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”:
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Right click on TransRoad: USA in your Steam library.

Click “Properties”.

Click on the tab “BETAS”.

Choose “public_test_version” from the dropdown list.

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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.