OpenLoco v23.08 is out! Owing in part to the summer having been quite rainy in our corner of the world, this has been such a busy month for the project again! And it isn’t just the game that’s received an update this time. As you can tell, reading this, we’ve got a new website! We hope you like it as much as we do.
Anyway, without further ado, let’s dive into the most major changes…
Vehicle object selection is now grouped by vehicle type (#2036, #2085, #2092)
A common complaint from players setting up scenarios, is that their vehicle object list gets too long to easily wade through. In February, we alleviated this somewhat by introducing search filters to the object selection window. This month, @AaronVanGeffen expanded on this by adding an extra set of tab groups to the vehicle object selection tab. To keep things performant, the game’s object index will automatically be rebuilt once to now keep track of vehicle subtypes as well. @Duncanspumpkin’s latest work on the object index is paying off nicely here!
Construction improvements (#2078)
Constructing impressive transport layouts is at the heart of the game. We’ve improved a few things this month. First off, the construction ghost for buildings now shows the building in their constructed form, rather than just the scaffolding needed to build it. Moreover, placing a company headquarters now respects the keyboard shortcut for rotation (defaults to Z), so you can build it just at the angle you like it. The same goes for new industries and other buildings you construct in-game. Finally, we also fixed a bug from the original game, where the yellow construction marker would stick around after closing the construction window.
Our work on the game commands over the past few months is really paying off here. We couldn’t have easily tackled these issues without it!
More game commands reimplementation (#2061, #2065, #2066, #2076)
The remaining game commands are all huge functions to undertake, so the pace has slowed down a bit compared to earlier months. This month, @Duncanspumpkin has tackled the signal placement game command. Functionally, it is identical to the old version, but it’s all in C++ now! Ready for multiplayer in the future.
We’re about 65% into the game command reimplementation process now. This meant there
were a bunch of files in just the one GameCommand folder. @ZehMatt set out to split
these up into logical units, with game commands grouped by themed subfolders. For
example, Terraform or Vehicle. This has cleaned things up nicely!
Some love for the file browser (#2051, #2087, #2088)
This month, some longstanding minor bugs in the in-game file browser were addressed. Disk drives are accessible again on Windows, and accented characters now display correctly, as long as the in-game sprite font supports them.
Another issue that went under the radar for a while is that the game would not close cleanly when the file browser is open. @ZehMatt fixed that one, too.
Smoother right-click scrolling (#2057)
A bug that had us stumped for a while, was why right-click scrolling would sometimes stutter. Crucially, this wouldn’t happen with window scaling off. Well, as it turns out, the problem was that we were a bit too enthusiastic with scaling the mouse position in this case. Our thanks go out to first-time contributor @RednibCoding for fixing this one!
Work on the map generator (#2054, #2081, #2084)
Our implementations for the map generator is still calling into vanilla Locomotion routines a lot. Over the years, our understanding of the game’s structures has improved considerably, so it’s become much easier to implement them now than it would have been back then. And so we did! The original height map generator has been tackled, which also led to us discovering a years-old bug with setting water levels at map edges.
With our implementation expanding, we also finally split up the map generator code into several smaller files. A cleaner code base makes it nicer for us to work in, but importantly for new contributors as well. We hope to see more of you in the future!
Assigning map window colours (#2072, #2073)
Like the map generator, the map window was still using a bunch of vanilla code. This month, we implemented the functions assigning colours to industries and routes. Fun fact! Did you know all of them have a preferred colour? Sometimes those preferences clash, however, and it becomes a first-come, first-served kind of situation. In that case, the first available colour is assigned instead to the others.
Exceptional work on exceptions (#2068, #2074)
Exception handling, or lack thereof, was a big cause for debugging woes. No more! @ZehMatt added handling such that the line and file throwing the exception are now included in the exception message. Thanks!
The hardest problem in computer science: naming things (#2049, #2050, #2062, #2064)
We’ve been quite strict with trying to name variables and functions as soon as possible, but sometimes clarity only strikes after more implementation. @ZehMatt and @duncanspumpin had a few such epiphanies this month, even finding remnamts of things that should’ve been renamed into entities years ago. Good to have that sorted!
Using FileStream for better status reporting (#2067, #2075)
In June, @ZehMatt worked on refactoring our custom stream classes to be more efficient and generalisible. This month, he’s expanded their use in the codebase. Conveniently, this means it’s now much easier for them to report on their progress, for instance when processing the object index. Neat!