Iron Log #29 - Choo choo 🚂

I want to start off by saying thank you to everyone who’s supported the game in one way or another. It is incredibly exciting to see people playing and talking about it. Two YouTube creators dropped videos recently that were so fun to watch! I am sharing these videos at the end of the dev log if you want to check them out. The game has come a long way in a year and I’m grateful for all the support 💙. Can’t wait to see what it looks like in another year.

Development

A few weeks ago I released a private experimental build on Steam with some big changes. If you missed it you can read more about it in the last dev log. Members of the Discord have been a huge help finding and reporting bugs.

Since then I have been working on a big update to trains. It’s taking a little longer than I expected but I hope it’ll be worth the wait.

Let’s take a look at what’s to come in the next update…

Driving Trains

Coming in this next update you will be able to drive trains manually. You can take control by switching the train into manual driving mode and click a button in the UI. The camera does not switch over to following the train so you probably want to hop aboard first! This is just a first pass at manually driving the trains so I'm always open to feedback.

Train Collisions

Trains can now collide with one another and derail. I’m still tweaking the speed and physics of them so let me know what you think. I hope it’s not too destructive but I want trains to feel like they have some weight and the impact is meaningful if you don’t set them up right. Once a train derails you’ll have to go dismantle the parts and rebuild it. I know at first it’ll be a pain to reconfigure the schedules but I have an idea that will make that part easier, more to come soon!

Signals

In order to prevent trains from crashing into one another you’ll need to place signals along the tracks. Block Signals and Path Signals allow you to divide up the tracks into segments that only allow one train to occupy them at a time. Block Signals work by only looking at the train that occupies them and turns red when a train exists. Path Signals look ahead to the next Block Signal and take the state of that. This allows for complex intersections while also remaining somewhat familiar if you’ve played similar games.

The ground work for signals is done but there are many tweaks I still need to make and I’m sure there are bound to be a few bugs.

And more

I’ve also made track placement easier and more intuitive. I’ve added visual effects showing when items are being loaded into the cargo wagons. For performance reasons only 1 item type will be show, so if the wagon has multiple items only the first slot will show and it might not look correct. Something I want to fix if I have more time. I plan to add a fluid wagon to transport liquids/gases but I don’t want to delay this update much longer so that might be in a smaller update after this next one.

Community

Like I said at the beginning, these are the YouTube videos from a couple creators.

As always, thanks for reading and head over to discord to learn more https://discord.gg/xmmPeZHj4T