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A new version is live. Main focus is on fixes and improvements to UI.
0.87 -> 0.875 – Added additional atmoport, buildable once the city hits 125k population. – Added option to customize panning direction in x and y directions. – Added option to invert panning directions. – Added missing percentage sign on efficiency in building information view. – Added reverse color logic for resources on the top bar. Crime increasing flashes red instead of green for example. – Added shortcut to the next campaign level when finishing a level. – Added icons and value displays for goods and person traffic capacity of atmoports and goodsports. – Added missing resource description text in top status bar (english only currently).
– Made some minor performance improvements in the main building shader and vegetation shader. – Moved some of the building item menus so that they don’t end up outside of the screen when UI size is increased. – Refined atmo fleet landing movement on atmoports. – Tidied up objectives interface. – Adjusted pollution tolerance with city size. – Adjusted icon resolution for a handful of resource icons.
– Fixed missed timing between calculation thread and updating values in the top bar and objectives causing values to flicker between zero and non-zero values. – Fixed flickering building count values in objectives display in campaign and challenge levels. – Fixed some block types not working properly on space/temporary blocks. – Fixed partially missing night time stars. – Fixed missing trails on returning atmofleets. – Fixed incorrectly aligned action buttons in building information panel. – Fixed bug where “Completion” icon in challenges and campaign would sometimes get stuck halfway when appearing.
An additional Atmoport has been added. This one unlocks when the city has grown in size and supports more people going in and out of the city.
Along with the new atmoport, I’ve also added in additional icons (among them for traffic capacity) to improve information to the player on how much a building contributes to a specific item of interest. This also goes for goods traffic in the goods port.
Aside from this, I’m continually working on improving icon resolution so that I can improve the size of resource icons further in the near future.
I’m also placing a lot of focus on improving the UI. A lot of this work is aimed at improving text size and simplifying certain views. As with icons, this is an ongoing project.
I’ve made an update to the game to add in some fixes and new content. There’s some ongoing UI work, so the UI might look a bit different in some places, but it should all fall into place in the next update.
0.861 -> 0.862 Changed hologram shader to bring out more building details in hologram during placement. Added second density of 3×3 middle class commercial buildings. Added second density of 3×3 mixed tier class commercial buildings.
Adjusted building footprint shader to lower artefacting from texture compression.
Fixed two decorations (1×2 sized) that had a messed up texture. Fixed stair decoration not properly aligning to grid and thus not being placable. Fixed adaptable blocks on circle block decorations not adapting to buildings built on top when loading city. Fixed vac track end caps missing. Fixed z-fighting in some building foot prints. Fixed temp blocks’ texture disappearing when lowering texture quality.
The mixed tier 3×3 second density commercial building is in!
As is the middle class equivalent as well:
I’ve changed the hologram shader for when buildings are placed to one that has better readability. This is helpful in particular with different block types and some of the parks where the former, flat hologram would be different to discern direction from.
Some of the upcoming UI changes involve being able to customize what resources you want to display in the bottom bar as well as some adjustments to font sizes. Once that is all in place, there will also be some adjustments made to allow for further UI upscaling.
First off, it’s been a while since I updated. My work situation has been incredibly rough and so I’ve focused on development instead of devlogs.
The next version is underway, but needs a few more days to wrap up some remaining issues and balancing stuff out.
This version changes up industry and hotel balancing and also adds in the first set of 3×3 buildings. It also rebalancing difficulty slightly among other things.
0.86 is live and with it, the following additions and changes:
0.859 -> 0.86 – Current police and fire department stats adjusted and population requirement increased. – New small police and fire departments added with lower cost, stats and population requirement. – Rounded block segments added.
– Resource demands for residential zones changed. This should make them more balanced over zone size, as for example 2×2 was a bit overpowered before. Also, food demands have been changed so that mixed tiers (tier 2 and 4) have the same required resources as tier lower and middle class tiers, but at higher demand. This is basically to allow players to get middle class and upper class citizens, without having to produce the additional resource types. On top of this, food demands are generally lower at low densities, and higher towards higher densities and goods and service demands are absent from the first density, and overall lower. – Building demands for residential zones have been changed. This mostly corrects 1×1, 2×2 and 3×3 zones having very few demands for nearby parks and schools etc. – Changed resource requirements of quarters (they were seriously OP!).
– Commercial building local area effects changed. – Commercial building resource requirements changed. Overall the requirement for goods is higher to offset the lower requirement from residences. Labour requirement is higher, except for mixed tiers where it is lower. This also increases tax income from commercial buildings. – Commercial building service output lowered (to compensate for lower requirement from residences).
– Industrial buildings’ local area effects updated. Resources input/output will be tweaked later. – Hotel buildings’ local area effects updated. Resources input/output will be tweaked later.
– Increased cereal output from farms to accomodate increase in cereal required by residential buildings. – Increased power output from all power production buildings to match increased power requirement from residential buildings. – Increased water output from absorbents and water towers. – Decreased output from food processing and drinks processing plants.
– Crime now lowers area property value, which primarily affects commercial buildings negatively as they require high land values.
– Further adjustments to trade price elasticity.
– Fixed missing service output from 1×1 and some of the 2×2 commercial buildings. – Fixed missing good/bad building requirements for quarters. – Fixed cost information panel “sticking” when switching from a building to bulldozer. – Fixed bug allowing 3rd density upper class 3×3 building to grow (to none existing building). – Fixed bug where police departments were unaffected by changes in funding (allowing free policing!). – Fixed all 3×3 residences being avalaible in challenges. – Prospective fix for slow shutdown of threads when exiting the game. – Improved on the fix for the duct taped connection issue. There’s some work remaining on speeding connections up. – Removed static world size display on template images in world creator.
This update adds in small police and fire departments, which become available rather early and are enough to cover the needs early on in the game. The bigger version become available later than before. These are still upgradable like before.
The addition of these come with a bunch of changes to local area effects for commerce, industry and hotel buildings. Overall, crime generated in cities will be lower, but the negative effects of crime are now slightly greater as crime will lower building value, which is negative for primarily commerce and hotel buildings.
Rounded block segments have also been added. They’re mainly aimed at expanding on customization options in cities.
The update also adds a bunch of fixes and prospective fixes.
There were a few items that did not make it into the update. These were primarily difficulty refinements and additional boosters for buildings. These additions have been pushed to the next release along with the following prospective items:
Fix for rounded blocks not lighting up when bulldozing. Add boosters to buildings. Addition of UI to show size of area selected for zone placement Conglomerate difficulty adjustments (not as angry) Difficulty refinements (easy to hard) I and H resource input/output Permanent fix for connection issue in large cities Further tests that threads stop properly in large cities. Grass/plaza texture painting Order decos (2 1×1, 2 2×2), 1 1×1, Economy decos (2 1×1, 2 2×2), 1 1×1, Tradition decos (2 1×1, 2 2×2), 1 1×1, Revolution decos (2 1×1, 2 2×2), 1 1×1, Static perks – House of buearucracy passive perk Cityname displayed on media center building Commercial 3×3
As seen there is a known issue with the rounded blocks not lighting up when hovering bulldozing. This will be fixed in the next update.
Work is underway on the upcoming version of the game.
Here are the items I am hoping to have added in:
2×3 police and fire department Change resource demand and input goods for residential buildings Crime should affect building value Addition of UI to show size of area selected for zone placement Fix for residential button partition issue Conglomerate difficulty adjustments (not as angry) Difficulty refinements (easy to hard)
Fix for thread not stopping on shutdown Further adjustments to trade price elasticity Permanent fix for connection issue in large cities Update C, I and H local area effects
On top of this I’m also adding in a set of curved blocks (pictured below).
The 2×3 police and fire departments are intended to work as small neighborhood police and fire departments, so that you won’t need to have large departments in sparsely populated areas. They will be fairly cheap, but won’t offset crime and fire danger much.
I recently changed the local area effect values for residential buildings. I will be moving on with updating the values for commerce, industry and hotels as well. Additionally, I’m also reworking resource demands for residential buildings (power, water, food etc.).
I’m also adjusting difficulty settings a bit. One thing that will be added is that tax revenue will be higher on easy mode, on top of the economic boom/bust cycle being much nicer than on normal.
There are also some bugs that I’m hoping to iron out, the connection issue that occurs in large cities is one such bug. This has been duct taped to work, but a more permanent fix is needed.
0.858 -> 0.859 – Screen space reflections deprecated. (high performance cost, for little visual improvement) – Changed trade volume effect on resource demand. This should make prices less affected by large trade volumes, especially in large cities. – Rewired controller customization asset updated. This could possibly address issues with control customization. – Upper class 3×3 third density residential buildings added.
I’ve removed the screen space reflections option, as it is both costly in terms of performance, but offers little in the way of visual fidelity. It was also not functional on all OS:es.
I’ve updated the rewired controller mapper to ensure it is up to date and bug free.
The last remaining 3×3 buildings have been added in. This is the third density upper class buildings.
Lastly, I would like to wish everyone a happy new year!
0.857 -> 0.858 – Added tool tip for how to change size of roundabouts. – Area frame fixed so that it shows the correct size of the area marked out when placing buildings. – Fixed incorrect rounding when placing multiple buildings. Selecting a 6×6 sized area with 4×4 buildings would place 4 buildings, although only one would properly fit the area. – Fixed roundabouts not working on flat worlds. – Zone planning tool added for residences and industrial buildings. Selecting (for example) 4×4 residences and framing an area of 6x times 6x will now will place one 4×4 building and fill the remaining area with 2×2.
I’ve fixed a bug preventing placement of roundabout on flat worlds. I’ve also added a proper tool tip for how to resize roundabouts when placing them.
I mentioned a while back adding in a zone planning tool. This is now live for residential buildings and industrial buildings (they have complete sets of 1×1 to 4×4 buildings).
You can now select an area to place zones into. The selected size building will be the maximum size, and all areas that don’t fit that size will be fitted with a smaller size zone.
This makes it easier to mix different size zones.
I’ve also fixed the outer frame when selecting an area, so that it correctly compensates for building size, making it easier to see what area is being selected. On top of this, a rounding error has also been fixed, preventing an amount of buildings larger than can be fitted into the selected area being placed.
0.856 -> 0.857 – Entertainment output of entertainment buildings increased. – Third tier (Middle class) 3×3 third density added. – Fourth tier (Upper middle class) 3×3 third density added. – Added click and drag functionality for roundabouts (click and drag to change the size rather than placing several).
– Changed import options for recently added textures. – Changed import options for building textures to remove alpha channel (which isn’t used but took up memory).
– Possible fix for slow shutdown of the game when cities are large (this is likely due to a thread taking a long time to quit).
– Fixed LOD settings for recently added buildings. – Fixed incorrect population requirement for buildings to grow displayed when playing on a flat world.
As mentioned, I’ve added in more of the 3×3 third density buildings. Only the upper class variants remain.
I’ve changed the way placing roundabouts work. Previously each size roundabout was a distinct item that needed to be selected before placing. You could click and drag to place several roundabouts at a time. This is usually not what you want to do (have a set of interconnected roundabouts…) so I changed it so that there is only one item to select and clicking and dragging will change the size of the roundabout. That way I can also compress the amount of items in the road group.
I’ve also done some minor optimization, changing texture import settings and some LOD settings for recently added buildings.
I’m in the process of adding in the recently mentioned “zone planner” feature and block painting. This is a bit time consuming, so I’ve opted to continue making some smaller updates on the side while this work is ongoing.
Here’s what’s new:
0.855 -> 0.856 – Updated view modes to work better with changed post processing stack. – Increased wealth requirement for commercial zones and hotel zones. – Increased traffic visibility and added it into the draw distance option. – Shrunk the large sanctuary building slightly and added props to it to make it look nicer. – Added second tier 3×3 third density – Rebalanced local area effect requirements of residential zones. Overall residences should require less culture and entertainment up until the 4th density, which require slightly more. Also fire safety requirements are lower and crime generation is also lower. Later on industry will be the primary source of fire safety demands, and industry and commerce will be the main zones that require police protection.
– Fixed blimps not spawning correctly. – Fixed there being too many conglomerates in older saves. This would cause some buildings to be incorrectly displayed in the owner view. – Fixed small wind turbine, wood burner and batteries now showing as power production buildings in the type view. – Fixed fog color in icey flat world. – Fixed shadow caster on both sanctuary buildings and 3×3 lower class residential buildings.
I’ve started reworking local area effects, starting with residential buildings. There have been so many things added into the game over time, that it’s become necessary to rebalance things. For starters, there are too few entertainment buildings and the demands for entertainment have been too high. So I’ve started tweaking this slightly. The idea is also to get more mixed areas to be required, ie not placing all commerce in one area etc. But more on that later!
Third and last density for second tier 3×3 residences added!
I’ve continued working on the post processing stack and tweaking layer render distances a bit. This makes traffic show for greater distances.
The view modes were a bit bugged since changing the post processing stack. This has now been fixed. I’ve also added greater color separation in the building type view.
0.85 -> 0.855 – Post processing stack overhauled. – Focus distance changed. – Shadow contrast changed. – Third density for lower class 3×3 added. – Fine tuned clip ramp for buildings fading at distance. – Revised nighttime lighting.
– Fixed collider issue with rounded grass tiles.
The collider issue was with the grass tile meant for the rounded block type:
I’ve refined the clip ramp to make the distance building fade out a bit more detailed (it looked blocky before).
The entire post processing stack has been changed. Some effects moved over to a new asset, while others have been tweaked in the existing asset. Pictured below is the improved depth of field which also means the calculation for focus has also been greatly improved. For those that dislike DoF, the effect can be turned off as usual.
I’ve extended the reflection probe distance so that buildings don’t “black out” so close to the camera. The distance has also been tied in with the render distance so that the reflection probe distance shrinks when a lower render distance is used. Overall, this improves visual fidelity.
I’ve also changed the shader code so that nighttime lighting has a bit more punch: