I’m taking a short break from ideology buildings until I regain some design inspiration. In the meantime I’m going back to working on the last density for 4×4 residential buildings – the super tall 6th density!
First finished one is the lowest tier, the lower class. This one holds just above 1400 citizens at maximum efficiency. The sixth tier won’t grow until the city has reached a population of roughly 315k. In other words, these are later stage buildings.
I’m hoping to have all 6th tier residential buildings in by next update, due out next monday.
I was informed of a money bug on the sixth campaign level. This was an easy fix and an update will be up fixing this later today.
There was also a bug where corner decoration pieces would sometimes not work properly with angled pieces due to a slightly oversized collider. The sanctuary on place and on click sound was also incorrect, but now fixed.
A small update is coming tomorrow already! I had initially planned on doing a 2 week leg of dev, but found some minor annoyances that I want to have fixed. What’s new will be the addition of more corner pieces for decorations. Tiles can now also be flipped, adding more customization alternatives.
I’ve continued work on ideology buildings, taking some time off from the big buildings to make some of the decorations.
I’ve corrected block-like decorations, like the U shaped side block, so that they correct to the U-shaped road piece.
A sanctuary building is making its way into the game as well. This is an early game culture building – helping fix the lack of culture buildings available for small cities.
Also continued working on adjusting challenge level and main campaign level objectives to better fit with newer systems.
0.58 is just around the corner (live tomorrow!). There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff fixed in this one to prepare for a change in how worlds are handled. But there are some other fixes as well.
The decoration tile has been fixed so that the corner piece that was added a while back can also be fitted together with a corner.
A standing vactrain station has been added. This one, like the small 1×4 one, doesn’t boost storage and has only a small public transportation effect on surrounding buildings. But given its small footprint and how it’s quite space efficient in terms of getting vactracks built away from buildings it fills a function regardless.
I’ve also added a flip object function for certain objects like decorations and certain special roads (twists for example). That way some objects can be moved away from the building menu and is now instead accessed by pressing and holding alt while an object is selected. Not all objects can be flipped however,
I’m also rebalancing the challenges in the game as there have been a tonne of changes to the game since these were added in. For example, local area effects of (for example) entertainment and culture wasn’t implemented back when the challenges were added. So the challenge levels have gotten progressively less and less fair and balanced over time. Starting with 0.59, a few challenges will have been rebalanced.
The tourism tutorial now also has a new level, more fitting the theme of tourism.
A somewhat delayed devlog, but a devlog nonetheless!
I’ve continued the work on ideology buildings, which unfortunatly is taking a bit longer than expected. Mostly because they are larger than the average building in the game, but also because of differing designs etc.
The great arena for example will be available when adopting an order ideology.
For solidarity ideologies the revolutionary plaza can be built.
I’ve also started a new optimization pass, fixing poorly performing code and pressing texture size again.
The next version will be up on monday the 17th of may. Focus will mostly be around performance, but I’m hoping to get some minor additions and UI tweaks in as well.
Another update will be live in a bit! This time around, I’ve focued primarily on fixing bugs related to placement of buildings and decorations. Stuff like overpasses not being possible to build over flat blocks for example. Or overpasses and bridges sometimes building with 0 length (basically spawning an overpass/bridge object, but without and segments).
There’s also some new stuff that has been detailed in previous devlogs, like diagonal road pieces.
0.56 -> 0.57 – Added adaptive tax revenue. Higher tax revenue early on to help boost cities in the early stages. – Adjusted health insurance cost (down) and parental benefit cost (up). – Added diagonal road pieces. – Corner piece added for one type of decoration. – Changed vehicle intersection behavior. Cars should now be a bit less illbehaved (not stopping) at intersections.
– Fixed main menu not translating when switching languages in options. – Fixed efficiency penalty calculation when resources are missing. – Fixed bridges with zero length being possible in certain conditions. – Fixed side decoration collider so that it can be placed after roads have been placed. – Fixed side decoration so that it removes road connections if placed over road. – Fixed overpasses not working over half blocks. – Fixed flat blocks merging incorrectly in certain instances. – Fixed not being able to place half blocks on the otherside of other half blocks. – Fixed being able to destroy overpass block, without destroying the overpass parent object. – Fixed main menu panel not moving out properly in higher resolutions. – Fixed overpasses not interacting properly with water blocks. – Fixed cars being stalled when a building is placed. – Fixed wrong building sounds playing (for tennis court for example). – Fixed missing mesh for a 1×1 commercial building. – Fixed commercial footprint low detail LOD texture (density 5, wealth 5).
I’ve added in an outer corner version of one of the side decorations. For the remaining side decorations, the outer corner will be available soon (it requires some further adjustments to work properly).
Since increasing traffic density, it has become more obvious that some vehicles go rogue and decide that basic traffic rules don’t apply to them. Essentially they just skip through intersections with no regard for other vehicles. I’ve started adjusting some timing values that should make this much less common and should improve the visual look of traffic.
As mentioned above, overpasses we’re a bit buggy and have therefore been receiving some fixes. In conjunction with flat blocks, overpasses would not calculate length properly. In testing, I also discovered that flat blocks would sometimes merge incorrectly, leaving blocks that we’re in between the regular grid size. There were also issues with placing and destroying overpasses and flat blocks using the click and drag destruct function.
It’s a feature, not a bug! I’ve also discovered that buildings will connect to roads that are built directly under an overpass. This means that houses can be built on top of tunnel like areas and function properly. I found that even if this was not originally intended, it does make sense and it will be left in.
Alongside the ongoing ideology work, cars will receive further improvements moving forward. Also, another tutorial is being added in for the next update as well as the aforementioned outer corner for the remaining side decorations.
Diagonal roads, even more vehicles and early game tax adjustments
I got caught up with work yesterday, so last week’s devlog ended up being posted today instead!
Current work is focused on some new additions, namely diagonal roads!
They are placed the same way roundabouts and either special road pieces are placed, so they are quite as flexible as the regular straight roads, but still offer a lot of possibilities for customization. More work on diagonal pieces will be done later on, and I’m also planning for some special zones that can be placed in the triangular spaces left on the sides of the digonal roads.
Since vehicle performance is fairly solid now, I’ve upped the amount of active cars in view as well. A thing that remains to be done is to fix cars spawning very closely to eachother, but that is more of a visual issue rather than functional, so it has less priority.
I’ve also added a way to place outer corner pieces for decorations:
I’m making further adjustments to tax revenue from zoned buildings. From the next version they will start generating slightly less tax revenue to promote the use of other means to make money. In order to avoid this making the early game too difficult, there’s a bit of a revenue bonus that lasts quite some time into the game.
Next version should be live next monday!
Small aeroports, more traffic and a bunch of fixes – 0.56 goes live.
0.56 is now live, here’s what’s new since the last update.
0.55 -> 0.56 – Expropriation policy now fully functional. Costs of destructing zones are higher when enabled, but conglomerates retain their happiness levels. – Goodsport now has full animation. – Goodsport function now fully implemented. If there’s enough capacity, more can imported in shorter time. Import rate 25-250 units per time tick. – Added small aeroport station (less of a growth boost in surrounding zones, but can be placed on small islands). – Added basic city planning tutorial – Added building sound when it is placed. – Added low poly shadow casters and LOD for convention center, – Added low poly shadow casters for hotel third density 4×4 buildings. – Increased car count per building. – Added unique color for supply buildings in view modes when viewing demand for education, health and crime safety (for example). – Improved performance of viewmodes. – Updated german localization – addition of missing text elements coming later on.
– Fixed blimps landing in the same location. – Fixed roads sometimes connecting through decorations placed on edges. – Fixed cogwheel not spinning in building info window. – Fixed cars despawning incorrectly. – Fixed cars stalling when spawned. – Issue with sliders not displaying in the building information window should now be fixed.
The small aeroports are in this version, making small, unconnected islands more viable.
The recently fixed goods port animations have been tidied up and code has been cleaned up.
I’ve also continued working on traffic code after having separated vehicles into two classes – regular vehicle and complex vehicle. Cars (regular vehicles) have been a bit buggy since, often stalling or despawning. Most of these issues have now been fixed. Cars no longer stall for example, but may remain inactive but visible for a while before receiving their paths – this will be polished up for the next version.
The amount of cars active has also been increased now that it’s more predictable how many are active in the scene when they don’t despawn incorrectly.
A new tutorial has also been added in – a basic road and city planning tutorial giving some tips on how to make things grow and ways to place roads effectively.
The tutorial also briefly mentions how building reach works – both in terms of buildings reaching roads, and the reach of a building’s effects.
Starting next version, goodsport will have full functionaly. Basically, atmoports used to determine how much goods and people could move into a city at a given moment. This has now been separated into atmoports handling primarily people traffic (and a bit of goods) and goods port handling goods traffic. This means that starting next version, goods ports determine how much is traded per time tick. If you have many active trades at the same, but not enough ports, then less of each item can be imported per time tick.
I’ve been gradually moving more buildings into the new animation management system to make them more performant and to make them work with the time scale in the game. In doing so I’ve also finally finished up the animation for the goods port. Containers are now loaded onto and loaded from the freighter. More building animations are coming to make cities come alive a bit more!
Next version, a new blimp station will be added in. This smaller version doesn’t boost surrounding growth as much as the bigger one, and relative to its price, it also doesn’t provide as much public transport. It does, however, make blimp stations more viable on small islands. Blimps now also don’t land on eachother at the stations!
Work on ideology buildings continues – this is an almost finished institute of health which is a special building when adopting communism or authoritarianism:
When built, this building boosts health output of clinics and hospitals across the city.
0.53 -> 0.54 – Decorative pathway added – Added a decorative panel. – Added frame around category buttons in trade panel to indicate they can be clicked. – Bridge max build length increased. – Atmoports, goods ports and aeronautics stations can now be rotated. – Non-symmetric buildings can now be rotated (180 degrees). – Area information added into building info window.
– Lowered baselikelihood of heatwaves. – Heatwaves now more common if pollution is high. – Vehicle code separated into vehicles (cars etc.) and complex vehicles (atmofleets etc.) for memory usage reasons. – Crime policy costs lowered. – Residential revenue lowered, commercial, industrial and hotel(ial?!) revenue increased to compensate. – Cost of unemployment increased. – Hydrogen power plants now included in green energy category in the budget. – Convention centers now boost hotels. – Third density hotels now have night time lights on. – Ads added to new vactrainstation. – Parks nerfed. – Carbon storage facility output increased. – Citizen reps. now disregard there being no welfare, if there’s instead a UBI. – Property sales tax added. When property is sold, the revenue for the city is shown in the notice. High property sales tax will generate fewer building trades. – Storage capacity and public transport added as visible outputs. – Total storage space now visible in trade window
– Absorbent footprint updated. – First density lower skill commercial footprint fixed (seam).
– Stalled cars should now correctly remove themselves when out of view. – Fixed block type decorations interfering with roads – Fixed incorrect distance in density calculation. – Fixed lack of education, health and wealth (among others) lowering output on power plants. Buildings are generally affected by crime, fire safety and public transport, not the other aspects. – Fixed bug where adaptive decorations would not load properly. – Fixed citizen rep. happiness generally being higher than the average happiness for the city.
This update adds some new decorations – a sort of pedestrian pathway and two types of metallic panels that can be used to decorate the side of blocks.
Buildings that could previously not be rotated (atmoports and non-symmetrical buildings for example) can now be rotated. Non symmetrical buildings can be rotated around 180 degrees, as that requires no additional free space. I’ve also extended the maximum range of bridges.
There were some missing emission maps, primarily for third density hotels, that have no been added in. On top of that a bunch of textures have been spruced up and edges/seams have been fixed.
A property sales tax has been added. This tax allows the city to make some money when conglomerates purchase buildings from one another. Adding this, I’ve also changed the likelihood of them purchasing buildings from eachother.
Storage space is now indicated with an icon, so the amount of storage “output” from for example warehouses is apparent. The city’s total storage space is also displayed in the trade window.
Area status has also been added into the building info window. So it’s now easier to see area statuses that lower the efficiency of a building.
There are also a bunch of fixes, like removing cars that have been stalled and citizen rep happiness being higher than the average happiness of the city.
The game was updated earlier today. The update finishes off the remainder of minor UI work for the main menu and fixes some minor bugs.
Work on implementing ideologies is progressing fairly well. The most recent building addition is the Stock exchange:
The Stock exchange is available when adopting liberalism and laissez-faire liberalism. The building produces additional revenue for the city.
Ideology buildings will output production as long as the ideology is still active. If ideology is changed after the building has been placed, then they will become dormant and only output culture. A sort of “remember back in the days of [ideology]” historical bonus for the city.
When adopting an ideology, the city will enter into a revolution during which revenue drops, costs increase, crime increases etc. Once the revolution is over, the ideology slowly comes into effect after which upkeep costs, crime, culture, education, happiness, health, labour, revenue, safety and wages will be affected.
Depending on the characteristics of the ideology, these parameters will either be increased or decreased. For example, in communism, everyone has a job, but upkeep costs increase as a result of increased corruption. In Laissez Faire liberalism upkeep costs are lower as a result of effictivization and revenue is increased, but wages drop, happiness drops, crime increases and culture also takes a hit. Each ideology has its pros and cons that will need to be offset by expanding on for example education or health, or by increasing revenue to counteract increased costs.
Once the ideology system has been added in, I will start adding a handful of unique residential and commercial buildings that will randomly grow in the city while it is run under a specific ideology. Given the amount of buildings needed, this will be done gradually.
