Garbage Feature & Content update

Today Mashinky got an unexpected update and was expanded with waste management.

What had started as a side idea to support the upcoming 7th era, has quickly become a fully functional and balanced update, and we had so much fun testing it.

The idea was simple - to create some twist, some cargo that is treated differently than all other types of cargo. In this case, the cargo "Garbage" is produced by each building on the last level (skyscrapers), and it has a negative effect: Filling the station with it turns off the production rule of these buildings (they will stop generating passengers).

You need to transport this cargo away from the cities and get rid of it somehow.

You cannot remove the garbage easily, but you may either - transport it far from town centers and use landfills (station upgrade) - extend the Coal power plant with the Waste burner so you can burn the garbage and produce electricity out of it (but coal power plant will gain larger pollution zone, so be aware) - or you can invest to the Waste processing facility and either get rid of some amount of the garbage, or extend with the Incinerator and produce electricity while burning it. This facility will have way more upgrades in 7th era once released. - extend your station with sorting containers to lower the garbage catchment area

To better understand where trash affects your cities, I've not only added a new city overlay color, but trash can be seen over the city, littering the streets and buildings.

Once a building loses its ability to generate new passengers, it will appear dark and abandoned. This way you can easily identify the problem and start thinking about how you can make your cities clean and fresh again.

If you want, both visual guides can be disabled in the settings.

You'll have a wide range of options for transporting garbage, either by rail or road, because there are new types of garbage wagons and cars in the game.

Garbage will been around since Era 6, so for those who haven't reached that era yet, the update also brings a lot of improvements and fixes. Let's put the complete changelog here:

Changelog

Garbage

• Highest building levels produce garbage

• Station having too much of a garbage produces garbage area around

• Garbage area limits some town building functionality

• Player can transport garbage out of a town (and either stack it in the land fills or use it in the recycling plant or in the incinerator upgrade near the coal power plant)

• Added 2 garbage trucks and 2 garbage wagons

• Garbage area is also visualized over buildings and infrastructure (littered trash all around). This can be turned off in setup.

• Disabled buildings are now visually abandoned. This can be also turned off in setup.

Quality of life

• Disabling rules in buildings (in multiplayer, it affects only your company so others can still benefit from these rules)

• Rotation / movement cursor (compass and relative position in the map tile)

• Filters in industry overlay, showing producers and consumers easily.

• Stars where new items (buildings, wagons, locos, track types etc.) appear

Rendering

• TXAA, temporal antialiasing improves edges and screen noise

• Anisotropic filtering, this makes textures appear sharper, more detailed.

• Sharpening post effect, automatically applied to compensate some TXAA smoothness. Also makes screen appear sharper

• Shadows in construction mode. This gives construction mode a lot more plasticity and eye candies :)

Optimizations

• Precaching shadowing objects for render thread

• Improved Terrain frustum culling

• Caching signals interconnections for faster update once cached

• Better frame profiler marks (allowing search for script peaks as well)

• Speed up loading a bit (by skipping reloading mods when not needed)

• Crash and performance wasting solved in building-rules-enabled checks

Fixes

• Vehicles stuck together

• Floating point in vehicle window engine running costs

• When station cargo rating drops to zero, no draining is applied until either: User disallow station from producing cargo or there is another station around having positive cargo and allowing station to produce the cargo

• Anisotropic filtering also for vegetation

• Possibility to skip mod requirements when saving scenario in editor

• Improved trains path-finding ignores signals behind first destination (still need valid path to the second destination)

• Derailed trains / vehicles without reason

• Rare multithread crash when watching create or join company window while company value updated

• Crash when interacting with depot window

• Building rule is automatically disabled if no station around accepts products (this way you can selectively enable / disable building rules)

• Fixed missing map icon when train has no name

• Sometimes placing signals tool doesn't show arrows properly

• Showing cargo amount in building/stop part

• Electric wires rendering

• "Useless vehicle message" can be aggregated

• Wall under the food shop

• Snow mask consistency between hipoly and lowpoly

• Added possibility to skip Splash window forever

• Default first signal is one-way (except easy difficulty)

• Path highlight on proper road side (mostly on bridges)

• Road sharp step issue when road connected to a bridge

• Snow mask on road suspension bridge and rail steel arched bridge

• Building model also change when limited by garbage to visualize the issue

• Icon above building (in town overlay) and building info window showing limitation by garbage

• Luxury upgrade tip not visible until proper era

• Loading of stations not having a single tile will disable them (some rare mods on/off circumstances)

• Highest level of city buildings and luxury areas moved to 6th era

Again, thanks a lot for your patience and support!

After the summer - partly in the woods with my family - I am again full on development. We are finishing some airplanes assets & mechanics, 7th era is shaping great (having some of industries and monorail fully functional), steam workshop has 400+ totally awesome items and community is growing... Thank you for the possibility to be part of such awesomeness :).

Have a great day,

Jan