Rolling Line

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• Announcements·18 Aug 2026Official

  Performance optimizations! v6.1

  It's that time of year again where Rolling Line deserves some focused work entirely on optimization and background programming improvements. Since computer parts are getting horrifyingly expensive it's more important than ever that games are able to run as well as possible on low end hardware. I love the fact that Rolling Line is a train game that can run on very low end PC's and laptops (at least small maps can!) and I'm always looking for ways to improve performance as much as possible. This update is mainly all about performance optimization, but it also includes some new features and lots of quality-of-life fixes. The optimizations in this update are focused on these main things:Reducing draw calls caused by inefficient use of materials Reducing CPU bottlenecks from game logic More aggressive LOD (level of detail) to hide objects far away from the player Smoother loading of chunks (specifically for track)With this update you should see a noticeable framerate improvement on all maps, but certain maps will benefit much more than others.Specifically maps with a lot of complex interactable objects like circuitry will see HUGE improvements! Maps that use a lot of signals and freight loading will also see big improvements and much less stutter during gameplay. Various rendering improvements I've made will also have a larger effect on low-end PC's and laptops when using the low graphics settings in the game especially.The current main bottleneck for most maps will still be the number of moving trains (which use up the most performance). I've tried to optimize this as much as possible, but the next step is going to require a complete re-design of how train movement is handled when outside of view distance, and this will be a big job for another day. So if you find your maps are very laggy, try a test of removing all the trains (in the menu "pause menu -> manage saves -> delete all trains") and see how much of the lag is being caused by just the trains. here are some exa...
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• Announcements·20 Jul 2026Official

  Scales & Gauges! v6.0

  The scales & gauges update is here! With this update you can now fully customize how large the track, trains, props and player character are in the world. So it will finally be possible to accurately model real-world model railway scales in the game, like HO, G, N, Z, etc.You can make tiny N scale layouts all the way to huge G scale garden railways:How does it work?Firstly, if you just want to make maps and aren't concerned about real-world measurements, then you don't have to change anything! You can keep making maps and driving trains at the default scale and everything will look exactly the same as before. But if you want to switch to a real world model railway scale that uses accurate measurements, then you can now do this with the new scale feature. This system lets you customize two values, the "scale" and the "gauge".The scale controls how large the map is in relation to the real world. So if the scale is 1/100 (one hundredth of the size of real life) then a 5m high building will be 0.05m high on your map (5cm tall). For example, the most popular model railway scale "HO scale" is 1/87, which means that objects on an HO scale model railway are 87x smaller than real life. Meanwhile the gauge is the distance measured between the rails on track. For HO scale this would be 16.5mm, and for the much larger G scale this would be 45mm.Trains are automatically scaled to match the scale value, and their individual wheel blocks are scaled (only the width) to match the track gauge value. This means you can easily make narrow gauge track with a more narrow wheel gauge, while keeping the scale the same. (Here's an example made by Camoguy showing a tiny Z scale railway!)The game lets you customize both of these values, or choose from a range of real-world model railway scales (like HO, HOn3, N, Z, etc).You can pick from a preset list or set your own custom values directly:The "World scale' sets how large the player is in miniature mode, so if you are placing down N scale tra...
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• Announcements·5 Jul 2026Official

  Custom model railway scales/gauges coming soon!

  Coming up within the next few weeks is the much anticipated scales & gauges update! I'm announcing this now because the update is well into testing but still has a lot of work to do, and I want people to be aware of how this new scaling system will work and what to expect. My plan is to release this update on July 20th!The main feature of this update is that you can now fully customize how large the track, trains, props and player character are in the world. So it will finally be possible to accurately model real-world model railway scales in the game! Like HO, G, N, Z, etc.You can make tiny N scale layouts all the way to huge G scale garden railways! How does it work? This system lets you customize two values, the "scale" and the "gauge".The scale controls how large the map is in relation to the real world. So if the scale is 1/100 (one hundredth of the size of real life) then a 5m high building will be 0.05m high on your map (5cm tall). For example, the most popular model railway scale "HO scale" is 1/87, which means that objects on an HO scale model railway are 87x smaller than real life. Meanwhile the gauge is the distance measured between the rails on track. For HO scale this would be 16.5mm, and for the much larger G scale this would be 45mm.Trains are automatically scaled to match the scale value, and their individual wheel blocks are scaled (only the width) to match the track gauge value. This means you can easily make narrow gauge track with a more narrow wheel gauge, while keeping the scale the same. The game lets you customize both of these values, or choose from a range of real-world model railway scales (like HO, HOn3, N, Z, etc).You can pick from a preset list or set your own custom values directly:The "World scale' sets how large the player is in miniature mode, so if you are placing down N scale track and set the world scale to N as well, then you will be able to fit inside the cab and drive the trains. But if you set the world scale to HO, then your...
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• Announcements·15 Jun 2026Official

  Color editing, drawer improvements and more! v5.48

  Every now and then it's great to do a "spring cleaning" kind of update, that includes lots of quality-of-life improvements and fixes a ton of small jobs I've had on my to-do list for ages. This update includes a lot of changes, so I'll go through them one-by-one:Edit colors directly on props/menusThis is great quality-of-life improvement I've been meaning to add for ages! You can now open the custom color edit menu on any paintable object. So when you are editing a color in the multi-paint popup, track style menu, modding menus, settings, etc you can now press Shift + left click to open the color edit menu instead of spawning a copy of the color in your hand.From inside that menu you can adjust the color (hue, saturation, value, etc):You can also now set whether the material is transparent by changing the alpha value ("A") and this means you can also adjust how transparent it is, rather than it just being an on/off setting:You can also toggle whether the material emits light:Note: You can customize these keyboard bindings in the "Controls" menu. Also you can skip directly to the paint edit window by pointing at a prop and pressing Shift + ETo make things work easier with this new system, all props (even ones with just 1 paint slot) now have the option of opening the multi-paint window.Custom drawer improvementsYou can now use the transform edit mode (press F) to move, rotate and scale props that you have placed in a custom drawer! This means you can fully customize how a drawer looks instead of being restricted to just the grid:Custom drawers also now have an options menu, where you can set whether props auto-scale to fit the grid size or whether they keep their default size when placed in the drawer.Track style copy-paste fixWhen you copy a track style (by pointing at it and pressing Enter) and paint another piece of track with it, you might have noticed that it will override turnout levers and remove them.This is because the turnout lever is part of the track styl...
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• Announcements·8 Jun 2026Official

  Mountains and Rivers map jam favorites!

  Congrats to everyone who took part in the Mountains and Rivers map jam event! There were 85 entries and it was really hard to narrow down my favorites to just a few.As with all these map making events, I always play through every single entry and then pick some to give shout-outs to at the end. So without further ado, here are my favorite entries (in no specific order):And here's also a list of runner-ups:Thank you to everyone who took part! I always love these map making events, It's a great chance to have a go at making something if you need some extra inspiration. I highly recommend having a look at the Steam Workshop yourself and giving the event entries a try. When choosing tags/categories on the Steam Workshop you can view the entries from this event as well as all the previous map making events too! This is just a news post and doesn't include any game feature updates, but keep an eye out because I've been working on a whole bunch of quality-of-life features that I'm about to release in the next update very soon! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy playing these great new community-made maps!
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