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Month: November 2018

Atmocity progress update entry 12

Atmocity progress update entry 12

Hello!

This week I’ve been putting in a lot of polish to make the game more presentable for Dreamhack next week.

First notably, the traffic system is now in. It’s still fairly basic with cars just moving and not really abiding to any rules. It’s also not as performant as it will need to be further down the line. I’m going for some sort of ECS solution later on, but there hasn’t been time to fix that now. It works for now at least. 🙂

Atmocity

A gif of the cars in action, prior to some further polish, can be seen here:

Currently, all buildings spawn two vehicles, but later on I will probably make this one per non growable buidling, and then make it 1-5 for residential and commercial buildings so that traffic levels sort of follow the density and size of the city more.

Atmocity

I’ve had to put in quite a bit of effort optimizing the game further. I’ve moved shadow casting over to the lowest poly LOD for each building, which lowers poly count for shadow casting. I also decided to cut having four shadow cascades and instead go for just the two. This cuts the poly count down further, without too much of a cost visually.

Earlier, I’ve run the game at an FOV at 60, which has now been increased to 80. There will be an FOV-slider in the future, of course. But keeping things consistent allows me to find some sort of base-performance level.

Since finishing up the current version of the traffic system I’ve also added in cars as props for each building. This of course adds more shadows and polys to the scene, but I’ve managed to offset this with the above improvements. Also, as all props, cars are grouped together when a building is constructed.

Atmocity

The day night cycle system has also been optimized, removing some lousy code and also fixing some minor bugs (sun sometimes displaying at night for instance). I’ve also given it a few tweaks to improve visual fidelity. The “Always night” and “Always day” options are not fully implemented as well proper menus for fast forwarding.

Atmocity

Since adding the click and drag function for building blocks and roads, I’ve also decided to add a new Visual queue to guide players to what’s going on and allowing them to follow what “rotation index” they’re current only.

Atmocity

All in all, the game runs fairly well on my rig at a consistent 60 FPS. Currently textures are pushing memory a bit (4GB only for textures). But they’re mainly 4k textures, so I will be adding a downscaling feature to allow lesser rigs to run the game with lower texture quality.

The buildings are all event driven so they are very performative. All calulations run on a separate thread to allow for complex calculations to run without hickups. Cars are currently the main source of performance drop along with post processing effects (On CPU and GPU respectively).

All in all, I’ve managed to get into a faster pace of development recently, which is good since after Dreamhack I will focus on getting a first early beta version out to testers (signup info on Steam!). This is scheduled for December 16th!

/ Dispersing minds

Atmocity progress update # 11

Atmocity progress update # 11

Hello!

Lots of stuff going on and lots to finish up before Dreamhack Winter next weekend. :)

Most of my recent work has been put into improving functionality and to a degree also visuals.
One of my main improvements has been to implement a sort of drag and drop typ system for roads and blocks so that players won’t have to place one after the other and can instead select areas to build on. In a “normal” city builder where building occurs on a 2D plane, this kind of functionality wouldn’t be much of a hassle to implement, but given Atmocity allows players to build in 6 directions things become a bit more complex.

For roads I’ve opted for a start and end position with a midpoint in between. For flexibility, using the scroll wheel players can swap the midpoint to change where the road goes.

upload_2018-11-19_19-21-52.png

upload_2018-11-19_19-22-7.png

The way this works is that when starting a build process, the world direction is checked and locked in. Players will then be able to plop down their road on that specific plane. When they need to switch planes they need to initiate another process (mouse click). I have found when testing, that this works fairly well since most of the time you need to navigate the camera to a new location when building on different planes anyway.

For blocks, the plane is checked and then using the scroll wheel players can switch build direction between xy, xz and yz.

upload_2018-11-19_19-26-26.png

This system will allow players to fairly quickly build areas ready for development. It also removes some of the camera micro management that was required before, when you’d have to move the camera around to place blocks in specific locations.

As for visual improvements, I’ve mostly focused on improving roads from their previous flat planes into being actual 3D. Not a huge difference, but it does look better in my opinion to have the sidewalks slightly raised.

upload_2018-11-19_19-17-50.png

I’ve started working on some decoration pieces as well. Once the game releases on early access, a fair bit of time will be spent adding objects that players can use to improve their cities visually. These will mostly just be for decorative purposes. Here’s a sort of “balcony” piece I’ve prototyped:

upload_2018-11-19_19-31-27.png

Cars are still being worked on, I’m almost done with the texture after having done the mesh (a fairly simple one). I’m also still working on movement, so I didn’t get around to fixing up traffic rules yet. Hopefully I can get this done in time for Dreamhack. :)

Surprisingly, this past week I also came across a fair number of bugs that have now been neatly squished!

/ Dispersing Minds :)

Atmocity weekly progress update – #10

Atmocity weekly progress update – #10

Hello,

First off, Correcture Games will attend the Indie Playground at Dreamhack Winter in Sweden at the end of the month. Atmocity will be showcased and you can have a go at some gravity defying city building!

I’ve spent most of the week working on systems in the game. The traffic system is now functional, but needs quite a bit of work so that it looks good, spawns and despawns vehicles and just overall adds to the atmosphere of the game.
There’s quite a long ways to go, but at least cars don’t freak out when going around corners (that was a headache to fix).

W45e.gif

I’ve started reworking some of the building placement stuff. Before, all buildings would be assigned a random rotation when built. Now I’ve changed it so that building rotation is controlled by the player using the scroll wheel. Buildings can still be rotated when they’ve been placed too. Here are some farms freely placed. :)

W45a.png
Next up, I’ll be changing block and road placement to allow players to assign areas with blocks and roads instead of having to place one after the other. This should allow for quicker construction of the foundation on which you build the city. Being able to click and drag where to place roads is also standard in most games of this type so it’s a given to add.

I’ve added a building register that assigns a unique ID to each building in the city. This will be used along with the traffic system to assign a vehicle to each building. Goods are produced and consumed globally, but each building will need access to other key buildings and this will be “tested” using the vehicles. The building register also allows for quicker processing when using the different view modes (like building efficiency view or building owner view) among other things.

W45d.png
Policy is on ongoing project. I’ve changed how tax rates affect citizen happiness from a somewhat consistent curve to one that allows you to set fairly high tax rates before truly affecting happiness. This should allow for some more player freedom, but also allows players to set fairly high tax rates if they have other things that offset the unhappiness from higher taxes.

W45b.png
The tax rates are still divided into three, targeting low/mid/high skilled labour respectively. The effect of taxes on happiness will also depend on how large the proportion of the targeted class is compared to the overall population. If you have a small low skilled labour population you will be able to tax them higher without losing out too much on the overall happiness.

I’ve also finally managed to get the graphs looking more up to my own expectations.
W45c.png
Lastly, I’ve implemented toggles for day/night, always day and always night into the UI. When moving the mouse to the top center of the screen, a small options panels slides down. From there (and the keyboard of course) players will be able to set the game speed (paused, normal, 2, 4 and 8x).

Next week I’ll continue work on cars, doing some modelling/texturing and trying to finetune movements and then adding some basic path finding and traffic rules. I’ll be working on drag and drop for blocks and roads and also some initial work on decoration tiles that can be used to improve your city visually. More policy is also on the schedule!

/ Dispersing Minds

Atmocity weekly progress update #9

Atmocity weekly progress update #9

Hello,

This week I’ve been revisiting making buildings for the game.

I’ve focused on commercial buildings this week having finished 5 new buildings.

Atmocity

That means I’ve finished another full set of commercial buildings.

Atmocity

When finishing up this set and placing all commercial building sets next to eachother I decided to switch them around a bit. The above one was initially intended as the upper middle class set, but after reconsideration I’ve decided to make it the lower middle class set.

Atmocity

The set that was formerly the lower middle class will become the new middle class, and the former middle class will become the new upper middle class. I’ve also decided that post release, once there is time, I will expand each residential and commercial set with one more (a sixth) density. I’m also considering three classes (low, mid, upper) of single or possibly dual density commercial and residential buildings with smaller “foot print”. This would allow players to zone left over space. These sets should be available for the initial early access release of the game.

I’ve not only worked on buildings, but also continued work on the traffic system. Unfortunatly, this is proving slightly more difficult than expected. Hopefully by the next devlog I will have more info and maybe a gif to showcase the progress.

Next week I will also continue work on the middle tier of industrial buildings, and hopefully I can finished it too, as these tend to be fairly simple to make.

Atmocity

That’s it for this time!

/ Dispersing Minds