Chuffing along

Whew! So much text, lets have a screenshot!

What have we been up to recently? Things have been moving slow but this is expected as we must eat, and so do what funds that food - work! Unfortunately or fortunately (depending how you look at it) we have been busy working. This means Trains & Things has moved slower than we would like, as T&T is not our bread and butter. But lets get into it and tell you what we have been up too over the last few months!

Pain Points

The programming department has been working on resolving pain points. Pain points are those things that take away from the fun smooth flowing feel of the game.

The biggest point of pain was having to manually take out a loan if you could not afford the purchase presented to you. This meant having to halt what you were doing, opening the company tab (or worse, leaving it open!) and taking out a loan from the bank, then you could complete your purchase.

This now works by changing the button to 'Loan & Purchase' and will automatically take out a loan from the bank to cover the purchase if you don't have the cash on hand. A small change it would seem, but a world of difference this change has made!

Others include:

• The selection effect did not work properly when resizing the screen
• Animated track building. It no longer just appears at seemingly random times. It's nice to see in action!

OooOoh! Shinies!

Various Other Goodies

There have also been some bug fixing, optimizations and art updates:

• Fixed the shadows around where the terrain is chunked/cut
• Locked down to using Godot 3.1 instead of rolling along with master branch in preparation for getting the game stable
• Fixing bugs introduced by upgrading Godot Engine version
• Added track LOD
• Did a quick pass over to polish some UI layouts
• Porting the 3D pipeline to use Blender 2.8, which is an amazing upgrade from 2.7!
• Cleaning up debug and error checking code
• Porting maps to 16-bit textures and removal of sRGB textures
• New animated props in the level for a sense of life
• A new water shader is in the works
• Refreshed tree models

One more to leave on...

Finally there has been some work on maps. This will likely be the slow point going forwards as making and balancing maps is a time consuming effort. However with the new pipeline changes, this should be less of a tedious process for us.

Coming soon...

We have purchased a video capture device to allow us to finally record good quality 1080p footage of our game without having to take a frame rate hit, so expect some new footage soon!