Diamond crossovers, better usability and many improvements

Update September 15, 2015: Today we released a new build 6219 which improves on the previous build 6181 by fixing a couple of bugs and adding a new way for modders to change the vehicle load configurations. Please find the complete release notes here.

Right before the 1st birthday of Train Fever, we are happy to announce the release of the newest build 6181.

With this game update we fulfill some of the most common wishes by introducing a new rail switch type, improving the usability and the user interface, as well as adding new ways to modify and customize the game.

speed_trainThe newest build introduces diamond crossovers.

Parallel Track building and upgrading is much easier and forgiving. Not only can you upgrade crossovers to diamond crossovers, it is now possible to upgrade tracks at any time regardless of whether the track is used by a train or not. The length limit for multitrack tunnels is gone.

Another big enhancement is how the different cargo types are handled by vehicles. To achieve a more realistic simulation, a truck or wagon is now fitted on purchase to haul one specific cargo type.

A significant effort was also put into improving the user interface. Windows are now arranged and aligned in a more intelligent way. Better window layouts and new buttons, overlays and filters make Train Fever more accessible and easier to use. There is more direct control over vehicles by allowing the player to reverse trains at any time and send it to a depot effortlessly.

speed_trainIntelligent alignment, filters, customizable cargo types, improved window design, more control over trains and user-friendly tools.

To provide more influence over how industries and cities behave, more parameters are now exposed to modding, allowing for a way to affect how a map develops by customizing the maximum size of industries or the grow rate and starting size of cities.

To bring more life into the simulation, a new animation type was added giving any object in the world the ability to play animations in a continuous loop. This opens a lot of new possibilities to modding.

Last but not least thanks to the everlasting support of our community we were able to eliminate yet another couple of reported bugs including disappearing vehicles and issues with track building.

Please find the complete release notes here.

Thank you for your continuing interest in Train Fever! We hope you enjoy the newest improvements and additions.

64 thoughts on “Diamond crossovers, better usability and many improvements

  1. Thanks so much guys. You have breathed new life into a game that I have put aside for a while. Once again, I will excitedly look forward to playing TrainFever and exploring the new improvements. You guys are the best!

  2. Thanks, I had been checking dialy for this news. Finally the wait comes to end. I am really looking forward to know about your next project. Consider 1 copy of it brought from me 🙂

  3. Awesome work guys, many thanks for your continued development of this game. Just the diamond-crossovers alone is an amazing new feature, no more struggling to fit in all the regular switches into a tight space!

  4. Great news, but 2 questions: when will it be avaliable for GOG version and did you repair the end of the month pauses?

  5. ONE BIG THANK YOU FOR:
    1. The double crossover.
    2. Reduced ‘clicking’ in windows of trains (UI issue).
    3. Filter buttons that now stay in place (they r not jumping to a different location on screen).
    Also, worried with the absence of ‘development continues’…
    Best regards!

  6. Great disappointment in diamond crossovers…I’ve been waiting for this update for 3 month and it disappointed me so much, you cannot do the double track to double track crosses, you can’t cross different tracks in ‘+’ crossover and definitely you can’t make difficult track crossovers (3 to 1 or 4 to 2, etc).

    Thanks for everything else, but the most expected feature hasn’t been done.

    • Really, you are using a macbook air to play a full-blown 3D simulation game and expect it to run smoothly? Although there is an apple on the back of your screen does not necessarily mean that this machine is powerful enough to handle every game. Especially the macbook air, which is a device made for everyday office work, browsing the web, watching a movie, and maybe play a round of candy-crush. This game here needs a dedicated graphics card with dedicated graphics memory. You might now say: “But Christoph, I payed so much money for this laptop it must be very good!” Well, it uses the same components as a standard laptop for 500 bucks, you just payed a 600 dollar geek tax on a nice casing with a half-eaten fruit logo. I’m sorry to tell you this but I guess somebody has to do it!

  7. Great! Diamond crossoverts was very need. You are doing very well maintaining this great game alive. Great work!

  8. I feel regret find it’s only diamond crossover, not diamond junction. What’s more, the game runs extremely slow under windows 10..

    • I just checked on Steam, Windows 10 is not supported by the Game. So I don’t see, why you should be entitled to any support. But still, UG is trying to help you guys who were upgrading to something they didn’t understand, isn’t that amazing? It might well be a Windows bug rather than a TF fault. Maybe Windows is creating a personal profile of you by scanning your porn collection in the background, while you are playing TF. 😉 But seriously, check your memory usage before and while playing. If the memory is highly utilized, try to play shortly after a restart of Windows. If you see a difference in performance, it is a Windows “feature”.

  9. Wow I guess I’ll dust my shortcut off and play it again. Must admit it has been a while 🙂

  10. Das letzte Update hat viele tolle Neuerungen gebracht, auf die ich schon lange gewartet habe. Vielen Dank dafür!!!
    “diamond-crossover” habe ich allerdings nicht wirklich vermisst. Wo bleiben stattdessen die schon lange herbeigesehnten Kreuzungen und/oder Kreuzungsweichen im Schienenbau. Es kann doch nicht Euer Ernst sein, dass man keine zweispurigen Abzweigungen mit Kreuzung über das Innengleis bauen kann oder dass man beim Einfädeln in mehrspurige Strecken statt des Baus von Kreuzungen oder Kreuzungsweichen die Züge über mehrere Weichen Slalom fahren lassen muss. Ich hatte die Ankündigung zum neuen Patch wohl falsch verstanden und hatte fälschlicherweise gedacht, meine Gebete seien erhört worden. Daher kann ich leider nur meiner Enttäuschung über das letzte update zum Ausdruck bringen. I am disappointed! Col_Fouks is right!

  11. Nach wie vor sehr gutes Erstlingswerk. Ich musste gleich vor’m Arbeiten die neuen Möglichkeiten probieren und es war schwer dann zur Arbeit zu gehen.
    Bin gespannt auf euer nächstes Projekt!

  12. Good stuff as usual… but I still feel the need to re-voice the same hopes I’ve been voicing since the game was first released:

    Is there any chance that the map generation is going to receive some attention? I still think it’s the most fundamentally lacking element in the game. Not that it looks bad – your terrain generaion creates some of the most natural looking hills, valleys and mountains I’ve seen in a management sim game. It’s the lack of options, and the lack of water that holds it back. If nothing else, then I really think it could do with:
    A – non-square map sizes… I still think this could add so much for so little a change – allow 32×8 or 64×4 maps… just imagine – surmounting difficult-to-avoid terrain features, connecting up the few sparse towns and industries along a 64km-stretch of land, all within the same memory constraints as an existing 16×16 map!
    B – the ability to raise the water-level, and thereby end up with coastlines rather than just occasional lakes. This would do so much for shaping how you approach a map, and make each map look unique, rather than the same beautiful-but-indistinguishable rolling green hills.

    • Incidentally – Urban Games guys – if any of my suggestions here are fundamentally at odds with how the map generation works in Train Fever, or are just unfeasible suggestions for any reason, please let me know, and I’ll shut up about them 🙂 I’d love to hear your thoughts either way.

      • I agree with Dan. Map generation is VERY IMPORTANT. It would be nice to know if you plan to do something or not !

        • Agreed!!! Love this game, and the maps do look great, they just all blend together after awhile, would love to here from the developers if more map creation options are even on the table?

          Ps, thank you for allowing us to change the number of industries, even if you have to go and edit game coding, it has made a huge difference in my game play. Would be awesome to have more options like this in the game without having to go and edit program files.

  13. I don’t like having to choose the resource for my trucks when buying them. I used to have two ways routes where trucks were shipping a resource in one direction and bringing back goods in the other one. Quite realistic I would say, but now this is gone 🙁

    • Would also agree, while it is realistic that train cars (wagons) are usually designated for one industry, trucks cary every thing in every direction, maybe with the exception of bulk liquids (oil). Just like in the game, in real life trucking companies don’t make money with empty trucks passing one another. There should be an option to designate trucks for “any” load. In real life for a trucker, an empty truck equals an empty stomach!

  14. Erf, the tracks are still giving me headaches; I have to redesign the tracks multiple time, before I get an adequate layout for multi lines station. The whole platform is set once for all, once the line is created is painful as well.

  15. Only one year later, and here we go. Diamond cross is here. Well, now improve performance on the end month, add different weight to full wagons, solve people dissapear bug, solve main connection “feature” and few hundreds other issues then player would come back again. :-]

  16. Will there be further updates regarding the performance of the game? The end of month lag/freeze experienced by many users and introduced by Build 5746 is stopping me from playing the game all together.

  17. Thanks for the patch, but I found the new idea for specialized cargo wagons to be just a terrible idea. Most trucks or wagons can realistically transport different types of cargo. This just makes us to create more and more lines and gives less possibility to optimize existing lines.

    As another user said on the forum, this is another example of features that were not asked and only complicate the game… Instead many highly requested features like rail crossings, construction planning or undo button, more options for map generation, balancing etc. are not addressed… Developers, please try to listen a bit more to your users 🙂

    Thanks anyway for the other features. I hope some modder takes advantage of the new possibilities.

    • We are sorry to hear that you are disappointed. We have put a lot of thought into the new system and how to realize it and found this to be the best compromise of all the player wishes and requests, so listing to our users is exactly what we did in that case. The plan was to make the game more realistic in terms of the simulation but also visualization.

      Also we are aware that there is still a long list of ideas and requests. Be assured we read everything posted on this forum and on Steam.

      • Many thanks. This is probably one of the few responses I saw from you developers. I often read the forums (because I really like your game even with all its shortcomings) but I don’t remind that someone asked for this… Anyway it would be nice to have the option of choosing “any” cargo.

        • PS: I forgot to thank you for taking the time to respond. I hope this will last and you developers take some time reading and answering in your forums as well.

          • As I said before, we are always reading everything posted in the forums. And we will respond more often in the future!

  18. This in great! Haven’t tried the patch yet though, but I’m excited 🙂
    I wish there was a way filter available routes when assigning routes to vehicles. For example, if you could filter be the “route visible” action it would be great and you wouldn’t need to scroll a long list of routes, which is boring especially in the endgame

  19. I think it would be more realistic if you set the cargo to pick up whatever is available, so when creating the train or vehicle, it would be generic, then when set to a line it would pickup the proper cargo to wherever its destination is, this would simplify the process, and allow for much more complex routes

  20. Thank you for the updates! I am loving this game. So glad that finally someone decided to make another one of these transport games. Cannot wait to hear what your next game is? 🙂
    I would love to see perhaps seasons added to this game. Also the greyed-out area around the square map I don’t like. Perhaps fill it with greens, but make it not accessible… I also find it very hard to find nice mods… almost everything on the modding site is in German. Thanks for the hard work.

  21. As an addition to my early post on this page: thank you also for blinking windows, terrain forming marker, more realistic approach for cargo. You really did what players asked. As a hot request for this time I ask developers to fix a Doppler effect for trains with engine cars at their tail (for instance, when TFV is moving away from camera, the rear engine car sounds like it is incoming while it is moving away). Tom, please pass this request to developers! Thank you.

  22. Beware of using sarcasm … you could really get your doppler fix in the next patch along with a small performance decrease to compute it correctly 🙂

  23. Hello to all.
    I would ask you if you take long to load the map.
    It takes an eternity to me.
    Thank you

  24. Guten Tag,
    ich möchte mich ebenfalls für das gelungene Update bedanken, dass wie ich meine, der Spielfreude einen gewaltigen Schub verpasst hat. Die Spielbarkeit des Bauens und der Fahrzeuge sind ja nun enorm gewachsen. Leider vermisse ich doch noch sehr die Möglichkeiten in der Industrie, Planen Sie hier noch Verbesserungen oder gibt es in Zukunft weitere Möglichkeiten ins Spiel einzugreifen?
    Mit freundlichen Grüssen TM

  25. Hello..! Can you please add traffic lights and one way roads? Please.. the traffic jams in the cities gets a bit too big later in the game. Also Tram avenue roads would be nice… also more options for the tram tracks such as tram tracks only one side of the road? Please add this!

  26. The new update sounds really good… With the new cargo system, TF seemed so boring ! I might now again return to play Train Fever. I really hope there will be a Train Fever 2 who will be a little bit more dynamic and entertaining from a gameplay (it is too ripetitive… after laying the network it just feel boring to just substitute vehicles as there is no real changes in the map … even the competition from cars does not change things a lot… but it would change if some industries would become obsolete and new industries would appear, or cities would accept different goods, or price would change), economic (too few informations to optimize lines) and competition (IA or multiplayer) standpoint.

  27. So. I got the GOG update to 6219. And my save now crashes the game 🙁 It loads till 100% and than – bam! – crash. No problem with a new game with all the mods I had in the save, but this particular save is now unplayable. I’m soooo disappointed :/

    • Martin, can you please have look in your main menu to check if you run the 32bit or 64bit version? It seems GOG published the wrong (32bit) version. We are currently in contact with GOG to get that fixed.

  28. still the most annoying thing is that passengers jump out of the train during the journey…

  29. Hello. Where should I send the email to the problems?
    To me at the end of each month will freeze for a while, and it’s very annoying.

    • Yes, the freezing is very annoying. The end if the year is the worst, plus the introduction of new rolling stock (“Oh Yeah!”), plus the autosave . . . . time to go to the bathroom I guess.

      • I agree, this should be a high priority for next patches! But you can deactivate autosave in the menu. Also in some cases the end of month lag is shorter if you reduce your graphics settings.

    • Don’t freeze for me. Everything works very smooth on the highest graphics settings. Even with 32-bit version of Train Fever (i don’t check 64-bit yet). My OS: Windows 10 64bit.

  30. The month end pause is terrible in Windows 10. Windows 8 it was annoying, but it’s a game killer with 10. A full 1 second game freeze. Using i7 5700HQ, GTX970M, 16RAM. Needs to be fixed, please.

  31. Hi folks, love the game.

    With deepest respect, I have to side with the players who don’t agree with the specialized cargo classification of the vehicles. A shipping company will go to great lengths to find any commodity that can be loaded into their trucks, trains and/or planes, and then they will find a way to ship it. Even the simplest transport manager know the most important rule is never, never, never move a vehicle empty.

    One of the distinct traits that used to make your game better than your competitors was what I thought was a conscientious acknowledgement of that fact. I relished the ability to find as many jobs per mile as I possibly could for a multi cargo vehicle.

    Could you perhaps add another option to the load configuration that sets the vehicle back to its old semi-universal mode? If so you are my heroes. If not you are still excellent game designing geniuses who make an outstanding product. Thanks for the many, many hours of fun you have provided.

    Viva La Mechanization!

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