Map Editor with first set of custom maps is finally released! These are main features you can use to support your creativity:
Load / save so called "Scenarios" (it means custom maps, in the future, these will come with custom scripts as well).
Support for loading / saving height map, vegetation or humidity maps - you can obtain heightmap of any world location via this site https://terrain.party/. Place heightmaps to /heightmap/ location inside the game directory.
Generate initial terrain, industries, towns, trees by a single click in the editor, so you can quicky modify already populated maps.
GPU accelerated brushes able to generate various noises, modificate terrain, add / remove trees of colorize grass as well as healing brush after loading noisy heightmap, brush able to draw rivers and more.
Manually place, rename and grow towns or you can draw roads and place buildings to design town manually.
Manually place industry buildings so the game will generate them on these locations.
You may place also infrastructure including rails, bridges, tunnels, stations to create specific initial conditions.
You can add textual description to your map so everyone can read this before starting new game on your map.
Easily shareable
.mss files with each maps (located in /scenarios/ inside game directory).
First set of hand made maps (6 handcrafted maps for now, some of them comes with initial infrastructure to support your business start).
7000+ real towns locations and sizes for automatic placement (you need to set proper latitude / longitude of area chosen).
Many fixes and improvements, optimizations.
New steam engine "Elishka" :)
I am looking forward to see what creative people like you can create with these tools! Please share with us your maps and best of them accompanied with your name can make it into the next build update ;)
Have a great day!
Jan
Editor
Hello respected community!
It has been a loooong time, full of issues to solve, unclear plan estimates and I am so glad we can move further and finally release the Mashinky's map Editor!
Changelog is quite long, so I need to prepare it for you, but in few days, I will release editor update with these main changes:
Support for loading / saving height, vegetation or humidity maps
First set of hand made maps
7000+ real towns locations and size for automatic placement
Many fixes and improvements
New steam engine "Elishka"
It was not an easy task and I want to appologise to all of you for such delay. What started as a "hey, lets add possibility to load heightmap" to something rather complex requiring to rewrite some game parts (generating towns, industries, changing map size, dynamic ownership of map items etc.).
I've learned a lot and I will do my best to meantime ensure some content updates coming.
Full steam ahead!
I've also decided to focus on Mashinky and I will work on this game on full time starting next month! This should speed up the development radically. We can also switch back to content updates soon!
Thanks for all your patience, looking forward to see your creativity in the Editor and have a nice weekend!
Best,
Jan
So many good things happend recently :)
Hello respected community!
Editor is close to be finished and we are working on initial maps that will be available together with editor release (for those of you who are not looking forward to spend hours creating your own world, there will be prepared maps to let you benefit from editor release even if you don't use editor at all).
Meantime, quite many things happened meantime I want to share with you!
Czech - Slovak game of 2017
Once a year, the Czech Republic celebrates the best Czech-Slovak game for the past year. The general public decides in the largest survey and the results were announced March 14th 2018 in Prague. Mashinky got a nomination and I arrived to this festive announcement with my graphic artist. And guess what? Mashinky won!!
Now Mashinky is officially the best Czech - Slovak game for 2017!
It is a huge honor to me and the team and it gives us even more energy to work on the game. Also I want to thank you all who voted for us!
Family upgrade
My daughter was born on March 17th! I know it doesn't mean too much for Mashinky community, but since for me it is quite life-changing and it is also reason I was few days offline, I want to share with you also this great news :) Now I am proud father of this young beautiful lady Eliška ;)
Development speed up
The last but not least update I have for you is something I cannot announce yet, but in 2 months, I also plan to boost Mashinky development speed a lot, so stay tuned ;)
Best,
Jan
Brushes for editor #1 + #2
Hello respected community!
When I started to work on the Mashinky editor, my plan was pretty simple: to allow you to import custom heightmap and place towns where you want...
One month later, I was implementing filters, real town placement and enlargement tool, GPU-accelerated brushes or designing how industry could appear on the map when it's place is meantime occupied by player's infrastructure.
So many features needed let go of the fantasy when creating custom maps. And still it just scratched the surface.
There are many features finished, some more features to finish, but today, I am going to start small series about brushes.
#1 - Flatten. It is able to copy height easily.
#2 - Geo Noise. With this tool you can easily add random landscape where needed.
Best,
Jan
PC Gamer Weekender 2018
Hello respected community!
It has been few busy weeks, not only because of work on editor, but also due to preparation of my attendance on a great event called PCGamer Weekender in London. Only 2 days and I will be sitting in a plane flying over this beautiful country with such a strong train history.
I am writing this not only to apologize you guys for less updates or news about the game, but also to invite you:
If you happen to attend PC Gamer Weekender in London 17-18 February, visit me on stands D33+34 and talk together about games and also play Mashinky ;)
I am looking forward see you there!
Best,
Jan
Ongoing work on Editor
Hello respected community!
I am still working on editor and although it seems to be much bigger task than expected, I am sure that every extra hour of development saves a lot of time for all of you when modifying your maps.
I've switched to GPU accelerated 32bits terrain editing and add few extra filters for you. The WIP editor is now able to:
High level heightmap tools
This is the basic rough terrain creation.
Load / Save height maps from various image formats
Blur - blurring heightmap (it is like aging hills)
Median - removing noise (usefull when loading heightmap from file)
Voronoi - random tiles with different altitude
Voronoi slopes - random tiles with slopes
Gerstner sharpening - making walleys wider and mountains steeper
Water erosion - most powerfull tool for water eroding
Humidity
This affects color of grass.
Load / Save from file - using humidity mask for grass color
Generate drainage areas and humidity
Vegetation
Trees, forests.
Load / Save from file - using density masks for tree generating
Generate randomly according to density selected
Towns
This helps you to populate map quickly
Load from file - it is able to generate real towns with relative size according to chosen latitude & longitude (database with over 7000 real towns)
Manually grow / Delete / Rename towns
You can also place each building and road manually
It's still ongoing work and we need to complete it and test all the functions deeply, but the internal editor is now able to create quite nice terrain in a few clicks;)
Next stop: Brushes! :)
Stay tuned for few more days and soon you will be able to lay your hands on it too ;)
Upcoming Editor improvements
Hello respected community!
To get a little insight into what I'm working on, in one of the next updates you'll be able to use creativity and forge your custom maps ;)
And which part of the world will you create first :)?
New not-only-performance update
Hello respected community!
I've spent last few days trying to figure out why bigger map's performance is GPU-bound and having low fps. The reason seems to be more complex, but I identified one issue with distant terrain rendering and fixed terrain smooth geometrical loding "geomorphing" as well as lowered distance according to camera altitude. This gives you extra 15-20% of speed in cases where camera is in realistic mode close to the ground. Not much, but the game is even faster when low graphics settings used.
Other than this, there are few fixes, some 3D assets improvements and last but not least, there is one new song! And this one is really fantastic (kudos to Slikk Tim!)
Full changelog
Added: New song
Added: New HQ graphics
Added: New Refinery graphics
Added: Terrain far clipping according to altitude (performance)
Modified: Script - 15 years to third epoch
Modified: Shadow refresh frequency (performance)
Modified: New localized texts version
Fixed: Script - new era oil ico
Fixed: Signals remaining red in some cases
Fixed: Track to bridge discontinuity in some cases
Fixed: 2 Depots released 2 trains into one block
Fixed: Random UI Crash
Fixed: Invisible models for some station upgrades
Fixed: Improved Terrain loding (geomorphs, terrain distance, adaptive distance via camera altitude) (performance)
Removed: Editor buttons cleanup
Best,
Jan
Chain signals!
Hello respected community!
It is unbelievable, but today, it is already 1/4 of a year from the EA release. It has been awesome 3 months with the best community I would ever dream of and I want to say THANKS to all of you!
Although it has been finished very recently, today we did our best to deliver the new feature to you, CHAIN SIGNALS.
Hope you will like it and create even more awesome rail networks!
Best,
Jan
Audio improved
Hello respected community!
Some of you may already recognised small changes in last 2 days without any announcement. I've realised that due to some issues, I should focus on fixing all of them before sharing all good news with you. Now, it is finally solved so here you can see the changelog.
It is mostly about sounds. Missing sounds, not balanced music tracks, the same sound for all 3 diesel engines... These issues has been sorted out as well as many other bugs!
Full changelog is here:
Added
Second Diesel engine sound set
Modified
Enter when typing new save game will save the game immediately if does not exists yet
Captions above industry buildings show correct number of inputs / outputs per tick
Music tracks volume balanced
Improved sound attenuation via distance and improved listener position in sharp mode, optimized sound manager workload
Saves now stores 10-years statistics instead of just 3
New localized texts version
Fixed
Wagon loads non-sense amount of cargo (like 100/8)
Playing short sounds (like "click")
Renaming train when inside
Trace log spamming
Remove bridge when there is a train on it
Wrong tokens obtained when cheating
Sounds missing
Crash fix when loading old savegame with obsolete wagon ids(edited)
