Hello Railroaders!
Today we are happy to share our progress on the Maintenance of Way (MoW) update we've been hard at work on. We knew this was going to be a big update, and as we have playtested and iterated on MoW that has certainly proven true. It's also driven us to revisit some aspects of Railroader's milestone progression and the map itself.
We think it's important to note that none of this has happened in a vacuum, so to speak. Since we announced that we were working on MoW we've received tons of great ideas and feedback. Thank you! This is one of those features that makes it challenging to balance wide open vision with what we can make real, and will mesh with the rest of the game.
In our last update on MoW we shared that you'll use ballast, ties, and rail to maintain your tracks. One thing we didn't share at that time was our thinking on how the core MoW mechanic of the work train would be a very cool way to do construction milestones. Instead of spotting a few batches of cars next to the missing track, what if you had to purchase and supply loads to the work train as it made its way down the line? This is the direction we're taking for the MoW update, and we're very excited about the richness and challenge it adds to Railroader.
The Price of Ballast: A Historical Reference Point
What loads are needed to rebuild the Ela bridge? Or build from Bryson Bridge to Alarka Junction? We dug into our sources, textbooks and historical records including the Tennessee Valley Authority and Southern Railway's own historical numbers for rebuilding the line to come up with the "at the time" resources. Based on those numbers we estimated the loads to build the 13 miles of railroad between Bryson and Fontana Lake and came up with:
22 cars of rails
139 cars of ties
1,429 cars of ballast
Total load cost: $335,039
Well. As exciting as it was to imagine moving 1,590 cars to and from the interchange, we decided that for the vast majority of players this was not anywhere in the realm of realistic or practical. By scaling those numbers we've arrived at car counts and costs that are both practical and substantial:
10 cars of rails
20 cars of ties
200 cars of ballast
Total load cost: $15,080
(Note that for simplicity I've omitted costs and loads to construct the bridges in these example milestones.)
Keep in mind that we are still very much in the development/playtesting phase and these numbers are almost guaranteed to change before we release the MoW update, but we wanted to give you an idea of what we're thinking about. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.
Rethinking Milestones and The Map
Rethinking the milestones in terms of construction materials has also caused us to rethink the boundaries of those milestones, and even the reward for accomplishing a milestone, which is generally satisfaction of reaching a goal and access to more customers. We understand that for many players the western end of the map, with its lower customer density and heavy grades, may be too much to tackle. To address this we are making the following adjustments:
Changing the Bryson Bridge to Fontana milestone to run only as far as Alarka Junction, and adding a second milestone from Alarka Junction (past the spur to Robinson Gap) to Almond. The Nantahala milestone will begin after Almond.
Dramatically reworking Nantahala Talc & Limestone at Hewitt to provide more traffic.
Adding an interchange and small freight house at Almond. (This is a big one. We have wanted to do something like this for a long time now.)
Others?
Our goal in making these changes is to provide more options for your railroad, as well as to make expansion more rewarding.
Below: expanded Nantahala Talc & Limestone with placeholder scenery buildings.
Speed Restriction Signage and Other Challenges
We've also been busy with some of the more challenging details of MoW. For example, dynamically displaying signs to reflect speed restrictions due to poor track conditions.
In some circumstances displaying signs that make sense and don't overwhelm the player poses a real challenge!
In addition we are planning on looking at supporting MoW load storage, reevaluating starting equipment, and so forth. Like we said: it's a big feature, but we think the wait will be worth it!
Scenery and Equipment Models... and the Turntable
As with previous updates we've been continuing to work on equipment model updates, as well as new scenery structures, including a revamped turntable bridge.
Speaking of the turntable: we have added a control window to allow "remote control", as well as a new overlay interface which allows you to drag the bridge to the desired position, which it will automatically turn to. Hat tip to the Century of Steam team for inspiring us to improve the turntable interaction!
Drag and drop turntable rotation:
Using the window to manually control the turntable, shown at 3X speed:
New Map Terrain Data Format
Although we don't officially support modding, we wanted to provide a heads-up that this update will change the map terrain data format to one that uses the RIFF format and improves terrain data load times. We expect this to simplify creating/manipulating the terrain data in mods, as we know some of you are keen to do. We'll share more details about the format once this update is available on an experimental branch.
Wrap-Up
That's all we have to share for now. Naturally we've got a number of smaller enhancements and bug fixes queued up, and perhaps a surprise or two. We don't yet know when this update will be available on an experimental branch, but rest assured that we want you to have it as soon as possible.
Thank you for reading and for supporting Railroader!