Correcture Games

Hello!

Skipped last week’s update, because there was mostly system work done and not a whole lot to write about at that stage.
This week however, there’s a bunch of new things going on!

Firstly, I’ve started working on the connectivity system, which will check connectivity between buildings and sections of the city and calculate production and consumption based on what is available in connected parts of the city. Currently, the system divides the city into small “cubes”, and connectivity is then checked between cubes. Next week, I will start dividing these into groups, so that calculations for produces and consumed goods can be done on a group by group basis. For most players, I reckon the entire city will be interconnected, so there will only be one group, but should a player want to do so, cities will be able to be divided into separated sections. This system will also check travel distances for labour, so that all labour needs to be able to reach a workplace within a specific distance. This means that unemployment and labour shortages can arise, if there’s a difficulty in reaching work places. This is to simulate having to have reasonable travel times to get to work. The vactrain system will extend the travelling distance and allow labour to travel further to get to work.

Here’s an image of the system, when mapping the city:

I’ve also overhauled parts of the policy system. This is mostly to allow faster implementation of new policy. These were hard coded before, but now there’s proper code to handle a handful of different types, that can just be added to an array. This also makes saving them into the data file easier later on.

I’ve finished up the remaining commercial buildings as well! With that, I only have another 18 buildings left (out of 111) to make for the early access release. Next up will be the industrial zones, after which I only have another 11 left to make! I’ve already started expanding the list of buildings that will be implemented post EA-release though, including a sixth density for each residential and commercial zone and a set of smaller zones and parks.

For the upcoming beta-release (scheduled for the 4th-6th of february), the budget panel will also have been implemented. Currently I’m working on the data struct that will collect all the data necessary during the calculations cycle. This includes fetching costs for sets of buildings such as healthcare buildings or education buildings.

I’ve also started receiving some early version of Music from the composer. It’s all sounding very promising and fitting! It’s going to be very exciting to start getting some music implemented into the game.

/ Dispersing Minds

Hello,
It’s been a long and productive week for sure! Testing is in full swing and I’ve made plenty of changes according to the feedback I’ve received. One of the bigger changes is that I’ve started redoing the UI to make it easier to more directly find the items you are after and to lower the amount of scrolling required when building things.

Another change (that I’m still working on) is moving more values over to text and icon displays. For instance, instead of displaying city happiness as a value from 0 to 100, the value has been divided into five smiley levels. To avoid the confusion behind “negative unemployment” (labour shortage), this will be changed into categories of severe and mild shortage/unemployment and a neutral state.

The thinking behind this is to get players more focused on the bigger picture. The actual values can still be found in more precise panels, like city statistics and budget.

I’ve started working on buildings again as well. The entire roster of standard residential buildings available at early-access release are finished. I plan to also finish the small footprint residential buildings as well (about 6 or so, and more added after release).

The upper-class tier of residences can be seen here, along with a very WIP version of the new UI.

The entirety of the residences can be seen here:

Another change this week has been the addition of adaptive depth of field. Unlike before, when depth of field was always set at a specific focus distance (modifiable via options though), distance is now set depending on the distance to a building being in view of the camera. If no building is found, focus is always set to the sky. This way, there will never really be blurriness where a player is facing the camera.

I’ve also managed to fix a couple of bugs and glitches, from both feedback and own discoveries. Moving toward the mid January update (scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday) these are the current changes:

– First iteration of new UI. More adjustments to come.
– Upper class residences implemented. Their full requirements are not finished for the time being as some more resources need to be implemented.

– Fixed null in conglomerate window panel.
– Fixed null when a new conglomerate establishes itself via trade of property.
– Fixed null causing file entries to not load in the save manager.

– Reverted to old way of calculating efficiency to avoid ”ping pong” values – efficiency swaying from 100% to 0%. Might revisit this later on.
– Added adaption rate to building effiency changes. This makes building slowly transition from one effiency state to another instead of instantly switching from one to the other.

– Camera shake when constructing buildings now works properly in paused mode and 2-8x speeds.
– Education values now scale properly with city size.
– Crime levels now depend on unemployment, education levels and size of population classes.
– Crime level added to happiness calculation.

There will also be the addition of Spanish localization, a selection screen that allows players to select start layouts for foundations and a toggle for depth of field. The missing icons in the UI image above will also be implemented.

/ Dispersing minds

Hello!
It’s been quite a productive week. I’m about to push version 0.44. This is the full extent of these two updates:

New features:
Services implemented. Commercial zones provide services demanded by residential zones and some public amenities. Naturally, these cannot be traded like normal goods and cannot be stored.
Conglomerates make demands if policy targeted at them is too strict (high taxes for instance). Only unhappy conglomerates will make demands, so ensuring you don’t demolish their buildings and keeping taxes fair will make them less inclined to make demands. If you decline a demand, you may run the risk of a short period of lower production of goods or services. The rate of lower production and the duration depends on how unhappy the conglomerate making the demand is.
Bribes have been implemented. Conglomerates will try to give you things in return for changes to policy they dislike.
Property tax has been implemented. This puts a percentage tax on the value of conglomerate buildings. As your city grows, taxing property can amount to a fairly substantial source of income. But it’s also a source of discontent among your conglomerates.
Conglomerate happiness now affected by policy and dependant on conglomerate memory.
Conglerate information panel (local economy) available.Services icon added to resource panel.
Corrections center building added.
Safety indicator added to city stats panel.
First iteration of crime added. Crime currently doesn’t affect any values around the city, but has been made visible to the player via the city stats panel. Crime is (currently) managed with police departments and corrections centers and calculated on a citywide basis.
Conglomerate happiness now indirectly affected by business cycle, wage levels and unemployment. This will be developed more later on.

Changed UI/UX:
UI adapted to allow 16:10 aspect ratio. A minor issue with positioning of hide/reveal side panel arrows remains, as does a positioning issue with the message panel at the bottom of the screen.
Corrected a discrepancy between actual values and displayed values in UI.
Added tool tips to building info panel.
Moved scrool wheel from zoom to translate (scrolling moves camera forward/backward). Zoom function on keys Z and X moves camera anchor and changes the rotation center.

Glitches/Bugs/Poor optimizations fixed:
Further vehicle code optimizations and refactored code.
Fixed bug in text display for health and environment indicators in city stat panel. Text display would sometimes be incorrect.
Fixed a bug where sky rotation change when switching to day/night only mode.
The sound trigger code was incredibly inefficienct, especially when the camera was close to many buildings. This was the source of significant slowdowns. Now, only one building will be fetched at any time using a different (and faster) method.
Sped up performance of calculation thread.
(the two above mentioned fixes lower the fps-drop when running the game in 4x or 8x speeds)
Fixed faulty calculation of unemployment insurance cost.
Health values were persisting over calculations meaning ever improving health. Corrected by value not persisting over calculations.
UI for trades, bonds and offers update when panels are opened. Before they updated regardsless of whether the windows were open.
Fixed glitch in concrete foundation manager causing a null.

Other changes:
Changed calculation of efficiency when missing resources. Before, missing one out of three resources (for example) would cut 1/3 of efficiency. Now completely missing a resource will set effieincy to 0.
Fixed overlapping buttons in options panel.
Fix for density shader glitch.

New issues/Known issues (an outtake):
Minor issues with menu in 16:10 aspect ratio as mentioned above.

Pushed to later update (an outtake):
How control schemes are affected during construction will be tweaked.
Quicksaves.
Additional concrete foundations, fancier concrete foundations.
Fix for sun (currently breaks on build…).
Remainder of 16:10 aspect ratio fixes.
Demolition indicator.

Some of the bigger changes this time around is the addition of services as a resource. Commercial buildings not only provide work places for your citizens, they are also more valuable for conglomerates than residential and industrial property types. As such, they also add more income if you tax property. Aside from that, they produce services which are consumed around your city. Currently, only residences consume services, but in the next update, some other buildings will be added as consumers of services as well. In the next update the rate of service production will be affected by commercial taxes as well.

A first iteration of crime has been implemented as well. Crime currently doesn’t affect anything in the city, but in future releases crime will affect property values, production and the rate of construction for conglomerates. It will also affect health levels marginally. Along with the addition of crime, comes the corrections center building:

This, together with the police department, combats crime in the city. Crime levels grow linearly with the population, but also exponentially from unemployment. Other factors will also be added in future updates.

Conglomerates can now be viewed in the first iteration of the local economy panel. Here you’ll be able to view the currently building count and value of each conglomerate, as well as variables such as happiness, patience and memory. Patience and memory are tied together with the ceo of the conglomerate, and since this position changes over time, so do these variables. The conglomerate happiness on the other hand, depends on how well they feel things are working. High tax rates will drop their happiness, while good cooperation and fortunate global economy will raise their happiness.

The last offertype has also been added – the bribe. Conglomerates will from time to time attempt to bribe you into changing policy they dislike. Unlike demands, bribes can occur even when conglomerates are happy with the current levels of taxes, but want you to lower them further. Currently, accepting bribes do no harm, but the idea is that this will lower happiness for a brief moment and increase the base line crime rate (setting a bad precedent for corruption).

I’ve also managed to fix a handful of bugs relating to production not being calculated correctly and in particular ui bugs relating to efficiency and production rates not being displayed properly. There’s still some work remaining, but overall, most of these issues seem to be fixed now.

Next week I will push to finish up the residential and commercial tiers completely and continue work on the budget panel. I’m also finishing up text documentation so that I can start sending out all text elements to translators.

That’s it for this time!

/ Dispersing minds