Official wiki and mod specification released

Today the official Transport Fever Wiki and mod specification were released.

The >Wiki< gives background information about Transport Fever’s construction features, management options, game world and campaign. Also, there is a beginner’s guide with tips and tricks. Because the Wiki can be extended by the community we expect that it becomes a comprehensive source of information in future.

The Urban Games team is impressed by the amount and quality of mods already released in the >Steam Workshop<. To further motivate and support development of mods, we have published >a modding specification< as part of the official Wiki. As an example mod, we are excited to provide >a curved train station<.

In addition, we have released a tool to facilitate modding. With the >Model Viewer<, modders can preview their models and test features like animations, dynamic aging, coloring, logos, passenger load and more. There is also a feature to automatically create screenshots and GUI icons of vehicles.

This said, we wanted to let you know that development on Transport Fever continues and there will be additional patches. Based on the huge amount of feedback we get, we try to improve Transport Fever also in the future.

We say thanks for your interest and continue working hard so that we can release a next patch soon!

Robustness patch released

Today a major robustness patch has arrived. The patch includes both bug fixes and game-play improvements.

Please find the complete release notes >here<.

On the one hand, the patch solves a list of stability and compatibility issues. Most of the crashes that occurred randomly, at the end of a month or upon user interaction are solved now. Also, most of the crashes that occurred on startup or during initialization due to specific system configurations have been addressed. However, note that still it’s of upmost importance to update your graphics drivers to the latest version available.

On the other hand, the patch brings a list of game-play improvements to clear some common misunderstandings. Examples include more accurate visualization of station catchment areas, a maximal waiting time for vehicles set to full load mode, or a new warning to display that an industry has stopped production because its output stock is full.

Finally, there are additional improvements, like a more stable display resolution change mechanism or an optimized terrain tool. Also, translations have been improved, and, thanks to great community efforts, both Simplified and Traditional Chinese were added as new languages.

For sure Transport Fever will receive additional updates, including the already announced major performance patch which is currently work in progress. At this point we also wanted to emphasize that we are aware that still there are compatibility issues on certain Mac OS X systems which we address with highest priority. If you still encounter problems, please don’t hesitate to write us to info@transportfever.com; we are happy to help.

We hope that the newest patch improves your game experience and send the best wishes!

Post release plans

The Urban Games team is very happy about the successful launch last week and is now ready to share the post release plans with the community.

Not only did Transport Fever reach the global top seller spot one on Steam, it also received great review scores like, as an example, 83% in the very popular GameStar magazine. The only thing we don’t feel completely happy about is the current Steam review score with “only” about 7 people really happy out of 10. From our analysis we have identified three key challenges: technical issues on launch day, misunderstandings (or lack of explanation) concerning game-play mechanics and performance problems.

Based on this, let us present our post release plans. First, we will release another patch to fix the few remaining crashes and clarify the game-play mechanics. For instance, there are some inconsistencies with the catchment area of stations, and running lines with vehicles waiting for full load is sometimes destroying the line frequency, which then leads to industries stopping production. Also, it seems to be unclear that industries with full output stocks stop their production, so a player has to be informed when only a part of an industry chain is connected.

Once the game is running stable for everyone, we will focus on improving the performance. We understand that performance is suboptimal in certain cases, heavily depending on graphics hardware, but generally in the late game. Therefore, we plan to release a major performance update to address these issues.

After that, for sure we will continue improving Transport Fever. We are very happy to have such a great community of players and fans, and we really feel responsible to support the game also in future and give something back to the community.

Let us also to tell you that soon we will release a documentation about modding; Transport Fever was designed modding-friendly from the very beginning and thanks to Steam Workshop support there is huge modding potential available.

Finally, we wanted to point out again that if you encounter any technical problems, please don’t hesitate to write us to info@transportfever.com; we are happy to help!