Firstly, thanks to the many people who joined us during our testing phase, and especially to our regular crew who took on the expansion of KickStarter County. (More on that below).
Many new friendships were made in our regular Discord chats and Discord Screen Share is also a great way to watch the experts in action.
The stress testing was a vital step to identify what would happen when dozens of people where all online together and editing routes, driving locos, and, in good old beta testing fashion, breaking things!
There's nothing like a real world test to find out where problems occur. The biggest discovery was that with lots of people moving lots of trains (either in the Editor or in Driver) and coupling, loading and crashing regularly, our train replication systems needed a thorough overhaul.
We also made great strides in ensuring stability and that clients remain in sync so that each user is getting the same view of the world as it expands and operates.
So thanks again to our testers, and congratulations to our FIVE winners who each get a copy of TRS22.
The key to MPS is that every day you log in, the world may have changed. While you've been sleeping, new tracks may have been added, cities built, loads delivered, industries created and scenic rivers finding their way through the mountains.
Here's a quick snapshot of the progress on one of our test routes - KSC2.
Kickstarter County is well known from The TANE Kickstarter crowdfunding project in 2013/2014, and was itself based upon the Highland Valley route created by CeeBee in the very early days of Trainz.
Throughout our MPS testing there have been numerous additions to the original 40 or so baseboards.
New industries are created.
New cities develop.
New lakes and rivers emerge.
Yards expand
The most commonly requested feature is the ability to use whatever content you like in MPS.
The good news is that development is almost complete on the next stage of MPS which provides the opportunity for creators to add "Custom Content Sets" for their MPS routes.
Our Trainz Plus members will be able to begin testing this feature in the next month or so.
Once that feature is complete and released, we'll move on to our future features including, among other things, the ability to save MPS routes for offline play.
There are a couple of other features that we're keeping under our hats for now, but exciting times are ahead!
