Friday 16 January 2015

What's going on?

Hey Victory Works, we hear many of you shouting, what's happening? Have you quit?

Definitely not, we reply!
We do like to write regular blog posts of work in progress and keep everyone up to date with new developments (and pretty pictures!) but since the GWR Small Prairies pack we've been working on a loco for a route that hasn't been announced yet.
Consequently we can't say anything about it yet, sorry!

The good news is that while making it we've made quite a few improvements to the way we build and script and have some pretty cool improvements to all aspects of our loco add-ons, especially in the area of realistic cab driving.
Some highlights are:
A higher quality cab environment including water gauge glasses that look like actual water in a glass tube, showing the refraction of the striped background.
Visual priming effects.
Improved weather effects, including dynamically changing adhesion to add to our realistic wheelslip - no longer will one adhesion type (dry/wet/snow) cover the entire scenario. If it starts raining halfway through the scenario, expect things to get slippery!
Improved cab gauge accuracy.
Cab head-out view as part of the standard cab views - a nice transition from the drivers view to the head-out view allowing the use of all visible controls by turning your head to look back in through the window.
Improved smoke colouring effects.

We're getting towards the end of this loco build and once it's done then we'll announce our next one (which will not be a secret!) and we can get back to the weekly updates.

Until then thank you for your continued support and we hope you're excited about what 2015 is going to bring.

4 comments:

  1. Good news on the loco front, but I hope you are going to give the driver various choices of control, keeping the present Auto fireman version available which is the prefered choice of many drivers, versions being Easy, Auto Fireman and Driver.
    Sheers
    Pat

    ReplyDelete
  2. Of course, Pat :-)
    All Victory Works locos work in Simple mode and Standard Mode (sometimes called Expert mode), with or without Auto-Fireman, and are fully compatible with mouse (HUD and cab controls), keyboard and X-Box Controller.
    They then have Advanced mode which introduces features like realistic wheel slip, steam chest simulation, boiler and cylinder management, etc, which works with Auto-fireman on and off. We recommend driving this mode with mouse (HUD or cab controls) and keyboard. And for a real experience turn off the F4 HUD and drive using the locomotives instruments, appearance and sounds, all of which are carefully crafted to give as much feedback as possible to allow "real" driving.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Advanced mode is tricky, but also hugely rewarding when you manage a full scenario with no driving aids.
      However we always have Simple and Standard modes too for those days when you want to take it easy :-)

      Delete