Update 004: Track Switching

Update 004 Topics

• Track Switching (long winded)

• Auto Testing

Track Switching 🔀

One cool aspect of developing Railborn is the unique design challenges we come across. One of these seemed trivial at first, but became more complicated as we started to conjure up the answer: how does the player switch tracks?

A couple of challenges:

• Life would be simpler if Railborn’s train had a “front” – like Zelda Spirit Tracks. But – since we allow piece by piece building of your train, you decide what is the “front”, not us! Therefore, when we present the player “left” or “right” what is this all relative to?

• UI! How do we present the player the UI to switch tracks? Again, most games would probably pop up an interactive menu – but again, we want players to have the ability to build their train's controlling components piece by piece in the location they choose. Making your own cockpit is cool.

So how do we do this? Track Switcher

The Track Switcher is a built item that has a digital display. The player can switch it to go left, straight or right. The display will always show the upcoming intersection path options.

How do we tell you what is the next intersection? Alright – we’re trying out an in-world icon that displays the distance and path choices so you have an idea of what’s coming up. In the example below you can see next intersection is in 48 meters, and one can go left or straight.

Switching in action

Let’s get weird. So here, you can see the train changing what it considers “front” depending on the direction of travel.

So, what happens when your Track Switcher is facing the opposite direction of what your train thinks is front (again remember, front changes with direction of travel). Well – the display on the Track Switcher will always display the upcoming intersection in the direction of travel.

Let’s see this in action:

If that seems a bit too tricky for you – we have an easy solution (which I use) – it is to build another Track Switcher facing the other direction! All your track switchers synchronize direction, so now deciding which way to go is much simpler. Check it out:

This is what we have in mind, although once your, the Early Access brave souls get your hands on Railborn, might change.

Auto Testing 🧪

Well, this wouldn’t be an update post if there wasn’t a boring technical part. We have set up a slick little system that builds the Railborn after every check-in to our repository. We then automatically load up Railborn on our trusty old laptop equipped with a 1660 Ti - our minimum spec target.

The test performs a few in-game operations then spits back the performance with respect to FPS, Draw calls, GPU usage, along with a few other nifty benchmarks (below). This is really handy because it lets us know which new addition to the game caused a performance hitch. It easily can be that performance suffers from a feature or addition you had no idea would be a problem. Anyway, here is a chart of our last 20 check-ins. 😊

Note cells that turn red are over our threshold for our minimum spec target and that build should be investigated.

As always, please shoot out our game link to some friends for a Wishlist or two 😊