July was devoted to design a revamp of the train order system. The goals are to make train schedules a more visible element of the game and to make the concept of train shifts more elaborated. A "blue sky" design was discarded due to the impact it would have on existing saves, and it was replaced with a compromise design, which keeps the current order system intact, but moves it to a new game object, Schedules. There's still a lot of work left to implement this new system, so 1.14 might be some ways off. Read more at the devblog:

https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-july-2024/

Aug 4th UPDATE: The idea for dynamically assigned shifts is flawed and has been removed from the 1.14 design. The post has been updated to reflect this.

In the 1.50 update, we introduced a dynamic loading and unloading feature for Nebraska DLC's custom agriculture depots using a grain hopper trailer. Now, we are happy to reveal that in the upcoming 1.51 update for American Truck Simulator, we are going to add more animated loading options as well as depots where players will encounter this feature!


Truckers delivering with their own grain hopper trailer will experience dynamic loading and unloading when transporting corn, soybean, grain, sugar beet, pelleted animal food, potatoes, or cotton seed not only in Nebraska but also in custom depots of Kansas and Arkansas as well as "prefab" depots across the whole USA.








But that is not all! This upcoming update will also include a new dynamic loading option for the chip van when hauling wood shavings or cotton seeds. Currently, this dynamic feature is available only for cargo loading and will appear in Arkansas' custom depots as well as "prefab" depots across the USA. We plan to extend this functionality to include other types of cargo haulable with a chip van as well as dynamic unloading in the future.








We hope you are excited for the 1.51 update to arrive! Until it is released, make sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to catch all the latest ATS information. We will see you on the virtual roads!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2585150/American_Truck_Simulator__Arkansas/

whoops

• New Character: Fat Snake

- Version 1.1.6

-- Unblock (reset room) in rare situations in one of the puzzles in rookery
-- Squirrel in first wilderness area now is respawned everytime you (a) load the game (b) enter the area

1. The sandwich's price is written on the board.
2. Bug fixes.

• Reduce restrictions on attack and dodge timing for now to make the character more responsive in combat
  
• Add character definition Juno to adventure mode main party selection (all heroes)
  
• Diagnostic UI now has a flag to turn on object spawner, off by default
  
• Fix core gameplay manager to use Action keypress from input mapper instead of local keycode which players couldn't rebind
  
• Add Action Held and KeyUp states for action input
  
• Add ability to skip intro sequence for new sandbox game (Press E)
  
• Fix intro sequence
  
• boat passengers seated and exiting boat properly
  
• Add additional overflow starting positions, supports 18 start positions
  
• Merchant is now created with the proper spawn procedure, starting equipment updated
  
• Add quest system core, also used for tutorials
  
• Add global communities manager and leader identification
  
• Add guid character ID, wired through save system
  
• Dialogue system now merges normal NPC dialogue branches with quest branches
  
• Fix new build plans - now properly copies plan name and description to workplace/job name
  
• Fix case where player was responding to input when focus was in a text input field
  
• Cleanup player input and animation lock states
  
• Change Story game mode banner in main menu to say "Available in Full Release"
  
• Fix missing ocean depth cache reference, set flag to use ocean in gameplay manager, this allows ocean depth cache to re-populate automatically after terraforming operations
  
• Change text for game mode Sandbox in main menu from "Sandbox" to all upper case "SANDBOX"
  
• Fix Terraforming - set flatten height button, it was setting the flatten height value when you toggled the button off which reset the height value
  
• Fix build pieces showing duplicates in the UI
  
• Several updates to internal tools for build pieces
  
• Add more ground near dragon in lava caves
  
• Fix new game default inventory coins not going into inventory, items are now under rules of EquipFirst instead of just Equip
  
• Put AI into idle animation on start to fix sunken frame during new game creation in main menu

Current dev focus is on the dialogue and quest systems, and the starter tutorial.

For the Kingdom!

Hello folks!

I have some great news. The banker's integration into City Game Studio has begun.
Under the hood, the banker is there, but visually nothing has changed for you. Only the presence of a `banker.gde` file that allows me to show the banker and his interaction.
Nothing has changed in the game, for the moment. Because the banker doesn't provide any solution, he just appears, you click a button and it's game-over. So I'd rather not to show him in-game.

Hopefully, by next week, you'll already be able to sell your game engine or console to replenish your company's treasury.
Which means that next week, you should be able to start negotiating with him.

After all, this week I've mainly been working on optimizing the game. As last week I reviewed Steam's detection algorithm, I've took a close look at what happens when you launch City Game Studio.

As I keep adding new features to City Game Studio, I want to make sure it doesn't get any slower. So I've looked at memory consumption in detail. As an example, opening the game and staying on the main menu takes up around 2.5G of RAM. Then when you load a savegame and land in the middle of your studio, City Game Studio uses around 3G of RAM.
Therefore, I've overhauled the way the game's assets are loaded. Rather than preloading everything in memory, assets are now loaded on demand when the game needs them.

City Game Studio launches faster, and takes up less memory. It saves around 1G of RAM. Furthermore, as assets are loaded dynamically, performance is not affected. So it's really a win-win situation.

I also took the opportunity to fix a few more minor bugs that were affecting the gaming experience. Thanks to XHFlame for pointing them out!

That's about it for this week, next week will be more exciting for sure!
Until then, take care
Xavier aka Binogure

### Added
- First draft of SINGLEPLAYER. Please test it out, I'm still working on some UI stuff, but you should be able to play singleplayer now with no spawn delay

### Changed
- Changed the "author/playername" in Server list and chat, so not be able to have BBCodes/Richtext
- Upgraded Unity to 2022.3.40 (Maybe helped on vSync/FPS issues?)

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1079260/view/6242613536165636826

YouTube | Twitch | Twitter | Discord

- Enjoy!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1079260/Fireworks_Mania__An_Explosive_Simulator/

v0.032