since we want to make patches available to you directly instead of handing it over to quality assurance before, we have created a separate Steam branch that you can activate on your own. This is so to speak a “branched off version” of the official version.
How to activate the “Public Test Version”:
[olist]
Steam will now add a download for TransRoad: USA to the download queue.
Generally speaking, savegames will not be downwards-compatible.
For example, the Public Test Version is v1.0.8b1, and these savegames will not be compatible with the v1.0.7 official version!
New features:
- Automatic maintenance is now implemented. Once your HQ is upgraded to level 3 (click on your HQ map marker and then the upgrade in the bottom-right), you can activate nationwide automatic maintenance in any depot. You don’t need a maintenance depot for that. All trucks will maintain themselves once they reach a 2,000 miles threshold.
- Contract deadlines now have a “day + hour” accuracy, meaning they will count down the hours and not just the days. Like this, it does not matter at what time of the day you accept a contract; you won’t loose multiple hours if you accept a contract late in the evening/night.
Contracts & Trucks:
- When a truck waited in the queue for a truckshop maintenance, it was possible to assign a different task to the truck. But it did not leave the maintenance queue, causing the queue not to continue correctly. This could result in trucks waiting endlessly in a truckshop’s maintenance queue.
- When you added contracts to a schedule and then instantly deleted the contract from the schedule, the trailer icon remained in that schedule. Now it disappears and the problem is solved.
- When a Special Contract appears, you can see the individual contracts in the lower right corner. Now you can scroll in this list while the “accept or decline” popup is opened.
- For recurring contracts, a buffer was added to the calculation for needed trucks, since it sometimes showed not enough trucks.
Depots:
- Drivers can now be switched directly inside the depot, instead of having to clear the slot first.
- Depot map markers are now all visible even when zoomed out: Your own depots, depots of the competitors, and depots that are still free to buy. You can toggle them by using the key [G] (directly next to the [F] that lets you cycle through all owned depots).
Other:
- Zooming in and out can now be done on the keyboard with [i] or [+] on the keypad for zooming in, and [o] or [-] on the keypad for zooming out.
- We fixed two cases where the colored lines on the roads that mark the currently hovered or selected route would not vanish.
- There is a new, more detailed explanation now on how to remove or unassign trucks from a contract (namely by dragging it from the truck fleet list or from the map onto a depot). This explanation is in the ingame manual (? button in the top right) in the chapter Schedules, Trucks and Depots. It is furthermore a tooltip on a “info i” icon in the truck info window, and in the truck list of a single accepted contract (click on a contract in your schedule to see that list).
- When clicking on a city map marker, the city info window in the lower right now also shows the reputation progress bar of every resident client. Hovering over it also gives you the exact reputation amount.
- When wanting to drop a truck onto a depot for transfer or maintenance, the respective drop zone on the right and on the left side of the depot now have a distinct highlight color, indicating more clearly where the drop zone is.
Current game freeze bug
We currently have a bug in the game that causes the whole game to freeze. This most often happens when you open the truck fleet list. Internally, the engine Unity tries to address a memory address where it does not find the correct data. That is why it might not happen on your PC, in your savegame, or with a previous version of the game, since the addresses always change.
This bug causes Unity to stop rendering the game’s visuals correctly, so it may look like this:
The screen might not change at all, though, every time it’s different.
Interestingly, the game keeps running in the background. If you have your speakers activated, you will continue to hear the music, and if there are trucks on the way, you will hear the money ka-ching sounds when they deliver their freight. You could even continue playing the game “blindly”, so if you click in the top-left corner for example, you will open the HQ menu. If you can open a contract list, you will see the mouse cursor changing from the pointed finger to opened hand when hovering over the area where the contracts should be.
We even had one user here in the forum that had the rare case where he saw all of the game’s visuals continuing to run. For him, only the truck list was invisible.
We have to report this bug to the engine developers at Unity once we have made sure that this is still a bug in the most recent engine versions.
Since the bug is related to drag and drop functions, we will try to change the internal handling of drag and drop in the meantime to get rid of it for now. It may reappear even though, until Unity fixes it.
This includes the contracts, the schedule, the depot, the truck map markers, and the truck list of an ongoing contract.
Plans for v1.2.0b2
For the next public test version, we will handle the freeze bug as described before.
Moreover, we are going to add the popular feature of sending your drivers to a license training, so you can “buy” more license for any driver.
This version will be available next week, so roughly speaking between January 15th and 19th.
