Dear players,

We’d like to give you a little update about the current status of the HTML5 version of the game.

For those of you who missed it: We’re switching from Flash to HTML5, since support for Flash will end next year.
A while ago, we already switched all Russian and German servers to HTML5 for a short period. During that time we noticed that, although the game was running smoothly for most, a few players still had significant performance problems with the new version of the game. That’s why we decided to switch back to Flash, while we polished HTML5 a bit more.

Today, we’re in the middle of doing just that and we want to explain what exactly this involves. The bug reports we received in our previous live test did not point to a specific singular cause, but were rather quite general performance issues.

Luckily, we identified an area with a lot of potential for performance improvements: the user interface (UI) elements.
Right now, the processes in the background when a UI element is moved or changed require a complete recalculation. Other UI elements that are connected to this element then need to be recalculated too. And, like a domino effect, others that are connected to those elements need be recalculated as well.
This chain of unnecessarily complicated recalculations can use up the entire CPU capacity for the browser tab and then lead to memory problems, resulting in performance issues.

Our developers are currently working on changing how these UI recalculations work. In simple words, if a UI element is changed, it checks which other elements need to be recalculated with it, instead of causing a chain of recalculating everything.
It’s quite a complex process to overhaul this, but we think it’s worth the effort. We can’t give you an exact date yet, but we at least wanted to provide a bit of insight into what exactly we’re doing for HTML5 right now.

We’re looking forward to entering this new era of Rail Nation and we’ll share further news with you as soon as we can.

Your Rail Nation Team