Update log
Full Railroader update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello Railroaders!
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Maps
- UI and audio
- Balance
On Monday, March 3rd, we are finally bringing our work on the Experimental branch to everybody! Those of you who have not opted into the Experimental branch will finally experience Auto Engineer Waypoint Mode, Timetables (if you so choose), new engines, and more!
We will remove the experimental-2024.6 branch at this time. If you wish to delay updating to 2024.6, you can switch to the 2024.5.x branch which is currently available, but note that we plan to remove the 2024.5.x branch on Monday, March 17th.
Thank you to the many of you who played the experimental branch and shared your feedback with us. You've been a huge help in improving Railroader. If you're already on the experimental branch you don't need to change anything before Monday: when we remove it you will be moved to the main release. We plan to create a new experimental branch at some point in the future.
For those of you who haven't been on the experimental branch, here are some of the highlights of what to expect in 2024.6 when it releases:
Auto Engineer Waypoint Mode
The most game-changing feature in 2024.6 is Auto Engineer Waypoint Mode. Waypoint Mode lets you give your Auto Engineer (AE) a point on the track, and it will route itself to that location, lining switches along the way! You can perform a run-around in just a few clicks, or send a train out of the yard and straight to a customer track, miles away.
While Waypoint mode is very powerful, there are some limitations:
AEs can not negotiate meets with other trains; you still need to act as dispatcher, either by setting incremental waypoints or using CTC.
Along the same lines, AEs may "fight" over switches if they have conflicting routes.
If you haven't used it yet, we think you'll find Waypoint Mode makes a huge difference in your ability to scale your operations, which is why we've invested so much in this feature over the past few months.
Other Auto Engineer Changes
Another new feature for Auto Engineers is Notices, a new UI element that lets the AE notify you when something is wrong, or when it has completed its instructions. Notices appear in the upper right corner of your screen and help make you aware of when an AE reaches its waypoint, a fusee, or can't move because of a handbrake, switch against it (Road/Yard mode), and so forth.
In 2024.6 we've moved all AE control to the HUD (lower left) -- the Auto Engineer Orders tab has been removed from the locomotive inspector. We know the Orders tab is preferred by some players, but with adding a new AE mode we had reached a point where maintaining two different UIs for the same thing was not practical. We'll be looking at ways to make it easier to control an AE engine without selecting it for a future release.
We've also made numerous other refinements and enhancements to the Auto Engineers, including making hard couples less likely, reducing some of the "padding" distances to make it easier to get right up to the end of track, and treating intermediate signals as Stop and Proceed. The default minimum passenger stop duration has been changed to one minute, and can now be set as low as 30 seconds in Settings. Additionally, MU now works better with steam MU'd to diesel and vice-versa.
Timetables
Timetables are a new, advanced, and optional feature in 2024.6. By creating a timetable in the in-game editor
Source