News Liste Art of the Rail

Devblog #1: Testing... lots of Testing!
Art of the Rail
02.06.21 14:08 Community Announcements
The key focus on the project so far has been to really ensure that the game can scale. That's been very important, so that's meant a lot of testing followed by refactors. Not only do I need to ensure the game is able to render thousands and thousands of objects (sometimes in multiple cameras!) but I need to be able to synchronize all their states; both to disk and any clients!

Progress on Modding Tools



Additionally I've been slowly expanding the modding tools available for the game. All the game data itself is actually loaded as a mod, so anyone will be able to do this. But I'm also putting a lot of editor tooling in the game to make it much easier for people to make mods.



Dedicated Server Testing



I've been testing quite a lot with dedicated server files as well. Currently issues are mainly occurring due to FPS differences between clients and servers. Solving this is causing me a slight headache! Nevertheless at the studio we have been having some successful (and very fun) multiplayer sessions.



New Trains, Industries, and More



We've got Petr and a contract artist working on lots of new content for the game as well, so we have a lot of new industries, trains, and vehicles already flowing into the game. Expect to see more and more in the screenshots as the weeks go on.



Next Steps



Lots more testing. Performance is excellent and network bandwidth will support very large numbers of units. Some more work needs to be done "virtualizing" the splines more. I've tested over 4,000 of them with no issue, but realistically the game needs to support over 60,000 of them. Additionally, some rendering cleanup in terms of occlusion culling is important too.

The big ticket item is to continue the early stage work I've done with cities. Expect to see the cities in all their glory in the next update!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286190/Art_of_the_Rail/