Game in Development: Train3D

[mmcconnell1618]

Hi,

I've been working on a new transportation game and I'm starting to share some details. It's still very early in development but I love the community here and would appreciate feedback and suggestions as the game progresses. I've got a short list of things to wrap up before releasing my first video preview but you can see a few early screenshots on my blog.

The game is inspired by the strategy and transportation games I grew up with like Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon (ChrisSawyerGames.com), Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, and open source reimagining projects like OpenTTD. I'm not sure what form the final game will take but I did start out with some specific objectives:

• Build a tile-based transportation game - I want tiles, not a mushy ground mesh with random spline tracks
• Make if 3D - I want the ability to view the world from any direction.
• 4K resolution - I want the game to run 60fps+ at 3840x2160 resolution
• C# where possible - C++ is the game language of choice but I'm tired of headers and manual memory management
• Make it fun - I want to recapture that feeling of being absorbed into the game world and escaping for a little while

[orudge]

Interesting work, especially doing it in C#, in terms of performance. Are you using .NET Core?

[mmcconnell1618]

I'm using Unity for the base engine. C# is used as the scripting language but the low level stuff that comes from the engine is written in C/C++. Unity may even be doing some optimizations where they are compiling C# to C on build. There are certainly some tricks to getting better performance out of C# like not using LINQ and preferring loops by index instead of foreach.

[mmcconnell1618]

Unity doesn't have .NET Core support yet but hopefully will have it soon. It uses .NET Standard 2.0 as the default profile. I believe the whole thing is built on the Mono project at the moment.

[orudge]

Well, good luck with it! Is the intention for this to be open sourced?

[mmcconnell1618]

I'm not 100% sure what the commercialization vs. open source will look like yet. Hackable with mods is certainly on the requirements list but I'm not sure if the core engine will end up as open source or not.

[mmcconnell1618]

Here is a quick video preview of the land engine in the alpha version:

https://youtu.be/VXGZWtcxITc

[mmcconnell1618]

Here's another video of the work in progress. This one shows off bay management at bus stations where buses are assigned to one of three available spots as they enter a station.

https://youtu.be/uXynFDLovrU

[mmcconnell1618]

I've posted another quick developer update and video of the track building tools as I test them. This is the first pass at a tool to draw track layouts or edit existing ones.

* Currently have 19 unique track parts that can be combined in a variety of ways.
* Click a start point on the edge of tile, then click the destination point if available
* Space bar to unlock start point and select a new one

https://youtu.be/53RGxdzl00k

[Challenger007]

Very interesting. Have you thought about the storyline of the game or what will it all look like in the end?

[mmcconnell1618]

It's obviously inspired by games in the genre like Transport Tycoon, Locomotion, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sid Meier's Railroads and Railroad Tycoon. I know that I want to focus on two major components right now: fun to build complex transportation networks (with a potential sandbox mode if that's all you like) and interesting business decisions that impact how your world evolves.

For example, I'm considering if maintenance spending should be configurable across everything or individual routes/vehicles. If you have a bus that runs a very short route and still makes a profit, it might make more sense to spend more on maintenance and keep it running longer because you don't need to buy the latest bus that travels 3x as fast. On the other hand, if you have an air transport route and the technology is developing quickly, maybe you cut maintenance costs and reduce the lifetime of the jet knowing you're going to upgrade in a few years anyways.

I always appreciate input from the community on where you see interesting gaps in current transport games that might be fun to play.

[Challenger007]

There is little realism in modern games. When the car knocks over a bunch of junk, and there are no dents left. I would like such realism as in life, with the need to repair cars, pay fines. It would also be interesting to implement public transport and other social elements. Although it might be boring. I do not even know. It's just that many games are very much divorced from reality, from real physics.