Since the release, I've received many emails about train navigation ideas and some of you have reported issues or sent me pictures where the train decided to go by wrong path of even caused some deadlocks.

Thank you all for this help, ideas and bugreports.

Based on this, I've recently reworked pathfinding and I am quite satisfied with the result ;) There are several new features:




Trains are now able to find its way also by turning around. Each direction change has some penalty, so train prefers straight paths, if there is any.
This feature is especially useful when depots exit leads to one way track. It can be also easily utilized to turn around train when magic flip is switched off.




Train that doesn't need to stop at the station prefers an outer way around. This can prevent from some deadlocks or overloaded stations. The train prefers outer way only up to specific additional distance. If it is too long, it goes through directly the station instead.





When the train cannot find the way at all, it stops and let you know about it. In previous version, train used the heuristic to guess which tracks leads to the closest neighbourhood of the destination, which combined with oneway track usually ended up having train far from its route and blocking another path.





The train predicts the next destination and chooses the right platform! This feature has been requested by community several times and I was always looking forward to have it in Mashinky game.




Aside from these features, several pathfinding bugs has been fixed (at least 3 of them were that kind of bug: "How could it ever work before the fix?" :) )

Thats it for now, hope you will like it ;)

Have a nice weekend!
Jan

The development getting speed again, but today, I want to share with you something different, it is my excitement about "unlocking" another achievement:

Two days ago, Mashinky scored a huge success:
The special jury evaluated the game in The Czech Games of the year 2017 as the Winner of two categories:

• The Greatest hope
  
  
• The Best game design

We've also got nomination for

• The greatest technological improvement

It is a big honor to my and for the whole team, since this jury was full of game development veterans and well known press professionals.

Next step:
Big AI update so stay tuned ;)

Have a nice day!
Jan

Map Editor is out for few days already and I've spent most of the time fixing bugs that has been reported by you.

Thanks all of you who helped me finding these bugs and by sending also save files, you made it easier for me to fix it quickly.

These bugs were mainly freezes (either caused by old save files on when unlocking second era). Everything should be ok now, sorry again for inconvenience and thanks for helping me!

Changelog:

05/20/2018

• Fixed: Loading of old saves
  
• Fixed: Missing humidity when random map generated(edited)

05/21/2018

• Fixed: Missing humidity when random map generated
  
• Fixed: Freeze when starting 2nd era
  
• Fixed: Town buildings generating + optimized
  
• Removed: Trace dump disabled until proper switch implemented
  
• Fixed: Another freeze when unable to place buildings

I've promised you to share change log and here you can see what I was doing those few months. It was not easy, but I've learned a lot and next time, I will keep you updated and share some versions and new content meanwhile.

Here you can see each internal build with changelog. Sorry it is quite long and not very readable, but at least you can get an insight of how the development of editor looks like ;)


02/02/2018

• Added: Support for save/load/delete scenarios
  
• Added: Support for start new game from saved map (scenario with erased artificial infrastructure)
  
• Added: Support for start new game from saved scenario
  
• Added: Possibility to load and save Heightmaps and masks
  
• Added: Planting trees based on density
  
• Added: Saving height map
  
• Added: Recompute humidity (grass color)
  
• Added: Place towns according to latitude/longitude
  
• Added: Terrain tools window
  
• Modified: Input box improvements (dark background, handling focus properly)
  
• Added: Editor keeps landscape when changing map size
  
• Added: 2 new heightmap filters (multiply and bias)
  
• Removed: Construction mud when in editor mode
  
• Added: Generating heightmap in editor mode
  
• Added: CPU filters (new tab, buttons, .. disabled for now, need to switch to GPU filters instead)
  
• Modified: Terrain tools window visible by default when starting editor
  
• Added: Generating / Removing separately plants, heightmap, towns, industries, humidity map
  
• Added: Input box able to restrict to number
  
• Added: Latitude Longitude for towns generation in editor (stores to setup.xml)
  
• Modified: Terrain tools window improvements
  
• Added: Europe heightmap
  
• Added: World largest 7000 towns

02/03/2018

• Fixed: Default map coordinates now fits to Europe heightmap
  
• Modified: Towns in editor are sorted and placed from largest to smallest
  
• Modified: Towns are smaller (still according to its real size)
  
• Added: Number of towns is progressive according to map size (90/30/10).
  
• Fixed: Loading of bitmap where no imageSize filled into header (some OS?)
  
• Added: Map coordinates are visible in bottom right corner
  
• Fixed: Terrain tools are not available out of editor
  
• Modified: Some of Terrain tools window Button names
  
• Added: 4 script callbacks: OnIndustryTick(), OnEpochChange(int epochIndex), OnTokenChange(string hash, int delta), OnSecond()
  
• Fixed: Saving maps

02/11/2018

• Added: Loading heightmap is now GPU-accelerated
  
• Modified: Terrain heightmap Filters tab is back again
  
• Modified: Heightmap support for jpg, png, dds
  
• Modified: Heightmap internally switched from 8bits to 32bits texture on GPU
  
• Added: Switch on/off terrain heightmap 32bit
  
• Modified: Iteration of GPU terrain routines
  
• Added: Auto recompute humidity after generation step
  
• Added: Asynchronous queue for filters
  
• Modified: Fixed new game map generating
  
• Fixed: UI Frame text alignment
  
• Added: GPU heightmap filters (Multiply, Bias, Blur, Median, Voronoi, VoronoiSmooth, Perlin, Gerstner, AdjustHeights, GeoNoise, WaterErosion)
  
• Modified: Voronoi and Voronoi Smooth are tileable to avoid different density on map borders
  
• Added: Amount scrollbar so now it is possible to combine more filters sequentially
  
• Added: Building buttons to Grow town and whole Delete town
  
• Fixed: Debug script output window
  
• Fixed: Town growing when missing road
  
• Modified: Raise number of arguments limit (16->64) for script function UpdateTextFormat
  
• Added: New song "Diesel time"
  
• Added: UI gradient window overlay
  
• Fixed: Building editor buttons properly limited to editor only (grow / delete town)
  
• Fixed: Deleting town with larger buildings (2*1 at least)

02/15/2018

• Fixed: Crash when click on building
  
• Fixed: Not working Content tool colors
  
• Added: First version of terrain heightmap brushes (disabled for now)

03/04/2018

• Added: Terrain raise in editor uses brushes instead
  
• Added: Editor can place all possible buildings
  
• Added: When saving in editor, not-available buildings in 1st era are removed and put to special list (type+pos+version)
  
• Added: Terrain changes per vertex (non-brush) are batched together
  
• Added: Brush hardness, brush size
  
• Added: Terrain brush visualization
  
• Added: Simplified rendering of screen quad
  
• Added: Brush paints to the texture first and once mouse released, texture is used as amount mask for effect
  
• Added: Optimization for brushes: Only affected area updated
  
• Added: Brush visualization on map no more uses line, only actual brush position
  
• Added: Rightclick to cancel brush
  
• Modified: Improved brushes / manual vertex edit / whole map filters
  
• Modified: Brush paints also when moving mouse over GUI windows
  
• Modified: Properly initialized GPU heightmap after editor start
  
• Modified: Intensity of some filters
  
• Modified: Filter tab UI polishing
  
• Modified: Tuned Filter tab in Terrain tools
  
• Modified: Mult / Div filter - now it ignores underwater terrain and scale down/up not to zero, but to sea level
  
• Modified: Splash screen shows Including Editor
  
• Fixed: Deadlock in async generation when staring new game
  
• Fixed: Compile time switch for terrain brushes
  
• Fixed: Water erosion when generating new map
  
• Fixed: Filters sometimes caused wrong results
  
• Fixed: Loading screen freeze until mouse moved
  
• Fixed: Runtime brush update
  
• Fixed: Whole map filters
  
• Fixed: Brush issue (streaks across the whole map) on first use
  
• Fixed: Wrong map shape when generate new map
  
• Fixed: Brush in construction mode
  
• Fixed: Map reset when restart editor
  
• Removed: Brush no more change its color according to brush amount

03/05/2018

• Added: Texture initialization supports more formats
  
• Added: One param for each filter (it can be used for specifying filter function)
  
• Added: "Set" filter able to draw specific altitude
  
• Fixed: Device lost Cleared whole map
  
• Fixed: After load file into editor, editing cleared the map
  
• Fixed: Wrong tooltip after each brush application
  
• Fixed: Vertical scale of heightmap after load
  
• Fixed: Right bottom corner of map issues after using some filters
  
• Fixed: Brush wrongly applied when clicking on UI
  
• Fixed: Lowering map when painting using some filters
  
• Fixed: New map generating

03/09/2018

• Added: New brush able to copy height from where painting started
  
• Modified: Hidden year in editor
  
• Added: Reset year when new game
  
• Added: Scrollbar in map selection in new game
  
• Fixed: Corrupted file when add industry in editor and save / load
  
• Fixed: erasing map in editor after load

03/13/2018

• Fixed: Loading of textures having non power-of-2 size
  
• Fixed: Height scale when loading heightmap is 0-255 again
  
• Added: Autosave in editor
  
• Fixed: Buttons enlarge in non-town building window
  
• Fixed: Using buldozer on buildings in editor
  
• Added: Industries from other than 1st era are removed from custom map when starting new game
  
• Added: Custom industries are placed in each era, if not possible (due to not-empty space), placed within 20 tiles distance, if not possible, at least randomly
  
• Added: Undo (5 steps atm, using adaptive CPU mem. allocation)
  
• Modified: Undo has 10 steps
  
• Added: Undo UI, visualize num steps cached
  
• Added: Rivers brush
  
• Fixed: Crash when load heightmap, change map size, erase

03/16/2018

• Added: Persistent per brush setup
  
• Modified: Brush strengths and default params
  
• Fixed: Loading flat heightmap

03/20/2018

• Added: Plant brush (disabled - wip)
  
• Added: Script function IndustryGetType (returns hash of given industry object)
  
• Fixed: Watermark when loading map into editor

04/02/2018

• Added: New brushes
  
• Modified: Switch versioning repository

04/11/2018

• Added: Internal possibility to test load (reads only some basic info about the file without applying it)
  
• Fixed: Paragraph line
  
• Modified: Refactored town growing (building budgets)
  
• Added: Possibility to force building facing to road, including corners
  
• Modified: Editor map has always high sea level
  
• Modified: New game - custom maps window
  
• Added: Second stage of town buildings (WIP)
  
• Fixed: removing of bigger buildings
  
• Modified: Town growing improvements (upgrading buildings, roads)
  
• Added: Wind sound switch
  
• Modified: Improved town generating
  
• Modified: Recovery from some savefile coruptions

04/12/2018

• Fixed: number of town buildings generating
  
• Removed: Asserts from release (without VC it caused crashes instead)
  
• Modified: Mods moved from media to mods directory
  
• Added: Possibility to use also directories inside mods as a mod
  
• Fixed: Erasing of towns when generate
  
• Modified: Erasing all buildings when changing map size
  
• Fixed: Towns 1x1 generating when used for the second time in editor
  
• Fixed: Industry generating when start new game

04/15/2018

• Added: Optimized processing of UI add item list
  
• Added: Limit brush / filter to either under /above water
  
• Added: Map seed
  
• Fixed: Heightmap loading for the second+ time
  
• Fixed: Scaling heightmap when loading
  
• Fixed: Packages loading
  
• Fixed: Corupting save files by saving
  
• Added: Some test for save files error recovery
  
• Fixed: Random numbers generator (master vs slave logic fixed)
  
• Fixed: limit brushes to underwater / above water
  
• Fixed: bug with repeating of keystrokes
  
• Fixed: Baking textures

04/18/2018

• Fixed: New game produces only 1/4 of a map
  
• Fixed: Far ambient BBoxes computing
  
• Modified: Switched positions Flatten and Set brushes
  
• Modified: Another iteration of steam workshop implementation
  
• Fixed: Town growing in editor
  
• Fixed: consistency of random numbers
  
• Fixed: When maximized, do not remember window size (keep one from normal window state)
  
• Fixed: Mods loading from zip, also switching every path to lower case
  
• Fixed: reusing of map cache (performance ~5% improvements)

04/20/2018

• Fixed: unpacked mods
  
• Fixed: icon
  
• Modified: Improved custom map window
  
• Modified: steam workshop iteration

04/22/2018

• Added: After terrain brushes, all affected map objects are tested and removed if not suitable terrain
  
• Modified: Speedup main menu
  
• Added: Map Size Filters when browsing custom maps
  
• Added: Brush for planting trees
  
• Added: Brush for removing trees
  
• Modified: Texts

04/23/2018

• Fixed: Newgame window size
  
• Fixed: Copying artificial plants when generat new map
  
• Fixed: Town (+industry) names when start custom map
  
• Fixed: Number of towns displayed in right bottom corner
  
• Fixed: Randomly spread buildings
  
• Fixed: removing of roads by plant brush
  
• Fixed: Multiple industries generated when start custom map
  
• Removed: Autosaves from new custom map menu
  
• Fixed: Tree brush hides forest model

04/27/2018

• Added: Limit for custom map count
  
• Fixed: generating on low/med/high presets
  
• Modified: Hidden date in editor except month
  
• Fixed: Crash when generate trees -> change map size
  
• Modified: moved plants to landscape generator so it cooperate easily with brushes
  
• Fixed: Industry start positions & names
  
• Added: Basic FBX generator
  
• Fixed: Generating editor trees followed by painting them
  
• Fixed: Missing shadows
  
• Modified: Town generating
  
• Modified: New game window (custom map info is loaded only one on request)
  
• Added: Input box now supports multiline
  
• Added: Map description (wip)
  
• Added: windows can have fixed width of right half (not only left one)
  
• Fixed: Low/Med/High town count when generating in editor
  
• Added: Remove whole town when main building removed
  
• Fixed: Town/building icon altitude when modify heightmap
  
• Modified: Town do not remove its building so often
  
• Fixed: New era buildings positioning
  
• Fixed: Missing shadows
  
• Fixed: Advanced New game Params are applied also to custom maps
  
• Added: Possibility to add custom map description (with images etc.)
  
• Modified: Script for ruined church is now able to search for existing one instead of create new one (custom maps)

04/28/2018

• Added: Sorting industry icons in build tool according to their start era
  
• Added: Autowrap text in input box
  
• Added: clip text into input box
  
• Added: Scrollbar in Custom map description (new game window)
  
• Modified: Increased custom maps limit to 512
  
• Fixed: Crash in editor
  
• Fixed: Reassign town when town it's is removed

05/03/2018

• Added: Icons & Help for plant brushes, under/above water
  
• Modified: Roads placed in editor belongs to towns

05/10/2018

• Modified: Copy build media batch file
  
• Fixed: Asznchronouse Undo list issue
  
• Fixed: Memory overflow (reading uniform string from file
  
• Fixed: Town growing
  
• Fixed: Town captions
  
• Fixed: loading of longer strings
  
• Modified: Minimal resolution raised from 800600 to 1024?/?*720
  
• Fixed: Column width in new game - custom maps - map info
  
• Added: Localized Terrain tools + Terrain brushes window captions
  
• Added: Many editor related tooltips
  
• Removed: Wrong tooltip with tutorial string
  
• Fixed: Credits
  
• Modified: Terrain tools buttons scaled up by 20px each to fit translated texts
  
• Added: DbgTextClear() script function
  
• Modified: Localized texts

05/12/2018

• Added: Humidity brushes
  
• Added: (WIP) Humidity after device lost restore
  
• Fixed: Humidity paint brush
  
• Added: New game -> Advanced -> back returns to previous tab
  
• Modified: New texts version

05/14/2018

• Fixed: Random spread of generated buildings
  
• Fixed: Brushes remove bridges and tunnels
  
• Fixed: Changing of map size in editor cause brushes to generate holes or other issues
  
• Fixed: Vegetation checks suitable terrain after using brushes
  
• Fixed: Using automatic humidity map generating and than humidity brushes
  
• Fixed: Manual trees placing and than using tree brushes
  
• Fixed: Shadow clipping to early in a distance
  
• Modified: Shadow quality vs distance improved, improved shadow bias 10x
  
• Added: Plant / Humidity tooltips
  
• Modified: Humidity brushes and editor icon

05/15/2018

• Fixed: using random tree and than tree brush
  
• Fixed: Save/Load heightmap scale
  
• Modified: New localized text version
  
• Modified: Better shadow fading in a distance
  
• Added: Mod with Elishka steam engine

05/16/2018

• Modified: Date progress in editor turned off
  
• Modified: removed not finished (locked eras) buildings from construction menu
  
• Fixed: Not-growing towns
  
• Fixed: Placing industry searched for closest towns also in non-existing towns
  
• Fixed: in paused game, towns got number of passagners from surrounding builngs
  
• Modified: latest translated texts version
  
• Fixed: Humidity reset when used undo step
  
• Fixed: Available industry buildings only in editor + quest buildings
  
• Modified: Turned off time in editor

Wow, you have reached the end! Thanks a lot for your time.

Finishing editor after so many weeks was like releasing some stone I was rolling in front of me for a long time. I know it was even more difficult for you, since having so minimum insight into the development from outside is not fair for all of you who already bought the game and I will do my best to keep you involved next time, because only together we can make the best tycoon game ever ;)

Have a nice day!
Jan

Map Editor with first set of custom maps is finally released! These are main features you can use to support your creativity:

• Load / save so called "Scenarios" (it means custom maps, in the future, these will come with custom scripts as well).
  
• Support for loading / saving height map, vegetation or humidity maps - you can obtain heightmap of any world location via this site https://terrain.party/. Place heightmaps to /heightmap/ location inside the game directory.
  
• Generate initial terrain, industries, towns, trees by a single click in the editor, so you can quicky modify already populated maps.
  
• GPU accelerated brushes able to generate various noises, modificate terrain, add / remove trees of colorize grass as well as healing brush after loading noisy heightmap, brush able to draw rivers and more.
  
• Manually place, rename and grow towns or you can draw roads and place buildings to design town manually.
  
• Manually place industry buildings so the game will generate them on these locations.
  
• You may place also infrastructure including rails, bridges, tunnels, stations to create specific initial conditions.
  
• You can add textual description to your map so everyone can read this before starting new game on your map.
  
• Easily shareable *.mss files with each maps (located in /scenarios/ inside game directory).
  
• First set of hand made maps (6 handcrafted maps for now, some of them comes with initial infrastructure to support your business start).
  
• 7000+ real towns locations and sizes for automatic placement (you need to set proper latitude / longitude of area chosen).
  
• Many fixes and improvements, optimizations.
  
• New steam engine "Elishka" :)

I am looking forward to see what creative people like you can create with these tools! Please share with us your maps and best of them accompanied with your name can make it into the next build update ;)

Have a great day!
Jan

It has been a loooong time, full of issues to solve, unclear plan estimates and I am so glad we can move further and finally release the Mashinky's map Editor!

Changelog is quite long, so I need to prepare it for you, but in few days, I will release editor update with these main changes:

• Advanced map editor (with GPU brushes, industry / towns planning etc)
  
• Support for loading / saving height, vegetation or humidity maps
  
• First set of hand made maps
  
• 7000+ real towns locations and size for automatic placement
  
• Many fixes and improvements
  
• New steam engine "Elishka"

It was not an easy task and I want to appologise to all of you for such delay. What started as a "hey, lets add possibility to load heightmap" to something rather complex requiring to rewrite some game parts (generating towns, industries, changing map size, dynamic ownership of map items etc.).

I've learned a lot and I will do my best to meantime ensure some content updates coming.



I've also decided to focus on Mashinky and I will work on this game on full time starting next month! This should speed up the development radically. We can also switch back to content updates soon!

Thanks for all your patience, looking forward to see your creativity in the Editor and have a nice weekend!

Best,
Jan

Editor is close to be finished and we are working on initial maps that will be available together with editor release (for those of you who are not looking forward to spend hours creating your own world, there will be prepared maps to let you benefit from editor release even if you don't use editor at all).

Meantime, quite many things happened meantime I want to share with you!


Once a year, the Czech Republic celebrates the best Czech-Slovak game for the past year. The general public decides in the largest survey and the results were announced March 14th 2018 in Prague. Mashinky got a nomination and I arrived to this festive announcement with my graphic artist. And guess what? Mashinky won!!

Now Mashinky is officially the best Czech - Slovak game for 2017!

It is a huge honor to me and the team and it gives us even more energy to work on the game. Also I want to thank you all who voted for us!





My daughter was born on March 17th! I know it doesn't mean too much for Mashinky community, but since for me it is quite life-changing and it is also reason I was few days offline, I want to share with you also this great news :) Now I am proud father of this young beautiful lady Eliška ;)





The last but not least update I have for you is something I cannot announce yet, but in 2 months, I also plan to boost Mashinky development speed a lot, so stay tuned ;)


Best,
Jan

Editor is close to be finished and we are working on initial maps that will be available together with editor release (for those of you who are not looking forward to spend hours creating your own world, there will be prepared maps to let you benefit from editor release even if you don't use editor at all).

Meantime, quite many things happened meantime I want to share with you!


Once a year, the Czech Republic celebrates the best Czech-Slovak game for the past year. The general public decides in the largest survey and the results were announced March 14th 2018 in Prague. Mashinky got a nomination and I arrived to this festive announcement with my graphic artist. And guess what? Mashinky won!!

Now Mashinky is officially the best Czech - Slovak game for 2017!

It is a huge honor to me and the team and it gives us even more energy to work on the game. Also I want to thank you all who voted for us!





My daughter was born on March 17th! I know it doesn't mean too much for Mashinky community, but since for me it is quite life-changing and it is also reason I was few days offline, I want to share with you also this great news :) Now I am proud father of this young beautiful lady Eliška ;)





The last but not least update I have for you is something I cannot announce yet, but in 2 months, I also plan to boost Mashinky development speed a lot, so stay tuned ;)


Best,
Jan

When I started to work on the Mashinky editor, my plan was pretty simple: to allow you to import custom heightmap and place towns where you want...

One month later, I was implementing filters, real town placement and enlargement tool, GPU-accelerated brushes or designing how industry could appear on the map when it's place is meantime occupied by player's infrastructure.

So many features needed let go of the fantasy when creating custom maps. And still it just scratched the surface.

There are many features finished, some more features to finish, but today, I am going to start small series about brushes.

#1 - Flatten. It is able to copy height easily.



#2 - Geo Noise. With this tool you can easily add random landscape where needed.



Best,
Jan

When I started to work on the Mashinky editor, my plan was pretty simple: to allow you to import custom heightmap and place towns where you want...

One month later, I was implementing filters, real town placement and enlargement tool, GPU-accelerated brushes or designing how industry could appear on the map when it's place is meantime occupied by player's infrastructure.

So many features needed let go of the fantasy when creating custom maps. And still it just scratched the surface.

There are many features finished, some more features to finish, but today, I am going to start small series about brushes.

#1 - Flatten. It is able to copy height easily.



#2 - Geo Noise. With this tool you can easily add random landscape where needed.



Best,
Jan

It has been few busy weeks, not only because of work on editor, but also due to preparation of my attendance on a great event called PCGamer Weekender in London. Only 2 days and I will be sitting in a plane flying over this beautiful country with such a strong train history.

I am writing this not only to apologize you guys for less updates or news about the game, but also to invite you:

If you happen to attend PC Gamer Weekender in London 17-18 February, visit me on stands D33+34 and talk together about games and also play Mashinky ;)

I am looking forward see you there!

Best,
Jan