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!)