Fixed overlay glitches when device lost
  
• Fixed crash when load some of the old saves

Others

• Added ability to show vehicles having route through this station

After this update, which brings rather new functionality, there will be a city update, which I will focus more on the content and appearance of the game, but there will also be new mechanics associated with the growth of cities. Look forward to it ;)

Best,
Jan

After spending more time on experimental branch, 6th era update is finally ready to be released to public default version of the game Mashinky!

After releasing Electrification and UI imrpovements in the last update, I was expecting 6th era update to be rather small. Well, at the end, this is one of the biggest updates so far and I hope you will enjoy it.

Also I want to thank all of you who reported issues and also ideas for future improvements. There are still some game changers on my todo list, and just to let my community know, I've already started to implement multiplayer!

Here is the list of major changes (you can see them also in attached release trailer):



- Limestone quarry with upgrades
- Cementworks with upgrades
- Concrete plant with upgrades
- Supermarket
- there are also several new upgrades for prev. eras industry

- Aries (inspired by Taurus)
- 60E (inspired by GE E60CP)
- Lok 460 (Re 460 / Lok 2000)
- SGV (inspired by TGV SE)
- Siberian (for prev era, inspired by VL8-1522)

- 2 Limestone wagons
- 2 Cement wagons
- 1 new passenger, 1 diner, 1 mail for any loco
- 2 new passengers, 1 bar, 1 mail for SGV

This is not promissed road vehicle update, I've only seen many requests for food truck so there is 2 new road vehicles in this update as well.
- 1 trambus for Food
- 1 trambus for Goods

- 1 Hotel
- 1 Warehouse

- 7 new quests, some with unique reward, some with funny challenges (The Movie is great!)

- Underwater tunnels - now you can place tunnel under sea bed. This should solve the "cannot build under water" error message
- Signals in tunnels - I've implemented also underground view for tunnel visualization. Now it is very easy to place / remove / modify signals in tunnels.

- as always there are tons of fixes, small improvements and minor features..

Thats all for now :) Please enjoy!

Best,
Jan

Thanks a lot for your awesome feedback on latest update. It helped me to identify the problem and change my mind regarding to map icons.

There are sveral changes in today small update:

- I've returned to the old style icons
- At the same time, I've added smart placement to ensure these will not overlap
- Keep the smart filtering (activated when stay on any map object for a second or open it's window)
- Additional 2 map icons styles.
- Everything can be selected in game options right under UI scale.

Please let me know what icon style suits you the best, so I can change the default setup for the next update.

Thank you and have a nice day!

Best,
Jan

There is a new update for Mashinky! As I've announced, this update was part of 6th era update, but since there are too many new stuff, I am releasing this part alone. It helps me focus on features and polish them as much as possible.

Here is the list of major changes:

- Brand new power management gameplay feature! Ingame tutorial included. You can also check our wiki for more info wiki/Electrification
- 3 different type of electric poles (small one, tower and subsea cable node)
- Industry bonuses when electrified
- Special overlay, tools, drag&drop to place multiple poles at once.
- Power management by fueling and upgrading power plants and decisions which industry to connect
- Transformers to cut network branches off

- Redesign windows with new pictograms instead of localised texts
- Smart map icons, reacts on hovering above the map object, active window or even bottom right corner category icons
- Smart icons filters both Producers and Consumers for cargo of selected building

- As community asked, multiple railroad crossings next to each other are driven together for better road vehicles safety

- Flip engines / wagons feature! Now you can flip direction of any engine or wagon in a depot and train having driver spot on both train endings have no penalty for going on reverse!
- This way you can customize your special train sets easily

- 2 New bridges (one for road, one for rail)
- 1 New building upgrade and upgrades visuals for foundry
- Not that much content because the upcoming 6th era update will feature mainly new content ;)

- Precomputed terrain SSAO / SSDO improving not only construction mode
- Improved SSAO blur, improved CSM shadows blur
- Overlays cover also buildings with color

- Possibility to duplicate / copy vehicle route also from vehicle list
- Social media shortcuts in main menu
- Script function IsElectrified( building )
- Increased track max speed
- Improved track geometrical smoothing according to terrain
shape / bridge / tunnel improved
- Fixed Stamps S-curves signal positions when rotating
- Fixed asphalt road missing snow mask
- Fixed proper Train/Road vehicle icons in depot or vehicle window
- Fixed sea reflections
- Fixed horizontal black line / Water noise line
- Fixed tutorial for terrain edit
- Fixed start from any previously reached era (steam stats preload)
- Fixed coal mine upgrade highlight rendering
- Fixed wrong cost of road bridge
- Fixed right click cancelation of depot action (flip wagon, sell wagon, etc.)


Hope you will like these changes! If not, please let me know, I am still improving for example Smart icons, due to the great feedback from brave players already playing this feature for several days on the experimental branch.

Best,
Jan

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:

Thinner wires and some shape changes.

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

Also rail frets are improved and visual noise in a distance (so called moire effect) has been fixed.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.



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



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