Major Gameplay Changes
Introduced dynamic pathfinding (a.k.a. bypass or detour mechanic), where trains will seek out alternative paths to their destination under certain conditions.
More specifically, when a train is coming towards or waiting at a red traffic signal (1st one in build menu), it will look for a detour through the immediate next traffic block with an outgoing chain signal (2nd signal in the build menu) to try and bypass the occupied traffic blocks that are further ahead on the current path of the train.
The train will evaluate the length of the potential detour, compare it to how much closer it can get to its destination to make the best choice - stay and wait, or take the best detour alternative. Hopefully this change allows for more interesting and complex intersection designs.
The clip below roughly illustrates the new detour mechanic:
Bug fixes:
Worked on improving the braking system for trains to prevent rare edge cases of overshooting signals or stations when braking
Worked on addressing a rare bug where a train would not finish its trip, even though it seemed to have fully arrived at its destination
Fixed a bug where destroyed and then re-placed signals would have an incorrect internal state for a single frame, sometimes resulting in undesired edge cases
Clamped the overall simulation frame-time to a reasonable value to prevent lag spikes, system freezes or even switching between applications in fullscreen mode to cause major jumps in simulated time, which could have caused trains to jump forward and produce undesired results
Fixed a bug where direction indicators were not correctly displayed for the chain signal
Added a few new fonts to support more niche characters and symbols, so that some player names would not appear blank in the leaderboard screen
Fixed an edge case bug where tiles that become unreachable due to adjacent city placement were still included in next-demand calculations (when playing with limited resource difficulty), which could cause a new resource demand to appear that would potentially not be sufficiently fulfillable until the end of the game
Gameplay tweaks:
Difficulty, which disables destroying rails after they have been placed now allows deleting the rail for the full price when placed and deleted during the same pause window
Starting gold difficulty option weights were changed - lower starting gold options now impact score multiplier more
If a chain signal is the first signal that a train encounters on it's path after spawning or leaving a city, the train will stop for it to prevent annoying and unfun cases of trains crashing, even though this goes against the core idea of how chain signals function in the game