After a long wait we put alpha9 live yesterday. We’ve changed direction on the upgrade system—we’re back to offering a semi-random selection every week. We feel the upgrades are now more balanced, but still not where we want them. We have a fairly clear idea on how we’re going to tackle this in alpha10.
Here is the list of changes between alpha8 and alpha9:
- Railcar capacity is now six passengers.
- Upgrades are offered at the end of every week, instead of when passenger milestones are reached.
- The clock has returned. Please note the pause functionality is still there—click on the clock, or press the spacebar.
- Instead of having a choice between three fixed upgrades, two semi-random upgrades are presented.
- The possible upgrades are railcar (same as before), railcar speed upgrade (all railcars increase in speed), platform upgrade (all stations increase in capacity), interchange (upgrade one station to hold 18 passengers, and load / unload at 4x speed), extra tunnels (two extra tunnels).
- The upgrade dialog will wait until the player has finished building tracks or placing an upgrade before showing.
- Lines can be edited from the middle by dragging any non-terminator line.
- Lines render differently when an unconnected station is on top of them.
- When a line is being edited, all stations that are part of that line are now highlighted.
- Extra railcars now start at the station nearest where the upgrade is dragged to and face the cursor.
- Lines can only ever have two railcars operating independently.
- Railcars now pause at stations if required to prevent bunching up.
- The window shrinks to fit small desktops.
- Passenger pathfinding now takes seat allocation in to account.
- Warnings now show up on overflowing stations.
- To aid debugging, each game is now recorded in a text file and can be played back at Dinosaur Polo Club HQ. If you hit a track editing bug, crash, or infinite loop, please email us the record file and a brief description of the problem!
- Bug: Terminator click detection was off in certain cases.
- Bug: If an upgrade is earned right when the game is over, the upgrade dialog now won’t show.
- Bug: Clicking on the upgrade buttons multiple times no longer awards multiple upgrades (only fixed in alpha9a!).
- Bug: Straight links should use tunnels more correctly.
- Bug: Missing line terminator issue fixed.
Today we plan on rolling out several fixes to the web player build, and finally updating the standalone builds when we’re happy with alpha9.