Posts

Open-sourcing Trains & Things (and our other projects)

Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored

Moving to bitshift.rf.gd

Just a super short update with 2 pieces of info: (1) We are moving back to our previous hosting in order to cut hosting costs: www.bitshift.rf.gd (2) We are still waiting for Godot 4 to be stable enough to be able to release the 0.4 update to Trains & Things. I suspect this is still a long way off unfortunately.

Slow progress towards 0.4

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Our last blog post was over a month ago, how time flies! As our regular followers will likely know, bitshift is a 2 man studio, me (Fabian) and my brother (Bronson). We have both been super busy recently and have had little time to work on Trains & Things lately. Some of this busyness comes from the Corona virus and looking after family. Some from work and some from other life things going down. On the programming front, 0.4 is about ready. The company panel overhaul is complete! But what exactly does that mean you ask? It means we have reworked the whole of the company panel to be sweet. The major part of this is breaking it down into tabs and the finances tab involved breaking down the game internally storing revenues and expenses for each quarter instead of just showing you a block of revenues and expenses since the company had begun. This means you can tell each quarter very quickly if you are improving or not. New company panel W.I.P Also here we have removed the op

Working towards 0.4

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We've been plugging away at the next major milestone which still needs a catchy name. No not COVID-19, the last thing we want to do is take advantage of the panic and fear. As mentioned previously we have been working on adding the China map! We looked at the Shenzhen region but found the region was extremely flat and geographically boring. So we have opted for the Beijing area which is still very flat, but at least has some water ways and mountains. China - Work In Progress On the programming side, one of the big new features we have been working on is the Event (or notification) system. This basically popup events in the bottom right of the screen notifying the player of significant game events. This was implemented primarily as a means to help players in PvP games have some idea how their company is tracking without needing to keep the Shares panel open. We have added in a quarterly report here also to you also don't need to have your own company panel open all the

Editor & Mod Tools Released

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  Just a quick post to let all you Modders know that the Trains & Things Editor is finally available for download via Steam! Download it, open it and it will process the raw assets - this will take some time. Then once done you can look over the code, assets and find some tutorials under the Bitshift > Docs menu. If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask!

0.3 - Modders Delight

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Version 0.3 - our second major update is out now!   Please note that for the 0.3 release you must delete project.godot from the game install directory! If in doubt, delete the Trains And Things directory and re-install it. This will ensure Trains & Things will show the correct version. First up is this snippet of news from Godot (the engine we are using): https://godotengine.org/article/headsup-vulkan-merged-master-branch-unstable I've posted this as it has some major implications for us. In short, the Vulkan branch is now the primary branch of development by everyone working on Godot! What are the repercussions here for us? Well, this means that the Vulkan branch (now known as the master branch) will now be changing rapidly, indeed mass changes have been happening! Some of these include fixes, and no doubt some will cause instability. For 0.3 we have locked down to a build that is a few weeks old as it is a stable known point. The latest and greatest version of the

v0.2 b1797 Released

Just a quick one, we have released a hot fix for version 0.2, build 1797. We have disabled most of the water shader as there are still some issues with Godot we are waiting to be fixed which has caused some random problems with water. And we simply have removed the water from New Zealand for now as it has its own special problem. Also note that you should delete the project.godot file in your Trains And Things directory, this is a new issue we found over the weekend which causes the game to display the incorrect version number and will stop you being able to join other plays if there is a version mismatch. Finally, we have added in some log supplies into New Zealand map as this resource "chain" was incomplete.