Hi guys,

Today we're adding a major save-game improvement that all of you have been waiting for!

https://youtu.be/Fpmy2Ecs5o4

Ever wished you could quit the game while on a job and continue later? Now you can!

Derail Valley now continually autosaves player position, rolling stock and ongoing jobs. When you load the game it will no longer move you to the nearest station, but rather let you continue from where you left off. Note however that fuel and damage states are not being saved yet, which remains to be added in a future update.


- Added console command to reset player position, in case you fell under the terrain
- Various item storage fixes


Save-game:

- Saves player position
- Saves trains and their position
- Saves ongoing jobs and their progress
- Added console command “Debug.DeleteCarsAndJobsSaveData”
\ Flushes all current train and job save-game data in case of a bug

Item system:

- Fixed inventory order getting shuffled when reloading
- Fixed game starting without items for some players
- Fixed certain items sometimes missing for some players (may go to Lost & Found)
- Fixed duplicate wallet appearance (might need to find yours in Lost & Found shed)
- Fixed tutorial items able to render tutorial impossible to complete as of #62
- Fixed shop items not sharing the total available amount of each item
- Added colliders to Lost & Found shed, window tweak

Controls:

- Player position will be auto-fixed if falling under terrain, past the water level
\ Added console command “Player.MoveToLastGoodPosition” for manual recovery
- On Vive enabling option “touch-click” will now use click to turn pages too

Misc:

- Updated various 3rd party plugins (potential bug fixes and performance improvement)

As of the last build, some players experienced all their inventory items gone. With this fix, essential items should now be located at Lost & Found sheds.

Those of you affected - please let us know if it worked!


Item storage:

- For players missing essential items, they will now respawn at lost & found sheds
- Minor graphical tweaks to shed

Hi everyone,

You've all experienced your inventory becoming full but being unable to get rid of items. This is no longer a problem!

https://youtu.be/1Ve-WmBc-QY

Items you throw away will no longer come back to your inventory, but rather stay where you left them! If you go too far from items you own however, they'll become "lost". You are able to retrieve lost items at your own convenience in new "lost & found" sheds, found in every station.

If you leave items in a train cab, they'll stay there. If, however, you go too far from the locomotive and it despawns, your items will be transferred to a lost & found shed.

Apart from job booklets (support coming soon), all player-owned items are now saved at the locations you left them. Mind that this will be improved along with savegame improvements coming soon.


Our new community manager Ivan is doing a fantastic job creating new videos to accompany our updates! You'll be seeing those with every new update.


Item storage system:

- Added Lost & Found sheds
\ Located at every station
\ Lost player-owned items will respawn in these sheds
\ To be considered lost, item needs to be 600m+ away from the player
\ Items will no longer respawn in player inventory
- Rail vehicles are now storage locations too
\ Items left in locomotives and cars will remain there
\ If a locomotive/car is deleted, items will be moved to Lost & Found
- Player-owned items are now saved at their real location, if not lost or in inventory
- Job Booklets and Job Reports are not yet being saved (coming soon)

Jobs:

- Fixed occasional bug with missing jobs in empty stations
- Fixed Food Factory schematic map saying S04 instead of I04

Hey all,

It's only been about a week since we posted that we're expanding the team for three new positions. In the meantime the positions have been filled, with the members already in the team and working today!

Altfuture is now an 8-member team, with the addition of:

- Community manager
- Programmer
- Junior assistant

You might like to know that we've actually met the first two in our Discord community
- Ivan and Nohus! Welcome guys!

This expansion will help us develop the game notably faster and reach even more players. Thank you everyone for making this possible!

See you very soon with another update!


Community unlock points are growing at an insane rate! We've passed the Caboose goal today! Estimate of adding it to the game - early May. See community unlocks for more info.

Hey all,

Many of you experienced that when you come back to a long-paused game, it would smash the windows and cause maximum damage to your locomotive. That should now be fixed in this second attempt.

For those of you who have been experiencing crashes when quitting the game, or other kinds of crashes, this build might potentially fix those problems. We are not sure about it, so please let us know if you're still experiencing them (this doesn't count crashes caused by insufficient memory!).

If you're a Vive user, you no longer need to swipe to turn around. A new option in the Misc menu will allow you to click the touchpad to rotate or flip pages.


Build #61 - February 27, 2019:

Bug fixes:

- Fixed unpausing still shaking/damaging trains

Controls:

- Added option to click touchpad to turn, on Vive

Misc:

- Potentially fixed quit crash and some other crashes (updated burst compiler, untested)

Hi everyone!

It’s one month since Derail Valley was released. As such we felt the timing is right to have a quick recap of what was done on the game so far, and what our plans are for the future.

We’ve released 13 updates since launch, which is one update per 2.5 days! Here are the major improvements we’ve made so far:



Most of critical launch problems have been resolved by now, leaving a handful of urgent issues we’re working on right now, such as full savegame and item storage.

Over time we’ve been scouting all your bug reports and feedback. Each and every report gets added to our internal issue tracker, which is restructured daily in order to optimize the bug fixing process as much as possible. Current state:




Some of you know that we’ve been funded by Serbian Innovation Fund for the past year. The funding, which was a tremendous help to the project, ended in January and we are now solely dependent on the game’s revenue to continue.

That said, the sales have been going great so far, exceeding our launch expectations!

We've returned our investment, and gained solid development time ahead of us. Considering that we haven’t spent a dime on marketing to date (funding restrictions), this is a great result and we’d like to say massive thanks to all of you for continually helping us spread the word about Derail Valley!


The five of us are working as much as we can, and we obviously can't keep up with all that needs to be done. We decided to take things a step further and invest to grow Derail Valley faster and reach more people:

• Ivan, our long time closed beta tester will soon start coordinating community events and making video updates, briefly showcasing every new build.
  
• Starting today, we are on a lookout for an experienced game developer (programmer) to join our team, preferably in Belgrade, Serbia.
  
• We are also on a lookout for a junior assistant with exceptional communication skills and passion for games, in Belgrade.

First of all, make sure you are aware of our public roadmap. We’re updating it regularly!

Now, if you ever wondered what we’d like to do after that - we’ve heavily updated our community unlocks page to reflect our vision for the possible next couple of years.

Given the launch allowed us to expand the team, we’ve slightly adjusted the “economy” of community unlocks in your favor, reducing requirements for the diesel locomotive down to 25K. Already at 30k, we will start working on initial version of mod support for locomotives, that so many of you were asking for! Many more goals were added too, such as co-op multiplayer:

New Community Unlocks.



To make these goals possible in the future we would need to expand our team once again. In no way can we guarantee that we will ever reach these goals (hence they are community goals), but with your help we might as well give it a go. There’s still a LOT of people unaware of Derail Valley.

When we launched the community unlocks campaign, just two months ago, we were at 4.3k points. We are now at 16.3k, so let’s see where this will lead us! Since then three goals were passed and we are working on the rewards. We expect to have Hazmat Jobs and Shunter Remote ready in a few weeks (ETAs have been adjusted accordingly)!


It’s early to fully announce this, but we want to begin preparing all the potential buyers - as bugs get sorted out over time (i.e. once there are no more priority 1 issues), we will increase the price of Derail Valley. Of course, price increase will be announced in more detail when the time comes.

Thank you everyone and see you tomorrow with another game update!

Hey all,


Since launch bridges and tunnel walls could be passed through, which was especially inconvenient when it led to falling under the world. This is now fixed and bridge tops and tunnels are now solid objects.


There have been some bumpy tracks and tunnels, that have been adjusted. As part of this the infamous Steel Mill grade was somewhat nerfed. We've also further reduced amount of trees and rocks on tracks.


Ever since build #56 Derail Valley allowed default Oculus adaptive resolution to be set over 1.0. For players running Oculus SDK version, unaware of its original setting, this created an impression that performance of the game dropped, whereas it was in fact doing higher supersampling. The default value is now back to 1, and if you want to force a higher value you can do so using a console command Oculus.RenderScale.


We've slightly updated our roadmap, and are currently working on savegame, item storage, hazmat jobs and more bug fixes: http://www.derailvalley.com/roadmap/


World:

- Added bridge and tunnel colliders
- Fixed a faulty tunnel entrance on lake helix causing collision
- Fixed tunnel sticking out of terrain near Forest South, causing collision
- Further removed trees and rocks from track
- Somewhat reduced severity of grade south of Steel Mill
- Fixed lake helix track bumps
- Fixed Iron Ore Mine East track being named L05 instead of L08

Misc:

- Updated nonVR controls booklet page
- Added nonVR controls page to game files

Platform:

- Reverted max Oculus adaptive resolution default value from 2 to 1
\ Was causing performance drop to people unaware of its original setting (as of #56)
\ To force another value use console command Oculus.RenderScale

More daily bug fixes!

Those of you with non-US keyboards will like to hear that now you can drive trains using keys F1-F6, in addition to former keys.


NonVR HUD:

- Fixed HUD showing empty on game start, even if it isn't
- Respawned items don't show up in the inventory until selected again
- Fixed HUD getting broken if using debug.toggleui command as of build #57
- Minor HUD CPU usage optimization

Bug fixes:

- Fixed "Press F to enter" not appearing when aiming under shunter’s window
- Fixed lean/crouch being bugged after teleporting in some cases in nonVR
- Fixed error with deleting unused cars introduced in #58

NonVR controls:

- Added secondary locomotive keybinds:
\ F1/F2 - throttle release/apply
\ F3/F4 - brake release/apply
\ F5/F6 - reverser backward/forward
- Keyboard driving now fades control movement in/out




In case you missed it on our Discord and other social media, here's a teaser shot of some of the upcoming Hazardous Materials assets!

Hey everyone,

Here are a few relatively urgent fixes for today. In parallel we're working on larger updates.


Bug fixes:

- Fixed a bug that in large stations negatively impacted performance since #56
- Fixed cars sometimes spawning inside buffer stops
- Fixed leaning and crouch smoothing bug introduced in #57

Console:

- Added console commands for Oculus SDK adaptive resolution & render scale
- Oculus.AdaptiveResolutionEnabled
- Oculus.RenderScale

Other:

- Few minor memory allocation optimizations to reduce stutter
- Updated splash screen background color

Quick patch - while we're working on some bigger improvements, we managed to squeeze in a few bug fixes and another CPU optimization for today.


Performance:

- Further optimized CPU usage by not rendering various off-camera text elements

Controls:

- Fixed teleport imprecision/offset when used on moving trains
- Fixed reverser sometimes getting inverted and causing infinite acceleration as of #56

UI:

- Further improved nonVR HUD

Jobs:

- Fixed lack of available jobs as of #56

Debug:

- Pressing ‘i’ no longer activates spawn mode