Hello respected community!

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

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

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

Changelog

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

Best,
happiest Jan

Hello respected community!

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

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

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

[/i]
[/list]

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

It is all about Passenger destination

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

Overlays

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

Fixes

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

Others

• Added ability to show vehicles having route through this station

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

Best,
Jan

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

- 1 Hotel
- 1 Warehouse

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

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

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

Thats all for now :) Please enjoy!

Best,
Jan

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

There are sveral changes in today small update:

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

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

Thank you and have a nice day!

Best,
Jan

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

Here is the list of major changes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Best,
Jan

6 epoch is shaping up nicely, but since there are tons of other changes, I will soon release a separate update with electrification and all improvements and once stabilized, the 6th era will follow ;)

New electrification mechanics will be added to let you electrify your current map (since the 5th era). Thanks to zour successful power distribution management, some industrial building upgrades will get a whole new meaning having the power supply.

There are also improvements for the user interface, and I've also improved the map icons, which are now more responsive (and less annoying :))

The graphical side of the game will also be nicer, especially in the construction mode, where many of you are spending most of the time.

Stay tuned, there are a lot of cool changes we are already testing!

Best,
Jan

Today, there is a new update available. This time it is rather small one, but may please some of you :)

I've been working on next era and suddenly the amount of flickering and visual noise on rail frets and electric overhead wires hit me :) So I decided to spend 2 days improving rail rendering and the result is this smaller update.



To be more specific, here you can see the list of changes:

Thinner wires and some shape changes.

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

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

It is rather my experiment (not based on any real world observation), but I've added specular highlights on rail frets and it looks a bit better in my opinion.

I've done several changes to make the gravel border softer (fading out normal and glossiness map, continuing with gravel more under the ground, bending vertex normals to mimic ground around it, etc.) So it could be a bit better now.

Also mask that determines surrounding gravel texture on the ground has been updated. Now it is a bit less intense, so there is less gravel around rails.

It is a bit weird, but while having better visual quality, as a side effect, I've optimized out around 50% of rail geometry polygons. The reason is because I've removed solid geometry from overhead wires and rail frets and replace these assets by planes with special texture and shader effects. The result is less flickering, better visual quality and improved rendering speed :)

I've also implemented depth of field effect on transparent objects (rail frets and overhead wires in this case). It is a bit tricky and with slightly lower quality than solid geometry DOF, but instead of bluring the result image, I am using lower mipmaps according to coc (amount of of-focus) for that pixel when rendering it.



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



By selecting shadow quality, you can now affect also shadow resolution (not only update frequency as in previouse version). So now you can have double precision shadows or faster shadow rendering on low spec HW.



Thats all for this update...
Hope you will like the new wonder look of our railroad network! :D

Have a nice weekend!

Best,
Jan

Today, there is a new update available.

This time, it is all about road vehicles! I've choosed another 11 vehicles we need to have in the game (which makes the sum of 21 vehicles available). Those are mostly from 2nd and 3rd era and allows you to deliver more cargo types - iron ore, iron, crude oil and oil and most important - goods. There is also one new bus available.

While listening to the community, I know we need food trucks as well, but since these are in later eras, we have to add them next time ;)

To support new vehicles, I've added also new road type - asphalt. It is a bit more expensive, but support higher top speed and some of new vehicles will benefit from it. The new road type also have more road signs just to support the feeling of advanced eras.


There are also small improvements and bug fixes, for example now you can release all vehicles from depot by a single click, there is finally fixed shading (applying of normal map) of animated objects, fixed texture on porter's tender and so on.

Detailed changelog:

• New Crude oil truck
  
• New 2 Oil trucks
  
• New 2 Iron trucks
  
• New 2 Iron ore trucks
  
• New Wood truck
  
• New 2 Goods trucks
  
• Fixed all Normal maps and tangent space shader logic (shading on surfaces)
  
• Fixed shading on animated objects
  
• New Bus
  
• Removed signal arrows from realistic view
  
• New road type - asphalt
  
• Fixed missing "Wait on signal for too long" message
  
• Fixed vanishing of forest when placing farm nearby
  
• Small rebalance of road vehicles

Thats all for now, we are working on 6th era so stay tuned for next update ;)



Best regards,
Jan

I am excited to introduce you the next upcoming update. There will be:

• 11 new road vehicles! These are mainly for 2nd and 3rd era, so you will be able to transport also iron ore, iron, crude oil, oil and goods, and there is also a new bus included.
  
• new road type - asphalt - which finally allows some vehicles to reach their maximum speed.
  
• some minor fixes as always

All will be added to your game on
Best regards,
Jan

While working on another content (several new vehicles and the next era), I want to improve the gameplay and tools as well to make your play sessions a bit more pleasant. Thats why I am introducing what I call Usability update for you.

Aside to huge optimizations (especially when running game with maximum speed), there are several new features, so let's go through them briefly:


This feature is a bit similar to what tunel tool or stamp tool are already doing: When you lay rails where the terrain is not suitable, the tool will offer you small terrain changes to satisfy needs for that track piece.

It uses only small terrain changes and only when there is no possible path available, so the challenge is still there. You can't just lay track over the mountains without thinking about terrain. At the same time, it saves a lot of time switching to terrain tools and back to rail while "trying" to find situations where it allows you to do what you want.

Thanks to this feature, I've added also new tab into setup window so you can turn off/on these features at any time while in game.




I've seen for so many times and in many youtube / twitch streams that using our signal types (block / chain, one way / two way) is not always that easy so I am still trying to make it more intuitive.

There are several great tutorials, like for example the one from Psojed https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1160952202, but this is unfortunatelly not enough.

The next step I wanted to try in regards to make using of our signals easier, is to detect situations where some specific signal type (block or chain) is needed and either show some warning or even better: help the player with choosing the proper signal type directly. So there is this Automatic signal type tool available.

I know this will kind of polarize our community the same way as it polarized me and Walking Wad (who helps me with the design and scripts). Originally he was strongly against it, but since he tried it, he now supports this idea a lot as I do.

As always, you may enable / disable any time while in game.




If you decide to not use the Automatic signal type, do not worry, there is one feature that may still helps you with signals. It is another overlay, this time it shows signal blocks (under the cursor) and it also detects if this block is either occupied or if it has some issue to solve (like there is no exit or entry to that block etc.)

You can activate this overlay by selecting any of signal type and hovering over the existing track. In the future, I would like to add special window controlling all overlays easily.




Another new overlay shows industry type as well as wagon cargo type. It works with any zoom level and easily highlights what you are looking for. It also highlights specific industry type name in bottom screen edge while hovering over the building.

I will keep improving overlays but let me know any related ideas so we can make it the most useful together.




Another overlay is focused on terrain shape. While zooming and rotating terrain, you can easily lost sense of actualy terrain shape or you may wonder in what height is the town you are laying track to etc. For making this a bit more intuitive, there is a new overlay showing terrain altitude via colorization.

You may (as all other overlays) enable / disable this directly in toolbar.




Another improvement I wanted to do is to show where the train wants to go. AI path finding in my game is very dynamic, not binded to any sort of fixed routes, and each vehicle decide on each junction where it should go to reach destination as soon as possible based on actual situation, signals state etc. (while also checking it can continue to the next destination easily).

This caused a lot of confusing when train picks different path than player expected, so to help us understand the vehicle's "plan", the game will now show you the actual path of selected vehicle. This works also for implicit routelists (empty routelist so the train decide according to wagon types).
It is also animated and only destination stations are highlighted. It also shows the next destination path using a bit darker color.

When path cannot be found, it shows red path and the train / road vehicle automatically stops at the end of this red path.




Last but not least is the new feature which visualize ends of rails or specific places where track electrification ends.

It helps to identify for example when you place junction, but the track end is misplaced so this junction is not connected. Originally you needed to zoom closer to find reason why train cannot find path.





Thats all main improvements, but overall list would include pile of fixed bugs - hope I haven't introduced many new ones :). Sorry for writing such a long text, but this update deserves it I guess.

Thanks a lot for supporting the game, enjoying it, spreading the word about our trains and trucks world and for helping me by bug reporting. I am so much enjoying working on this game for the best community ever!

All the best,
Jan