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.

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 ;)

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 ;)

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:

• 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.

• 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

• 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 :)

• 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

• 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

Mashinky is being upgraded with the Multiplayer Update today!



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

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...

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:

• 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

I have been fixing multiplayer bugs on experimental branch, adding new stuff and focused also on performance. Since those improvements are not related only to multiplayer, I've prepared build to share them with you today, even before MP release.

This update introduces:

• Huge improvement of general engine and game performance (including loading times)
  
• New faces for director of your company, including women
  
• Quality of life - adding list of crashed vehicles, list of favourite vehicles (together with route lists) so you can buy them by a single click in depots
  
• Fixes

I would say I really enjoyed getting back to optimizations for a while, and although there is still some space for future improvements, I am pretty happy with the current state. I've also focused on 4x game speed, because most of you are using this feature and also performance issues where mostly related to higher game speed (since the game is CPU-bound).

• Improved CPU game performance, especially when higher game speed used. By searching using Visual studio Performance non-intrusive profiler, I was able to identify places in code where CPU spends most of time and optimize these.
  
• Improved lags and freezes of game. By using my own frame profiler and whole game run profiler, I was also able to identify places, where processing time vary the most. These areas in code cause small freezes when for example industry tick occurs, town is about to grow and so on. Improving code in these areas end up having more stable framerate. Some tasks were moved to another thread or splitted into multiple frames.
  
• Improved loading times. I've also modified several places where extra power could be invested into map preparation and assets streaming from disk. For example FPS limiter works in a different way when loading screen is on, to allow other CPU threads do their job. I've spent also extra care to ensure that there are no redundant tasks when loading game. Overall loading times are smaller now.

While testing the game and reading the feedback, we identified several potential improvements to make playing Mashinky a bit more relaxed:

• Now, it is not that fatal when two trains crash into each other. There is a list of crashed vehicles in each depot to help you re-create what has been lost. This list includes also route lists.
  
• Having list of such vehicles led us to the idea of adding also favourite vehicle
  list (also including route list), so now you are able to "save" any vehicle, even the one running out of depot, and have such list of favourite vehicles to create duplicates easily.
  
• Some of you complained about circle icons in walking mode visibility, so now you can easily hide them in realistic mode transparency window. Thank you for raising your voice so i can improve the game!

Because of upcoming MP release, I've added also more face variations and thanks to community requests, I've found time to add also women faces ;) I need to improve the generator possibilities in the future, adding more face types, skin colors, but hope you will like the current state too.


Just to give you better insight on what has been optimized, here is the list (change log related to performance)

• Optimized Passenger destination AI network update
  
• Optimized Station cargo add/rmv when choosing destination
  
• Optimized Stop cargo destinations
  
• Optimized Track spline computation
  
• Optimized MP events, vehicles sync, etc
  
• Optimized Client skip event processing while loadscreen present
  
• Optimized Server skip sending all events after unconfirmed map save
  
• Optimized Maximum of 1000 events sent per network tick (prevent client from being overwhelmed)
  
• Optimized Precache stop and vehicle bonuses
  
• Optimized FPS limiter allows other threads to process when loading screen present
  
• Optimized Vehicle to vehicle collision spatial data structure faster when searching for vehicles around
  
• Optimized Arc-tangent replaced by fast approximation (precision on 0.01 rads)
  
• Optimized Sin/Cos precomputed and approximated runtime
  
• Optimized Update 0-N towns per tick instead of all at once
  
• Optimized Far geometry lod baking has now dirty area instead of checking all map chunks

• Fixed Autorouting ignore stations where cargo acceptance is disabled
  
• Fixed Assert about wrong track ending
  
• Fixed Transparent tokens
  
• Fixed Industry not producing cargo (caused by rating drop to 0, now visible and colored red in that case)
  
• Fixed When detected missing era quest on load, add one (have no idea how the original one could be missing, some mods?)
  
• Fixed Duplicate wall param in building types XML
  
• Fixed Some new faces glitches, changed background
  
• Fixed Crash when city grows
  
• Fixed Assert in depo window
  
• Fixed Visibility of walking mode icons properly reacts on transparency setting
  
• Fixed Overlapping graphics on stop window upgrade buttons
  
• Fixed Wrong positioning of road vehicles wheels on curved road
  
• Fixed Broken faces in quests
  
• Fixed Wrong electricity distribution computation
  
• Fixed Adding vehicles to favourite in road vehicles depot UI

This is all for now, soon I will release the multiplayer on public branch and continue on 7th era and airplanes ;)

Have a great day,
Jan

I was unable to resist to do one more update. This one introduces Xmas event into the game (both for Multiplayer beta testing and for public branch).

You can gather presents 🎁 in

• Toyshop (sawmill upgrade)
  
• Furniture workshop (toolworks upgrade)
  
• Factory

and deliver them by special wagons and road vehicles to city centers to get 🚂 secret reward once per 5 city centers stocked 😉

Event starts now and ends on 31st of January. Hope you will enjoy this holiday season limited reward.

Have a great holiday season and wish you all the best and happy new year!


Best,
Jan

First of all, I would love to thank you all for such patience. I wanted to release multiplayer in October, but we kept finding more and more issues and some of them were quite serious. I forgot all my plans and just focused on fixing and finishing the first version of fully functional multiplayer as fast as possible. At the end, it took more than two more months, but today I am finally allowing all of you (at least those brave enough:) ) to switch to Experimental branch and join our open beta multiplayer testing.

I would be very thankful for any feedback or issues reporting. We have great and growing discord community page for this, here is the invitation https://discord.gg/jeYGjCES. I will do my best to be there as much as possible and working on any needed fixes meantime.

So, what is in today's open multiplayer beta?

• You can play as group of up to 8 players on the same map (including custom maps) now! Just enable multiplayer when starting new game. This will start server and anyone can join you.
  
• The setup stays in the savefile, so next time you load this game, the server will be online again. Each player will autoconnect to their company when they join again.
  
• Connection is peer 2 peer, but you can host the game without public IP. I've implemented also rendezvous server for this, so hopefully it will handle all your requests smoothly.
  
• You can also protect your server by password.
  
• Chat window is accessible by ~ or icon in the toolbar. You can easily add a map location or object into your messages by clicking on it when writing a message. Everyone can then easily click on these hypertext links.
  
• See other player's cursor on the map or even special "beam" when switched to first person mode (walking, driving, using building mounted camera positions etc.). Quite funny feature I would say, I like it a lot :)
  
• Each new player or company is automatically identified by creator's steam name. No more default names!
  
• Server browser. It is not filtering games atm, only (for example) by games of your friends.
  
• New options when starting new game (if to start server too, if mods allowed, default setup for new players cooperative / competitive)
  
• You have the possibility to send invitation to your friends. It will appear in their steam chat window.
  
• All scripts run on server side to allow any script interaction or quest sharing
  
• Some scripts are not compatible with distant processing (on server side) yet, so these are removed in MP (some camera control tutorials for instance)
  
• Added the possibility to connect directly to the server via steam friends list
  
• Mods are enabled/disabled/downloaded according to the server you are connecting to. This does not change your future single player game.
  
• Clients can run faster now. Some events are no more simulated on the client side, but only on server side to release some workload from clients, or to ensure the consistency and also to prevent any client-side cheats or local mods, so nobody gains unfair advantage over other players.
  
• Smoothing vehicles and player's cursors movement when server sends update

• I've added rating into stations cargo distribution. Now (in MP) it is important to pick up your cargo frequently to keep your station rating high. Otherwise, the industry will prefer another station or, when your rating drops to zero, redistribute your cargo elsewhere (including to some others of your stations around).
  
• Companies and players are decoupled in game logic. You can join other players in their companies or start your own. Or change it anytime while in game ;)
  
• Multiple companies can cooperate on quests (some quests are shared by default). We will be changing this while in multiplayer beta testing. Maybe some more options for sharing quests can be added based on your feedback.
  
• You can also protect your company by password so no one can join your company freely.
  
• You can share tracks with another company. Once you share your track other company can connect by their tracks as well, so think twice before allowing them to do it :)
  
• To prevent other company from using some of your shared tracks, you can place owner-only signal where only your trains can pass through.
  
• Company rating! This score board (0-1000 points) shows how successful your company is (including detailed graphs). And what is the best result of the rating?...
  
• Headquarters grows according to your company rating!
  
• There is also a possibility to send tokens to another player
  
• Owner's overlay easily showing what assets belong to each company

• Yellow chain signal properly causes vehicle to stop when the next exit signal on
  vehicle's path is red
  
• Improved shadow filtering, ranges, interpolation between CSM levels and resolution
  
• Fixed brushes in editor
  
• Fixed screen vertical tearing when vignetting effect used
  
• Fixed GPU heating up when in main menu (FPS cap)
  
• Fixed FPS limiter, so it is more accurate now
  
• Fixed situations where train is not loading in the first visited station
  
• Fixed invalid icons when using 100+ active mods. Still there, but occurs later
  
• Fixed LOD baker issue (polygons over the map, invisible objects)
  
• Fixed several rare crashes
  
• Fixed approximately 200 other smaller bugs, including in MP

So, that being said, I am really glad that I can allow all of you interested to play the game with your friends, to do so now. It means a lot to me, and for the last couple of weeks, we were playing each evening with my friends from Russia, Argentina, Canada, Czech republic and more on big maps. After couple of hours, the map is so advanced each day, so populated, I am just flying the camera over and I am speechless (and happy). Hope you will like this update as much as I do :)

Have a great holiday season! And all the best to whole new incoming year 2022 ;)

Best regards,
Jan

Today is the anniversary of the Mashinky Early access release.🎉

Only thanks to all of you, I can spend an amazing part of my life on a dream project and fulfill dreams not only for myself, but hopefully also for many of you. 🚂

This year's anniversary is characterised by polishing the multiplayer. We are working hard to bring you an undisturbed experience with your friends.

To be honest, I was hoping to introduce you the multiplayer in the experimental version of the game today, but I have to admit there are still serious flaws and you would probably beat me up by your emails 🙈 😃, so I have to kindly ask you for several more weeks of patience...

We are doing our best and I am sure you will like the multiplayer in mashinky ... and find new gameplay challenges in it 😅



Best regards,
Jan

Today, I've released the City update for everyone!

• The new update for Mashinky introduces reworking of towns in the game, adding new challenging mechanics to shape residential areas,
  
• Adding more than 50 buildings related to cities in game, including city upgrades, several levels of each residential building, decoration tiles or even different visual apperance of buildings through ages.

• You can now 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.

• Update introduces different zones around each city upgrade. These zones unlock through the gameplay, starting with basic amenities for your towns (school, fire brigade, police, ...), relax facilities later in the game (parks, stadiums, gallery) and luxury end-game buildings (luxury car dealer for instance).
  
• Each residential building has 3-4 different levels based on the co mbination of zones present at the building location, but be aware of pollution areas around industries preventing houses to level up.
  
• Some other areas are used to set up the urban plan of your town, specifying where it should grow or what areas to avoid with residential buildings development.

• New update also introduces reworked city generator, which is now able to use bridges, tunnels, rotate building towards the street, grow behind multiline railroad crossings or modify terrain in order to produce beatiful and more realistic towns.
  
• It also uses different tiers of sidewalk to show you the wealth of each city area.

Hope you will like it!
Best regards,
Jan