As usual I’m continually thinking about ways to improve RTB. That not only means developing new features (and I have plenty in store) but also making some improvements to existing features. The recent update to improve the Google background image is an example of this – a future extension of this will be to run it as a background task so you can begin working on the track whilst higher res images are gathered.
Right now I’m re-coding some parts of the application to be even faster. It’s a tricky business working out where best to focus on making an improvement. Unlike BTB which was slow to update the screen, RTB runs the calculations on background threads and as pieces are re/calculated they can then be displayed on screen. Terrain affects the track, the tracks cut into each other as well as the terrain and then objects and string objects rest on top. Meanwhile the interface continues to be available whilst computationally intense calculations occur in the background.
Development is going well with some improvements in the rendering making it less GPU intensive, whilst speed improvements should begin to appear for people that insist on making very long single pieces of track (against all recommendations) instead of joining many smaller tracks together (although small joined tracks is still preferable).
I strongly recommend people watch the tutorial videos if they haven’t already. From the feedback I get it seems some people are not really aware of the full capabilities of RTB and are asking questions that are demonstrated in the videos, or worse ignorantly commenting in forums or in Steam reviews.
The next update won’t be too far off as I’m keen to get the current improvements out (in testing now), and the funds from RTB are being used for new XPacks so more are “coming soon”.