Report for the Community #37

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. It is time to hurry up and bring all your harvesters into the fields before the winter hits and your crops decay. For us it is the time to announce that next week we will switch the current beta version into stable, and it also means that we will be able to change our focus on something new and for most of you more exciting stuff. But even before that, we were able to make something extra that we added into this update, and we want to share some of these things with you.

At first, let us have a look at the beauty and pride of soviet engineering, the T815. In late soviet and early post-soviet eras these vehicles carried massive amounts of materials in Czechoslovakia and there were no highways or other important infrastructure being built without using them. That means this vehicle deserves a special treatment and unfortunately it was a bit neglected in the past by us. We refreshed its model and added new color skins. But it is not the end because we plan to add more variants in near future because dumpers were not the only variants in broad use. We know this is not a game changer as there are already some models with different variants available in the workshop, but it gives a bit of flavor to the game for those who remember the days when they saw these vehicles all over the Republic driving to their destinations.

And besides that, we added two more vehicles and you may be interested especially in the roller made in Czechoslovakia. It will be a powerful addition to your construction mechanisms because it is level 27 and is faster to do its job than the American roller and it is available more than 10 years earlier than that. And we also added a new diesel locomotive T678 (nicknamed Pomaranč or Orange in English) which is available from 1961 to 1967 and gives you opportunity to get a strong and cheap engine to carry your wagons in early game.

We were also improving the overall graphics of the game by adding new 3D terrain setting. It should prevent creating so obvious tile patterns in certain situations but it depends on map and how even the terrain is, so it may not be visible in all circumstances. And then we finally dealt with the cursor which was shaped as cube and was not the favorite feature among players. Lot of people did not like that but now we do not have that cube shape anymore. We changed it into circle and made it much smaller. If you zoom in it will be bigger but not as big as the cube used to be. The next thing that was not looking good in game were the roads under construction because the gravel texture for them was blurred and ugly. We updated this texture and now it will look much better.

Now let us have a look at fixes and tweaks we made during past 2 weeks that may be important to speak about. We restricted the building of roads, and you will no longer be able to draw roads over rail junctions or rail dead ends. Just be aware of that while you will plan your infrastructure. We also made underground pipelines and cables which are under construction more visible in underground mode. We also corrected the terminal reservation for signals to avoid deadlocks and fixed an issue when train would not find route (mostly in the station) causing signal to turn red when the train flips on the signal. Then there was an issue with excavators’ strength not counted properly while terraforming without money. That was fixed too. Next thing we needed to deal with was the broken anarchy (free placement) workaround modders used to place stuff as we updated how structure collisions work, some mods relying on free placement broke. We hope we successfully fixed that and modders will be able to use non-collision again.

As you can see there were not that many critical issues during past weeks, and we can stick to the roadmap and do our last steps before we switch the public test into stable. That will give us room to refocus and hopefully we will bring you fresh exciting news about upcoming features of the update planned to be released in December. Until then do not forget to enjoy the life, have fun, and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team