Hello!
It’s been a couple of slow weeks again. Been bogged down with regular job and some family matters. But now I’m back at developing the game properly again! Recently I’ve been working mostly on graphical touch ups and optimization.

Main progress recently is that I’ve finally managed to get trees that look good and perform well. I’m now using an unlit shader with an illumination layer. It also has vertex distortion so that they sway, looking like a bit of a wind effect without having to use colliders etc. I also added so that the cutout is affected by distance, allowing me to “fade” trees before they are culled by the camera.

To accomodate for the increasing amount of props in the cities (trees, containers etc), I’ve added a mesh merging system so that objects of the same type for each building are merged on build.

Since changing to smaller building blocks, buildings can no longer grow from within the blocks. Buildings now being bigger than the blocks. Instead, I’ve added a cutoff based on height. Buildings will now appear from the bottom and up. Hopefully I can make this look even nicer with some working machinery or something.

I’ve also started texturing roads. There will be two types of main road depending on whether they’re connected to residential and commercial zones or not. Currently the latter version is the finished one and as such it’s shown even alongside industrial zones in the images below.

Trees and roads:

Night time roads:

I did manage to also get some systems work done. Mostly related to the global economy system, which is now a bit less unpredictable. I also fixed a handful of bugs, among them one where nominal costs would increase over time (due to inflation), but incomes would remain the same, meaning that over time you would start losing imense amounts of cash

Moving forward towards the next alpha release, the third, I will focus on adding a handful of new buildings and improving the UI further. I will also start incorporating new menus, such as the global economy menu.

/ Dispersing Minds