Alpha 1: The beginning. Planned for mid-2025.
The first public tests to collect feedback. The first alpha does not support certain features that require a more deeper integration with the internal game systems, like making passengers to stop at certain place of the vehicle, changing destination displays linked to the map, and also custom door animations. Future versions will introduce delegates, events or other custom calls to allow those operations.
They are a bit more complex to expose since everything else must continue working to not break existing mods. Also the the passenger system must be universal to allow it running in any bus. You may code custom doors or displays as a prototype in alpha 1, but they will be not linked to game doors or displays functionality for now. Please avoid accessing directly internal game scripts, like the doors, because they may break in future versions. We will expose a clean API to handle it properly later.
The first alpha does not support trains yet – altough it is possible coding it directly on the map scripts, it won’t be practical. For trains, please consider waiting for a future version. It may take a while to happen (from a few weeks to several years, we don’t know hehe). We plan adding trains using a spline with kinematic movement. It is way more stable than using engine physics with lots of joints.
Future updates (no estimate dates – to be announced):
- Bugfixes/better stability during initial alphas.
- Support for destination displays on a standarlized way for maps.
- Support for custom door animations using events or delegates or whatever (the internal script must call your script).
- Support for making the passenger stopping at certain point inside the vehicle (useful before custom turnstiles, payment etc).
- Support for trains (this will be a bit more complex; it requires changes on the way map and player scripts are compiled because trains should accesss map scripts).
Things currently missing on private alpha 0
- Shader and material access (shader compilation probably will not be supported due to engine limitations, but we will expose some standard embedded shaders like diffuse, emissive, additive, cutout, transparent and so on).
- Custom 3D loading, outside of the main 3D directory (this would allow creating optional game objects that are loaded on demand).
- Custom textures loading (they may be used to animate things in meshes/materials).
- Custom audio loading (they be used to load runtime audioclips to make custom sounds).
- Custom file loading (text and bytes… so you may use different structures in the game, even loading other file formats).
- Clicking on items (there will be an API for that, it requires internal modifications)
Things not confirmed due to security reasons
Those features are being studied and considered for an Enterprise version:
- Write access inside the game folder, or at a temporary location (it would be necessary to create map modding tools… so it would be nice exposing it).
- Internet and network access (this would be very useful but at the same time may introduce a lot of problems).
- Unlocked limitations regarding security, like full network access, custom DLLs and System.IO support (this is unlikely to be done in consumer versions, but it may be considered for the future Enterprise edition).
Please remember that CIANO is very experimental!
CIANO is at a very experimental stage. It requires some technologies that are only possible using workarounds. We must test a lot before confirming any new set of features.
Proton Bus Simulator roadmap
PBS roadmap is almost done, here is the link on Trello:
https://trello.com/b/eWtkGV93/protonbus
Most things are shared with CIANO, except for vanilla/embedded content. CIANO does not have plans to include buses by default like PBS. Everything should be mod here due to its nature: the code direct on the mod directory instead of being inside of the game.
CIANO and Proton Bus are NOT open source
Many internal components were developed or licensed to use inside the game, but they cannot be exposed. Most new mods functions will be open source, but the core is not. Do not expect a full open source release, we cannot do it for several reasons.