Hi everyone!
A new demo build is live! The main features are:
Improved hub managers
Improved tools to manage indirect traffic
AI optimization and improvements
Crash and bug fixes
Some localization is missing and will be updated closer to the release.
This will be a shorter blog post as we are polishing things up and adding graphics these days. There is still infrastructure that we did not share which we are planning to fit into the demo build. More features in the demo mean more testing done, which is always good.
AZERTY
We got feedback a few times about the AZERTY keyboard not being supported. People needed to manually bind keys. That is finally added together with German and Polish variants and should work for the first-time launch and when pressing on the reset keys to default button. Are there any other types of keyboards that should be added?
Vehicles by Longitude
Most of the work in the past week was regarding vehicles and balancing. One of the main features is 120 vehicles in total. Planes and ships are global. You will be able to buy any kind anywhere in the world. But road vehicles and trains will be region-locked, or more accurately, longitude-locked. In general there are 3 regions: America, EU + Africa and Asia + Oceania. Available vehicles will be based on where your hubs are located. You can cheat the system and buy hubs in all regions, but the import cost will not be worth it.
Here are some of the new vehicles:
Here is a nice screenshot with more than 8000 vehicles worldwide going about and making profit. A good stress test to see if connecting the whole world and getting the hardest achievement is possible. At this point import costs and other trivial financial problems are in the past. The main challenge is make sure everything is running smoothly and cities are not overcrowded. Good time to experiment as well.
Some Statistics
Thank you all who share analytics with us. It really helped with the first AI addition, seeing how people tend to turn it off. Not it seems in the middle, some turn it off, some make it harder. Our statistics are basically just counters. Someone buys a vehicle, the server gets a signal and increases the amount for a specific flag or just registers a max value. I would not say that it is the most useful thing to have, but at least there are trends that can steer us and allow us to evaluate feedback. Now to share some interesting stats from the demo start:
There have been 111,212 new games started
47,748 hours played by 20,747 people who shared statistics
Someone reached 2860 year in a game
1,004,414 tasks completed and 2,968,008 tasks failed
2,240,656 vehicles bought
Someone had 17,022 vehicles in a single session
Max road vehicles was 3,728
Max trains was 15,504
Max planes was 4,023
Max ships was 1,834
The most popular road vehicle is Arcalod, bought 265,438 times, the most despised one is Hochkalter with 52,248 orders
The most popular train is Class 3700 with 308,422 orders, but the younger brother, Class 2663, was least liked with 99,489 orders
The most popular plane is the 390 Transporter with 155,325 orders, and the least bought one is A-180, sitting at 24,756 orders
The most popular ship is Little Explorer with 98,797 orders, and the least popular is Roer with 20,780 orders