Decided to really push forward with 3×3 industry and now all three tiers are finished. Will have these live through an update tomorrow.
Lower tier industry was added in last update, but only the first density. Now all three densities are finished (bar some polish).
The middle tier is also finished, as is the upper tier:
There’s still some additional prop work to be done, but overall they are pretty complete and fully functional.
With the 3×3 industry added, all industrial zones are now complete. I might return to add 4×4 variations in the future, but that will be post full release in that case.
I’ve continued optimizing textures, since there are still quite a few buildings to add and preserving memory is key before adding more stuff in. I’m fairly content with the balance between texture size and quality now. Overall normal maps and gloss textures have more compression and less resolution, while the main texture now has less compression. I find this is a good balance.
Next update around I will have finished the remaining hotel buildings as well as polished up the UI. Hopefully also finishing up on blimps (long overdue)!
Next version is just around the corner! There are some things that I had planned to finish, but that didn’t make it in as a result of shifting priorities – adapting UI to wide screen for example.
One new addition is a type of velodrome type road piece to transition to sideways roads. There’s a similar twisted road piece already (seen below), but I think this one adds additional city customization.
Aside from a couple of roundabouts I’ve been prototyping, I’m pretty much done with all the custom road pieces now. Next up will be adapting some of them to allow trams.
As 1×1 and 2×2 buildings are now all finished, I’ve started working on the 3×3 sized sets, getting industrial buildings out of the way first. As of now, I’ve only finished the first set of first density dirty industry:
There will be three densities of 3×3 industry, with an alternate for each. That means another 16 buildings to go!
This version tweaks most of culture and entertainment output and also adds some minor tweaks to entertainment output as well. Certain decorations will also absorb pollution similarly to parks (makes sense, since some decorations are essentially parks). Decorations have also been added into the budget, so they will start costing money.
I’m gearing up to get the remaining 4×4 hotels done, 6 buildings in total. Hoping these can be done for the next update. I’m also toying around with some ideas for larger (6×6) power plants, starting with a larger solar power plant.
Missed last week’s devlog, since I was moving to a new place. Dev has been a bit sidelined due to this, but is now back on track. Version 0.42 will see the last density of 2×2 hotels, as well as the third 4×4 hotel set. Some of the new hotel buildings pictured below.
Since tourism is now getting fairly well tweaked, a tourism tutorial will also be added – as usual, english version will come first and additional languages will be added later on.
I plan on also getting a first set of 3×3 industry implemented to add more variation to industrial areas. Since remaking the growth system for zones, it’s much easier to add “unfinished” sets, so I can add them in as I go.
UI is starting to need a proper clean up, so that is something that will be started up too. There are also some clarifications that need to be added to certain parts of the UI (like showing off when a building can and can’t grow for example).
I’ve still not finished work on blimps, so that will be seeing more work and hopefully there will be a somewhat functional blimp movement system going in the game.
Almost time again to update the game. This time around, the main focus has been on expanding tourism!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Short update this week! Most of the work this past week has been focused on systems work, so que mostly random images!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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:
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.
Version 0.4 will be live tomorrow!
Wood burner, policy changes, calculation changes and water shader fix
After rebalancing building material requirements for buildings, and after reviewing overall demands for resources, I felt that the wood resource is fairly underused compared to how easy it is to obtain. So I added a wood burner power plant! It’s less pollutant than the carbon power plant, and carbon neutral if the wood is grown in the city. It’s a bit more expensive in both plop cost and upkeep cost, but is a fairly good early game power plant.
I’ve started working towards implementing the ideology system, and a first step towards this is to clarify the function of all policies. Descriptions have been written for all of them – initially only the english version will be added, but over time I will get translations added in for the currently supported languages.
While working on the policy descriptions, I’ve also another round of tweaks and ensured that they function as planned. Quite a few have been made either cheaper, or more effective, and some were missing certain effects that have now been added in.
In preparation for a fully functional aeronautics station, I’ve started restructuring the calculation thread. This is to allow networks to be partially calculated (as opposed to sequentially as is the case currently) so that labour can be shared between them. This also involves splitting what used to be pretty much one solid chunk of code into more managable pieces and cleaning up redundant, repeated and unused code.
On the visual side of things, the blimps now spawn properly and aeronautics stations are registered and given a port number so that they can be connected in a system. Getting blimps to find and go to different stations is quite a bit of work, but should be fairly straight forward. I’ve also gotten some visual annoyances out of the way, among them how there was a seam between water block sections. This issue popped up out of nowhere quite a few versions ago, but I’ve not been able to find a solution until now. But now it’s back to normal again.
A new version is going live in a bit! It doesn’t feature quite all of what I wanted to have done, but there’s been a lot of stuff done to prepare for these additions, so they should be in fairly soon.
What IS in then?
EA 0.39 – Mayors house added – can be upgraded! – Added another 2×2 park and plaza. – Palm tree avenue added. – University building changed to community college building. New University building added. – Aeronautics station added. Currently they only add the public transport area effect. Connection to other regions of the city and blimp functionality will come in the next version. – Heatwave, blizzard, crimewave and epidemic disasters added. Additional heatwave and blizzard effects to be added later on. – Heat now affects risk of fire. – Added a season toggle into the options menu. – Vacuumtubes now have color settings!
– Public transport area effects of tram (lowered) and monorail (increased) stations tweaked. – Building resource plop costs increased (generally with the exception of nano structs). – Increased building credit plop cost for a small selection of buildings. – Added LOD:s and low quality shadow casters for hotel buildings. More hotel props also added. – Added LOD:s and low quality shadow casters for less frequently occuring buildings like the coalpress and batteries. – Texture streaming tweaked.
– Vactrackstation was missing public transport area effect. Fixed now! – Fixed flower farm, dye and textile factories not enabling in build menu. – Fixed bug that was stalling research. – Fixed citizen rep goto home/workplace not working (remnant issue of recent SSAA update). – Fixed avenues not reverting to regular road when tram was built. – Fixed fires burning out when saving (then loading) city during a fire. – Fixed disappearing second density 2×2 first tier industry buildings. – Fixed bug where setting monorail/tram color would set the wrong material.
Small additions like a palm tree avenue and palm tree prop that is added around hotel buildings have been added, along with the football goal prop to the stadium building.
The aeronautics station is in! Currently it only adds the public transport effect to its surroundings. Getting it to connect to other regions of the city with an aeronautics station so that labour can be shared all over will require work on the core of how things are calculated in game, so I have held off on doing this to not rush it and risk breaking stuff.
Not seen in the image, but added afterwards is a new shader that will allow players to set custom colors to vehicles such as the blimp, vactrain or trams. This aside from being able to set a custom color on tram, monorail and vactrack networks.
The old university building has been “downgraded” to a community college and a new university has been added. Currently, the community college provides as much education as it did previously, but with the addition of a new university as well as new education boosting buildings once ideologies are added there will be a small adjustment made to these values in upcoming versions.
A bunch of bugs have been fixed too. Most notably a bug that caused research to stall.
Recently I’ve been getting to work on the aeronautics station that will spawn blimps and can be used to connect “islands” of the city with resources and labour. The aeronautics station will (understandably) not connect electricity and water, but allow labour to travel across the city and resources to be moved around the city easily.
I’ve added additional disasters that can be triggered manually or occur randomly: Heatwave, blizzard, crime wave and epidemics. There’s some more work needed to visually convey heatwave or blizzard, but currently it uses the vegetation shader to display dry grass or snow.
The next version will feature another 2×2 park and plaza building as well:
There’s a bunch of bug fixes going into the next version as well; among them a fix for research stalling, a fix for 2×2 second density first tier industry being incorrectly mapped when loading cities (and as a result, the building is not loaded) as well as a fix to the goto home/work feature in the citizen representative panel.
In version 0.39 the current university building will be “downgraded” to a community college and a new university building will be added in. More billboards are being worked in, as well as hotel LOD:s and (hopefully) another density for hotels.
Was initially going to have a longer dev stretch for the next version, but found a bug I wanted to fix so I’ve uploaded version 0.38 early! It’s a fairly small update overall though.
– 2×2 second density industry added. – Rebalanced 2×2 first density industry. – Proper cereal and legume farm icons added. – More street noises added. – Icon for upgradable buildings added to cost info. – Building collapse sound added when buildings burn down. – Sport props added to tennis court and baseball field. – Proper fix for block placement offset bug.
– Flowers added to flower farm. – Fixed issue where nested vacstations would not connect networks properly when nested. – Fixed being able to build more than one city hall etc. – Fixed fire sound not despawning. – Fixed notices going haywire when changing resolution when a city is loaded. – Fixed vegetation shader not lighting back of (cereal, legume, flower) particles properly. – Fixed being able to click and drag to place several city halls (for example) and other
The bug I wanted to fix was where nested vactrainstations sometimes wouldn’t figure out what was connected and what wasn’t. This should now be functional. The scenario below would not work properly:
Not in the update, but something I’ve worked on this week is the mayors house – an upgradable building that adds a bit of culture, but mainly boosts surrounding property value.
I’ve managed to fix the issue with the vegetation shader where the “backside” of the billboard wouldn’t be properly lit. Now it’s consistently lit regardless which way the billboards are facing.
Using the same technique as above, I’ve also added in flowers to the flower farm:
I’ve also added in more street noises, fixed the block placement issue (properly this time) and fixed notices losing their anchor position when resolution is changed in game, among other things.
