First off, version ea.0.25 has been postponed until tuesday the 31st, to allow for some last minute additions and tweaks
As mentioned in a previous update, the density system has been overhauled and has now been tweaked and seems to function. Along with density, the population condition has also been adjusted. From now on, a population of 1400 citizens is required for zones to grow to density two, 11200 before density two can grow, 37800 before density three grows and 89600 before density four grows into five. Once the sixth density is added for the regular 4×4 sized residential and commercial zone, they will require a minimum of 175000 citizens.
I’m making fairly good progress in adding new buildings in general. For 0.25, a stadium will be added. The old theatre building is now the opera (as was originally intended) and a new theatre building has been added.
That means that culture and entertainment will start working as intended. Currently this is only counted as a local area effect, but once tourism is added, they will start working a bit differently.
The third density of the 2×2 commercial zones has also been added. That makes a total of ten new commercial buildings and means that both the residential and commercial 2×2 set of buildings are complete. Work will soon begin on 3×3 zones, but first some other more pressing matters will be dealt with.
I’ve also seperated education calculations into primary, secondary and tertiary education. Currently, these are just summed up into a total education in each neighborhood and in the city. But you can now view where each of the three sets of education types is strong, to find where there might be a need to plop down more grammar school or highschools.
Some things that I had intended to have in this version have been moved to the next one. Among them the new camera tutorial and some additional control tweaks. This will be in 0.26, scheduled for release the 14th of april (that version, too, will be quite substantial).
New decorations are also in the works. I hope to get a few ready for the upcoming version, so that you can start blinging up the city even more!
Only a quick update this week, as it’s not time for a new build yet.
I’ve still quite some way to go for the upcoming update, but I’m hoping to get a lot into the upcoming version. I’m planning the third density of 2×2 commercial buildings to be added. I’m also going to start expanding the roster of culture and entertainment buildings, starting with the opera and stadium.
Current progress is that I’ve redone the code for bridges. Before they were individual objects per length, which becomes difficult to maintain as more bridges are added. So now each type is a unique object, but then the length is generated as they are built. This meant it was fairly easy to add bridge variants in, seen below.
The density system, that would count nearby buildings to determine if an area was dense enough to allow zones to grow has been replaced. The old system differentiated between 4×4 on the one hand and 1×1 and 2×2 buildings on the other. This wasn’t ideal as, for one thing, it used up 4 collision layers instead (big/small RC/I), but it also required a spherecast upon each grow test which would sometimes bog things down. Now density is calculated similar to how health and education is calculated. This means it can also run on a thread.
The system that handles storing water in cisterns has been overhauled. Water is now stored only after all buildings have consumed their water. Cisterns can now also store more water to cover up a longer period of high water demand. I’ve also added in a battery building that stored electricity for a simlar purpose as the cistern.
The block splitting tool has been deprecated. Instead all blocks have been translated into the smallest building block. This makes loading a slight bit slower, and also adds more faces in any given view, but these effects should be minimal compared to the benefits in terms of easier sculpting. In other words, a small con in terms of performance, but a big pro in terms of game play.
I’m hoping to restart work on waterblocks in the upcoming week, but it’s still uncertain whether they can be made available in the upcoming version.
Hello, I’ve been a not inconsistent on the subject of when 0.24 would release, first saying the 15th and then the 22nd. I’ve found an issue with building duplication that I wanted to have fixed, so I’ve decided to push a smaller version of 0.24 through today. The next version will then follow march 29th. Changelog EA.0.24 New stuff – Added third density of 2×2 residential buildings. – Tooltip for modifiers added to panel.
Tweaks – Plop costs adjusted (up). Primarily for tier two and tier three production. – Hydrogen power plant given consumption priority. Also fixed that it wasn’t added as an economy unaffected building. – Super absorbent production increased. – Pre and grammar school, clinic, hospital and police department are now prioritized labour consumers, ie. will be prioritized when it comes to being given labour. – Commercial and industrial labour demands adjusted up a bit.
Bug fixes – Found bug causing duplication of buildings. Affected buildings is the 2×2 middle class first density commercials. If this happens, the file size will have bloated and loading will be slow. This autoresolves if you load the city now. First time around loading will be a bit slower, a text (“Resolving duplication…”) will be displayed and the progress bar will stop before reaching 100%. Just wait this out and the problem will be fixed and resaving the city will make load times normal again. Depending on how many duplication have occured, this might take a while. Should it fail to remove all duplicates, reloading the city should resolve the remaining problem buildings. – Fix for advice when unemployment is high or there is a shortage of labour fixed. – Fixed bug where hydrogen was not persistent (ie. needed to be produced every time step instead of the surplus being stored). – Fixed lighting on bridges. – Fixed the citizen board from requesting the same policy twice. Also added a cool down so that things aren’t requested too often. – Fix for road connections not working when roads were placed in a u-shape.
Other – Adjusted top bar sliders to use the entire slider. – Policy cost data is loaded as soon as policy window is opened (assuming things have been calculated).
The third density of 2×2 residential buildings has been added into the game. This means 2×2 residences can now start holding fairly large amounts of people. In the upcoming version their demands and the density checks for when a building can grow will be adjusted.
Building plop costs have been increased slightly, in particular for later stage buildings. Consumption priority has also been changed to ensure that some buildings are stocked with labour first – this is to avoid central utilities from not having any labour. Commerce and industry now also requires slightly more labour.
The building duplication is due to the deprecation of the effector type in the previous vesion. This is due to a script accidentally being left on two buildings. If these buildings were in a city, they would result in two buildings being saved each time, meaning new buildings were added exponentially. If this has happened in a city, the save file will be bloated and take very long to load. Performance will also be affected. This will be fixed automatically when loading a city, which means initially loading a city will take a bit longer.
I’ve also added modifier descriptions to the modifier window to avoid cramped tool tips. Fixed lighting on bridges and also road connections not working properly when roads were placed in a u shape in tight corners.
Version EA.0.23
New stuff:
– Hydrogen production plant added.
– Hydrogen power plant added.
– EffectorType deprecated.*
– First iteration of clouds added.
– Additional props added to production buildings.
– Absorbent building modified and made shorter allowing them to be stacked and making them more space efficient.
– Absorbent building props added.
– Climate effects added (humidity, heat, wind). Primarily affects wind and solar farms, as well as food production facilities and water production.
Tweaks/minor additions:
– Food requirements rebalanced for residential buildings. Overall demands are now lower, but the highest tier had mistankenly been set to low requirements, so they now have higher food demands (in line what they should have had). Conversely, the fourth tier had very high demands, but now has lower.
– The board of citizens now demand changes to welfare levels and enacting/repealing specific policies.
– Conglomerates can now demand adjustments to the financial transactions tax. Preparations made for hotel tax level demands as well.
– Some minor tweaks in the building information panel.
– Cost and effect of policy adjusted (costs generally adjusted down and effects slightly up).
– Research tool tip now displays description in the text bar at the bottom of the research window when hovering over research icon.
– Fixed wages not displaying in stats window.
Controls:
– Camera spin/tilt controls removed.
Other:
– Polish translation expanded.
– Lighting from street lights improved.
– Fog override fixed so that retro levels have the proper fog color regardless of chosen theme.
– Fixed bridge description being incorrectly mapped in english.
– Reordered some of the production buildings in the menu.
This time around, there aren’t that many new additions. I’ve been putting quite a bit of work into refactoring code and improvement overall performance. There’s also been quite a bit of work put into simplifying code so that the upcoming additions (primarily new zone densities, hotels and also ideology-specific buildings) are easier to implement and maintain.
The hydrogen resource now has a production facility. Currently hydrogen is only used in the newly added hydrogen power plant, a pricey, but clean way to produce big amounts of electricity. These two new buildings can be seen below. Also in the picture, the absorbent building has been made smaller so that it’s easier to stack together.
*The effector type has been deprecated. This was essentially building type groups checked when placing a new building (good/bad nearby buildings). Previously, when a building had all nearby good buildings and no bad buildings it would run at 100% efficiency. This has now been redone to work in tandem with the local area effects system. Local area effects account for 40% efficiency, presence of all required good buildings another 30% and the lack of bad buildings another 30%. This change also allows being informed exactly of what building is required or is considered a bad neighbor, instead of buildings being grouped. This is a big change to one of the core systems of the game, so there might be some minor unexpected issues. Also, in the old system, each type of building would only be counted once, so having two pollutant power plants near a residential building was just as bad as having one. Now, each bad neighbor is counted, while good neighbors are still only counted once.
Climate effects have been added. In campaign, challenge and free roam levels, these effects don’t affect things greatly. There might be a shorter period when there is less wind which means less output from wind farms for example,but overall, these effects are discrete. They are more prominent in the retro mode levels where the levels are themed. Ruined earth for example is dry, windy and warm, so farms are affected a bit, solar farms and wind farms are a good choices for electricity production etc.
Graphics are currently not a high priority, except when it comes to optimizations, but there are some new building props added, a water tank for example. Street lights now emit light as well.
Policy costs and food demands have been tweaked. Since the addition of coffee, cocoa and tea, the food/drinks demands of buildings has gotten rather costly. So I’ve adjusted most demands down. But in checking through all demands, I noticed the upper class residential buildings were not scaled properly, so they now demand slightly more food than before. The fourth tier on the other hand, demanded way too much, so their demands have now been lowered substantially. Policy costs were way to high compared to their effects, so cost and effects have been tweaked to make them more viable. The citizens now also demand specific policies be enacted or repealed. Keeping citizens happy will prevent them from making too many demands.
There’s been some minor fixes on top of all this, fog having the proper color in the retro levels for example and some other bug fixes (listed above for the most part, but also some really minor stuff aside from those).
The next update, 0.24, is scheduled for march 22nd or 23rd. Planned for this update is a new controls tutorial, which sadly didn’t make it in this time around along with some additional controls fixes and simplifications. I’ll also be focusing heavily on adding the foundations for the features listed in the latest road map so that most of it can be finished around summer this year.
This week, I’ve started reworking the effects and costs of policy. This should make them more viable as an option when players want to expand the levels of education or crime prevention for example. When it comes to the effect on labour availability, the majority of policies have already been fairly well balanced both in effect and cost, so these have largely been left as they were.
Weather effects have been added. In most free roam levels, challenges and the campaign, weather has very little effect on production etc. But in the retro stages, weather settings are set to vary greatly, so in the ruined earth scenario water production will be lower due to dry conditions, but solar farm electricity output is higher due to heat/sun. Over time I intend to develop this system a bit further, adding a very basic climate factor (high pollution, pushes heat in the bubble the city is built in).
Controls continue to be a focus, and in a move to simplify the controls of the game the spin controls have been removed. I’ll also be replacing the current camera movement tutorial with one that incorporates being able to test the different modes currently available and to set which one the player prefers. Additional tweaks will be made and I hope they will to simpler, but still versatile controls.
A new clean power plant will be added in the next update, hydrogen power plant. This one requires the recently added hydrogen resource which can be produced in the Hydrogen plant seen below. This allows for substantial amounts of electricity produced (more than solar and wind) and can preserve a bit of space as opposed to wind and solar, but it is also a bit more costly.
I’m also overseeing the current buildings and some will be seeing minor changes. The absorbent is one of these. I’ve found that it takes up too much space (height-wise) and as such it has now been made smaller. It still produces as much as before, but can now be “stacked”, allowing more of them in a small area and making them more viable in bigger cities as well.
The 0.23 version will be live next sunday (march 8th) and feature the above as well as a few other tweaks and additions. I’ve started working on the 3rd density for the 2×2 residential and commercial zones, but they are still some time away from being finished (possibly for 0.24 scheduled for march 15th).