Transport Tycoon Forums

Just discovered this on my Steam queue (which I diligently plough through every day while I should be working) and thought it looked interesting: Art of the Rail

While I'm not entirely a fan of the name (reminds me too much of a certain orange man's written ramblings) the premise sounds pretty good:

Inspired by the classic transport tycoon games, Art of the Rail brings the spirit of these games into a modern context. Build, grow, and manage your transport empire and use it to shape the economy of your game world for the better.
Features

Construct transport networks using roads, rails, tunnels and bridges
Develop your vehicle routes to maximize profits
Establish and upgrade stations and vehicle hubs with bays, cargo yards, and more
Meeting economic needs directly grows and develops the economy of your world
Edit the terrain to improve your transport networks
Full multiplayer with up to 16 other players, either cooperatively or competitively

It seems to be in 3D with some decent cartoony stylings (ugly landscape though) and mimicking TTD quite closely. Of course, this is not out yet but they're aiming for a december 2020 release. It doesn't say if it'll be an early access release, which looking at some details (see attachments) on the screenshots might be a smart plan, but I'm at least intrigued and will probably be picking it up to see if it's any good, if the price isn't too hefty.

Last time I did this was somewhat of a disappointment but to be honest it's always fun to scout the Steam/itch.io/GOG libraries for good train fun.

I'm Rocket, creator of Art of the Rail!

Longtime OpenTTD (and TTD) fan. It's actually one of two games I took with me on a laptop when I climbed everest!

If you have any questions, and would like to try it out - I'd love some feedback and could provide some alpha keys.

While I'm wanting to make a spiritual remake; I don't like doing remakes without bringing something new. My pillars are:

• Scale is fun. The scale of OpenTTD allows you to have a sense of empire and a sense of a "real" economy. It's important this game can handle thousands of vehicles and great amounts of terrain
• Optimizing is fun. I want the sense of building, improving, terraforming - I think OpenTTD and Factorio are great examples of this
• Investment is fun. What I want to do different from OpenTTD is stations - the idea of investing in Hubs. I've started this by having cargo capacity at stations as placable station pieces.

I'm exploring how to make road vehicles not just an option but also important, for the stations. Exploring having a building (courier depot) that you can assign road vehicles to in a station, where the road vehicles travel themselves in an area to pickup cargo without you having to make orders - as needed. So micro management of road vehicles isnt as important.

My trello is at: https://trello.com/b/fYYAYVq6/art-of-the-rail

rocket2guns wrote: ↑19 Oct 2020 23:56I'm exploring how to make road vehicles not just an option but also important, for the stations. Exploring having a building (courier depot) that you can assign road vehicles to in a station, where the road vehicles travel themselves in an area to pickup cargo without you having to make orders - as needed. So micro management of road vehicles isnt as important.

This is very interesting. You're probably aware of this already, but Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic incorporates such a feature quite well. It's a relief not having to build road vehicles and determine where they go as demand and available cargo change. Adding capacity doesn't involve analyzing demand or changing orders, just expanding the pool of available vehicles.

Here's some screenshots from my last multiplayer test:

Personally I love the way that water looks. Also spotting some pre-signal system already implemented?

Hi !

What hapend with this game ? I really wanted this and the release was December 2020 but now it said "Coming soon"
And you got noone to contact for answers

I love how it looks! I'll be sure to buy/download it~

s_o_n_y wrote: ↑11 Feb 2021 13:09 Hi !

What hapend with this game ? I really wanted this and the release was December 2020 but now it said "Coming soon"
And you got noone to contact for answers

A good place for this sort of info is generally the games' community hubs on Steam

and sure enough

Good that they're thinking about limits and performance now, it seems almost normal to tackle that last as part of the optimisations, and I am often disappointed by late game performance even in many triple A titles where a lot of entities are simulated.

Yeah this game is definitely coming along nicely. I've been lucky enough to play the test build for a bit, and so far performance hasn't been an issue at all - granted, I've not been at the point where I'm really heavily taxing the game but I'm guessing the way they've designed the geometry will be beneficial for it holding up when the map is really filled up.

Despite not having too much content yet it's already pretty polished in certain aspects, like the vehicle scheduling system and the terrain being very easily editable. Also the stations already have the potential to be used for pretty cool builds, at the moment there's specific cargo tiles that fill up like the Industrial Stations Renewal set but I can see it being expanded. I'll add a few screenshots of my current save, in which I haven't even gotten to building any trucks yet, it's all trains so far.

Thought it was about time I did an update!

Sadly 2020 was a very busy year for my company, I had to focus a lot more time on our major project and I didn't end up with a great deal of time on Art of the Rail until a few months ago. However, the good news I was able to get an artist at my studio who came of a previous project to be full-time on Art of the Rail. His name is Petr and he worked with me on Stationeers. I thoroughly enjoy working with him and he's incredibly skilled. He's going through and replacing all of my "programmer" art. Additionally, our talented sound designer (who is somewhat of a programmer now) Matt has been adding sounds to the game very quickly. Everything has sounds now, so he is iterating and adding flavor like industries having active and idle sounds.

I've spent my time focused a lot on "hardening" the game (fixing the worst bugs), optimizing, and extending tooling support (ingame asset editor etc...). I've also started implementing the towns, I currently have their positions generating. And, as Petr has made better art, optimizing and refining how vehicles and other things are rendered.

I am doing a lot of custom rendering, such as batching and texture arrays - to allow me to support thousands and thousands of vehicles with a reasonable fidelity. Our last MP play test we ended up with ~250 vehicles, running about 3KBps (one client, plus the host). I ran at 200 fps (current max FPS limit) the whole time. Older machines though, don't run so well. Especially if you have grass enabled.

Recently my old saves have turned out incompatible with the latest version, so it was about time to start yet another game. Having gotten to grips a bit better with the leveling tool my current goal is to have an as smooth as (vertically) possible network. These are two of the first stations as I've set up a wood/planks/goods line first. Currently the game's got more different and quite pretty (rail) vehicles and a couple of industry chains, but not towns/passengers yet - the map setup screen hints at them coming soon though.

rocket2guns wrote: ↑19 Oct 2020 23:56 I'm Rocket, creator of Art of the Rail!

Longtime OpenTTD (and TTD) fan. It's actually one of two games I took with me on a laptop when I climbed everest!

Been playing OTTD for years. What finally drove me away was partly the discovery of Transport Fever, and partly that OTTD's graphics were starting to peeve me a little in the modern era - spend hundreds of quid on a new GPU and TTD is still fuzzy... But when I saw you chatting with Cnl Failure with screenshots I thought this looked like a worthy successor in the wings. I'm eagerly looking forwards to getting back on the footplate.

Interesting you mention laptops - most of the games I play at the moment (lots of Factorio!) don't fit well on a laptop screen, but this does look like a game I can likely take with me when I'm away from the farm.

Watching this space...

Are there any Updates for Art of the Rail? I discovered it recently, but it seems dead? There´s a fairly big studio behind it, but there seems to be absolutely no progress... Was there ever a playable Alpha? Is there a way for me to get access? Probably not?

Steam still shows it as "Coming soon". I live in hope but would rather on the whole taht it was ready for public exposure before being available, rather than escape into the wild half-ready and give itself a bad rep.

In other news I recently tried Voxel Tycoon, but found it... un-engaging. I may have another go in the spring as unlike most of the games I play at the moment it's small enough to run on the PC I have access to when on holiday!

GianniGianni wrote: ↑25 Oct 2021 11:03 There´s a fairly big studio behind it

My impression from this thread is that this is basically a one-man project, large studio behind it or not.