One of the goals was to add trams into the game. I’ve noticed while working on them, that it would be much easier to add them in if I started reworking the road connection system first. So the actual tram vehicles will not be added. But the station will be there:
I’m hoping to have the improved road connection system in the next version already, so trams should hopefully not be too far off. This way, the traffic system gets an overhaul too!
I’ve added another set of decoration blocks:
A lot of work has been put into refining some of the systems already in place – the way goods tickets are generated as well as the demanded resources has been reworked and what foods are demanded by different classes of citizens has been changed.
The city stats window has gotten some additional info – The amount of resources produced in the city can now be seen there, as well as the amount of education and health produced compared to how much is required.
Demand for resources and their pricing has also been altered. Instead of the price and demand of a good diminishing very quickly when selling them, now the amount you can sell before price is drastically dropped depends on the city’s population (a proxy for the world population basically). Once a resource has been sold, the time it takes for price to return to normal, will depend on how much has been sold.
0.31 will be live tomorrow. This version will add in the monorail trains, a bunch of new monorail track pieces and fix a bunch of performance issues and slow loading times.
In adding the monotrails, I’ve had to rework how vactracks work – since they share systems. Part of this work has been to fix slow connection calculations, trains sometimes occupying the same track and imprecise movement. Part of this work can now be ported over to roads and cars to start making traffic movement nicer looking. This will be done after trams have been added in (version 0.32).
Monorails being more or less finished (obviously tweaks will be done), trams are the next step. Whereas monorails share systems with vactracks, trams will share the road system. This system has been incredibly slow to calculate what roads are connected and what road system belongs to which road network. In the test city (a huge city with lots of roads), the process of checking road connections when loading the city took 68s. I’ve now managed to cut this down to about 3s. This is a huge performance improvement noticable both when loading cities and when playing the game, as things will connect together much faster now. Some of the techniques I used to improve performance have also been moved over to vactracks, making them faster to calculate too.
Since I’ve been working on a lot of performance related fixes, I’ve also looked into cleaning up the project to remove files not used and also improve import settings. This should hopefully push in game performance a bit. I’ve also looked into the post processing effects.
I’m hoping to get an additional free roam template added as well as some minor decorations. Aside from that, this update will mostly be performance focused. 0.32 on the other hand will add more features, this one is set to release a week after 0.31, on monday the 22nd.
New stuff
– 3×3 concrete, steel and glass production facilities added.
– Flower farm added. Flowers can now be produced.
– Dyes factory added. Dyes can now be produced.
– Textiles factory added. Textiles can now be produced.
– Monorails added! They currently don’t spawn trains though. This is an early iteration, so many changes still to come.
– Local area effects now non-linear. Before the effects of for example crime, poor health and poor education would be added up. Now a neighborhood might have poor health levels, without taking quite the same efficiency hit. However, when more than one aspect is poor, then it takes a bigger hit instead.
– Vactrains updated. Some more tweaks coming as tram/monorail/vactrain systems receive more love.
Tweaks
– Vactubes made smaller (-25%)
– Changed modifier crate drop frequency and they now only appear near buildings. They also give off a light when they appear.
– Camera controls and gameplay tutorials french localization added.
– Moved farms to its own category (food prod.)
– Trash notice was displayed on load, fixed.
– Better and more consistent collision detection when placing/demolishing buildings.
– Improved loading performance. Improved on placement times (the first part of the loading bar). Also improved road connection calculations. This is the last bit of the loading bar. More work on loading performance remains, but this should take a fair chunk out of loading times.
Bugfixes
– Fixed buildings sometimes not registering a nearby good (collision layer mishap).
– Fixed bug where nested vacstations weren’t working.
– Fixed buildings not displaying production despite being in a network connected to a vacstation.
– Fixed vactrack train not spawning on load.
– Fixed bug where click and drag placing blocks in the center would not work.
– Fixed modifiers being mapped oddly (cereal modifier added fruit for example).
– Fixed descriptions of crates in the modifers and crates window.
– Fixed glossmap for 1×1 tier one residence
– Fixed traffic timestep being a bit slower than it should be when city has been loaded.
Aside from the newly added resource tree with flowers farms, dyes factories and textiles factory displayed in previous devlogs, public transport has been a big project this time around. There’s a lot of work involved in getting this working properly, so it’s not all there yet. But you can now construct monorails!
I had initially meant to add trams in first, but this requires a bit of additional work on how roads and road bound vehicles work, which I will be finishing up for next update. There’s been some work done already, but this part of the code is currently a bit slow so it needs to be optimized before I can move further with it.
Monorail stations and connections can be built though, but won’t spawn trains currently. Monorail trains will be a bit funky so they require a bit of additional work on top of the vactrain code that’s already in the game.
On the subject of vacuum trains, they now have wagons! I’ve also made the movement a bit stricted so they stay in the vactube! More work is still needed to tidy up everything and make it look nicer, but it’s getting there! Here the train and wagons can be seen in a user made city (and an amazing build it is!!).
In this city there was an issue with nested vac train stations not tying together different road networks. This has now been fixed so that vac train stations work properly. Cities can now be spaced out on different islands and share resources as long as there is a station and proper connection. There still needs to be an atmoport near one of these stations.
In the next update, there will be more public transport, some new decos, a first implementation of disasters (fire) and a bunch of other things. I’m hoping to have this version out monday the 15th!
Here’s another user build that I find really nice:
Hello!
I’ll keep it short this week as most of the work put into the game this week has been on preparing existing systems for new additions.
One such new addition is the tram and monorail systems mentioned in previous logs.
What will differentiate the monorail from the existing vacuum train system, is that it will need to be built nearby blocks, only allowing shorter bridges across gaps etc. In terms of code, they otherwise share many things but monorails will need to add some additional complexity. So I’ve spent time this week cleaning up the vacuum train code to allow for better pathing and a faster calculation of routes.
Once I’m not updating the vacuum train/monorail code, I will get back to work on regular traffic to try to improve paths there as well. This will be a bit more difficult, as there are way more cars at any given moment, so care needs to be taken to keep it all efficient.
Since trams, monorails and vacuum trains will (hopefully) all be in and functional in the next update (due the 7th or 8th of june), I’ve also added a local area effect for public transporation. Since there are now very many local area effects (including crime, health, education etc.), I’ve also redone how they stack. Previously they all carried the same weight, given that now there are so many, it was possible to get good building efficiency even if one was completely lacking. So now they are now partially multiplicative, if one is missing it doesn’t make much difference, but if two are missing it will have a large effect, and so on. This will make it more important to build well rounded neighborhoods.
Once I’ve gotten the next version up, I will most likely do another version focused primarily on bug fixes and performance, as there has been a lot stuff added recently and a lot of systems that have been cleaned up (possibly introducing new bugs).
Flower farms, dyes and textile factories as well as public transportation.
This week a lot of work has been put into the new resource tree of flowers -> dyes -> textiles. Currently, flowers are used to produce dyes and dyes and wood go into producing textiles which are used in hotels. Additional uses may be added in later on.
The flower farm has a 6×6 foot print and is fairly pricey – overall resource production for hotels and hotels themselves are rather pricey, but tourism can also add a lot of revenue to a city.
Once flowers are produced, dyes can be produced:
I’ve started working on expanding public transportation as well. Currently there’s only vacuum trains. I’m working on expanding with trams, which will be an early game public transportation system. Trams are built on roads existing roads (not avenues) and stations are 1×2 sized and also placed on roads.
I’m also adding in a monorail system. The monorail system will be larger capacity than trams, but also require more space (stations etc.).
Vacuumtrains will be made a bit more costly, and will be the highest capacity system and will also allow resoures to be shared across different city “islands” unlike trams and monorail.
The tram system can be seen below as well as a WIP of the textile factory.
When working on the trams I also decided to overhaul the look of roads. So gone are the square roads, and in are roads with some curves.
EA.0.29
– Two new decorations
– Hotels and tourism are in! To begin with only one density for each tier. Additional densities will be added in the upcoming versions.
– Tourism policies added.
– Differentiated road upkeep costs. Plain roads are cheaper than the fancy avenue.
– New resources – flowers, dyes and textiles.
– Click and drag placement added for all buildingtypes, not just 1×1 buildings.
– Optimized building placement code.
– Reimported textures to decrease texture size in game.
– Fixed clinic collider
– Fixed tree shader so that shadows work properly.
– Fixed bug where blocks could sometimes be placed in the same location.
– Fixed bug where pub couldn’t be destroyed!
– Fixed issue where sometimes building info would show production occuring, when there was none.
– Removed water foam effect on Metal (Mac) pending a proper fix. This avoids water looking glitchy.
On the surface a fairly small update, but introduces tourism (which will get many tweaks over the upcoming few updates). There’s also some under the hood stuff fixed with how things are calculated. Currently only one density of each tier hotel can be grown. You can currently also only import the necessary resources (next version will add the production of flowers, dyes and textiles).
Two new decorations have been added:
There were some issues with unconnected buildings sometimes showing production output. This should now be fixed and unconnected buildings should have an efficiency of 0.
I’ve started going through some of the existing code and cleaning some stuff up to make things more performant. When adding click and drag placement for buildings regardless of size I have also been able to remove a fairly sizable chunk of code. I’ve also cleaned up some of the shaders and changed import settings for textures to improve fidelity while also lowering size.
Hotels, click and drag construction and texture optimization
This week I’ve started working on hotel buildings. In terms of code, tourism is more or less already functional, although it needs some tweaks here and there, but hasn’t been set live since there haven’t been any hotel buildings.
I’ll be added the 1×1, 2×2 and 4×4 versions lower, middle to upperclass at the same time, one density at a time.
Here’s the lower class first densities:
The middle class, first density hotel buildings are also “done” (some tweaking remains):
I’ve also incorporated click and drag construction for all building types now. Previously, this was available only for 1×1.
Some new resources will make their way into the game in the next version: Flowers, dyes and textiles. Textiles will be a consumed resource in hotels. Dyes are made from flowers, and textiles are made from wood and dyes.
I’ve started changing import settings for textures (primarily normal maps and gloss maps), to make room for additional textures. I’ve also tweaked existing shaders to remove some stuff that is no longer in use and to make materials less heavy. The tree shader has also been changed so that trees now receive shadows properly!
Hello!
EA.0.28 is live! Here’s what’s new since 0.27:
EA.0.27 -> EA.0.28
– New tutorial added! Non-english versions coming soon!
– Two old tutorials deprecated.
– Backtracking on how to rotate when plopping buildings. Only scrollwheel is back!
– First iteration of water blocks added!
– Weightier building destruction!
– Additional decorations added.
– Football field added – early game entertainment building.
– Added fountain to one of the decorations.
– Clarified what option is selected in the camera tutorial.
– Fixed slow loading times (particularly for tutorials, but overall when starting new challenges, templates or campaign levels) due to replacing old types of blocks to the new smaller block type. Tutorials will be overhauled in the next proper update.
– Fix for stadium and pub showing 0 efficiency
– Fix for weird directory structure for Win 32 build.
– Fix for building info panel displaying over certain ui items.
– Fix for items in save/load window not being properly sized at some resolutions.
– Fix for connection not retesting properly if building was unconnected when loading city.
– Grid now follows the cursor when placing roads.
– Fix for flickery particles (clouds and far away dust in retro modes).
– Fix for blocks not being built on temporary blocks.
– Football field now has correct sound when clicked.
– Removed continuous trade from trade window when there is no customs house.
– Fixed long term trades so they are no available when there is no customs house.
– Tweaked colliders for new decorations.
– Changed atmosphere material.
– Changed so that camera can move further outside of the atmosphere.
– Building icon now displayed in building info panel
– Building range now displayed when building info is active
– Window system overhauled to allow for a more efficient code structure when loading icons and to allow multiple windows to be displayed at once.
– Tweaked water shader – added foam.
– Russian localization updated.
– Cleaned up what buildings are available in certain modes.
The addition of water blocks is one of the major new features this version. This is the first iteration, so there are tweaks and fixes still to come, but they can be plopped into your city now!
Another central part of this update is updating the tutorial system and updating the practice tutorial and adding a new intermediate tutorial. The new tutorial delves deeper into some of the central aspects of the game, than the old tutorials did and should hopefully shed more light on some of the more tricky parts of the game.
A football field has been added! This is an early game entertainment building. More entertainment and culture buildings are still to come!
Some new decorations have been added, among them this L shaped decoration that can be used to create grassy overpasses over water or vactracks.
This version also adds a bunch of fixes and minor additions, such as a range display when clicking buildings and the density being displayed in the building info panel.
Missed updating here when launching 0.27 (hectic week). I’m making progress on the upcoming 0.28 version, here’s some of what’s going into 0.28:
A new type of decoration that adapts to surroundings, allowing some nice looking curves around corners. These allow for a softer look and can be a good compliment to other types of decorations. Above is the grass version, but it also comes with a regular conrete version:
The building info window is now completely finished. I’ve added the building icon as well as the zone density. This window used to be disconnected from the regular window system, meaning that it had to be closed and opened separately. This meant a bunch of extra code and was becoming a bit of a hassle as new stuff gets added. I’ve now added it into the window system properly and also added ui sections so that different types of panels can be opened at the same time.
Lastly, the range of a building is now also displayed when a building is clicked!
The new additions to the window system were necessary to be able to redo tutorials efficiently. There’s been a lack of screen real estate to display tutorial info without stuff overlapping and without having to code extra conditions for closing stuff. Now I’ll be able to get the new tutorial stuff into a panel similar to the building info panel and manage it within the new window system effectively. I’m hoping the new tutorial(s) will inform new players well enough, unlike the current ones. Hopefully I can get them translated into other supported languages as well, if not, translated versions will be in for version 0.29 for sure.
Buildable water is a new feature in the upcoming version. Getting this to work properly has required a lot of shader work, which has taken up a lot of time. I’ve also needed to redo a part of a mesh merging system as well as adding to an existing system that checks and adapts meshes to neighboring meshes (like roads). It’s not certain atm if the new buildable water will be complete, but it will be usable enough.
I’ve decided to launch a somewhat smaller 0.26 version to get a few bugs and issues out of the way sooner. Primarily what has been left out and will be added next week is the new camera tutorial, some new camera controls (some have been added in this version) and some new buildings and props (billboards for example).
But here’s what’s in: Fixes: – Atmospheric scattering and SSR off by default on Mac (due to compatibility issues). – Loading performance improved. Also managed to removed stalling at the end of loading a city. – Fixed poor performance when placing/removing many blocks. – Fixed camera shake bug when removing many blocks. – Fixed calculation error. – Fix rotation when using shift A/D when not aligned to horizon. Default key setting also moved from shift A/D to Q/E. – Fixed issue with old block types not being translated correctly (affected first campaign level and a few challenge levels). – Fixed (ie. removed) camera shake when trying to destroy blocks on a level where blocks can’t be built. – Fixed status effect not correctly displaying buildings that lack electricity or water. This was due to a change in how missing resources is handled since implementing the new UI for buildings. – Cost deduction now correct for bridges (cost was not per segment before).
New additions and tweaks – Building camera lock on replaced with a camera move to building function. Accessed via shift down and left or right mouse button. This is currently not removed from the tutorial, as the movement tutorial is being replaced in the next version! – Recycling center now produces small amounts of carbon. When running at 100%, it can essentially support a carbon power plant at 50%. Making the early game a bit easier. – New building UI. – Increased movement when using scroll wheel. – User interface color can now be changed in the options menu. – Controls movement speed options added. – Bridging pieces added – a sort of walkway to cover up stuff like vactraintubes etc. – Deactivated buildings are now saved and loaded as deactivated. – New sounds for buildings. – New bridge icons. – Two new bridgetypes added. – Max bridge length increased a bit. – New 2×2 park and plaza. More to come in future versions. – Added more bling to the stadium. – Consumtion now evened out across all consumers. Before, consumtion was on a first come first serve basis, meaning that buildings whose consumtion was ran first would get all resources. Now this is evened out, so that if there isn’t enough to cover all requirements, then the available amount is split evenly across all consumers. This also fixes an issue where the requirement calculation used to overstate how much electricity and water is required.
This version adds two new bridge designs, and also adds supports to existing ones. Supports are currently only added if there is free space beneath and if the distance to a block below is one unit.
The new building information panel is now more or less complete. There is one remaining issue where unconnected lots will sometimes not display missing water or electricity properly. A fix for this is incoming.
I’ve now added a precalculation of the amount of resources required. This means that instead of consumtion being performed per building until there are no resources left, now the total required amount is checked beforehand and the available resources are portioned out. For example, you have five buildings that require 50 low skilled labour each, but you only have 200. Before four buildings would get 50, and one would get 0. Now they all receive 40. This will generally prevent certain buildings from not working at all due to missing some resources. Now, if you have no carbon (for example), then you can’t power a carbon power plant regardless.
I’ve also started adding in some more buildings. More were intended for this version, among them a botanical garden, but there are now 2×2 parks and plazas. More stuff coming next week!
Lastly, I was informed ofan issue with atmospheric scattering on Mac, this feature has now been turned off to prevent it from causing trouble – thanks for the notification! 🙂
