Today's update is actually more of a background game-tech upgrade, so it doesn't have that many exciting new features to try out, but it makes a huge difference in the long run!
Rolling Line has grown tons since it was first released (over 2 years ago!) and the programming behind it has gone through more changes, feature additions and upgrades than I ever planned for. This means that many parts of the background code holding this game together are in dire need of improvement.
Much like with the "dynamic track" updates last year (which completely re-worked the track system) today's update focuses on cleaning up the code behind the color painting system in Rolling Line.
Color painting has gone through SO MANY changes over the years, starting with no color painting at all, to single color painting on props, to multi-painting, to custom colors, and then now, to this new system today which hopefully wraps up all of mistakes of the past systems and will be 100x easier to make changes to in the future.
I wont go into too much detail about how the new color system works, but it involves something I'm calling "KeaColorCodes" ("Kea" being the name i use for the level-editor as a whole).
These "Color Codes" store all the necessary information about a color (like material type, transparency, random hue range, etc) and can be easily saved and transferred in lots of different ways.
Thanks to these new color codes lots of new features (like paintable modded props, and paintable room walls, color cloning, etc) are now possible!
From the players perspective, this update adds:
Paintable room walls, floor and roof
You can now use any painter to set the colors of the interior of the custom table room!
Simply pickup a painter and paint the menu items in the wall (just like you would paint a prop)
Set the wall type to "Custom" and the walls will use the colors you set!
Clone colors
This feature is for PC only, you can now copy the color of any paintable prop by pointing at it and pressing [Enter]
This will give you a painter with the color of the prop you copied!
This is incredibly useful for matching the colors of previously placed props, and generally makes the workflow of building a map much easier.
Clone track data
This feature is for PC only as well and has actually been in the game for a while already, but it was quite hidden. You can now make use of copy-pasting track data simply by pointing at any piece of dynamic track and pressing [Enter]
After copying the track, go over to the dynamic track generating drawer, and press the new "paste" button.
Doing this will copy dynamic track data from a placed piece of track, then paste it into the dynamic track generator to copy over values.
For example:
If you copy a curve with Radius 12 and Angle 30,
Then paste it into the dynamic track generator,
The corresponding values will update to 12 and 30.
This is very useful if you want to make matching sizes of track or make small changes to a previously placed piece of track.
There are also a few useful quirks to this system:
- If you copy a curved piece of track, then paste it onto a turnout, only the curve part of the turnout will be updated.
- If you copy a straight piece of track, then paste it onto a turnout, only the straight part of the turnout will be updated.
- You can copy a turnout and paste it into a curve to generate a curve that matches the turnout.
Other changes
Most of what this update changes is behind-the-scenes, but here are a few miscellaneous features:
- The Biome Brush now saves all multi-paint data. previously it would only save the primary paintable part of the prop, now it saves everything.
- fixed bug where switching between drawer categories would not reset the page, leading to an empty page list.
- Fixed issues with storing custom painters in custom drawers.
Prop modding
Prop modding is still heavily in development and is my main focus at the moment!
The main reason behind doing this color update was to make paintable modded props possible.
Using the old system this would have been a nightmare, but with the new ColorCodes it works perfectly.
Prop modding is still several weeks away from completion, but it's all going very smoothly and will change the game in massive ways when it's complete!
And that's all for now!
This is much more a background-tech update more so than an exciting feature update, but it's still incredibly necessary to keep this game stable for future updates.
In the meantime the new little features (like wall painting and color copy-paste) should be pretty useful.
Enjoy!