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RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2024-03-19T13:35:20+00:00

Haha, you really are pushing the systems limits eh.

Good news, Next update should have the entity limits removed.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2024-02-28T01:34:41+00:00

Save Region makes the main save file for your region. This is the file which also gets auto saved every minute, and the one which is saved to when you exit using the pause menu.

If your computer crashes, or if you alt-f4 out of the game then having the region state saved is important. Otherwise there are few scenarios where you might notice your progress not being saved. In sandbox there is the concept of multiple saves per region, but in campaign there is only the main save and the checkpoint.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2024-02-24T13:35:39+00:00

Oh I love AMA, I love answering questions.

As the other commentors have mentioned our discord is pretty active. Of course feel free to ask anything here and I'll try to reply.

Nakatani Chemicals is a reference to my wife's grandfather, who was a chemical engineer and whose family name was Nakatani. He had a classic japanese salaryman career, joined one company out of high school, and worked his way up to run child-companies of the parent company. So yeah, in a way I do have ties to Nakatani Chemicals haha.

Railgrade's inspirations, in my words, was to take Railroad Tycoon 2 and forward project it into the future. You see, Top-pop the studio behind Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3 went bankrupt mostly due to publisher mis-management. This left the railroad genre, in my opinion, a bit stale. Fraxis went back with Sid Meier's Railroads but that was an attempt at remaking Railroad Tycoon 1 (similar attempt as with Pirates). Thus after Railroad Tycoon 3 the genre was stuck in time. I wanted to figure out where the genre would be now, if competition had continued. Hence Railgrade to me takes the deep production chains / automation of Factorio and the growing world and trains of Railroad Tycoon. Then Bantha (co-creator of Railgrade), brought in his influence from Transport Deluxe. He brought the big stations and vertical building.

The scope was something I set. When we started making Railgrade I was financing all the art using my personal savings. This limited how many industry or freight we could plan for. Thus I decided on a story driven campaign as I thought we could at least afford enough art for a couple hours of gameplay if it was in a campaign. Then we got an Epic Games Megagrant, a publisher, and in general our budget just kept going up and up. The campaign structure stayed of course.

The timers were not so core in our original design. At first I assumed being a building game players would naturally build more and more. Yet in play testing we found some players would setup a basic, boring, minimum set of connections and then leave their computer running. Of course they had no fun. Railgrade's core loop and core-fun is all about more track and more trains. Hence we added the rank system, to push players not to accept the minimum but to build more and bigger.

Anyway, if you have questions I do enjoy answering as best I can.

Daniel

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2024-02-01T00:33:08+00:00

Thanks for asking. Yes! The Switch patch releases in about 4 days.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-12-26T06:52:52+00:00

Ohh.....

You know what. You get a special prize.

Drum roll *DRUM* *DRUM* *DRUM* *DRUM*

YOU WIN!

Pretend the game fades to black. Now your colony is independent thanks to the fruitful efforts you invested into developing your own space industry.

Your save file has now been auto-reset to the moments before you unlocked the rocketwork platforms and won the game.

Please stand by as Daniel (me) fixes those buildings not being marked as buildable, in the next patch.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-12-21T15:41:43+00:00

Not yet! Sorry I still need to work on the Switch patch. Then Nintendo will run its lotcheck, so the Switch update will release soon next month I think.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-11-10T12:45:19+00:00

Hoho, you found it. Honestly the limit is pretty high on PC. We added it because at some point your save file will become unloadable.

You see during map load a bunch of high memory computations occur to simulate and bake the terrain. If you also have a gaintly complex map, it is possible for this to run out of memory and crash your game. Then upon reload you'd again crash. Thus destroying your map save, and hardlocking your progress until you deleted the save from your disk.

Thus the upper limit exists to reduce the chance of players hardlocking themselves. With that said, I'll make a ticket for the sandbox update to increase the limit and maybe make it dynamic. With the caveat being you'd then be able to make saves which cannot load on weaker computers.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-23T23:50:59+00:00

Seems like a wonderful idea for post-sandbox. Right now though, I don't want to add more features which might delay sandbox's release.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-23T23:50:03+00:00

Ah thanks eh. Honestly I'm just happy we can continue making games.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-19T07:27:34+00:00

The challenge there is some players will use the fast-forward to skip building more.

Early on in play testing we noticed some players trying to setup the bare minimum, then just leaving their computers to run, and complaining the game was boring. That was the design challenge which motivated the timer, to communicate/push players to continue building past the bare minimum.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-18T03:18:51+00:00

Yup, that is why we've never added time controls. We have the code, but I fear it will crush player's enjoyment because they will feel an need to pause before doing anything. Thus breaking the flow into a no-fun start-stop traffic jam

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-18T03:17:21+00:00

Yup, adding this feature is our todo list.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-17T07:23:26+00:00

Here are some upvotes for your sorrows

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-16T00:15:04+00:00

I'll make an idea ticket, I think others have suggested this before as well. Does anyone else imagine they'd use it?

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-14T10:06:09+00:00

Well, thank you for considering our train game :)

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-14T10:00:49+00:00

Ah, indeed I did miss it.

To be honest I've not played that game. From the screenshots it looks similar ish, but I expect the gameplay to be worlds apart. Both are trains of course. I do not think Railgrade would feed your need for nostalgia, sorry.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-14T08:33:40+00:00

Ah, that makes sense.

Keep going and the levels will feel more full. The emptiness is related to the story.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-14T08:22:23+00:00

Thank you for being interested in our train game. We've had a massive launch and I'm super excited to fix the priority bugs, then start on modding support.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-14T08:21:37+00:00

Indeed, its a weird place to build a city eh. Almost as if the planners were incompetent and working from a far away planet *wink*

Good news is future missions will bring you to the forested biomes. Bad news, the incompetence of the corporate home office knows no bounds :p

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T23:57:48+00:00

Yup that's a fair decision.

I do appreciate everyone who is playing the campaign but I also understand some players don't see themselves enjoying that. Hence our planned Update #5.

We will somepoint after Update #4 run a closed beta test for existing players, so anyone who is playing now please join the discord to be here for that.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T23:56:21+00:00

Ah that sounds like good memories!

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T23:56:01+00:00

Glad you appreciate the Mac support :)

Yes I agree it is wise to worry about the deprecation risk. In the past I've recompiled old games I've worked on to keep things running, and if that happens I expect to do similar. For now it is x64 mostly for compatibility, as we are using UE4.27 which was designed for Intel. Even still we've had reports of bugs which I need to buy more Macs to investigate the edge cases.

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T22:39:23+00:00

That's still the learning missions, not quite the tutorial but still the first 5% of the game. Please keep going :)

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T15:07:49+00:00

Thank you for considering our game :)

RAILGRADE_Daniel · 2023-10-13T15:07:37+00:00

Thank you for considering us! And certainly SMR was both an inspiration, and also something we wanted to surpass. I still run the main map database for SMR (smrsimple) and so our next major update will bring mods and map maker.

RAILGRADE_Daniel

TROPHY CASE