To ensure the “new era” of Trainz begins with an outstanding experience for all our fans, we have taken the difficult decision to delay the retail release of Trainz: A New Era until May 15.
These extra weeks of development and testing will enable our team to finalize and fine tune all the necessary features to deliver our target graphics and meet our promise of the “best ever” version of Trainz.
To keep our core fans fully up to date with our development progress, we will be releasing an updated “Community Edition” V1.1 . This new Beta version will be available via STEAM update to all past and future pre-order customers in the next couple of days (please see our post regarding final testing for the V1.1 release).
This updated version delivers the following improvements over the December Beta release:
- Improved stability and functionality across Driver and Surveyor.
- Initial Post-processing implementation including HDR tone mapping and bloom (with depth of field and SSAO effects still required to reach our “target graphics” goal)
- Improvements to Procedural Junctions (check rails, wing rails, blades, sleeper generation etc) and includes some content updates (but more work remaining)
- New “Low” shadow setting for improved performance on lower hardware specs
- Water - minor tweaks (with major shader effects and reflections still to come)
- Content Manager now has improved searching functionality, save custom filters, keyword support (more polish items to be completed)
- Fixes for saved sessions and scripts
- Lots of crash fixes We understand that this news is disappointing, but having reviewed the current build status and examined our development schedule, it is clear this extra time is required to deliver the product you are all waiting for. We are confident that this is the right decision to provide a platform that we can continue building upon for many years to come.