Correcture Games

Hello!

Version ea.0.22 will be live soon! Here’s what’s new since last update:

New stuff/tweaks:
– Added two new retro themes – Ruined earth and snow earth. They will be tweaked further over time.
– Preschool added.
– Preschool added into demand tree of residential buildings. Theatre, library and museum removed. Citizens will continue to want to have schools nearby, even as the system for calculating education levels is changed.
– Preschool funding option added into policy window.
– Brewery added.
– Wine maker added.
– Beer, wine and hydrogen resources added.
– Entertainment and culture added as local area effects. Views for entertainment levels and culture also added.
– Local area effects weight increased. As more things get moved from the old system of requiring nearby buildings only (called the effector system), it will become more important to keep an eye on having enough buildings to cover crime prevention, health etc. in the city overall, rather than near specific buildings. The weight has increased from 25% to 33%.
– Residential, commercial and industrial priority sets for local area effects changed. The priority sets determine what a building type finds more important. Essentially a weighting system to allow commercial buildings to prioritize low crime over health levels for example.
– Density 4 and 5 now require nano structs to grow.
– Tax effects on industry and commerce differentiated between tax tiers. For example, low tier commerce used to be affected by high tier commerce tax rate. This is now changed.
– Policies targeting industry and commerce used to affect tax revenue. Now they instead affect efficiency, which in turn affects revenue. This makes the connection between policy and effect more clear. Descriptions of policy effects are coming in an upcoming version to make it more clear what affects what.
– Effector capture radius made slightly smaller (This is the radius to check nearby good/bad buildings).
– Education is now calculated from number of available seats (what is seen as produced in schools etc.) and average coverage (local area effect).
– Similar to education, health calculations have now been similarly adapted.

Minor stuff:
– Added more conditions for domestic advisor advice for missing food/drinks. For example, if you have no legume, but also no middle class citizens, the message won’t trigger.

Bug fixes:
– Fixed nullref error when citizen is assigned building with no registered bads or goods.
– Fixed world constraint not working properly in retro mode.
– Fixed bug where advisor entries were not closed properly.
– Fixed cost display output bug where values for output would somehow “stick” between different buildings.
– Fixed alternate skybox themes fog setting.
– Ambient sounds trigger fixed.
– Centrifugal particle extractor locked from start as it should be. Researched building after all.
– Lots weren’t displaying efficiency, now fixed!
– Fix for issue where on commercial zones and industrial zones, tax revenue would not display.
– Fixed non-duplicable notices (the little things that pop in on the right side of the screen) from displaying more than twice at the same time.
– Fixed default settings for camera control buttons not displaying correct text on first time entering game.
QoL:
– Replaced cycling buttons for resources in trade panel with a window for selecting resources.
– Scroll wheel to move camera blocked when panels are open.
– Pausing and then unpausing with space now returns to previous speed instead of x1.
– Labour requirement now displayed in cost info. This is the requirement when building functions at 100 %.
– Return camera to horizontal position button added in bottom bar.

Other:
– Swedish, French, Spanish and German localisations complete! Russian localisation is ongoing. Polish localisation in beta added.
– Updated jewelry, diamonds and nano structs icons.

This version adds a few new buildings. First off, the preschool. This building is required nearby residential buildings. This is the first building featuring a 3×3 foot print, a size that will become more common in upcoming buildings.
With the introduction of the preschool, the way education is calculated has been changed. Before, education was calculated on a city wide level based on education “produced” in schools and libraries etc. Basically a pop / education type formula. Now education also uses the local area effects. You still need to “produce” enough education to cover the amount of students in the city, but also make sure that there is coverage locally.

Health was already moved to the local area effects system, but now also takes into concern how much healthcare is “produced” in total, similarly to how education works. Unlike before, you can no longer spam schools and hospitals in one area of the city to cover all health and education needs.

I’ve now also added culture and entertainment as local area effects. Currently, very few buildings produce entertainment and culture (museum and theatre). In upcoming versions there will be more of these types of buildings added, among them a stadium, a pub and an opera. These kind of buildings will accept the new resources beer and wine that are produced in the brewery and wine maker (suirprise!). These buildings have been added, along with the resources, so although they currently aren’t required in the city, you can still produce and trade them.

There are also a couple of QoL improvements, among them a button to reset the camera orientation in game, a fix for default controls when starting the game the first time. The cycling buttons for what resource to trade in a long term contract have also been removed. Instead clicking the resource opens a window where you can select what resource to trade. This is more accomodating now that the number of resources has increased and will continue to increase.

Localisations are finally updated as well! Swedish, French, Spanish and German have all been updated. Russian is underway and there is now also a beta version of polish. More work on localisations and fitting all text elements nicely will be done for the next version. If you find anything that is incorrect, just post in the Discord or in the forum what it is that seems to be mistranslated or mapped incorrectly in game.

Lastly, the way policy affects commerce and industry has been changed. Before, policies generally affected taxes revenue only. Now they affect the efficiency of industry and commerce, which in turn affects revenue. This makes the effect of a policy more visible to the player. How taxes affect the overall efficiency of an industrial or commercial building has also been changed. Before, regardless of what tier building, they would be affected by an average of the tax levels of all three tiers. Now each tier is only affected by it’s respective tax rate. For the second and fourth tier, a mix between low/mid and mid/upper class taxes apply, depending on the density of the building.

Hello,

As there is no update of the game today, this will be a fairly brief devlog featuring what has been done this week and what will be done leading up to the update to 0.22 next sunday.

First of all, two new retro type levels will be added. Pictured in this log is the ruined earth scenario. I’ll be working to implement a type of climate offset for each of these scenarios meaning specific buildings will be affected in certain ways due to the setting of the scenario. For the ruined earth that would be more sun = better power production from solar farms and farms but lower output from absorbents.

As I redid the calculations for crime etc., some buildings were removed as demands for residential buildings to grow. Since then I’ve also received ideas for adding both culture and entertainment into local area calulations so that more buildings can be removed from demands. This means that you won’t need quite as many of, for example, clinics, but you will still need to provide enough health care to the city in one way or another. This, in my opinion, adds more realism and flexibility in building so I will be added this into education as well, and the upcoming culture and entertainment effects. Initially there won’t be many building alternatives to add entertainment and culture, but I plan on adding pubs, opera buildings, stadiums and more.

These new buildings will use a set of newly added resources – beer and wine. These will be made in a new building each, the beer and wine maker buildings. I’ve also added hydrogen as a resource. It will be a while longer until it comes into use, but it will be used as a resource in a new green power plant added later on.

I’ll be adding a preschool into the next version of the game. This will output education and will be used as a variation for other education buildings once education is moved into the local area effects system. The preschool will be one of few education buildings demanded by residents nearby, but will come with a smaller 3×3 foot print.

Bug squishing continues. As does minor QoL fixing like locking the scroll wheel function when a window is open.
Come next version the french and german localisations will be updated (the whole game will be properly translated). Spanish and Russian translation is ongoing and should be finished shortly thereafter. There’s also a polish translation in the works!

Hello!

Version EA.0.21 will be live in an hour or so. What’s new you ask?

Minor additions:
– Added option for scroll wheel function – move forward/backward or zoom in/out. Settings balance against horizon and setting scroll wheel function to moving forward/backward basically means you can accomplish almost every movement option necessary to move around the city. If you prefer combining mouse and keyboard this can be done as well.
– Modifier tool tips added. They’re currently a bit undersized, but I will address this at a later stage.
– Camera follow on build option added. When enabled, the camera will follow to the last item built when placing roads, blocks or multi placed buildings.
– Added spacebar to pause and resume game
– Added intermediate tutorial about how to enable advisors and citizen reps for additional information. Also shortened and updated the other tutorials.

Major changes:
– Code that handles connections had gotten a bit mixed up with controls for traffic. Now they’ve been properly separated and traffic now also runs parts of the code threaded to improve performance. The performance improvement should be fairly noticable, especially in large cities. There will be fixes for cars going off road later on, but this is not a priority at the moment.
– Changed how time progresses in game. Before the game changed Unity Time to accelerate, which affects a bunch of other things, among them physics. This was a bit hacky so I’ve now changed it over to an internal time function. This means that framerate isn’t affected as much when running the game in 2x, 4x and 8x speed.

Minor changes:
– Global time tick starting value increased. This just means that when loading a city, more values are updates right away, rather than with a delay.
– Domestic advisor advice conditions changed a bit (less spamming of certain messages now).
– Multi building placement UI fixed. Might add some additional bling over time.
– Changed how modes are handled in game, to prepare for further expansion of different modes and to make code more easily managed.
– Added extra condition for overwriting how many campaign levels and challenge levels have been completed so this data can’t be overwritten with null.
– Increased draw distance for props.
– Bloom strength setting added in options menu.
– Added night lighting to dot decoration.

Bug fixes:
– Some issues with modifiers fixed.
– Fixed some ui placement issues in 16:10 aspect ratios.
– Fixed not being able to build roads over roads. This was a new bug introduced after redoing some of the construction mode code.
– Fixed issue with minister of labour staying quiet most of the time!
– Fixed random placement of islands in retro mode on load.
– Line, dot and circle hedge decoration tiles description fixed.
– Fixed a building counting bug that overstated the number of zones in the city.
– Fixed issue when conglomerates leave and don’t properly hand over their property to remaining conglomerates. If this issue has been present in your city, it would have likely caused stagnation and other weird issues. When loading a city, this will be resolved automatically by reintroducing conglomerates for buildings that were left without owners.
– Fixed issue where bridges sometimes couldn’t be built despite there being enough space.
– Fixed focus distance.

Focus this week has been tweaks and bug fixes. I’ve received a host of feedback on bugs and issues that I’ve focused on addressing. I’ve also started refactoring code, as this is long overdue and there’s code that needs fixing for performance and stability reasons.

I’ve continued work on performance related to 2x-8x game speed. The game has now moved away from using UnityEngine.Time to speed up and instead uses an internal clock to speed up the intervals at which calculations are performed. That way I don’t have to use the hackery I had to keep physics time stable. I’ve also started cleaning up the connectivity class – this checks what roads are connected to which buildings. Over time, code that is only remotely related to connectivity has ended up in this class, for example position checking for vehicles. The class has now been cleaned up and now only contains code relevant to connectivity. Position checking for vehicles is now in the traffic manager and has also been moved to a thread which improves performance quite a bit, especially in large cities.

Controls have been a continued focus, and I’ve now added scroll wheel function to the options menu allowing the scroll wheel to either zoom or move the camera. I find that controls are now quite stable and functional and you can basically get around a city using only the mouse.
I’ve also added an auto follow function, so that when roads are placed, the camera will automatically pan to the last road placed. There will be some further tweaking to this, but it seems to work fairly well most of the time.

A new tutorial has been added, this basically descibes where information can be found in the game and some of the common issues that will be facing a city. I find that tutorials should become less necessary, the more advisor, citizen rep and econopedia entries are added. There will, however, be more tutorials coming in the future. These will take a while to make as I intend on making lengthier ones.

A number of bugs have also been fixed. For example, at times when a conglomerate leaves the city, buildings would not be transferred to a new conglomerate. This meant these buildings were left “hanging” and could cause null ref errors and stagnate the city. This has been fixed and if the city was in this state, the “hanging” buildings will be given a new owner on load. Aside from this, there have been some minor bugs fixed, like not being able to place roads when starting from an existing road (which you could before, and now can again).

Next update will be in two weeks as I’m moving onto some bigger additions and will need more time to work these into the game.

Hello,
It’s time again for another update! This time around I’ve focused mainly on QoL improvements and fixing some issues introduced alongside the local area effects added a few updates ago. As many times before, the images are a bit random, as most of the work done is “under the hood” kind of stuff.

Version EA.0.20
Minor additions/changes:
– Local area wealth is now a part of property value (this in turn affects property tax revenue). Property value calculation now also takes into account the size of a zone in a better way than before. Mini zones used to be overvalued compared to standard zones.
– Conglomerates can now leave a city if they are unhappy with how things are going. This transfers their property to another conglomerate. Transferred property will be valued at less than before for a short period of time meaning property tax revenue takes a hit!
– Conglomerate happiness penalty when one of their buildings has been demolished increased.
– Tooltip trigger time lowered
– Atmospheric particle filtration plant requires 120 low skilled labour instead of 150.
– Water rationing policy added.
– Additional labour policies added – Worksite safety legislation and Employee funds (make people happier, but adjusts labour demand down a bit).
– Eco footprint reduction for buildings policy added. This lowers water and electricity use at the expense of the building owner.
– Citizen reps now hint the presence of bad buildings near their home, or the lack of good ones. They also share some policy related advice.
– Additional financial advisor topics added.
– Fixed some issues relating to raycasts not hitting objects as expected allowing blocks to be demolished if they only had decorations on them for instance.
– Campaign levels with trade objectives now count long term trade as well as short term.

QoL fixes:
– Click and drag placement. Initially for 1×1 sized buildings. There will be some additions to this over time (not only allowing 2×2, 3×3 and 4×4 buildings), among them a better and fancier UI for where you are placing buildings. The current UI marker for the area where construction will be done misbehaves a bit and doesn’t scale properly at times.
– Cancelling placement of buildings with right click now checks if there has been camera movement. Cancelling is only done if the camera has remained still, allowing players to pan/rotate (depending on button assignment) while building. This is a prototype solution, so feedback is appreciated!
– Added to options menu default time of day setting : day/night cycle, always day, always night. This is applied on newly started cities.
– Time of day setting now saved per city. If you have for example always day on, then this setting will be saved.

Performance:
– Using 2, 4 or 8x in game speed has gotten laggy over time. I’ve started working on fixes for this (it’s not one isolated issue). The fixes I’ve implemented in this version should improve things fairly substantially, but more fixes will come.
– Panel ui update redone so that they update on changed info rather than fixed time tick.

Bug fixes:
– Fixed issue where healthlevels would affect growth preventing growth. This was a remnant of the old way of calculating health, before local health calculations were added.
– Fixed issue with drop down options (save slots etc.) not saving properly.
– Fix for certain policies not displaying costs and not enabling properly.
– Retro mode: Rocks would be placed randomly even when a city is loaded. This has now been fixed.
– Cost of buildings not always displaying properly now fixed (production buildings have a cost regardless of effiency).
– Health display in top bar now responds properly to changes in the city wide health level.
– Fixed bug where on extremely rare occasions a thread would try to access Unity main thread specific methods.

Other:
– Updated german localization for certain achievements.

As mentioned previously, the multi-building-placement tool has been in the works for a while and is now functional for 1×1 buildings. There is a slight issue with the marker showing where buildings will be placed – I’ve not bothered with this since the concept will be overhauled in the upcoming update anyway. I intend on working on making the system work for buildings of other sizes too, but this will most likely not be for the upcoming update.

The whole thing can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1223670185040785408

Before, when right clicking, building placement would be cancelled. I’ve not attempted to make a system that checks if the button click was made to move the camera or not. If the camera moved, the placement tool will not cancel. If the camera was still, it will cancel the placement tool. This should hopefully make building while moving around a lot a bit easier.

When adding the local area effects, the calculations for health levels were moved from citywide to local. The citywide health level is then calculated as a mean of all local health nodes. Unfortunatly, I didn’t clean out all the old code and some of the new values were instead fed into old methods which affected residential growth. This meant that health was essentially counted twice and multiplied and would sometimes prevent growth. This has now been fixed and growth should now be easier to achieve once wealth, education, fire safety and health is high enough and crime and pollution low enough.

Speeding up the game has gotten a bit laggy over time. This is due to many new systems being added into the game and running calculations for each becomes more taxing when done faster (of course). I’ve started optimizing things now and there should be performance improvements in this version. More work is required, however, and will done over the course of the upcoming few updates.

Lastly, there are some minor changes, such as conglomerates now possibly leaving the city if they are very unhappy. Advisors and citizen represenatives now have additional advice topics, and more will come in upcoming updates. Time of day default setting can now also be set in the options menu and is also saved in the city save file, so you load the city with the setting you left off with.

Next week, other than fixing the remainder of UI work for the multi building placement, I will work on some new buildings and resources as well as prepare the newly added text items for translation into German, Spanish, Russian and French. If you know any of these languages and want to help out, drop a note in the Discord!

(Build from an Atmocity player!)