Today's update includes a bunch of useful tools and features for layout building, bug fixes and quality of life improvements.
Most of all, turnout lever styles!
But this update also includes:
- Tunnel regions (areas you can set where a special lighting effect is used)
- Rain exclude regions (areas where rain & snow is disabled, like underground and inside buildings)
- Changes and fixes to the wire tool
- Optimizations and lag fixes for skyboxes
- Various bug fixes
Plus i'll explain a bit about what i'm working on at the moment and what's coming to Rolling Line in the future!
Turnout lever styles
You can now change the style of the control lever on turnouts.
There are a whole bunch of options, and you can find them in the new tools drawer in the "track tools" category:
There are six different variations:
You can also the the 'X' painter to remove the turnout lever entirely.
This is useful for if you want to make the turnout only controllable from switchboards.
You can also swap the side of the lever (left - right) using the arrow painter.
Tunnel regions
One of the strange features that you can only find on the old "Top of the south" layout is something called a "Tunnel region".
Tunnel regions are areas where a special visual effect will happen if the player is inside them.
The sun will go darker, and fog will block the distant view.
This effect is used inside tunnels to make things look a bit nicer, but you can also use this same effect to make underground areas darker (or more if you want to be creative with it).
You can now make use of this effect yourself on your own layouts!
Simply use the new tunnel region options panel to set where this effect is used.
(you can find this panel in the "advanced editing options" panel on the wall)
From here you can spawn in "bounds boxes" (just like with audio regions, skybox regions, etc).
If you place these bounds boxes inside tunnels then you will get the tunnel visual effect!
Rain exclude regions
Just like with tunnel regions, this system lets you choose areas on your map which (in this case) exclude rain & snow.
When the player is inside one of these regions the rain & snow effects will stop.
This is perfect for any indoor or under-cover areas.
Various fixes and features
- The wire tool now has transparent selection points to help make accurate placement easier:
- There is also a bug with the wire tool selection that has been fixed.
(changing to the "erase" mode with a selection active could cause the tool to break)
- The level crossing on the Miami Shelf layout now uses the new dynamic trigger system.
- Fixed an issue where leaving the thumbnail capture mode would sometimes spawn you outside the map.
- Fixed issue where region bounds boxes would still have active snap points even when hidden.
- Fixed material issue with the audio panel icon.
- Fixed major optimization issue with skyboxes. You may have noticed lag spikes when running maps with skyboxes (spikes every second, constantly). This has been fixed.
What's next?
Something fun!
After a long time of very "technical" updates (designed for map makers) with things like ambient audio, level crossings, wires, switchboards, etc... I'm now working on something a bit more creative!
It's the "Santa Fe remaster"
Much like how the Miami Shelf map got an extended skybox and updated wires/switchboards etc, the Santa Fe map also needs this.
But this time I am going to be expanding the map a bit, including adding new locations and even some stuff surrounding the Mojave desert and Route 66!
The Santa Fe layout was made a long time ago, and almost every aspect of it (signals, track, skybox, etc) needs to be updated to the new tools that have been added to Rolling Line.
So keep an eye out for that!
I personally absolutely love the Santa Fe layout, and I've always wanted to expand it and make the most out of it's beautiful setting and theme.
Enjoy!