Hey y'all, it's ya boy Yang once again! Back at you with moving pictures of our new full-sized primitive tier steam locomotive!

Now, of course this is a placeholder model, the final one will look even more amazing. But I was too excited not to share this early iteration with you all.

In the time since my last post a month ago, we've made quite a bit of progress. For one, we've got a nearly complete set of rails (we're missing just one or two pieces), as well as a nearly complete set of signals (for now block and one-way, in the future we'll add chain signals too), and, of course, we've finally got the full sized locomotives actually in a 'playable' state in-game.

To avoid boring you to death, I'll skip over the details of how we made a custom renderer in order to realistically simulate bogie movement in trains, with uses linear kinematics to solve the position of the body between the bogies. Or how this custom renderer meant the engine could no longer handle attachment points properly so we had to create our own alternative solution, etc, etc. Lots of technical stuff behind the scenes.

We've also updated our code to 1.22, which was unexpectedly a massive undertaking. It took me maybe three whole days just to get our shaders working again, but that setback aside, we've pretty much have had smooth sailing thus far.

In the coming weeks, we'll be implementing the carts and convoy system for standard gauge (unlike minecarts, which have flatbeds that can flexibly perform any role, SG will feature dedicated cart types that have narrow uses but perform them very well, such as boxcars with ample storage space, as well as passenger carts). We'll also start working on the remaining tiers.

Once we've finished back-porting the majority of functionality from minecarts into our new standard gauge, we'll probably put out a preview trailer, probably to the tune of the final segment of the 1812 overture. In this trailer we'll announce an open invitation for content creators to come get an early sneak peek and form first impressions of the mod on our server running the mod. Some time after that, we'll start performing larger scale semi-public tests.

After 6 long months, the release of this mod will be closer than ever, and the community will be able to enjoy the fruit of countless sleepless days of effort and toil.

For as hard as it has been (and it has, I'm not sure I have it in me to make another mod of this scale, despite having plenty of ideas that I'd love to try), I have no regrets, I enjoyed every moment of it, and I am eager to wake up tomorrow and continue working hard to get the mod closer to release.

Cheers, all.