Hello Railroaders!
Today we are sharing what we've been up to since the release of 2024.6.11 back in March. We've been focused on two big features/efforts: Maintenance of Way and an enhanced tutorial.
Before we go into it, please keep in mind that this is all "work in progress" and may change dramatically between now and when it is released to you!
Maintenance of Way
Maintenance of Way is a big part of running a railroad, and we think the gameplay of Railroader will be made that much richer by representing it. In addition, for quite some time now we've had some visual ideas we've been wanting to try out, including dynamically changing the track and surrounding vegetation to reflect condition and maintenance. It's pretty exciting to see these ideas finally in action.
It's too soon to go into full detail about where we want to take this feature as we are still testing and developing it, but the general idea is that like your equipment, track will take wear and require maintenance. Track that's in poor condition will have speed restrictions.
Maintaining track will require running a MoW train consisting of a work car and material cars (for example, gondolas filled with ballast, ties, and rail). The work car will consume the resources (purchased similarly to how fuel is currently purchased) and repair nearby track.
We're also picturing that you'll be able to control the class the MoW train maintains track to. For example, you could keep your main line sparkling while the sidings and branches receive minimal maintenance. Or allow the entire railroad to gracefully languish!
Revamping The Tutorial
Making a good tutorial is hard. We put a lot of work into Railroader's tutorial prior to our initial release, and while we know that it could be better, until now we haven't felt that we had the time to invest in it to take it to the next level.
We have a lot of information to share with new players, but we want to do it in a way that is more interactive, gives better feedback to the player, and allows them to learn about Railroader in smaller chunks. Getting to this point, which is still very much a work in progress, has taken a lot of work, but we think it will be worth it!
Here's one of the new tutorial pages:
One of the cool things about the new tutorial is that it is built in Lua. We first started experimenting with Lua in Railroader early this year when we used it to write a suite of tests for the Auto Engineer. It's been fun to build this functionality out, as well as think about how it might be used by modders in the future.
Wrap-Up
We're also continuing to work on model updates, scenery, and bug fixes, but MoW and the tutorial are the two big (really big!) features we've been working on. We don't currently have an estimate of when the next update will be available, but we do expect to release MoW on an experimental branch, possibly as an optional feature, and look forward to hearing your feedback on it. Thank you for reading, and for your support!