I’ve been playing the game for just a bit, but I feel like there’s a bunch of things that can be used for helping with optimization.
Probably the biggest one I’ve noticed is how garish the smoke effect is on top of the buildings in the towns. I would definitely look into replacing the big, bulging clouds of black smoke coming out of the chimneys with something more akin to a smoke wisp, which I can imagine can constructed to optimize for performance
Beyond that, and beyond going absolutely insane with reducing polygons in various LODs (IE: The buildings directly infront of the camera can have fully rendered fence-posts, the buildings on the next street over should only have a single plane of fence posts), the game should have a scalable fog option. Not only can this optimize the game by masking buildings far away (benefiting users with lower-end computers) but having a tiny bit of fog at all times helps blur far away buildings and hills, creating an illusion of distance. This is something that’s common practice for people who map for Counterstrike or HL2, since in real life our vision tends to fade after a certain distance.
These are just some niggles that have been bothering me over the past few days as I’ve been playing TrainFever. I have lots of other niggles, but the game is too cute and fun to let me completely put it down.