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Month: October 2020

New hotels!

New hotels!

Hello!

Almost time again to update the game. This time around, the main focus has been on expanding tourism!

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Tourist influx has been tweaked so that the baseline is higher. There will be additional tweaks to this in the upcoming few versions, but I found this is a fairly good level to start on. There should be substantially more tourists entering the city if there are hotels built. Hotel tax revenue is now also higher. Tourism related policies have also been tweaked slightly.

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The 2×2 sized second density has also been added. The lower and upper class 4×4 second density hotel buildings have also been added. If there is time, I will also finish up the middle class 4×4 second density building.

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I’ve continued tweaking import settings to increase visual fidelity while trying to keep texture size down. Thus far, I’ve primarily focused on gloss maps, as these have had a lot of artifacts on them from compression. I think I’ve now found a good balance to keep windows shiny and nice, while not boosting size too much.

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Overall, this (version 0.41) is a fairly compact update that primarily adds new stuff with some additional tweaks and fixes. Moving forward to 0.42, which I estimate will be live on the 9th of november, there will be more stability work done as well as continued work on ideology now that policies have been fixed. I should also get around to finishing up blimp work. The reason for the three week brewing time, is that I will also be moving and setting up a new home office, which will need a few days.

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Billboards, more cars and pathfinding.

Billboards, more cars and pathfinding.

Hello,

Short update this week! Most of the work this past week has been focused on systems work, so que mostly random images!

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First of all, the billboard shader has been expanded so that I can animate images. The animations are different types of sweeps from image to black and different types of fade in and swapping images.

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While wrapping up the recent changes to the calculation thread, I also got around to adding in exact counts for the number of 1×1 through 4×4 zones in the city.

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Vehicle counts have also been increased. More can still be done to fill streets, but since I’ve gotten performance up both in general and in vehicle code, I think this can be increased more fairly soon.
On the subject of vehicles, I’m in the process of reworking aircraft code to implement blimp movement. Currently I’m still working on path finding, since this has been very dodgy for the airfleets that land at the atmoport. This should hopefully be improved in the upcoming version, and can then be used by blimps as well.

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Hotel density 2 is underway as well. Tourism will get a lot of tweaks in this version to get it up and running in a more balanced manner.

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Version 0.4 – live tomorrow

Version 0.4 – live tomorrow

Hello!

A new version of the game is just around the corner! In order to optimize dev time, I’ve decided to always update the game on mondays from now on (every second week, unless major changes are being made, in which case it will be every third week). I’ve done this a few times lately, but from now on that will be the rule. 

:)

In 0.4, which launches tomorrow, policies have gotten a much needed addition of proper descriptions of their functions. Currently in english only, but translations will follow. In writing up descriptions, I’ve also taken the time to check the function of each and every policy. I’ve added/removed/twekaed/fixed effects for 16 of the game’s policies. There are a handful remaining to be checked – this will be done for 0.41.

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Aeroport (formerly aeronautics station) function is now implemented. Labour is now shared across all networks where there is an aeroport. You’ll still have to provide electricity and water in these areas, but labour being able to be shared means districts can now be built completely separately from each other (on islands, so to speak).
Recently a small wind turbine was added to make it easier to build small neighborhoods separate from others. There’s now also a water tower that can be used in a similar way, but for water supply.

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Consumption calculation was extremely slow, so this has now been optimized. Generally, this will not be noticable as this calculation runs on a thread. However, if a city is very large and these calculations would not finish in time for the next time tick, they would be skipped. This would mostly be noticable when running the game on 8x speed.
Overall the entire calculation system has been changed up a lot to accomodate aeroport functionality, but also to improve readibility on my end and to optimize it. Hopefully, these changes don’t produce new bugs!

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The wood burner will be in, as well as a bunch of smaller decorations, like the container lots seen next to the warehouse. Two types of parking lots (industrial and commercial) have also been added:

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There have also been changes made to how health is calculated, making the number of ill people variable (it used to be static depending on population size). Also, happiness will affect the residential growth condition. This condition used to be that a residence would only grow if it reached 90% efficiency (and was in a dense area…). Now this condition is set to 100% – happiness in the city (from 0-20). So if citizens are very happy, a residence will grow even if local area effects are not fully met. If citizens are very unhappy, then it will be more difficult to grow the city.
Obviously, good health levels etc. improve happiness, so it all goes hand in hand, but policies can be used to push happiness further.

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Version 0.4 will be live tomorrow!