Hello! Welcome to the, uh... August instance of the devlog, which has been slightly delayed. Sorry about that. More information on why is at the end. Nothing catastrophic this time.
Anyway, the devlog is supposed to show some of the new features that are available in the rewrite - the new completely rewritten version of Alien Horizon - as opposed to the alpha, which is available now.
Public transport
Of course public transport has been in the game since the alpha, but the visuals have gone through significant improvements. You can set each line to have a color which is visible on the map, the paths are nicely animated and you can even easily tell when two lines are going through the same area or sharing stations.
Number of buses desired and actually assigned can also be seen in the line list along with number of stations. Once a desired number of buses is set, they are now assigned automatically, so even if you remove buses from one garage and add them to another, they will automatically reassign themselves to the lines. And because they no longer need to return to a garage to recharge, they will continue serving the line as long as needed. This works well with one of the features that has been present in the alpha, but that I'm sure not a lot of people have noticed - that buses that are bunched up along one line attempt to spread out by waiting at a station for a while in order to keep intervals consistent.
Speaking of intervals, colonists now take them into account when deciding whether to use public transport. Gone are the times colonists waited for a bus for an hour when it was faster to just walk. And when so many colonists wait at a stop that they no longer fit into one bus, the interval they consider is lengthened to discourage them from using such overloaded lines. Also, when waiting too long, they may decide to walk instead.
The UI for all vehicles has also been improved, showing all the information you may need, even speed, so that you can see the effect roads have.
Map pins
I've mentioned before that you can add pins on the map to remind yourself of your plans you have for areas, but I've never shown you what it looks like. The pin's icon can be easily customized and it can be moved or copied with one click. It also shows you when the pin was created.
And that's all for this devlog. There isn't that much this time, because I'll be honest - I've shown pretty much all there is. The game was supposed to be released already and it really is getting close to a release now. This devlog was delayed because I've been working on fixing the bugs players have found during the playtest, which I'd like to once again invite you to - just join the Discord or Stoat servers where all the information is. If you've tried it before and were discouraged by the crashing, maybe try again as current version is significantly more stable.
Even though there's not much more to show, I'll do more devlogs - one every month just like now - but this time showing just the progress towards release rather than new features.
I'm probably done with promises on when the rewrite is going to be released because I've been wrong so many times, but unfortunately, I have to say it's not going to be this year, as releasing close to the holiday sales is not a good idea.
However, if you really can't wait, the playtest is open and is going to be open until the game releases.
So, see you next time. At the end of this month, I guess.