Today, I have something unexpected for you :)
First vanilla people in the game! You should now see drivers and pilots taking care of your transport fleet. They will be there to help whenever the vehicle is on, not derailed/destroyed and you are not in the driver's seat.
To be honest, I was a little worried about the result a while ago, so I don't promise you such an update. Creating a human being is always tricky due to performance risks or the uncanny valley, which is a problem with creepy looking virtual people. It's made even worse by the fact that I'm a programmer with very limited experience in creating virtual human beings, and also because of the intention to keep low polygons for such small models, as is typical for strategy games.
In the end, I'm still not completely satisfied with the result, but I learned a lot while creating these drivers and pilots and I already love how it looks in the game! I hope you like it too, but in any case there is an option to turn it off in the graphics settings ;)
Drivers and pilots are animated either based on the direction of the front wheel in the case of road vehicles, or playing one of several looping animations in the case of drivers or pilots. I also added a system for recombining these drivers (different faces, t-shirts, pants and so on) as well as coloring to make it more interesting. In the original vehicles in the game, more animations were also needed for the different positions of the seats and steering wheels, and I also ended up separating and animating the steering wheels to match the driver movements.
Last but not least, I added an automatic vehicle replacement system based on their age. You can set it specifically for each vehicle or turn it off for some of them. In this case, the exchange is more of a renewal, since the type of vehicle or the number of cars remains the same.
Change log:
Drivers & Pilots
- Each Truck or Bus has now its own driver (visual appearance is randomized internally by vehicle index used as a seed). Animation is driven by front wheels and includes steering wheel as well.
- Each Train engine has also its own driver (vehicle index and wagon index are used together as a seed for random appearance). The animation plays only according to the elapsed time.
- Each plane has its own pilot (plane index is used as a visual appearance seed in this case). The animation plays only according to the elapsed time too.
- Visual appearance combines randomized model parts as well as colorization per each part. In some cases, it can also choose different genders.
- There are several different animations picked according to driver seat and vehicle controls positions.
- Visual appearance is picked according to vehicle type (different for steam and diesel / electric rail engines for example).
- The driver model is hidden when the player controls the vehicle himself or when the vehicle is destroyed, or turned off.
UI
- Camera positions are now visible only when camera looks towards them. This makes the UI a bit more clear
- There is also possibility to turn off/on drivers in graphics settings
- I've improved visualization of vehicle replacement plan to make it easier to orientate
Gameplay
- Added automatic vehicle replacement based on its age. This can be different per each vehicle or turned off.
- Road asphalt speed has been increased
- Cargo filter in industry list works now
- Start all / Stop all vehicles in vehicles list now works properly when filter active
Visual
- Added interior BR 3
- Added burn shader so the destroyed vehicle changes its appearance
- Fixed terrain holes (quarries etc) when in construction mode with overlays
- Added a bit more fresnel bright hallo around objects (more visually pleasing)
- Added fields rendering in a distance, construction mode and near the sea
- But Fields are not visible in construction mode except ground color, which improved visibility when laying tracks
- Fixed visual glitch with noise of horizontal polygons of overlapping trees in construction mode
- Ground gravel/concrete are now visible in construction mode even behind far rendering distance
- Fields borders are now properly positioned in construction mode
- Fixed: map border glitch when using any overlay
Optimizations
- Removed some debug output which caused massive FPS drop
- Moved file streamer from sync to render thread (sync thread is critical for performance)
- Improved performance of shadows rendering (wrongly invalidated more cascades than needed)
- Optimized terrain chunk preparation on the CPU
- Optimized overlay map synchronization on the GPU
- Building updates are now distributed over multiple frame ticks
- Optimized vehicle bounding box computation
- Lowered GPU memory requirements by ~36MB
Fixes
- Fixed crash in overlay synchronization after map size change
- Camera angle properly oriented when switched into a building camera
- Building sounds are now per building part index, therefore can be multiple per building and react properly on part addition / removal or change by upgrade
- Music is now moddable (possible from zip)
- Modded industry upgrades properly enabled in its era
- Fixed removing of upgrade that only changed building part model appearance
- Fixed mod building upgrades rules
- Fixed consistency of autohealing invalid towns in savefiles when done on server or on client
- Fixed visibility of building upgrades in building window in editor
- Fixed multiplayer routelist crash
- Fixed "Plants out of bounds" assert / crash
- Fixed detection of vehicle standing on railroad crossroads (may missed collision detection before)
- Fixed partial autoheal after building lost its map representation (corrupt savefiles autohealing)
- Anticrash for loading animated model crash in drivers (have no idea, but instead of crashing the game, driver is skipped)
Some of you may have experienced drivers and pilots on the experimental branch a long time ago, but this update was stuck there due to a related driver crashes. I hope everything is clear now, if anything, let me know.
Regarding the 7th era, I'm missing some building models and balancing. We also plan to release end game quests and game changing mechanics when you reach the end game so you can enjoy your world afterwards. I need some more time to finish it, but in the meantime I'll be releasing more planes and the last pack of road vehicles, so stay tuned ;)
What I can already also announce is the demo, which we are finishing now!
Thank you for all your long time support and patience, we're slowly getting there! :)
Best regards,
Jan
