The latest Captain's Diary from the developers of Captain Of Industry details significant performance enhancements and introduces major new features for rail logistics in the upcoming Update 4 and the Trains DLC. The technical focus of the diary addresses bottlenecks related to vehicle rendering and ocean simulation, resulting in expected frame rate improvements of 10–15% for players. This substantial performance boost stems largely from necessary modifications required to integrate amphibious vehicles smoothly into the environment, forcing a complete overhaul of how the game handles vehicle movement relative to water.
Core Engine Optimizations and Vehicle Poses
Captain of Industry simulates vehicles using 2D positioning for efficiency, a choice that greatly simplifies complex 3D pathfinding. However, the game must translate these 2D coordinates into a 3D pose every frame by calculating the terrain height at four corner points of the vehicle. When introducing amphibious vehicles, the primary challenge involved making them float realistically on the simulated ocean waves.
Since the ocean surface is calculated solely on the GPU, the CPU traditionally lacks the necessary height information for calculating accurate float dynamics. The team bypassed the expensive process of downloading complex ocean wave textures from GPU to CPU memory. Instead, a compute shader on the GPU now efficiently calculates the ocean wave heights at the precise 2D locations of the vehicles' critical corner points. This architectural change significantly reduces CPU load.
While this processing pipeline does introduce a minor latency of up to four simulation ticks, a robust latency minimization system ensures that most systems experience delays as low as a single tick, maintaining smooth gameplay flow. Furthermore, these optimizations resolve visual inconsistencies that arose when players utilized the low-fidelity ocean setting. The new processing ensures that vehicle dynamics correspond correctly with both the fully simulated and the visually simplified water environments.
Introducing Lightweight Train Waypoints
Update 4 will address common player feedback regarding necessary space requirements for rail infrastructure by adding lightweight Train Waypoints. These new structures function identically to standard stations concerning train scheduling, allowing for complex route planning and efficient queue management. Crucially, they are engineered for maximum space conservation.
Waypoints require no additional ground space beyond the train track itself, meaning they can be placed efficiently on parallel tracks without consuming extra plot spacing. However, they do not accommodate loading or unloading modules. Waypoints provide high logistical flexibility because they can be placed on elevated tracks, simplifying the construction of large, multi-level logistics centers. This feature is slated for inclusion in the base game update.
Nuclear Rail Power Specifications Revealed
Following earlier teasers, developers clarified the detailed specifications for the powerful Nuclear Locomotive, set to debut in the forthcoming Trains DLC. This high-capacity locomotive is designed as a modular, three-unit train set. The complete configuration includes the Crew Car (Unit A), the Nuclear Reactor and Turbine Car (Unit B), and the Condenser Car (Unit C).
This entire nuclear locomotive measures 25 tiles long, translating to 50 meters end-to-end. This length makes the three-unit rail system equivalent in size to five Tier 1 diesel locomotives placed bumper-to-bumper. This confirmation provides clarity regarding the scale and operational footprint of the most powerful train option arriving in Captain Of Industry.
