Dear community,

we have now released the official update to version 1.2.1 of TransRoad: USA. To prevent unexpected follow up issues and for the best experience, we recommend to start a new campaign if you did not participate in the v1.2.0 beta branches.


Patch Notes v1.2.1 (official)

Fixes:

• A bug was fixed were old data was kept in TruckShops, which blocked the new bought truck from spawning on the map.
  
• The Splashscreens with our logos will appear at game start again.
  
• Options menu: Players with a setup with 3 or more monitors will not have double resolutions to select anymore.

Dear community,

we have now released the official update to version 1.2.0 of TransRoad: USA.
The whole team would like to thank everybody playing the official and the public test version again, finding bugs or things they would like to be improved and posting them here in the forum. Your support and participation really made us happy!

For the campaign, savegames from v1.0.7, v1.0.8, 1.0.9 and from 1.1.0 are not compatible to the official v1.2.0, due to changes we made to the quest chain. To prevent unexpected follow up issues and for the best experience, we recommend to start a new campaign if you did not participate in the v1.2.0 beta branches.


Patch Notes v1.2.0 (official)

New features:

• Automatic maintenance is now implemented. Once your HQ is upgraded to level 3 (click on your HQ map marker and then the upgrade in the bottom-right), you can activate nationwide automatic maintenance in any depot. You don’t need a maintenance depot for that. All trucks will maintain themselves once they reach a 2,000 miles threshold.
  
• Contract deadlines now have a “day + hour” accuracy, meaning they will count down the hours and not just the days. Like this, it does not matter at what time of the day you accept a contract; you won’t loose multiple hours if you accept a contract late in the evening/night.
  
• Drivers can now be sent to license training. Decide on an idle driver in your HQ menu, open the license training window, and then select the additional license they should get. Training takes time and costs money.
  
• A new visualisation in the Truck Fleet menu will show now if a driver has quit before he reached a depot and will be vanished then.

Crash/Freeze Bug:

• Updating the engine to Unity 2017 has solved the freezing bug for a 100% reproducibility case we had on one computer at our place. We all can assume pretty safely that this freeze bug is now completely gone.

Contracts & Trucks:

• When a truck waited in the queue for a truckshop maintenance, it was possible to assign a different task to the truck. But it did not leave the maintenance queue, causing the queue not to continue correctly. This could result in trucks waiting endlessly in a truckshop’s maintenance queue. This issue has been fixed.
  
• When you added contracts to a schedule and then instantly deleted the contract from the schedule, the trailer icon remained in that schedule. Now it disappears and the problem is solved.
  
• When a Special Contract appears, you can see the individual contracts in the lower right corner. Now you can scroll in this list while the “accept or decline” popup is opened.
  
• For recurring contracts, a buffer was added to the calculation for needed trucks, since it sometimes showed not enough trucks.

Depots:

• Drivers can now be switched directly inside the depot, instead of having to clear the slot first.
  
• Depot map markers are now all visible even when zoomed out: Your own depots, depots of the competitors, and depots that are still free to buy. You can toggle them by using the [G] key (directly next to the [F] key which allows you to cycle through all owned depots).

Achievements:

All these Achievements were broken and lost their progress if the play session was interrupted by saving and loading a savegame of the same play session.
• “Everybody's darling” is now achievable.
  
• “Known all over town” is now achievable.
  
• “Top of the World” is now achievable. Achieving it afterwards is only possible with a campaign savegame.
  
• “Special Contract Adept” and “Special Contract Professional” are now achievable in one play session.
  
• “Quest Mode Adept” and “Quest Mode Professional” are now achievable.
  
• “Septett” is now achievable.

Other:

• Zooming in and out can now also be done with the keyboard using or [+] (on the keypad) for zooming in, and [o] or [-] (on the keypad) to zoom out.
  
• We fixed two issues where the colored lines on the roads marking the currently hovered or selected route would not vanish.
  
• There is a new, more detailed explanation now on how to remove or unassign trucks from a contract (namely by dragging it from the truck fleet list or from the map onto a depot). This explanation is in the ingame manual (“?” button in the top right) in the chapter Schedules, Trucks and Depots. It is furthermore a tooltip on an “info i” icon in the truck info window and in the truck list of a single accepted contract (click on a contract in your schedule to see that list).
  
• When clicking on a city map marker, the city info window in the lower right now also shows the reputation progress bar of every resident client. Hovering over it also shows the exact amount of reputation.
  
• When you try to drop a truck onto a depot for transfer or maintenance, the respective drop zone on the right and on the left side of the depot now have a distinct highlight color, indicating more clearly where the drop zone is.
  
• After loading a savegame the map icon lines will now be displayed correctly .
  
• Fixed a bug which let you lose reputation every hour.
  
• The voice-overs will not stop to early anymore. This happened mostly with Billy Bowman in the German version of the game.
  
• Radio: The Keyboard shortcuts are not active anymore when the Radio menu is open. There were problems when using the Radio Station filter.
  
• Fixed a bug where two Radio-Streams or Radio-Stream & Soundtrack could play at the same time.
  
• A truck in maintenance inside a depot will now be removed from the schedule automatically if the current driver of this truck gets fired.
  
• A driver can not be fired if his truck is loaded with freight in maintenance inside a depot. This could happen if the truck had a breakdown.
  
• Overwritten Savegames in the Save/Load menu will now sorted correctly and appears now above in the list.
  
• The second campaign quest is not blocked anymore if the player buys a Truck & Trailer before completing the first quest.
  
• The job tooltip will not shown anymore when dragging a job or Truck/Trailer over a job in the ‘Client Contracts’ or ‘Schedule’ menu.
  
• Questmode: Quest fixes. Some quests could not completed or distribute the wrong bonus.
  
• Enemy takeover: The first salary per mile from the new inherited drivers is now correct. The payment was too much before.

Dear community,

since we want to make patches available to you directly instead of handing it over to quality assurance before, we have created a separate Steam branch that you can activate on your own. This is so to speak a “branched off version” of the official version.

How to activate the “Public Test Version”:

1. Right click on TransRoad: USA in your Steam library.
   
2. Click “Properties”.
   
3. Click on the tab “BETAS”.
   
4. Choose “public_test_version” from the dropdown list.

Steam will now add a download for TransRoad: USA to the download queue.

Generally speaking, savegames will not be downwards-compatible.
For example, the Public Test Version is v1.0.8b1, and these savegames will not be compatible with the v1.0.7 official version!


New features:

• Drivers can now be sent to license training. Decide on an idle driver in your HQ menu, open the license training window, and then select the additional license they should get. Training takes time and costs money.

Crash/Freeze Bug:

• Updating the engine to Unity 2017 has solved the freezing bug for a 100% reproducibility case we had on one computer at our place. We all can assume pretty safely that this freeze bug is now completely gone.

Other:

• After loading a savegame the map icon lines will now correctly displayed.
  
• Achievement “Everybody's darling” is now achievable.
  
• Fixed a bug which let you lose reputation every hour.

Dear community,

since we want to make patches available to you directly instead of handing it over to quality assurance before, we have created a separate Steam branch that you can activate on your own. This is so to speak a “branched off version” of the official version.

How to activate the “Public Test Version”:

1. Right click on TransRoad: USA in your Steam library.
   
2. Click “Properties”.
   
3. Click on the tab “BETAS”.
   
4. Choose “public_test_version” from the dropdown list.

Steam will now add a download for TransRoad: USA to the download queue.

Generally speaking, savegames will not be downwards-compatible.
For example, the Public Test Version is v1.0.8b1, and these savegames will not be compatible with the v1.0.7 official version!

New features:

• Automatic maintenance is now implemented. Once your HQ is upgraded to level 3 (click on your HQ map marker and then the upgrade in the bottom-right), you can activate nationwide automatic maintenance in any depot. You don’t need a maintenance depot for that. All trucks will maintain themselves once they reach a 2,000 miles threshold.
  
• Contract deadlines now have a “day + hour” accuracy, meaning they will count down the hours and not just the days. Like this, it does not matter at what time of the day you accept a contract; you won’t loose multiple hours if you accept a contract late in the evening/night.

Contracts & Trucks:

• When a truck waited in the queue for a truckshop maintenance, it was possible to assign a different task to the truck. But it did not leave the maintenance queue, causing the queue not to continue correctly. This could result in trucks waiting endlessly in a truckshop’s maintenance queue.
  
• When you added contracts to a schedule and then instantly deleted the contract from the schedule, the trailer icon remained in that schedule. Now it disappears and the problem is solved.
  
• When a Special Contract appears, you can see the individual contracts in the lower right corner. Now you can scroll in this list while the “accept or decline” popup is opened.
  
• For recurring contracts, a buffer was added to the calculation for needed trucks, since it sometimes showed not enough trucks.

Depots:

• Drivers can now be switched directly inside the depot, instead of having to clear the slot first.
  
• Depot map markers are now all visible even when zoomed out: Your own depots, depots of the competitors, and depots that are still free to buy. You can toggle them by using the key [G] (directly next to the [F] that lets you cycle through all owned depots).

Other:

• Zooming in and out can now be done on the keyboard with or [+] on the keypad for zooming in, and [o] or [-] on the keypad for zooming out.
  
• We fixed two cases where the colored lines on the roads that mark the currently hovered or selected route would not vanish.
  
• There is a new, more detailed explanation now on how to remove or unassign trucks from a contract (namely by dragging it from the truck fleet list or from the map onto a depot). This explanation is in the ingame manual (? button in the top right) in the chapter Schedules, Trucks and Depots. It is furthermore a tooltip on a “info i” icon in the truck info window, and in the truck list of a single accepted contract (click on a contract in your schedule to see that list).
  
• When clicking on a city map marker, the city info window in the lower right now also shows the reputation progress bar of every resident client. Hovering over it also gives you the exact reputation amount.
  
• When wanting to drop a truck onto a depot for transfer or maintenance, the respective drop zone on the right and on the left side of the depot now have a distinct highlight color, indicating more clearly where the drop zone is.

Current game freeze bug
We currently have a bug in the game that causes the whole game to freeze. This most often happens when you open the truck fleet list. Internally, the engine Unity tries to address a memory address where it does not find the correct data. That is why it might not happen on your PC, in your savegame, or with a previous version of the game, since the addresses always change.
This bug causes Unity to stop rendering the game’s visuals correctly, so it may look like this:

The screen might not change at all, though, every time it’s different.
Interestingly, the game keeps running in the background. If you have your speakers activated, you will continue to hear the music, and if there are trucks on the way, you will hear the money ka-ching sounds when they deliver their freight. You could even continue playing the game “blindly”, so if you click in the top-left corner for example, you will open the HQ menu. If you can open a contract list, you will see the mouse cursor changing from the pointed finger to opened hand when hovering over the area where the contracts should be.
We even had one user here in the forum that had the rare case where he saw all of the game’s visuals continuing to run. For him, only the truck list was invisible.
We have to report this bug to the engine developers at Unity once we have made sure that this is still a bug in the most recent engine versions.
Since the bug is related to drag and drop functions, we will try to change the internal handling of drag and drop in the meantime to get rid of it for now. It may reappear even though, until Unity fixes it.
This includes the contracts, the schedule, the depot, the truck map markers, and the truck list of an ongoing contract.


Plans for v1.2.0b2
For the next public test version, we will handle the freeze bug as described before.
Moreover, we are going to add the popular feature of sending your drivers to a license training, so you can “buy” more license for any driver.
This version will be available next week, so roughly speaking between January 15th and 19th.

Dear community,

we have now released the v1.1.0 of TransRoad: USA.
The whole team would like to thank everybody playing the official and the public test version again, finding bugs or things they would like to be improved and posting them here in the forum. Your support and participation really made us happy!

We will continue to release public test version builds where you can participate in testing, if you want to.

For the campaign, savegames from v1.0.7 and from v1.0.8 are not compatible to the official v1.0.9, due to changes we made to the quest chain. To prevent unexpected follow up issues and for the best experience, we recommend to start a new campaign if you did not participate in the v1.0.9 beta branches.


Patch Notes v1.1.0 (official)

Performance:

• We minimized some more lags even further, like interacting with the driver staff list in the HQ menu, placing your HQ or the generation of contracts, or leaving the follower camera of a truck.

Contracts & Trucks:

• Sometimes, competitor trucks would not park correctly in their own depots. This would lead to follow-up bugs when you perform a takeover on this competitor, and it has been fixed.
  
• Enemy trucks sometimes tried to drive from their current destination to exactly the same destination. This has been fixed.
  
• In some cases, trucks would not go to the correct next recurring contract in the schedule, but skipping one recurring contract. This has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading special contract data which has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading fuel price data which has been fixed as well.
  
• When dragging a single truck or a single trailer from the “idle” list, there was no icon on the mouse that indicates the drag, making it look as if it didn’t work. This has been fixed.
  
• Trying to cancel more than 3 contracts was possible and led to the 4th contract always staying in the “trash bin”. This was fixed.
  
• When trucks were on the way to a maintenance depot, and they had a breakdown on this way, they would not start maintenance in the depot correctly, but instead park in the usual way. This was fixed.
  
• Pathfinding of all trucks was improved by giving each truck (competitors and player) an own “seeker object”. This removes problems with waiting competitor trucks for their “turn” to get the seeker object.
  
• When you added contracts to a schedule and then instantly reverted the schedule changes, the trailer icon remained in that schedule. Now it disappears and the problem is solved.
  
• Another case of trucks stuck at a loading zone was fixed. When they got the order to drive from the current position to the same position, and the path manager could not find any path because the distance is zero, the truck would stop operating.

Campaign:

• It was possible to save the game while Billy tells you to buy the reefer concession. If you did that, the quest log would be empty and the campaign blocked. This is now not possible anymore.

Other:

• Closing the contract list panel now does not put the game into play mode anymore, but instead stays in pause (if your game options are set to pause when it opens).
  
• Entering the truck follower mode (dashboard at the bottom), the game does not go to play mode automatically anymore.
  
• When a driver quits because the player didn’t raise his/her salary, the amount of drivers in the HUD in the top-left did not reduce. This is now fixed.
  
• When creating a screenshot for the autosave did not succeed, the autosave message in front of the play buttons did not go away. This has been fixed.
  
• Scrolling with the mouse wheel is now possible anywhere in the idle truck list (just like in the all and busy list).
  
• Trucks having a breakdown were at the very bottom of the truck list when grouped by maintenance data. Now, they are at the very top.
  
• Refreshing the truck list does not result in frequent rebuilds and resets of the scroll bar anymore. The lists are now much calmer.
  
• When loading a savegame or starting a new game, the amount of unread messages next to the envelope icon did not reset. Instead, it showed you the number of unread messages you had before. This is now fixed.
  
• The player’s trucks are now colored in the correct color, and not a lighter, softer version of the actual color. This only applies for trucks bought in v1.1.0b2 or higher, not for existing trucks in savegames.
  
• The competitors’ trucks are now colored in the correct color, and not all in black. This only applies for trucks bought in v1.1.0b2 or higher, not for existing trucks in savegames.
  
• The warning for trucks to go to maintenance has been raised from 1,000 miles to 2,000 miles.

Plans for v1.2.0
For the next version v1.2.0, we will change contract deadlines to days + hours accuracy. Like this, you will no longer have to pay attention to the time of day when accepting contracts, fearing to lose one whole day.

Moreover, we will implement an automatic truck maintenance that you can activate with your HQ level 3.

Besides, we will give our best to get rid of remaining bugs.


On other feature wishes
Another wish that came up in the community was the ability to let trucks park in any city. We talked about such a feature in our team, and we decided not to do it.

The reason for that is that it clashes with the purpose and implementation of the depots: Letting trucks park and wait in a city is the purpose of depots. Now there are some cities where you can never build a depot, so this restricts the possibilities.
But this is an important game design aspect of the game: If you could send your trucks to wait in any city (to bring them into position for normal or special jobs), the game would lose a challenge and thus be simpler. Meeting deadlines would become trivial, and this is a no-go in the game’s core loop.
It is not a realistic depiction of the real world business, but in game design, abstractions are often important and necessary to create emotions and agency in the player. If you could send your trucks to wait anywhere, you would meet deadlines way easier, and deadlines would become meaningless, you would not care. There’s got to be a counterbalance to meeting deadlines and being happy that you received the completion bonus and the reputation. There’s got to be moments of failure so you can worship the moments of victory.

Consider another game: Its goal is to get a round object into a hole in the ground. The easiest and most natural way would be to grab the object with your hand and place it in the hole. You would certainly not walk 100 meters away from it and try to get the object into the hole with a metal stick. But this is a famous game, and the name of the game is golf.
So, restrictions and rules that differ from the easiest way to achieve a goal are inherent to games.

Dear community,

we would like to thank you for your great support and wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Your TransRoad team

Dear community,

since we want to make patches available to you directly instead of handing it over to quality assurance before, we have created a separate Steam branch that you can activate on your own. This is so to speak a “branched off version” of the official version.

How to activate the “Public Test Version”:

1. Right click on TransRoad: USA in your Steam library.
   
2. Click “Properties”.
   
3. Click on the tab “BETAS”.
   
4. Choose “public_test_version” from the dropdown list.

Steam will now add a download for TransRoad: USA to the download queue.

Generally speaking, savegames will not be downwards-compatible.
For example, the Public Test Version is v1.0.8b1, and these savegames will not be compatible with the v1.0.7 official version!


Performance:

• We minimized some more lags even further, like interacting with the driver staff list in the HQ menu, placing your HQ or the generation of contracts, or leaving the follower camera of a truck.

Contracts & Trucks:

• Sometimes, competitor trucks would not park correctly in their own depots. This would lead to follow-up bugs when you perform a takeover on this competitor, and it has been fixed.
  
• Enemy trucks sometimes tried to drive from their current destination to exactly the same destination. This has been fixed.
  
• In some cases, trucks would not go to the correct next recurring contract in the schedule, but skipping one recurring contract. This has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading special contract data which has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading fuel price data which has been fixed as well.
  
• When dragging a single truck or a single trailer from the “idle” list, there was no icon on the mouse that indicates the drag, making it look as if it didn’t work. This has been fixed.
  
• Trying to cancel more than 3 contracts was possible and led to the 4th contract always staying in the “trash bin”. This was fixed.
  
• When trucks were on the way to a maintenance depot, and they had a breakdown on this way, they would not start maintenance in the depot correctly, but instead park in the usual way. This was fixed.
  
• Pathfinding of all trucks was improved by giving each truck (competitors and player) an own “seeker object”. This removes problems with waiting competitor trucks for their “turn” to get the seeker object.
  
• When you added contracts to a schedule and then instantly reverted the schedule changes, the trailer icon remained in that schedule. Now it disappears and the problem is solved.
  
• Another case of trucks stuck at a loading zone was fixed. When they got the order to drive from the current position to the same position, and the path manager could not find any path because the distance is zero, the truck would stop operating.

Campaign:

• It was possible to save the game while Billy tells you to buy the reefer concession. If you did that, the quest log would be empty and the campaign blocked. This is now not possible anymore.

Other:

• Closing the contract list panel now does not put the game into play mode anymore, but instead stays in pause (if your game options are set to pause when it opens).
  
• Entering the truck follower mode (dashboard at the bottom), the game does not go to play mode automatically anymore.
  
• When a driver quits because the player didn’t raise his/her salary, the amount of drivers in the HUD in the top-left did not reduce. This is now fixed.
  
• When creating a screenshot for the autosave did not succeed, the autosave message in front of the play buttons did not go away. This has been fixed.
  
• Scrolling with the mouse wheel is now possible anywhere in the idle truck list (just like in the all and busy list).
  
• Trucks having a breakdown were at the very bottom of the truck list when grouped by maintenance data. Now, they are at the very top.
  
• Refreshing the truck list does not result in frequent rebuilds and resets of the scroll bar anymore. The lists are now much calmer.
  
• When loading a savegame or starting a new game, the amount of unread messages next to the envelope icon did not reset. Instead, it showed you the number of unread messages you had before. This is now fixed.
  
• The player’s trucks are now colored in the correct color, and not a lighter, softer version of the actual color. This only applies for trucks bought in v1.1.0b2 or higher, not for existing trucks in savegames.
  
• The competitors’ trucks are now colored in the correct color, and not all in black. This only applies for trucks bought in v1.1.0b2 or higher, not for existing trucks in savegames.
  
• The warning for trucks to go to maintenance has been raised from 1,000 miles to 2,000 miles.

Plans for v1.1.0
For the next version v1.1.0, we will change contract deadlines to days + hours accuracy. Like this, you will no longer have to pay attention to the time of day when accepting contracts, fearing to lose one whole day.

Moreover, we will implement an automatic truck maintenance that you can activate with your HQ level 3.

Besides, we will give our best to get rid of remaining bugs.


On other feature wishes
Another wish that came up in the community was the ability to let trucks park in any city. We talked about such a feature in our team, and we decided not to do it.

The reason for that is that it clashes with the purpose and implementation of the depots: Letting trucks park and wait in a city is the purpose of depots. Now there are some cities where you can never build a depot, so this restricts the possibilities.
But this is an important game design aspect of the game: If you could send your trucks to wait in any city (to bring them into position for normal or special jobs), the game would lose a challenge and thus be simpler. Meeting deadlines would become trivial, and this is a no-go in the game’s core loop.
It is not a realistic depiction of the real world business, but in game design, abstractions are often important and necessary to create emotions and agency in the player. If you could send your trucks to wait anywhere, you would meet deadlines way easier, and deadlines would become meaningless, you would not care. There’s got to be a counterbalance to meeting deadlines and being happy that you received the completion bonus and the reputation. There’s got to be moments of failure so you can worship the moments of victory.

Consider another game: Its goal is to get a round object into a hole in the ground. The easiest and most natural way would be to grab the object with your hand and place it in the hole. You would certainly not walk 100 meters away from it and try to get the object into the hole with a metal stick. But this is a famous game, and the name of the game is golf.
So, restrictions and rules that differ from the easiest way to achieve a goal are inherent to games.

Dear community,

since we want to make patches available to you directly instead of handing it over to quality assurance before, we have created a separate Steam branch that you can activate on your own. This is so to speak a “branched off version” of the official version.

How to activate the “Public Test Version”:

1. Right click on TransRoad: USA in your Steam library.
   
2. Click “Properties”.
   
3. Click on the tab “BETAS”.
   
4. Choose “public_test_version” from the dropdown list.

Steam will now add a download for TransRoad: USA to the download queue.

Generally speaking, savegames will not be downwards-compatible.
For example, the Public Test Version is v1.0.8b1, and these savegames will not be compatible with the v1.0.7 official version!


Performance:

• We minimized some more lags even further, like interacting with the driver staff list in the HQ menu, placing your HQ or the generation of contracts.

Contracts & Trucks:

• Sometimes, competitor trucks would not park correctly in their own depots. This would lead to follow-up bugs when you perform a takeover on this competitor, and it has been fixed.
  
• Enemy trucks sometimes tried to drive from their current destination to exactly the same destination. This has been fixed.
  
• In some cases, trucks would not go to the correct next recurring contract in the schedule, but skipping one recurring contract. This has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading special contract data which has been fixed.
  
• There was an error with saving and loading fuel price data which has been fixed as well.
  
• When dragging a single truck or a single trailer from the “idle” list, there was no icon on the mouse that indicates the drag, making it look as if it didn’t work. This has been fixed.
  
• Trying to cancel more than 3 contracts was possible and led to the 4th contract always staying in the “trash bin”. This was fixed.
  
• When trucks were on the way to a maintenance depot, and they had a breakdown on this way, they would not start maintenance in the depot correctly, but instead park in the usual way. This was fixed.
  
• Pathfinding of all trucks was improved by giving each truck (competitors and player) an own “seeker object”. This removes problems with waiting competitor trucks for their “turn” to get the seeker object.

Other:

• Closing the contract list panel now does not put the game into play mode anymore, but instead stays in pause (if your game options are set to pause when it opens).
  
• Entering the truck follower mode (dashboard at the bottom), the game does not go to play mode automatically anymore.
  
• When a driver quits because the player didn’t raise his/her salary, the amount of drivers in the HUD in the top-left did not reduce. This is now fixed.
  
• When creating a screenshot for the autosave did not succeed, the autosave message in front of the play buttons did not go away. This has been fixed.
  
• Scrolling with the mouse wheel is now possible anywhere in the idle truck list (just like in the all and busy list).
  
• Trucks having a breakdown were at the very bottom of the truck list when grouped by maintenance data. Now, they are at the very top.
  
• Refreshing the truck list does not result in frequent rebuilds and resets of the scroll bar anymore. The lists are now much calmer.
  
• When loading a savegame or starting a new game, the amount of unread messages next to the envelope icon did not reset. Instead, it showed you the number of unread messages you had before. This is now fixed.

Dear community,
we have now released the v1.0.9 of TransRoad: USA, bringing you a lot of fixes and improvements in performance.
The whole team would like to thank everybody playing the official and the public test version again, finding bugs or things they would like to be improved and posting them here in the forum.

The performance has made a good step forward, and we were able to find a good amount of stuck trucks and stuck contract bugs.

We will continue to release public test version builds where you can participate in testing, if you want to.

For the campaign, savegames from v1.0.7 and from v1.0.8 are not compatible to the official v1.0.9, due to changes we made to the quest chain. To prevent unexpected follow up issues and for the best experience, we recommend to start a new campaign if you did not participate in the v1.0.9 beta branches.


Patch Notes v1.0.9 (official)

Crashes:

• We identified the source of a crash that happened sometimes when zooming in onto a city. This was caused by too many truck motor sounds becoming active. We refined the activation and the amount of truck motor sounds.

Performance:

• We improved a lot of function calls and data management issues. This reduces the amount and intensity of lags during the game. It includes the moment when an autosave is triggered, when you create your company, when trucks finish a contract or refuel, or when new contracts are generated, for example.
  
• We improved the overall performance and minimized lags during the game.
  
  • We removed unnecessary raycasts of user interface elements.
    
  • We removed unnecessary mesh colliders, for example on the highway intersections.
    
  • We reduced the resolution of the terrain collider, needed for the camera.
    
  • We added static batching for some 3D models.
    
  • We reduced draw calls on the animated flags.
    
  • We cleaned up the roadnetwork system, containing too many game objects.
    
  • We reduced raycast lengths of trucks, NPC cars and farming machines.
    
  • We improved the map marker positioning that avoids overlaps (for the city signs, purple clients, truck shops and depots).
    
  • We disabled animator components of inactive objects, which still caused some overhead.
    
  • We warmed up all shaders when the game is loading.

Please consider switching off VSync in the options menu for higher performance. This may have a very noticeable effect on your FPS.
Turning down the amount of NPC cars in the options menu may improve your performance as well. In the options menu, click on “Quality: custom” and then move the slider to the left.


Contracts & Trucks:

• Contracts in the contract list were sometimes marked as “does not fit the currently selected schedule” with a yellow warning sign, although a fitting schedule is selected, and vice versa. This has been fixed.
  
• When a truck goes into maintenance and the truck’s current contract is finished by other trucks, the maintenance truck did not leave maintenance correctly. This has been fixed.
  
• In some cases, trucks would not go to the correct next contract in the schedule, but skipping one contract. This has been fixed.
  
  • There is still an issue with the same behaviour regarding recurring contracts - this is not yet fixed.
• Trucks that were just taken over from a competitor and have not yet returned to a depot now don’t get controlled by the police for their license or the company’s trailer concession.
  
• Taking over trucks caused their player ID not to be updated every time, so you might not be able to use them. This was fixed.
  
• Dragging a truck that is already selected minimized the schedule window. This does not happen anymore.
  
• We identified two major bugs where contracts were stuck at “14/15 trips” for example or were not deleted at “15/15 trips” for example.
  
• The previous problem could lead to the last truck of this contract to disappear upon returning to a depot, which was fixed as well.
  
• Another case of unfinishable contracts has been fixed. This could have been caused by trucks trying to load another pile of freight after having been redirected to a depot.
  
• Trucks getting stuck at a client’s loading zone were caused by a bug in the newsticker system. This has been fixed.
  
• Trucks that have a breakdown were draggable to a own depot. This should not have been possible. It could cause trucks to get stuck in your depot.
  
• Moving and switching trucks or trailers inside a depot messed with the hitch status of other trucks. This has been fixed.
  
• The previous problem could lead to single trailers vanishing from the truck list and other messed up truck list displays.
  
• After signing a schedule, the truck list now only opens itself if there is at least one idle truck in it.
  
• While editing a schedule, the schedule panel sometimes minimized, for example when entering the HQ menu or the marketing menu. This has been fixed by adding a query if you really want to cancel editing the schedule.
  
• While hovering with a contract on the mouse over a schedule with a different trailer, the dragged contract froze in place. This has been fixed.
  
• Every Trade Area client can now not be locked again by failing a contract from or to them. It will be available to you as a basic client all the time from the point where you visit the city.

Overall, we implemented a lot of “safety nets” for trucks or trailers to disappear, to get stuck in maintenance or for contracts to get stuck on the last trips.


Campaign:

• A very important quest chain dependency has been fixed, causing quests to get skipped or quest to get stuck. This revolves around the section where you have to complete 2 contracts each to Montpelier, Boston, New York and Pittsburgh; and then have to pay the first tax penalties, buy a new depot and level up to rank 3.
  
• A savegame issue at the campaign’s end was fixed that prevented you from taking over Gordon Fox.
  
• Taking over another competitor than Gordon Fox when actually the quest is to takeover Gordon Fox messed with the story chain. This has been fixed.
  
• The formula for the amount of money needed to takeover Gordon Fox was changed for a better gameplay flow.
  
• Saving during a campaign story dialogue is not possible anymore. This could have led to blockers in the campaign when loading this savegame or autosave because there are no quests visible.

Sandbox mode:

• The sliders for contract payments, contract deadlines and lines of credit were inverted, so they returned the wrong values. This was corrected.

Quest mode:

• We fixed a quest that asks you to unlock all clients on level IV.
  
• The quest mode could get blocked when saving during a quest that asks you to buy a depot in a certain city. Upon loading such a savegame, the quest would vanish and be invisible.

Balancing:

• The second and third term-based loan will now be unlocked earlier, namely at a company value of $500,000 and $1,000,000, respectively (was: $1,000,000 and $2,000,000).
  
• Truck maintenance has been made cheaper.
  
• Maintenance intervals were increased, leading to fewer maintenances. Moreover, the minimum maintenance interval a truck can ever have was raised.
  
  • This made it necessary for us to update all trucks: the ones for sale in the shops, and the trucks in your fleet update their maintenance intervals once when you load your savegame. This means that all your trucks will be reset to a fresh, full maintenance interval one time only - see it as a gift from us :) .
• Bernie’s truck shop in New York City now offers cheaper maintenances (some truck shops are more expensive in the country).
  
• Upgrading depots with more parking slots is now a little bit cheaper overall. Moreover, fixed costs per week were lowered a little bit as well, in order to give a nicer, quicker game flow at the start of the game.
  
• When drivers ask for a salary raise, they now ask for less in terms of cent per mile.
  
• Special contracts now yield more bonus payments. For example, when the individual contracts from the special contract would bring you $100,000 in contract payments, you will get about $500,000 on top as the bonus payment if you fulfill the special contract on time.

Other:

• The playing speed and pausing has been adjusted to some players’ feedback: the game stays in pause after a truck has first visited a city, for example. A small amount of bugs where the game went into play mode instead of staying paused were fixed as well.
  
• When clicking on a client map marker, their input and export goods are listed in the lower right panel. The export goods often did not arrange themselves correctly, but instead overlapping. This is now fixed.
  
• Game times differed upon loading a savegame. This has been fixed.
  
• In the Cashflow tab in the HQ menu, the depot costs and the fuel costs were not added up correctly in the quarterly view. This has been fixed.
  
• In the Cashflow tab in the HQ menu, the year display (“calendar week 1 year 2017”) vanished when you cycled through the different weekly views.
  
• The main theme is now correctly retriggered in the main menu once the song is finished.