From Press Release:
Mashinky – the multi-awarded transport strategy game about trains and road vehicles made by a single developer on his custom engine – is being upgraded with the Multiplayer Update today
Another update of Mashinky game introduces the Multiplayer today. You can start a new game for up to 8 players now. Companies and players are decoupled in the game logic, so you can join other players in their companies or start your own anytime through the gameplay. Multiple companies can cooperate on quests (some quests are shared by design), fight for resources, or cooperate on supplying the industry buildings and split the rewards. You can also protect your company by password, so no one can join your transport imperium freely. You can also share your whole rail network with another company or set boundaries by placing owner-only signal.
Companies have their performance ratings, which show on the score board (including detailed graphs) from 0 to 1000 points. It basically shows how successful the company is, and headquarters changes its visual appearance according to the company rating.
You can use a chat window (by ~ or icon) to communicate with your co-players, and easily add a map location or object into your messages by clicking on it when typing a message. Everyone can easily click on these hypertext links later and see for themselves; which makes the strategy planning with your friends way easier. You can also see “cursor” of each player in the world and if anyone enters the first person mode, their appearance in the game world changes to show not only their position, but also the view direction. This way you can easily walk, drive, chase each other while jumping over buildings or even derail the train together. Fun is not only delivering the cargo anymore, but the multiplayer opens brand new possibilities. To support multiplayer gameplay, cargo distribution rating has been added into each station. It is important to pick up your cargo frequently to keep your station’s rating high now. Otherwise, the industry may prefer another station or, when your rating drops to zero, redistributes your cargo elsewhere.
Thanks to several huge optimizations done not only for multiplayer, the game runs smoother even in single player mode. In multiplayer, the fps increase could be even bigger due to the fact, that only the server computes paths and game logic, and evaluates scripts. This helps not only smoothing the gameplay, but it also prevents anyone from cheating or modifying the game locally. On the other hand, mods are allowed in multiplayer and clients automatically check & update list of used steam workshop mods when connecting to the server. Aside from many bugfixes also included in this update, yellow chain signals finally work the way that each train checks its path to ensure it can enter junction block without risk of not being able to exit it. There are also improvements to shadows, fixed editor brushes, FPS limiter, not loading trains, rare crashes and more than 200 other minor bugs.
Start the multiplayer by enabling this option in the new game setup window, or start the server while playing one of your old save files. You can also protect your server by password, join friend’s server from steam friends list, start your own server without public IP and have fun together with your friends. The preset stays in the save file, so next time you load this game, the server will be online again. With this update, Mashinky game is closer to adding the very last historical era, planes, more content regarding to vehicles and buildings variability, more special events and finally heading to the full release of version 1.0.
