Just a smaller holiday update, but hope you will enjoy it as you do every year :) Obviously It is the Christmas quest with unique task and unique reward.

We were thinking about this year's challenge to use some of the new features like airports and planes and finally decided to fly Santa again with some kind of delivery mission.

There was quite a mystery (and a bit of stress from my point of view :) ) this year. The release of the Christmas mod ended up being way more spontaneous and hectic. Here is the reason behind it:

- Several weeks ago, we prepared the mod at our internal branches and continue to test and polish it.
- Meanwhile, out of nowhere, several players reported crashes, but mysteriously on the public branch, where the last update added planes in October :) Nothing changed since that day, and basically no crashes reported until December 17th.
- Fortunately, I quickly found the cause of the sudden crashes that started yesterday - The public version of the game still contained last year's Christmas mod - the one before the introduction of airplanes to the game, the one where you had to control Santa and find some old houses on the map.
- The old mod has its own time limits and on December 17th this mod was automatically reactivated. But since the game's codebase has changed so much, and last year Santa was the only flying object before the implementation of airplanes, it's unfortunately no longer compatible...
- So I've released the new Christmas mod within the hour after finding the cause of crashes. It is reimplemented Santa and added new task and new reward.

I have to apologize to all of you who encountered those crashes between the 17th and 18th of December. I will keep improving and polishing the game and continue testing the mod, but hopefully the current version is a lot more stable.

And last but not least, I want to thank you so much for helping me improve the game, reporting crashes, and keeping an eye on our virtual traffic worlds! You are the best community I could ever dream of and I want to wish you all the best for the holidays!

Best regards,
Jan

Finally, airports and aircrafts landed into our game! It has been a ride, but although there are still some isseues toaddress in upcoming days, I'm happy to welcome all of you aboard!

Please keep in mind, that this is only first pack of planes available, more will come hopefully soon (for later eras).



Here is a changelog:

• Added new transport vehicle type - Airplanes
  
• Added ground infrastructure - old and new airport facilities

• There are currently 17 planes in the game (more will come later)
  
• You can transport limited cargo types by airplanes (passengers, mail, goods and food)
  
• It is quite expensive way to transport passengers / cargo, but it can be extremly fast
  
• Planes can smartly plan their path from one airport to another, and on the airport itself
  
• You can manage airports in routelist, add air waypoints or even use specific runway's / taxiway's tiles waypoints
  
• Planes reserve a runway 5 tiles before landing, and can cancel landing maneuver anytime and circle around airport instead
  
• They can wait on the last taxiway junction before occupied airport stands or stop and go through hangars if they get stuck
  
• They can even change altitude while circling the airport, when they need to avoid obstacles
  
• Each plane requires different runway length and may require modern runway type, and each can have different fly altitude
  
• Added new visualization of obstacles around airports (terrain, buildings or even trees can prevent plane takeoff / landing)
  
• Planes can be controlled from pilot perspective, althought it is very difficult when flying :)
  
• Planes use fuel only when flying

• You can design your own airport by placing runway tiles one by one, taxiways, junctions, airport stands, airport buildings and hangar
  
• You can also create, share or use airport stamps of interesting airport designs, making their reusing easier
  
• Minimalistic airport needs runway and airport stand, which is 2x1 tiles, but the actual building part can be overlapped with another airport stand building. This allows for even more unique airport designs
  
• There are several basic airport stamps included for your inspiration
  
• Airport has several automatic signals to smartly control movement of planes, while maintaining maximum airport throughput. Runway has signals on both ends reacting to incomming plane reservation. Runway and stand have also entry signal and stand and hangar have exit signal. There are several single plane only areas: airport stands, hangar and runways. On the other hand, airport taxiways allow multiple planes lined up on them, so there is buffer for planes waiting between loading/unloading at the stand and landing/taking off on the runway.
  
• Airport runways have huge 4 tiles pollution distance, so it can be better to place airports away from the town.
  
• Airports can be naturally combined with other transport types and act as a transport hub when using passenger destinations feature
  
• There could be railway or road tunnels under the airport, making combinations even easier
  
• Old airports can be easily upgraded to a new one when the upgrade becomes unclocked reaching specific era
  
• Taxiways are one way only and warning icons show you if there is missing entry/exit or unusable road
  
• Each runway has its own number shown on the runway ends. The number is also shown in routelist when runway is used as a waypoint.

• Planes can be managed in a similar way as other transport types, duplicated, replaced by newer type, driven manually, etc.
  
• Icons for planes are bigger, so hangar window and all lists have been updated accordingly
  
• Planes cannot be stopped or turned around while in the air or while performing landing / takeoff maneuver
  
• There is a new dynamic parameter in plane info window. I call it "runway accumulation" and it shows how many tiles the plane needs for accelerating / decelerating on the runway and if it affects the possibility to take off, stop or even turn from runway to taxiway. This is also helpful to watch when piloting your plane by yourself.
  
• Airport has also key bindings shortcuts that help you to build airport faster
  
• There are error messages when plane is unable to reach destination, when it requires different type or length of a runway etc.

• There are several new plane-related quests you can jump in and enjoy
  
• Some other quests can be finished by using planes now as well

• Aside from new visualization overlay for flight obstacles, there are many improvements because of planes
  
• Every vehicle part can be animated independently now (used for independent spinning of wheels and propelers)
  
• Vehicle innertia is divided to ground innertia (default) and air innertia, and planes can smoothly transition between them when taking off / landing
  
• Multiple particle generators on each vehicle
  
• Different rotation of plane parts when moving on the ground and when flying (rear wheels touch the ground only when plane doesn't have enough speed to take off. This can also help to see if "runway accumulation" is enough for takeoff when piloting a plane by yourself)
  
• Animation can be driven by power instead of speed (used also for propelers)
  
• Rotating propelers can switch to blurry version when power set above 50%
  
• AI driven vehicles increase power smoothly now, so propelers' spin speed increases gradually
  
• Vehicle path plan visualization has "shadows" in construction mode now, so you can easily see the altitude
  
• It is possible to turn the vehicle path plan visualization on even in realistic camera mode now to help you pilot your plane easily
  
• Crashed planes fall to the ground

• Fixed onboard cameras for flipped vehicle
  
• Fixed weight of vehicle speed when planning passenger destinations
  
• Improved stamp setup window (now each infrastructure type can be selected independently)
  
• Properly flipped engine's/vagon's icons in replacement list
  
• Fixed placing one way curve onto the same tile as diagonal track
  
• Fixed garbage tutorial Czech text endlines
  
• Fixed typo in caption when placing signals
  
• Fixed crash in path finder in some rare circumstances
  
• Added colors into routelists
  
• Fixed skybox flickering

Enjoy the flight! :)

Best regards,
Jan

Today I have just a small update. While working on airports and planes, I have generally improved the game, fixed bugs, optimized the engine and added some new rendering features.

• Long time requested feature is finally in Mashinky. You can choose borderless rendering and launch the game without changing the monitor resolution, as well as seamlessly switch between Mashinky and other desktop applications.
  
• In order to be able to choose the resolution again even when using a borderless window, I refactored the engine's render pipeline a bit so that the render resolution can be decoupled from the window size.
• Additionally, I modified the UI to always render at native resolution. This way, you can reduce the resolution on weaker hardware while maintaining a crisp and readable user interface.

• I also tried to improve the driver mode experience and since the track may not be visible from all driver camera positions, you can now see the track in front of you including signal states or stations thanks to simple visualization so you can enjoy the ride.

• Added AI now smoothly increase/decrease throttle (only visual usage, not affecting acc)
  
• Added possibility for animation per each wagon part
  
• When adding waypoint, only reachable stops icons are visible
  
• When adding waypoint, only same type of vehicles are visible (to copy routelist from)
  
• Added Prev/Next button for vehicles, stations, buildings, depo
  
• Keeping the Tab selected when switching to next / prev item (vehicle / stop / depot / building)
  
• Improved winter ground, grass and trees colors a bit

For Mods

• Added: All garbage-type cargo should affect station pollution area
  
• Added: Wagon part flags "visible_when***"
  
• Added TrackType/Version flag "alter_wall", able to change internal station wall
  
• When multiple local mods detected in MP, only first 10 are shown in a warning
  
• Added possibility to specify terrain type having huge river across the map
  
• Fixed animspeed param properly gathered from xml even when old vehicletype format used
  
• Fixed using 3D asset name with "2" at the end (which means it is animated), while not having animation on it
  
• Fixed crash when removing industry building (by removing mod)

For Scripts

• Added GetNumUpgrades improved so it can count upgrades for all buildings of specific type
  
• Added Script function int GetVehicleType(vehicle);
  
• Added Script function string GetListOfVehiclesByMaxSpeed(vehicleTypeFilter, hashTypeFilter, maxListSize);
  
• Added Script function string GetListOfVehiclesByMaxSpeedReached(vehicleTypeFilter, hashTypeFilter, int maxListSize);
  
• Added Script function string GetListOfVehiclesByMaxAge(vehicleTypeFilter, hashFihashTypeFilterter, int maxListSize);
  
• Added Script function string GetListOfCitiesByPopulation(maxListSize);
  
• Modified 45-NeedForSpeed and 56-DeliveryTele quests
  
• Modified script function GetRemoteQuestVariable so it can return any type convertible to string

Balancing

• Modified Slowing station cargo rating drop by 25x
  
• Modified Road vehicles stopping in the station cannot overpass other vehicles there
  
• Modified Cement delivery affects city growth again
  
• Modified Lowered penalization for passing through non-destination station

Fixes

• Fixed vehicle slowing down removed before crossroads when other exit from junction is a dead end
  
• Fixed terrain type switching buttons in editor
  
• Fixed face consistency when loading saved game
  
• Fixed stamp signals in tunnels consistency
  
• Fixed Save/load of last load stop id (used to properly choose new destination in autorouting)
  
• Fixed selective removing of rail signal
  
• Fixed block yellow signal
  
• Fixed flickering of signal glow when TXAA enabled
  
• Fixed performance when path has been redundantly recalculated when moving vehicle's info window (due to reselection of vehicle according to it's window focus)
  
• Fixed wasting of performance on repetetive path searching in some other cases
  
• Fixed removing of all industry on map works again in editor
  
• Fixed pixel alignment when upscaling image
  
• Fixed rendering transparent surfaces
  
• Fixed selection highlighting overbrighted colors
  
• Fixed ending of track wrongly positioned in some circumstances
  
• Fixed flickering of loading bar or face of company boss
  
• Fixed buttons in depot according to vehicle type
  
• Fixed rare crash when open the list of vehicles
  
• Fixed smoother movement interpolation in curves (to avoid goniometrics, there were 8 curve points, now raised to 256 precalculated)
  
• Fixed ALT press stayed after Alt-Tab, showing all icons on the map
  
• Fixed ghost non clickable space in depo bonus tab
  
• Fixed depot bottom bar height consistency
  
• Fixed missing some vehicle icons on map after load
  
• Fixed highlighted vehicle path flickering (vanishing and reappearing)
  
• Fixed vehicle position cache (for better performance)
  
• Fixed full throttle when switch in and out of vehicle
  
• Fixed stamps including stations when placed next to another station
  
• Fixed stamps influencing also station upgrades (WIP, still some issues there)
  
• Fixed wrong openning of station window when creating stamp from station
  
• Fixed duplication of vehicle by wrong-type-depot
  
• Fixed crash in pathfinder
  
• Fixed collisions ignoring where track's side wall clipped out

It took me long time, while this update has been just sitting on the experimental branch. When I originally planned to release all these new improvements, there was a nasty bug on a particular GPU that I couldn't get my hands on and fix directly. After some time (and many, many blind fixes and additional debug outputs), I have realized that I could reproduce the similar problem (same occurence, just with different behavior) on a CPU-only renderer (called Reference by the GPU vendors).

Fortunately, this helped resolve the bug without ever reproducing it on my computer, so I was finally able to release this update and resolve many of the reported issues today.

Best regards,
Jan

It's been too long since the last post, I deeply sorry for such communication silence and huge thanks for your patience.

The work on planes advanced a lot since the last post, yet there are some bugs to be fixed and flaws to be polished. I am finally almost satisfied with the AI movement on the ground, so we advanced this version to internal testing.


We are currently testing very promissing version of planes movement over the air and especially logic on airports.

Movement over the air is quite simplified, obstacle-awareness including hills, buildings and trees, changing altitude in circles when needed, curves with the same radius as trains on the ground etc).



On the ground, the sitation is a bit more challenging to implement. Player can build his airport tile by tile, using airport stands, hangars, taxi ways, runways and airport buildings.

This plays like a puzzle. Planes moves like road vehicles on roads, but occupy the whole tile (like road vehicle if occupies both directions on roads), so it can easily become locked by another plane heading opposite direction.

I've implemented several different approaches to address this (including automatically placed signals on bi-directional taxi ways, separate airport into signal blocks etc), but none of these survived due to either very low airport capacity, deadlocks or due to be non-intuitive for the player.



Current version uses only one-way taxi ways, planes can enter the same "signal-block" freely and the only restricted signal blocks for just one plane at the time are: Airport stands, Runways and Depots. "Signals" are placed automatically, so it is very satisfying to make your way to the perfect airport layout and share the "stamp" with community.

With the latest approach, the airport has high capacity with a small map footprint and most importantly without freqent deadlocks (there are some, but caused mostly by the wrong layout, easy to understand where the issue is).

Planes can lock runway when approaching to the landing point from air (5 tiles ahead from runway), cancel landing maneuver if anything goes wrong. Later it can waits on the very last junction on the ground if all stands are occupied.



There are first several planes ready as well as airport infrastructure, AI works almost seamlessly, so if this version survive testing, I will finish bugs and some last 3D assets, do last ballancing touches, prepare very first airport stamps and soon we will fly together on experimental branch. This will include driver mode, although it is very challenging to land properly :D


Meantime, there is a new (non-planes) update on experimental branch, adding many fixes, borderless window, improved driver mode etc, so you may already switch to experimental and try some new features before planes come!

Thank you for your time, reading this update and for your patience. I has been a bumpy flight, but we are almost landing with this delivery ;)

Best regards,
Jan

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