Correcture Games

Hello!
Although not a super efficient week, I’ve started picking up pace again. This week I’ve started expanding the UI to be able to fit new features in. More space for buttons at the top, slider for Resources (since the entire pane was full and I’ve still got resources to add).

The empty buttons at the top will be for the stock exchange/trade center, local economy/budget, conglomerate/citizen advisory board and the last empty one will likely be used for research.

 

Two new buildings have made it into the game this week. The Police station (here almost finished):

And also the Carbon Pressurization Plant, that will produce Diamonds that will be used for advanced circuits and jewelry.

 

I’ve been continuing optimization work. Since switching to smaller building blocks the same volume of blocks produces 8 shadow casters instead of one. This, along with the increasing number of props like trees and containers, was pushing the number of shadow casters a bit too much (1500+ in a view). To remedy this I made a system that creates a shadows only volume based on the blocks within segments of 5x5x5 sized spaces. Together with a system that merges all similar props into one object per building has meant the number of shadow casters in now generally below 500-600.

The grouping of blocks can be seen here:

There’s been some other minor progress too, fixing bugs, mini-optimization and overall polish and work on LODs, but that’s pretty much it.

 

/ Dispersing Minds

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

 

Hello,

This week’s focus has primarily been to reach a new stable version of the game. There’s been a lot of under the hood work done – stuff that initially pretty much broke the game and required quite a lot of effort to get working.

First of all, the game has moved away from the big block sizes into a smaller block size. Along with this, there will be two sizes of buildings. Currently, only roads and canals are the smaller size, but in the future there will be a set of smaller residential and commercial zones along with small parks and statues etc.

Another big change, hinted above, is the introduction of roads. The current implementation is rather simple – each building requires a road. However, there is currently no control as to whether this road leads anywhere. This system is still in its infancy and was therefore cut from the new alpha build.

The addition of a road system means the game moves away from a global resource system and into a system where resources are shared within an area connected by roads. This “Island” system as I call it is more or less finished, but as I mention above, the road does not connect different islands and as such, the game still handles resources as if they were global.

The finished road system should make it into the next alpha version.

This version also features three sets of residential zones and three sets of commercial zones along with the addition of the carbon storage facility and carbon power plant. This means that there is now also a carbon resource.

I’ve also redone the density function meaning that sparse areas of residential zones will not spawn higher densities. This is to avoid areas completely maxing out in areas that do not have a lot of densely packed zones. This also gives cities a more “realistic” skyline.

There are now also tool tips to help players understand what is what. Obviously, the game is still very light on information to the player, but this will be added in as more things get finished.

There’s also been quite a few bug fixes in the game, but I’ve mainly focused on optimization. I’ve managed to cut quite a few textures by adding together textures and mapping UVs differently. I’ve ensured things batch together properly so that there are as few new instances of things as possible meaning I could go from roughly 1500-2000 drawcalls in a medium sized city, to about 500-600.

A few things had to be cut from the alpha. Some policy stuff was meant to make it into this version, but had to be cut due to a few bugs needing to be ironed out. I’ve also pushed the addition of music for now.

Those willing to stream the game, please contact me via email!

/ Dispersing Minds