Hello respected community!

First of all, I would love to thank you all for such patience. I wanted to release multiplayer in October, but we kept finding more and more issues and some of them were quite serious. I forgot all my plans and just focused on fixing and finishing the first version of fully functional multiplayer as fast as possible. At the end, it took more than two more months, but today I am finally allowing all of you (at least those brave enough:) ) to switch to Experimental branch and join our open beta multiplayer testing.

I would be very thankful for any feedback or issues reporting. We have great and growing discord community page for this, here is the invitation https://discord.gg/jeYGjCES. I will do my best to be there as much as possible and working on any needed fixes meantime.

So, what is in today's open multiplayer beta?

Connection & Server

• You can play as group of up to 8 players on the same map (including custom maps) now! Just enable multiplayer when starting new game. This will start server and anyone can join you.

• The setup stays in the savefile, so next time you load this game, the server will be online again. Each player will autoconnect to their company when they join again.

• Connection is peer 2 peer, but you can host the game without public IP. I've implemented also rendezvous server for this, so hopefully it will handle all your requests smoothly.

• You can also protect your server by password.

• Chat window is accessible by ~ or icon in the toolbar. You can easily add a map location or object into your messages by clicking on it when writing a message. Everyone can then easily click on these hypertext links.

• See other player's cursor on the map or even special "beam" when switched to first person mode (walking, driving, using building mounted camera positions etc.). Quite funny feature I would say, I like it a lot :)

• Each new player or company is automatically identified by creator's steam name. No more default names!

• Server browser. It is not filtering games atm, only (for example) by games of your friends.

• New options when starting new game (if to start server too, if mods allowed, default setup for new players cooperative / competitive)

• You have the possibility to send invitation to your friends. It will appear in their steam chat window.

• All scripts run on server side to allow any script interaction or quest sharing

• Some scripts are not compatible with distant processing (on server side) yet, so these are removed in MP (some camera control tutorials for instance)

• Added the possibility to connect directly to the server via steam friends list

• Mods are enabled/disabled/downloaded according to the server you are connecting to. This does not change your future single player game.

• Clients can run faster now. Some events are no more simulated on the client side, but only on server side to release some workload from clients, or to ensure the consistency and also to prevent any client-side cheats or local mods, so nobody gains unfair advantage over other players.

• Smoothing vehicles and player's cursors movement when server sends update

Cooperation x Competition

• I've added rating into stations cargo distribution. Now (in MP) it is important to pick up your cargo frequently to keep your station rating high. Otherwise, the industry will prefer another station or, when your rating drops to zero, redistribute your cargo elsewhere (including to some others of your stations around).

• Companies and players are decoupled in game logic. You can join other players in their companies or start your own. Or change it anytime while in game ;)

• Multiple companies can cooperate on quests (some quests are shared by default). We will be changing this while in multiplayer beta testing. Maybe some more options for sharing quests can be added based on your feedback.

• You can also protect your company by password so no one can join your company freely.

• You can share tracks with another company. Once you share your track other company can connect by their tracks as well, so think twice before allowing them to do it :)

• To prevent other company from using some of your shared tracks, you can place owner-only signal where only your trains can pass through.

• Company rating! This score board (0-1000 points) shows how successful your company is (including detailed graphs). And what is the best result of the rating?...

• Headquarters grows according to your company rating!

• There is also a possibility to send tokens to another player

• Owner's overlay easily showing what assets belong to each company

Other updates

• Yellow chain signal properly causes vehicle to stop when the next exit signal on
  vehicle's path is red

• Improved shadow filtering, ranges, interpolation between CSM levels and resolution

• Fixed brushes in editor

• Fixed screen vertical tearing when vignetting effect used

• Fixed GPU heating up when in main menu (FPS cap)

• Fixed FPS limiter, so it is more accurate now

• Fixed situations where train is not loading in the first visited station

• Fixed invalid icons when using 100+ active mods. Still there, but occurs later

• Fixed LOD baker issue (polygons over the map, invisible objects)

• Fixed several rare crashes

• Fixed approximately 200 other smaller bugs, including in MP

So, that being said, I am really glad that I can allow all of you interested to play the game with your friends, to do so now. It means a lot to me, and for the last couple of weeks, we were playing each evening with my friends from Russia, Argentina, Canada, Czech republic and more on big maps. After couple of hours, the map is so advanced each day, so populated, I am just flying the camera over and I am speechless (and happy). Hope you will like this update as much as I do :)

Have a great holiday season! And all the best to whole new incoming year 2022 ;)

Best regards,
Jan