More info on the upcoming gameplay patch

The Urban Games team is working with full steam to complete the upcoming gameplay patch. Official release of the patch is scheduled for Wednesday, July 26.

Highlights of the patch include non-disappearing people and cargo when upgrading streets or stations, waypoints for street vehicles, an option to explicitly select a line’s track/terminal at stations, an upgrade to ships so that they can carry more than one type of cargo, an unload only feature for vehicles and less collision problems thanks to much better terrain alignment collision handling.

Visual and user interface improvements include tunnels that now actually cut the terrain so that you can see through, a confirmation dialog when bulldozing large structures, colored vehicle icons in the line manager when using specific colors for vehicles, sliders for music volume etc. and more.

Finally, we fulfill several modding requests like a line break feature for construction parameter windows, consistent street, track, and bridge resources so that new types can be added to existing save games, a new track upgrade feature when using modded tracks, better support for creating advanced constructions which combine multiple game features and more complete animation possibilities for ships and planes.

As always, several bug fixes and small improvements complete the patch.

Part of the patch is already available for beta testing. Information on how to test can be found in the “Testing version” paragraph >in the Wiki<.

Thanks for your interest in Transport Fever. We look forward to bringing this patch live soon!

Posted in News.

Tom (Community Manager)

Community and Project Manager at Urban Games

22 Comments

  1. The features in the beta patch are working nicely and very welcome. Real tunnels are a nice visual improvement, but the passengers/cargo not disappearing on upgrades is a big deal. The ability to assign specific platforms is also very useful. The multi-cargo ships is also something I’ve wanted a long time.

    There are still a number of long-standing bugs, such as trains reversing themselves on station/line changes. Even worse, since the patch (possibly related to specific-platform line assignment?) I’ve seen a train in a station somehow end up going down the wrong track, blocking trains on both routes, and not noticing this until hundreds of people are waiting in the station. I would really like to see a warning triggered if all the trains on a route are “waiting free path” which likely indicates a deadlock condition.

    Performance, however, is still kind of painful. I’d trade all the future new features for real multi-threaded performance. I’m suffering at ~5fps at 8% CPU usage. I fully understand the complexities of multithreaded programming, but it really really really needs to be done. A naïve observation without knowing the underlying issues would seem that it would be ideally suited to split the 50k citizens in my world equally among the [cores-1] unused CPU cores, leaving the primary core to do essential game core stuff. Obviously not as simple as that, but it needs to happen. Please.

    • I agree 100%.

      Not disappearing people or cargo is really huge and reversing trains (even when making changes while paused) is probably the biggest flaw still in the game. Also performance could be better.

      I really like this game. My main remaining realistic wish (non-realistic wish would be adding AI competition) would be a reworking of pricing mechanisms (why should you be paid according to max theoretical speed? why should you be paid for a straight distance between segments when you can zigzag at will to increase price ?) or of the whole economic model (infrastructure costs too less – especially on maintenance – and wagons too much in running costs, since there is no competition it is beneficial to transport cargo from the farthest point possible and be paid much more than transporting them from near industries , planes and boats are not that useful,…). After a rough start (in hard difficulty), the game becomes too boring and easy.

      • I forgot to mention another wish. Would it be possible to make the streets (at least those with the same number of lanes) the same width ? It is annoying to be forced to continue a two lane road with a larger two lane road or to be unable to convert some roads without destroying all the buildings nearby…

  2. Hello! Is there something else to be applied in-game later? Maybe distant future plans? There is some things, which can be made in vanilla game core to improve the user experience.

    Besides multithreading performanse, there is still some little bugs, for example: somehow it is possible to build docks just over pier or harbor. Looks like dock don’t have a collision at the water side. Vehicle selected colour doesn’t persist, if vehicle was automatically upgraded to new.
    And duplicating B button and N button to mouse wheel left-right tilt can make the game controlled without keyboard entirely.

    What’s the point to freely toggle on/off on railroad x-crossing? Maybe make that: 1) this upgrade costs money; 2) impossible to revert, only destroy with “bulldozer” tool (become unselectable after upgrade).
    With this upgrade mechanics, pedestrian crosswalk over 4-lane and 6-lane crossing roads should be made upgradeable into underground crosswalk (maybe available after year 2000) to fight traffic jams.

    Railroad tracks sticks to other tracks. They even sticks to automobile roads. So, make roads sticks to roads! With addition of one-way roads it would be a great deal for making highways, or even tramway going alongside automobile roads (with combination of tram tracks and dedicated bus-line). Oh, yes, at one-way roads there should be only one tram track (if upgraded to tram line), isn’t it?

    May be adding unloading posts (like bus stops, but for trucks) looks like a excess decorativeness, but it helps with immersion.
    For immersion, in my opinion, it would also be good if aged vehicle (when changing for new automatically) follow “send to depot and sell” logic, and a new vehicle appears from nearest depot, then add itself to the line. Instead of magically converting itself in new vehicle right at station.

    How about adding some parks and squares to growing cities? Buildings passable from one side to another (from road to road) only by pedestrians. Or maybe even as a road itself, but only for pedestrians – with this, player can made even railroad crosswalks. I know, there was a mod-contest winner with this idea. Why not implement this by default?

    And last, but not least. Cargo trucks with changeable trailers. So player can buy a tank trailer, and add it to box truck, for example. Like a railway coaches, depending on cargo, but on the road. Of course, I am looking for possible Australia add-on with their “roadtrains”.

    I personally would agree for paid DLC with additional transport sets of other countries as donation system to UG.

    Best regards.

    Nikolai.

  3. The station enhancements and extra optimization for routes is excellent. The one issue that I have been having issues with is the way roads work. Stoplights and divided highways and exits would greatly enhance the non train transportation. Aside from that, the game is progressing nicely.

  4. I still wonder if it may be possible in a future patch to make the railroad crossing make a sound when it’s closing/opening
    It may be a small detail but I think when you have the option for no sound or sound who you can edit and upload as a mod, it can make a nice difference for realism.

  5. About the railroad track in the underground.
    1. I want a layer button to hide buildings and roads on the ground.
    2. Constructing a downhill railroad and constructing a railroad to ‘underground’ will create a big depression in the boundary between the ground and the underground. Please make tunnel parts like ‘entrance to underground’.

      • Basically it would be cool, if we could just build a bridge directly from ground level, and not have the game force the embankments untill the track is x meters high above ground. This would have to come with narrowing the bridges a bit, because if you have two tracks near each other, the bridge graphic is glitching into each other.

  6. I cannot still use several platforms for the same line. A line with 10 trains, will always use the same platform in the station even if 5 trains are waiting to enter the station and the other platforms are free.

    I’m really hoping a change on this system could be implemented.

    However i welcome the platform selection thing. its just takes out the troiuble of creating waypoints an the entrance of each station platform.

  7. Ja, hallo erstmal. Bin auch schon einige Zeit dabei, tolles Spiel, aber an dem Algorythmus, wo die Fabriken stehen, sollte vllt. auch noch was optimiert werden. Warum sind die oft so weit weg von den Ressoure´cen?

  8. The improvements are very welcome, and I don’t want to sound intrusive, but the attention should now turn to performance. I feel many of us are ok without a major update for a while in exchange for better performance. In order to maintain moral in the player base, updates could be posted to let us know, or find a way to engage the community with issues, poll or survey. Once performance is enhanced, that would leave a great stepping stone for possible DLCs or major updates. Anyways, great job and pleae don’t take this the wrong way as an insult.

  9. Thank you for the non-disappearing cargo. I’ve been playing less than two weeks, and this by far has been one of the most aggravating things affecting game play, for me – deciding whether or not to tweak a rail station that has 600 units of crude oil sitting in it, e.g. to add catenaries or another track. I need the catenaries for the next train I’m gonna buy, but adding them will effectively cost me 50 million in lost revenue. Yeah I’ll get it back, but it really sucks to lose it over something like that.

    I have two wishes, both relatively minor, I think, for the future.

    1. A compass. Seems I can only tell which way is “North” is by plopping a truck stop or something until one gets auto-named “North xxx” or so. Can’t I just have a little translucent compass somewhere? Maybe an option to disable it, of course… I’m a big fan of options. See #2.

    2. Let me disable the “new vehicle notification” window. Actually it would be awesome if I can disable/enable -each- notification. As a newb I definitely appreciated the notifications. Now… well, I am still a newb, but I get the mechanics well enough that e.g. I don’t really need notifications about old vehicles, or new ones for that matter. I’m mindful of aging vehicles, and the only time I really yell at this game is when I’m busy working out a great rail line and get interrupted by “hey, check out this awesome new ship” popping down in my face, sometimes right where I’m trying to put a piece of track. I also hate “check out this new locomotive that’s 3x better than the one you JUST BOUGHT.” Ok, that one’s just bad luck, but it wouldn’t tick me off as much if it wasn’t being thrown in my face. 🙂 Anyway, I’ll see new vehicles when I go to buy one.

    Ah… 2b) sorry, just remembered this – in the buy window, please include the -length- of the individual locomotives and wagons! I like my trains to fit the stations. Even if it doesn’t actually matter (yet?), if one car is half hanging off the end of the platform, I may just live with it. But I can’t decide what combo of locomotive and wagons will suit my needs and still fit without trying to buy them first. Yeah, I can see the total train length, but if I’m short on funds I can’t “plan ahead” for an entire new train. Maybe I’ll borrow 5M to buy it, I don’t want to borrow 5M just to see if it’s what I want though.

    One not-so-minor thing perhaps, it would be great if all new towns – when creating a free game – have just one little truck stop already in them. As it stands, half the time I start a new game I end up having to smash existing stuff to put one in. Never mind how much I hate “eminent domain,” I’ve just started out, often in 1850, and using the limited funds to smash a couple expensive shops and factories just doesn’t seem fair, but there’s (almost) never a good open space to put one down.

    t would also be nice if they had optional appearances. E.g.the current models are fine as drop-off/pickup platforms by industries, but what about an actual warehouse? In town it’s almost obvious (in fact, at least one campaign features a warehouse). Outside town… well, I’ve learned I can drop a truck stop next to nothing and send different lines to it – like an actual transfer hub i.e. warehouse. But the existing models kinda look like hell for that. Yeah, modders can do and probably have done this, but a vanilla option would be good, e.g. a small warehouse about the same size as the large truck stop, and maybe a large one with about the same footprint as an industry.

    Ok, that was two things, I suppose. 🙂

    I haven’t run into performance problems others complain about, but I’ll chalk that up to being a newb and not really having a large-ish map with hundreds of lines running… yet.

  10. It would be good if the map generation actually had some options in it like increase/decrease number of cities/industries and also increase the amount of waterways.

    There seems to be a modern thing of moving away from decent map generators and instead relying on pre-built maps instead.

  11. Is there any advance in Timetables? If there are more vehicles on one route and you spread them through the line, than the last will catch the first in some time and that is the problem.

  12. Fixes and upgrades are very welcome, but there are still numerous serious issues. As others have commented, vehicles turning around is possiblly the most serious.

    As I just replaced my (not game-capable) laptop with a Surface Pro, I discovered another major flaw. It is not possible to change the size of UI items and fonts. On my desktop, there is no problems using a 2560 pixel wide 32″ display. On the Surface Pro, I get 2735 pixels on a 12″ display. That makes the target icons smaller than the tip of my pen. TF is just barely playable with a lot of patience.

    Since I am nearsighted, the tiny text font is readable. It is, however, hardly clickable or selectable. These days, one must expect that users can have any display size from 5″ to 50″, and design the UI sufficiently flexible to adapt to any of them.

  13. Can we get People to take any line heading to there destination IE I have 4 tram lines leading to my train station and as they get close they serve the same 3 stops which are always very crowded as some big building have spawned around them, but everyone seems to wait for one of the lines over the other 3 that pass through those stops when they could really get on any.

  14. Hallo,
    ihr habt mir eine Menge an Wünschen erfüllt, die ich mir als Verbesserung für dieses Spiel erhofft habe. Ich habe gerade eine Map auf der ich eine große Umstellung vornehmen möchte – es ist einfach grandios dabei nicht Passagiere und Waren zu verlieren! Schon lohnt sich der Patch und die Spielfreude steigt!
    Und dan nächste geht Ihr auch schon an – die viel gewünschte Performance!
    Danke Ihr seid wirklich “nah” an Euren Kunden – macht weiter so!
    LG schotterpilot

Leave a Reply to James Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *