Stoplights news & patch notes

Major Gameplay Changes

Introduced dynamic pathfinding (a.k.a. bypass or detour mechanic), where trains will seek out alternative paths to their destination under certain conditions.

More specifically, when a train is coming towards or waiting at a red traffic signal (1st one in build menu), it will look for a detour through the immediate next traffic block with an outgoing chain signal (2nd signal in the build menu) to try and bypass the occupied traffic blocks that are further ahead on the current path of the train.

The train will evaluate the length of the potential detour, compare it to how much closer it can get to its destination to make the best choice - stay and wait, or take the best detour alternative. Hopefully this change allows for more interesting and complex intersection designs.

The clip below roughly illustrates the new detour mechanic:

Bug fixes:

• Worked on improving the braking system for trains to prevent rare edge cases of overshooting signals or stations when braking

• Worked on addressing a rare bug where a train would not finish its trip, even though it seemed to have fully arrived at its destination

• Fixed a bug where destroyed and then re-placed signals would have an incorrect internal state for a single frame, sometimes resulting in undesired edge cases

• Clamped the overall simulation frame-time to a reasonable value to prevent lag spikes, system freezes or even switching between applications in fullscreen mode to cause major jumps in simulated time, which could have caused trains to jump forward and produce undesired results

• Fixed a bug where direction indicators were not correctly displayed for the chain signal

• Added a few new fonts to support more niche characters and symbols, so that some player names would not appear blank in the leaderboard screen

• Fixed an edge case bug where tiles that become unreachable due to adjacent city placement were still included in next-demand calculations (when playing with limited resource difficulty), which could cause a new resource demand to appear that would potentially not be sufficiently fulfillable until the end of the game

Gameplay tweaks:

• Difficulty, which disables destroying rails after they have been placed now allows deleting the rail for the full price when placed and deleted during the same pause window

• Starting gold difficulty option weights were changed - lower starting gold options now impact score multiplier more

• If a chain signal is the first signal that a train encounters on it's path after spawning or leaving a city, the train will stop for it to prevent annoying and unfun cases of trains crashing, even though this goes against the core idea of how chain signals function in the game

Bug fixes:

• Some players were experiencing crashes while alt-tabing in fullscreen mode. This is a known Unity issue, possibly related to Discord. As a result, switched default screen mode from "Exclusive Fullscreen" to "Borderless"

• Attempted fix on rare and obscure bug, where a city would not send a train even when a valid path was available

• Reduced size of "Moon" map buildings as well as increased starting occupied radius in order to eliminate a visual bug, where no buildings were visible on tiles close to rough terrain

• Attempted fix on a rare gameplay UI bug, where some UI elements would get stuck in place under certain conditions when moving camera

• Fixed two variants for the 50 day length option that had double resource demand on the same day

• Narrowed down data that was saved to the steam cloud, avoiding machine-specific data and settings, which might have caused performance or compatibility issues across synced devices

Gameplay tweaks:

• Changed how it's decided where rail tracks can be placed above water, making it less strict than it was before

• Modified clay material and shader, so it doesn't look as pixelated

• Selling entities placed during the same pause window now refunds 100% of the cost, regardless of the chosen difficulty setting. Unpausing removes this benefit and works as previously

Quick & Short Announcement! The upcoming full release will not only include color variations on train locomotives, but it will also include 2 new locomotive models, one of which can be seen in the picture above. Hopefully this brings some much needed variety to the locomotive department.

Possibly one of the final major content updates before full release, adding:

• A new map type pictured above

• Ambience and musical melodies, aimed to be as minimally intrusive as possible

• Score system

• Difficulty system

• Leaderboards

• UI tweaks

• Better and dynamic train path line visuals

The score system is influenced by the newly added difficulty system, where you can tweak the difficulty to be basically trivial or completely imbalanced - your choice! The difficulty you choose to complete the map will determine the score multiplier, which ultimately ties into the leaderboard system and how you rank compared to others.

Quick announcement on one of the things I am currently working on - new maps with distinct visuals.

This is one of the maps currently in the works - an asteroid / moon surface type map. Let me know your thoughts!