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.
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• 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.

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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.
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• 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.

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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.
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• 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.

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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.