Short update! The next version of the game will be live on sunday. In line with the previous one it is a rather small one while the roster of ideology buildings is being expanded.
My push to overhaul the UI is more or less finished. For the upcoming version, the main menu has been spruced up. Only some minor tweaks remain, but will do as more things getting added into the game in future versions.
I’ve prepared a short tutorial for tourism, as well as fixed up the recently added path finding system for blimps. Blimps should now have smoother movement when nearing stations. I now also have a functional hologram type shader that will be used for additional billboards!
Next devlog I’ll share some more details on the different ideologies that can be adopted and what pros and cons they have!
The new version has gone live with a bunch of fixes and UI tweaks. This version and a couple of the upcoming ones will be fairly small as I’m now simultaneously working on unique buildings for the upcoming ideology implementation. For ideologies there will be 20 unique buildings and a bunch of unique decorations, so making the entire roster of ideology buildings will take a while.
Some of the additions coming after version 0.51 tomorrow is the remaining 4×4 hotel buildings, more billboards and a new main menu UI. A few versions down the line, the entire roster of ideology buildings will be added in at the same time along with the supporting systems. I will however display some of the new buildings along the way. First out, the surveillance bureau for authoritarian mayors out there:
Full patchnotes:
– Temperature and day/night display on blimps – Animation manager added. This will control building animations across the city in a more efficient way and also mean building animations are subject to the current game speed. – Fixed bug where cars were not deregistered (the additional amount of cars that was added in recently). – Fixed tram network list null. – Stability fund policy fixed. If enabled, in a boom economy funds are diverted into a fund at an interest. The fund is then expended in a recession helping the city to automatically maintain a stable economy. – Employee funds policy adjusted. Increases income for citizens, but lowers growth. – Loading UI tweaked. – Random advice added when a city loads. – Refined pathfinding for atmofleets, freighters and blimps. – Stadiums now generate a team name and a team that can win and lose! – Crime and fire prevention output now visible when clicking police and fire departments.
Brief update on what’s up and coming in the next version of the game.
Work on the UI is being concluded. I’m looking into updating the main menu a bit and should have that finished during this week. I also need to update some of the resource icons, this work is ongoing but takes a while due to the large amount of icons. I’ve added in some text in the loading screen to show what is being loaded currently. There will also be some random tips added. Most notably though, there’s now an animation showing off what’s going on behind the scenes so to speak.
I’m adding some polish to the pathfinding for blimps and other flying vehicles. The goal is to minimize flying vehicles having to “circle in” on the location they’re going to. I’ve got a few ideas on how to improve the current framework to make this work well enough.
There’s now also a building animation manager that will control animations for buildings. This is mainly to improve performance and to centralize how animations are handled. This will also make animations properly conform to the current game speed. The goods port is one such building that uses this new manager.
Also added in some additional freighter details, like sparks flying when it detaches from the goods port. The idea is to also have the lighting get turned off when the freighter takes off, as it is no longer being charged in the goods port.
Policies are now all tweaked and finished. Moving on I will start working ideology into the game properly, starting with the additional of additional buildings. Also took the time to get a temperature display on the blimps!
Version 0.5 goes live tomorrow – blimps and freighters!
Hello, 0.5 will be live tomorrow. New additions are generally centered around flying vehicles and changes to how they find paths. I’ve also reworked some of the vehicle code to make it less difficult to maintain on my end, this fixes some bugs and issues that have arises since last time I worked on traffic.
Blimps are fairly well functioning after some additional testing. What needs to be added over time is some additional raycasting so that the path finder has an easier time navigating from the topside to downside of areas. Currently it needs to kind of circle in on an area to find it’s way which is very inefficient. This will be fixed fairly soon as it only requires some minor additions to existing code.
The goods port has been added into the game. This building will more or less expand on what the atmoport does today. It will be essential to increase the number of maximum trades that can be managed at the same time, and determine the capacity of how much can be imported/exported per time tick.
Currently, goods containers are only loaded onto the freighter, but come next update freighters will also come into the city loaded with containers that will be unloaded.
The game now features cars, trams, monorails, vacuum trains, atmofleet, freighters and blimps – additional vehicles I’m adding in are helicopters, small hot air balloons and some boats that will appear where there is water. After that I’m calling it on adding vehicles.
I’m still making some minor tweaks to the UI, I still need to make some graphics and update some of the icons, but will add most of this in for the next version.
Brief update – I’ve finally overhauled the way atmoport fleets find their path in and out of the city. The new system makes it possible to cheaply perform path finding in the city as well so that blimps can find their way around.
Blimps check against blocks, water and buildings. Like everthing else in the game, this is made all the more complicated by the fact that everything works in an open volume. The way I decided to go about the whole thing is to have a path seeker that continously tries to get from point A to B. The path is then smoothed to avoid stuff like can be seen in the above picture (zig-zagging). Paths are constantly being checked for changes like new blocks or buildings that have grown and positions are then loaded to vehicles when they’ve landed. Blimps are quite slow moving, so they will occasionally clip through stuff until their paths have been updated. This will be refined later on!
Above is a path that has been changed since a building has grown in the way of the old path.
Another issue I’m working on is that blimps need to gradually shift over and face the proper direction when landing on an upside down station for example. I’ve got this planned out, but it’s not fully functional yet. The idea is to have blimps gradually turn to the next station’s up direction over the course of its travel.
Atmoports are functional with the new system as well. Generally, things look fairly similar, with the main difference being that fleets will better find their way out when atmoports are placed in more closed in locations.
There are still some situations that take too many positions to figure and as such “time out” leaving vehicles inactive, but they are generally quit few.
Further refinements will be added over time, as well as some optimizations to the system.
Initially I had planned on launching 0.5 tomorrow, but I’ve decided to post pone it a week to finish up the remainder of the UI stuff as well as adding in a fully functional and animated goods port. My target date for the update is the 15th of february instead of the 8th.
Didn’t post an update last week, as most of the work recently has gone into minor refinements and fixes for the UI. Although still heavily into UI work, I’ve tried to vary the work a bit by adding some new buildings and tweaking systems a bit.
New bridges! This is a more classical look – a golden gate bridge type. There’s also a new bridge with a more futuristic look being added – but that one is not quite finished yet.
The econopedia is getting some updates, most recently I fixed the input/output panel. This one will be getting some additional features after the upcoming version.
I’ve been tweaking collider sizes for icons – previously the status icons would overlap the building category buttons a bit, which meant you could get incorrect inputs. This is now fixed, as is the fire and welfare safety icon blinking red even though conditions have been met.
Using shift + mouse wheel now switches buildings within the same category. This also meant I needed to move the building name to the small cost bar so that it’s easy to keep track of what building you have selected currently.
The tutorials have also been tidied up a bit since some recent additions. There will be some more work put into these before the next tutorial (on tourism) gets added in.
It’s now time for the first devlog of the new year! I’ve taken some time off from devlogging over the holidays (and some time off from dev too!), but from now things are back to normal.
Version 0.46 will go live tomorrow! This version primarily focuses on a much needed UI-overhaul, but there’s also some new stuff to build – like this one track vactrain station:
Obviously, UI work is rather time consuming so there are still a lot of things left to do. So for starters, I’ve cleaned up and revamped the in game UI as seen above. Status indicators have been moved down, as have the buttons to access stuff like city statistics etc. This opens up the entire upper part of the screen.
Building options can now be favorited and stored under one menu (with the heart icon). This still needs a bit more refinement, but should be fairly functional.
A lot of the windows in game still need to be reworked, but have been ported over to the new UI for the time being. One window that has seen some changes is the city statistics window. Now that there is more screen space, I’ve been able to expand the size of the window to allow things to fit in better. This is something I intend to do for all cramped windows (trade and policy windows will be fixed up first).
A new industrial type decoration has been added – a miniature fan.
Overall, mixing decorations and zone sizes can make for some pretty nice looking industrial areas!
Working on the UI, I’ve noticed and fixed a handful of bugs. The new UI also adapts better to different resolutions.
0.45 – Roundabouts (mini, small and large) added. – New decorations added. – Added control for resetting out of bounds camera when autosaving, saving and loading a city. – Further work on ground textures done. Most of it is now complete. – Decoration with warning stripes added. – Hotels density 3 4×4 added. – Adjusted entertainment and culture calculations. – Theme specific reflection probes added. No more blue sky reflections despite red sky. – Monorail stations and vactrain station that have no connections to other stations no longer produce public transport and density area effects. – Moved monorail-train deregistration to occur directly when monorail tracks have been registered as changed to avoid ghost trains staying around. – Blizzard and heatwave disasters don’t randomly occur in retro mode Ruined earth and snow earth. – Fixed LOD and shadow casters for dirty 3×3 industry. Also fixed import settings on some of the meshes so they are smoothed properly. – Fixed shadow casters being glitched on a handful of 2×2 residential buildings. – Fixed upgrade icon getting stuck in building info. – Fixed cost multiplier not reseting after placing roads. – Fixed missing destruction hologram on 2×2 density three commercial buildings. – Fixed missing hologram for decoration bridges.
Texture work is now pretty much completed for the ground textures. Pretty much all seams between stuff like concrete, grass and pathways are fixed.
Roundabouts have been added. Sizes 3×3, 5×5 and 7×7 are currently available. Additional variants will be added later on. Culture and entertainment area effect calculations have been tweaked to make them a bit easier to max out. This will help hotel growth as well as higher density residential growth.
Monorail and vactrain stations no longer produce area effects if they are not connected to other stations. Makes sense as why would you go to a station if you can’t travel anywhere?
Some new decorations have been added. A type of stair/warf type decoration that has been hinted before. I wanted to add some sort of automation so that pieces figure themselves out when being placed, but there were some combinations that ended up being impossible to automate as they could go several different ways, so I ended up opting for manual placement.
There’s been a lot of work put into underlying UI code in preparation for an overhaul. First thing that will change is allowing specific buildings to be favorited as well as being able to cycle through construction options using mouse wheel. That’ll be in the next version!
Hello, Skipped last week’s update due to a heavy work load. But dev has been ongoing!
New hotels (third density of 4×4 size) are finally finished:
Once the last density of 4×4 is ready, tourism will be getting some further tweaks to make it more financially rewarding and more well balanced. Currently getting the necessary inputs is rather pricy, so that needs to be tweaked a bit.
Work on ground textures is almost completely finished. Only some minor tweaks here and there remain, other than that, most things are seamless and nice looking now.
I’ve also added a few additional road variants – roundabouts!
These are currently available in two variants, but once the UI has been reworked a bit, I will most likely add more and allow players to cycle through different sizes between 3×3-7×7.
Hello, Will be pushing an update to update the footprint/ground shader. Way back, all details on ground textures were done via the diffuse map. This meant that there would be seams between each building’s ground texture. Later on I moved grass over to a kind of alpha mapped world based texture so that there would be no seams between grassy parts of the texture.Now I’ve moved on to the next step and added a 4 world texture per material system allowing stuff like asphalt and cobblestones to be added on a world coordinate basis. This means that additional seams can be removed (between industrial zones for example). There’s still some work remaining in adjusting textures, but overall it’s starting to look quite good. Another added benefit is that it has allowed me to cut all gloss maps, instead adding this information based on the world based textures instead. Effectively cutting out 55+ gloss textures. This system also allows player customization of building tiles a bit, as seen below. This is still some ways off, but will be added in around february next year.
Most of my dev time last week was taken up by these changes (adjusting 55+ diffuse textures and coding the new shader takes time). In doing this work I also started doing some overall graphical optimizations. One such optimization was to drop the realtime reflection probe. I found these reflections, although “correct” would look subpar since they take time to update – leaving a kind of stuttery look on windows when moving the camera.
Atmospheric scattering was also found to be taking up quite a bit of processing time, and as such the quality of this has been lowered a bit. The scattering effect is fairly sparsely used in the game, so it makes sense to drop the quality.
For some reason, the resolution scaling asset in the main menu was set to 4x, making gpu load very high although very little that is scaled is rendered in the main menu. This has now been fixed!
A side effect of the new ground shader, is that making these textures will become much easier, as will changing existing ones. So I can hopefully ramp up building production a bit as well as spruce up some of the old ground textures.
