Correcture Games

Hello,

Work on version 0.37 has really picked up this week and it’s now almost ready. It should be live tomorrow as planned!

It’s fairly balanced between new features, optimization and bug fixes. One of the more apparent fixes it that cereal and legume can now be produced by two different types of buildings. The previously available greenhouses are still available but are now more expensive, while also producing more. They are primarily intended for bigger cities. Early on, there are now more traditional looking farms that are cheap, but produce less.

I’ve also now added in an overpass that can be built on. These function similarly to bridges, requiring a connection on two sides. Once built, they function just like normal concrete blocks.

In this version, fires are enabled. If a building has very little coverage from fire departments, or crime is exceptionally high, it will run the risk of catching fire. Buildings on fire will be put out over time, but fire might also spread to neighboring buildings. Buildings that are owned by the city need to be repaired manually. Zones on the other hand will be repaired over time. Buildings can also burn down completely, if they are owned by a conglomerate, this will cause unhappiness. More disasters will be added in version 0.38 and onward, starting with minor stuff like heatwaves, blizzards, crime waves and ending with meteor strikes and nuclear meltdowns.

There’s now also a new mode – Atlantis – where the aforementioned disasters are disabled. In this mode, the economy is always booming and most of all – you have the perfect amount of cash at hand at all times!

Two modes of bulldozing are now available. The original one where blocks, buildings or roads are selected for destruction and a mode where blocks are destroyed, but whatever is built on these blocks is automatically destroyed as well. This will speed up restructing areas.

Most of the work on optimizing graphics is done for now. Pretty much every building now has a low poly LOD version and a very low poly shadow caster. This has allowed for a better draw distance that can be set from the options menu.
Trees now look a bit nicer too, after some shader adjustments and tram tracks are now textured instead of using a mesh, which is more effective but also reduces aliasing. Resolution scaling options were off causing some performance trouble, this has now been fixed and it should now also work better with TAA to prevent aliasing.

I’ve also fixed a bunch of bugs, among them roads connecting through bridges when placed on the side of a block that also has a bridge and block placement being offset when resolution scaling is not set to 100%.

Overall, this is a fairly large update with a bunch of new features and fixes. As mentioned, it will be live tomorrow!
As for version 0.38 – this is planned for september 21st. This is fairly far off, but it will also be a fairly large update with plenty new features that require time to brew. After that, I will go back to the two week update schedule I’ve had before.

Hello,

Skipped the devlog last week as I’ve mostly been focusing on boring optimization recently. But now I’m finally getting back into adding new features and improvements.

First of all, billboards are being added in finally. Currently, I’ve only added a handful of static billboards, but will be adding more of these as well as animated billboards.

I’ve changed tram tracks from meshes to a texture overlay which removes a bunch of unnecessary tris, but also makes them look better at a distance (less aliasing). I’ve also managed to get monorail emission to draw at further distances.

A result of the graphical optimizations is that I’ve now been able to increase draw distance. To keep the game running well on lower spec rigs, I’ve added draw distance into the options.

I’ve started implementing upgradable buildings – nuclear power plants, police and fire stations for starters.

I’ve also added a bulldozer mode that destroys blocks as well as buildings placed on the destroyed block. This makes destroying stuff faster. There’s more stuff underway, hoping to also get fires added in properly for the next update – which will go live August 31st.

Hello,

The next version of the game is almost done and should be live on tuesday. This one is primarily focused on performance and preparing for further optimizations on the graphical side of things (code is fairly optimized already).

The only new feature in the upcoming version is the addition of seasons. This called for recoding the ground texture used in the game, which also meant that seams between buildings could now be replaced. Grass is now mapped in by world coordinates, so building rotation won’t affect grass like before.

Seasons currently don’t affect trees, that shader work is still ongoing. But here’s autumn:

I’ve also continued work on LOD:s, but think I’ve gotten to a point where I might need to also rethink shadow casters and baking more things into grouped objects to improve performance further. Verts/tris are also a bit of an issue in some larger scenes.

(New ground shader also makes it possible to set specific colors in the scenarios, like dry grass or snow)

I’ve also decided to cut normal maps from building footprints as a lot of them are mostly grass or concrete and the unique normal map does not add much. Instead I use a generic noisy normal map to add a bit of roughness.

I noticed unity also now removed the startup window without a replacement, so I ended up having to incorporate some of the graphical settings into the options menu, primarily texture and shadow quality, as these were set in the window before.

Hello,

It’s been a year since the game went into early access! It’s been a long and challening but fun journey thus far. Although many things remain, there have been many additions to the game since. Water blocks, odd roads, monorails, trams, more than 200 new buildings and a lot more.

The game is now at version 0.35 which features:

– Modern museum building added.
– S ramp added for roads.
– Population condition to grow new densities of zones increased.
– Day/night can now be set using a slider.
– New fountain decoration added.
– Added alternate monorail t-piece to allow for a different rotation. This is more of a temporary fix, due to some restrictions on rotations for vactracks and monorails. A proper solution will be added later on.
– Snow and dust added to retro mode levels snow earth and ruined earth.
– Fireworks added to stadium (trigger randomly) and city hall (trigger every fourth night).
– Building manager script is removed when demolishing buildings so that buildings, when growing or being demolished, are not accidentally saved (causes double spawns on the same location when loading).
– Flat blocks are now merged into a regular 1/8 block when stacked. Existing stacked blocks are not affected by this.
– Happiness formula tweaked.

– Happiness calculation bug fixed. This meant health and education provided way too much happiness.
– Fixed a few special cases where roads would appear as if they connect to a ramp via the side.
– Fixed roads incorrectly connecting from a regular block to a road on a flat block.
– Fixed roads not spawning streetlights (this was due to restricting roads sometimes respawning when new buildings were placed).
– Fixed not being able to build zones near straight monorails, even though placing the monorail after placing the zone would work. (inconsistent collision detection)
– Fixed destruction hologram for lots.
– Fixed materials for some 1×1 and 2×2 residences where normal map was not correctly offset.
– Fixed shadows on water shader for waterprops on buildings.

There’s now a modern museum that will help boost culture in cities:

Culture has been a bit difficult to increase without plopping operas all over the place – the modern museum should hopefully help increase variation. Culture will be easier to manage once ideological buildings are added (many of which will increase culture).

I’ve also added some minor details like snow and dust trails in the retro mode levels and some fireworks that trigger in the outdoor stadium and city hall.

There was a bug related to the new flat blocks and roads, where roads would sometimes thing there was a neighboring tile although that tile was on a different height on a flat block. This has now been fixed. Likewise, sometimes roads would try to connect to the onramp or the twisted road. This too has been fixed.

I’ve also added a new type of ramp, an s-ramp to make smooth transitions between different heights.

Overall, this is a rather small update coming directly after 0.34 last weekend. I’m hoping to keep up this pace with smaller, but more frequent updates, for a while to finish up some of the smaller items on the roadmap such as buildings and details. I will try to work on systems stuff in the background, such as disasters and the ideology system.