Transport Fever 2: Console Edition brings the full Transport Tycoon experience to Xbox

One of the most valued features of transport fever 2 are his highly detailed vehicles. The game contains more than 200 lovingly hand-modeled trains, ships and planes, each equipped with multiple 4k textures and normal maps.

On PC, having all the models and textures in memory when needed is easily affordable, as a typical rig has 16GB of RAM and a GPU with dedicated additional memory. However, consoles are built differently. They have a unified architecture with less overall but ultra-fast memory. The key to making it work on consoles is texture streaming, which allows textures to be erased from models that are no longer visible. In addition, this technology is used in transport fever 2 Constantly loading textures in the highest affordable resolution to present the stars of the show, like the classic Class A 3/5 steam locomotive, in their best paintwork at all times.

A brand of transport fever 2 are his giant cards. Throughout the game’s development, providing a true sense of scale has always been paramount. The engine should enable maps where a bullet train like the famous Japanese Shinkansen can really show off its superior speed. Therefore, much effort has gone into developing a highly effective terrain rendering pipeline that can handle maps larger than 120 square miles in size and close to 1 yard of detail resolution. At its heart is a dynamic terrain tessellation algorithm on the CPU, which does cost some extra memory, but allows the engine to render these maps on a wide variety of PCs.

Now enter the world of consoles with their incredibly well-designed GPUs and graphics APIs. Here the hardware can be used very well for terrain rendering by using the GPU tessellation function. This function generates the render mesh for the terrain entirely on the graphics card, thus saving valuable computing time for the complex economic and city growth simulations. While more triangles are generated, the hardware approach still costs less memory overall due to its efficiency. Huge maps can be viewed from a bird’s-eye view high in the sky and seamlessly zoomed down to individual rocks on a river bank.

Finally, let’s talk about constructions, a central and defining part of the transport fever 2 Experience. Constructions are large assemblies made up of dozens of objects, road sections, floor decals, and terrain modifications. Think of structures like airports, train stations, docks, freeway junctions and more. Everything needed to build a massive transportation empire.

It is crucial for a smooth building experience that the player really feels like they have precise control over the building placement. On the PC, constructions are usually created with the mouse. Since the average PC user is very well attuned to this input method, it is sufficiently performant to calculate the entire construction of each frame and place it under the cursor. However, on consoles, it’s best to always keep constructions in the center of the screen and move the camera along the map to place them. And moving the camera has to be silky smooth.

So, for the console version of transport fever 2the construction preview management was overhauled. All dynamic calculations are now performed in the background while a static preview of the structure and underlying floor plan is displayed. Constructions are now not only rock solid in terms of FPS, but also give the player feedback on what environmental features the construction would demolish upon construction.

Let’s start tycooning on console

We are extremely excited to bring the Transport Fever franchise to consoles for the first time with the release of Transport Fever 2: Console Edition on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One in February 2023, and we hope you will enjoy it as much as we had while developing it.