Games [Early Access] Atmocity

There will be a more comprehensive update later in the week, since I missed the last weekly update (was out of town).
There's some exciting news about the game coming up, so stay tuned.

In the mean time - libraries!

 

Hello!
This week I've mostly worked on expanding the resource trees.

There's now an additional food type - funghi. Like cereal, legume and fruit, it will be an input of the processed food building. But funghi will also be used to produce medicines in the medicine plant (to the left):

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Another resource that has been added is Diamonds. These are produced in the carbon pressurizer. Diamonds can then be used as an input to make jewelry (in the middle building):

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Diamonds will also be used for the advanced circuitry resource, which will be required for high tech industry and the laboratory.

The electronics plant (seen to the left in the previous image), jeweler and medicine plant are all high tech production facilities which means they pollute much less, or not at all, and require highly educated labour to produce at maximum efficiency.

They also have a much cleaner look, as seen here:

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Since there are now quite a few buildings that require highly educated labour, I've started working on the upper middle class residential buildings. Like lower middle class that houses both low skilled labout and mid skilled, the upper middle class tier houses mid skilled and highly skilled Labour. The first density is more or less done:

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Overall, it's been a productive week. Next weekend the game will be getting another update going out to testers. What I'm hoping to have implemented by then is the options menu, some more sounds, the full upper middle class tier and an early iteration of traffic (visually only).

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Can you please put images in spoilers?
Can not read this thread, as loading images continuously moving the text content.
Takes too long to load for me.

 

I will edit old posts and do this, newer posts will still have images displayed.

The game will be updated on Steam fairly soon, this makes the third alpha version. After the next update, the game will move onto beta-testing for which I will involve more testers. The hope is to have most of the buildings and underlying systems ready for the beta, although some of the ui etc. will be underdeveloped.

This week I've finished the upper middle class tier of residences. This means that cities will now spawn the highly skilled labour required for the third tier industry (medicine and jewelry among others) and buildings like clinics and hospitals.

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Prior to changing the buildingblock size, buildings grew out of the blocks. To prevent buildings from popping in, they were contrained to the same size as each block. Since there's now a completely new sequence for when buildings are constructed (still WIP but detailed in earlier post), this limitation no longer serves a function. As such, the top densities for the upper middle class residential and commercial zones will be taller. This can be seen here:

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This should make for more interesting city silhouettes once players start building for highly skilled labour.

The upper middle class and upper class tiers have high demands, Requiring buildings such as the library to be built nearby as well as consumption goods such as jewelry and processed food.

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Since I recently added medicines as a resource, clinics and hospitals have been updated to require medicines as an input to function properly.

I've updated the UI to work with a new class - Window. Some ui-functions will be window based, like the options menu and global economy view. This class is used to manage windows better and make sure that if one is open, it's closed before a new one is opened to avoid cluttering up the screen.
Options have been implemented in a fairly limited, but functional form. It allows toggling some of the more demanding visual features.

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Moving into next week I will get back to work on traffic, which sadly didn't make it into this update due to time constraints. The upcoming week will be heavy on systems work, like road connectivity and resource distribution systems. I should be able to finish a few of the remaining 30 buildings left for the EA-release of the game.

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Sure, thats better, thx.
This looks really good. Nice work.

Great concept of multi dimensional world. Well multi sided
Makes me think about Inception film. Any reference, or inspiration to that by any chance?

 

Probably unconciously, given how iconic that scene is.

 

Oh btw, can we make simcity like game of this asset?

 

It's not an asset, it's going to be a complete game and will feature a retro mode that has more conventional city building on the ground (not fully planned out yet).

 

Ah I see.
Now I reread first post. Sounds interesting, if mechanics will be equally cool as art side.

 

Hello!

This week I've mainly worked on systems and bug fixes.
Most of the squashed bugs have been buidlings not setup correctly (box colliders, layers etc), so nothing huge has been found.

On the systems side of things, I've started implemented policies. First off simpler stuff like tax rates. Currently I've got tax rates for low, mid and high skilled labour implemented as well as commercial and industrial tax rates.

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Along with the tax policies I've also added a new city stat - happiness. This depends on overall health, education and wealth levels as well as on current levels of pollution and tax rates. In the future I will add unemployment and safety into the mix as well. The level of happiness determines how fast your city grows, when happiness is too low, citizens will start to move out of the city.

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A system for traffic is also in the works. Currently this is rather simplistic - cars are spawned and then drive around with no goal or purpose. The concept I'm working on should end up working though, but will require a few more weeks before it is fully functional and looks good.

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Only one new building has been made this week - The centrifugal particle extractor. This building serves the same function as the atmospheric particle filtration plant, namely to filter out carbon, metal dust, sand etc. from the atmosphere for use in other production facilities. The centrifuge is more expensive and requires more electricity and water to function properly, but on the other hand pollutes much less. The idea is that this building will become viable only after having built a sizeable city.

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I've tweaked the screen space reflections a bit and found a good balance between visuals and performance. It looks good especially during nights I find

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How is your performance at this stage?
What is current bottle neck?
With addition of mechanics / AI / Systems, while complexity grows, CPU demand probably will grow too.

To overcome above, Is ECS something you are considering?

 

Performance is relatively good. I need to implement another set of LOD to lower poly counts in the scenes. Currently I'm hitting around 500k tris in any given city view, I would like to get this down to 400k. I've managed to cut down on shadow casters and other graphically costly operations by merging objects at runtime.
Graphically I'd say the post processing is the most costly, especially SSR and AO.

On the CPU side of things everything that relates directly to buildings is event driven, so its all fairly lightweight. If for example a building doesn't have access to, say, a park, if the park is built within range the value for the building is updated. Production for each building runs on a separate thread to keep performance up.
I've considered ECS, especially for stuff like cars, since they need to run constantly and I would like to keep their performance cost down. Especially considering they fill only a small function.

All the economy stuff and their calculations also run on the separate thread to avoid hiccups when values are recalculated every 30s (30s for global economy and 6s for production).
Overall, the game will need to go through another optimization round fairly soon. But I want to finish implementing traffic in its current state and the local economy system before moving on to optimizing the game further, since it does run well on my rig atm. I estimate next round of optimizations will be in december. Hopefully by then almost all buildings will be finished and most of the major systems will be up and running.

 

It looks like you have everything well thought.
Just judging by screenshots itself

Good to hear that you spread work across threads.

ECS can be really bonus for cars.
Even now, technically they don't need collides, only simulation and position of cars.

Cool keep up good work.

 

Hello,

This week I've been revisiting making buildings for the game.

I've focused on commercial buildings this week having finished 5 new buildings.

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That means I've finished another full set of commercial buildings.

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When finishing up this set and placing all commercial building sets next to eachother I decided to switch them around a bit. The above one was initially intended as the upper middle class set, but after reconsideration I've decided to make it the lower middle class set.

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The set that was formerly the lower middle class will become the new middle class, and the former middle class will become the new upper middle class. I've also decided that post release, once there is time, I will expand each residential and commercial set with one more (a sixth) density. I'm also considering three classes (low, mid, upper) of single or possibly dual density commercial and residential buildings with smaller "foot print". This would allow players to zone left over space. These sets should be available for the initial early access release of the game.

I've not only worked on buildings, but also continued work on the traffic system. Unfortunatly, this is proving slightly more difficult than expected. Hopefully by the next devlog I will have more info and maybe a gif to showcase the progress.

Next week I will also continue work on the middle tier of industrial buildings, and hopefully I can finished it too, as these tend to be fairly simple to make.
That's it for this time!

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Hello,

First off, Correcture Games will attend the Indie Playground at Dreamhack Winter in Sweden at the end of the month. Atmocity will be showcased and you can have a go at some gravity defying city building!

I've spent most of the week working on systems in the game. The traffic system is now functional, but needs quite a bit of work so that it looks good, spawns and despawns vehicles and just overall adds to the atmosphere of the game.
There's quite a long ways to go, but at least cars don't freak out when going around corners (that was a headache to fix).



I've started reworking some of the building placement stuff. Before, all buildings would be assigned a random rotation when built. Now I've changed it so that building rotation is controlled by the player using the scroll wheel. Buildings can still be rotated when they've been placed too. Here are some farms freely placed.


Next up, I'll be changing block and road placement to allow players to assign areas with blocks and roads instead of having to place one after the other. This should allow for quicker construction of the foundation on which you build the city. Being able to click and drag where to place roads is also standard in most games of this type so it's a given to add.

I've added a building register that assigns a unique ID to each building in the city. This will be used along with the traffic system to assign a vehicle to each building. Goods are produced and consumed globally, but each building will need access to other key buildings and this will be "tested" using the vehicles. The building register also allows for quicker processing when using the different view modes (like building efficiency view or building owner view) among other things.


Policy is on ongoing project. I've changed how tax rates affect citizen happiness from a somewhat consistent curve to one that allows you to set fairly high tax rates before truly affecting happiness. This should allow for some more player freedom, but also allows players to set fairly high tax rates if they have other things that offset the unhappiness from higher taxes.


The tax rates are still divided into three, targeting low/mid/high skilled labour respectively. The effect of taxes on happiness will also depend on how large the proportion of the targeted class is compared to the overall population. If you have a small low skilled labour population you will be able to tax them higher without losing out too much on the overall happiness.

I've also finally managed to get the graphs looking more up to my own expectations.

Lastly, I've implemented toggles for day/night, always day and always night into the UI. When moving the mouse to the top center of the screen, a small options panels slides down. From there (and the keyboard of course) players will be able to set the game speed (paused, normal, 2, 4 and 8x).

Next week I'll continue work on cars, doing some modelling/texturing and trying to finetune movements and then adding some basic path finding and traffic rules. I'll be working on drag and drop for blocks and roads and also some initial work on decoration tiles that can be used to improve your city visually. More policy is also on the schedule!

 

Super cool

 

Hello!

Lots of stuff going on and lots to finish up before Dreamhack Winter next weekend.

Most of my recent work has been put into improving functionality and to a degree also visuals.
One of my main improvements has been to implement a sort of drag and drop typ system for roads and blocks so that players won't have to place one after the other and can instead select areas to build on. In a "normal" city builder where building occurs on a 2D plane, this kind of functionality wouldn't be much of a hassle to implement, but given Atmocity allows players to build in 6 directions things become a bit more complex.

For roads I've opted for a start and end position with a midpoint in between. For flexibility, using the scroll wheel players can swap the midpoint to change where the road goes.

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The way this works is that when starting a build process, the world direction is checked and locked in. Players will then be able to plop down their road on that specific plane. When they need to switch planes they need to initiate another process (mouse click). I have found when testing, that this works fairly well since most of the time you need to navigate the camera to a new location when building on different planes anyway.

For blocks, the plane is checked and then using the scroll wheel players can switch build direction between xy, xz and yz.

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This system will allow players to fairly quickly build areas ready for development. It also removes some of the camera micro management that was required before, when you'd have to move the camera around to place blocks in specific locations.

As for visual improvements, I've mostly focused on improving roads from their previous flat planes into being actual 3D. Not a huge difference, but it does look better in my opinion to have the sidewalks slightly raised.

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I've started working on some decoration pieces as well. Once the game releases on early access, a fair bit of time will be spent adding objects that players can use to improve their cities visually. These will mostly just be for decorative purposes. Here's a sort of "balcony" piece I've prototyped:

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Cars are still being worked on, I'm almost done with the texture after having done the mesh (a fairly simple one). I'm also still working on movement, so I didn't get around to fixing up traffic rules yet. Hopefully I can get this done in time for Dreamhack.

Surprisingly, this past week I also came across a fair number of bugs that have now been neatly squished!

 

Hello!

This week I've been putting in a lot of polish to make the game more presentable for Dreamhack next week.

First notably, the traffic system is now in. It's still fairly basic with cars just moving and not really abiding to any rules. It's also not as performant as it will need to be further down the line. I'm going for some sort of ECS solution later on, but there hasn't been time to fix that now. It works for now at least.

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A gif of the cars in action, prior to some further polish, can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1066641576515026944

Currently, all buildings spawn two vehicles, but later on I will probably make this one per non growable buidling, and then make it 1-5 for residential and commercial buildings so that traffic levels sort of follow the density and size of the city more.

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I've had to put in quite a bit of effort optimizing the game further. I've moved shadow casting over to the lowest poly LOD for each building, which lowers poly count for shadow casting. I also decided to cut having four shadow cascades and instead go for just the two. This cuts the poly count down further, without too much of a cost visually.

Earlier, I've run the game at an FOV at 60, which has now been increased to 80. There will be an FOV-slider in the future, of course. But keeping things consistent allows me to find some sort of base-performance level.

Since finishing up the current version of the traffic system I've also added in cars as props for each building. This of course adds more shadows and polys to the scene, but I've managed to offset this with the above improvements. Also, as all props, cars are grouped together when a building is constructed.

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The day night cycle system has also been optimized, removing some lousy code and also fixing some minor bugs (sun sometimes displaying at night for instance). I've also given it a few tweaks to improve visual fidelity. The "Always night" and "Always day" options are not fully implemented as well proper menus for fast forwarding.

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Since adding the click and drag function for building blocks and roads, I've also decided to add a new Visual queue to guide players to what's going on and allowing them to follow what "rotation index" they're current only.

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All in all, the game runs fairly well on my rig at a consistent 60 FPS. Currently textures are pushing memory a bit (4GB only for textures). But they're mainly 4k textures, so I will be adding a downscaling feature to allow lesser rigs to run the game with lower texture quality.

The buildings are all event driven so they are very performative. All calulations run on a separate thread to allow for complex calculations to run without hickups. Cars are currently the main source of performance drop along with post processing effects (On CPU and GPU respectively).

All in all, I've managed to get into a faster pace of development recently, which is good since after Dreamhack I will focus on getting a first early beta version out to testers (signup info on Steam!). This is scheduled for December 16th!

 

Hello,

Dreamhack came and Dreamhack went. I'd like to start out thanking those that dropped by and checked out the game. It's always nice hearing that the game looks good or looks cool, but a completely different thing seeing people actually try it out and responding to things. Many people seemed very intrigued with the main concept of the game, being able to build really inventive cities while also managing complex economic systems.



Of course, I also noticed some things that need fixing and also received some very good feedback. I will detail some of the fixes I've made, feedback received and some other fixes I've done since the event and also what will go into the game as I move forward to the early beta build.

Unlike most city builders, Atmocity requires a fairly complex camera system so that players can navigate around the city. Most builders fare well enough with just a top down camera, that can move east/west/north/south. In Atmocity, players need to navigate within a volume in full 3D. With this comes a bunch of difficulties that need to be overcome. Most of the people who tried the game out did ok with the camera, but I did get some good pointers on how to improve it further. So in the upcoming few days, the options menu will be fleshed out with a Controls-panel. Here, there will be a sensitivity slider, since some players wanted the controls to be more rigid, while others felt they could be softer and floatier.

Aside from that, there will also be a type of sideways rotation or "lean" feature implemented, so that players will be able to easily setup the camera on level with the overall area they're viewing. Currently this requires a bit of a specific click and drag movement to do. Zooming will be implemented on the scroll wheel, and clicking the scroll wheel will initiate the camera drag movement. Currently the drag movement is assigned to left click, but this will be used solely for building selection.

At the moment, demolishing buildings is weirly assigned to the right mouse button click. This will, as has been planned for a while, be moved to a hot key and button in the building panel. Instead, the right mouse button click will be used to "attach" the camera to buildings, so that it can rotate around them easier.

These changes should be implemented in the upcoming few days. Navigating mazes like this should become easier:



I discovered a handful of minor bugs, among them a null ref due to cars not despawning correctly when buildings were demolished. This has been fixed, as has the efficiency display shader not displaying correctly on skyscrapers.

I've also continued optimizing the game during the week. The reflection probe now uses time slicing so that it isn't quite as performance heavy as before. I've managed to cut some shadow casters, removed hidden faces and made some other minor (per object) optimizations that make a rather sizeable difference in bigger cities. I've also managed to cut down on the tri count from shadows by cutting shadow casting distance a bit. This scene maxed out at 1.5 million tris and 1000 shadow casters before, I've now gotten it down to 900k tris and 300-400 shadow casters (depending on the number of cars in the scene):



Further improvements will be made making far LODs even more low poly, since they are hidden in fog and blur anyway.

An idea that came up at Dreamhack, to make building weird cities more of a functional choice as well as visual, was to make pollution not spread through blocks. This will be implemented in an early version too. This means that unlike now, when building factories within a specific radius from Residences will cause a penalty, you will be able to plan cities so that factories can be built on one side of a block and residences on the opposite side. There will probably be some sort of balancing issue with this, and I will need to implement it well for it to work well and not make city planning too easy.



My initial plan for the upcoming beta was to have everything more or less implemented. Sadly, some systems are still a bit too underdeveloped to be used properly, so some will be left out during the early stages of the beta. But I am hoping to get them done early to mid january so that they can be properly tested in good time before EA release too. Local economy system is still proving quite difficult, but should get there fairly soon.

The remainder of the week will be spent optimizing traffic further and adding the connection testing that buildings will do to ensure connectivity with key buildings like power plants and water absorbents. On top of that, the save and load manager will be started so that more than one city can be saved and loaded.



There will be Another update on Sunday. For those interested in trying out the beta, beta signup information is available on the Steam page for the game (https://store.steampowered.com/app/779380/Atmocity/).

If you want to more closely follow the development of the game, you can also join Discord, https://discord.gg/CeUuyS9

 

Hello!
It's been a productive week. Mostly under the hood stuff and mostly optimizations and bug fixes.

I've redone the control scheme slightly, moving the demolish action from the right mouse button to a separate button in the UI. Right mouse click now anchors the camera to a structure so that players can more easily get the camera around corners or rotate around buildings. Rotating the camera has been moved from left click to scroll wheel click. I've also tweaked the "floatiness" factor a bit more and this will be implemented into the options menu in the upcoming week, allowing players to adjust how rigid or floaty they want the controls to be.

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I've added better lighting to the "shady side of the world". This has been an issue for a while, that certain areas will always be worse lit. I've tried to compensate this by adding a dimmed light that is always opposite the sun. It will need further tweaking, but should end up solving the issue. This also works as an additional "night light", making building easier during night time, if players insist on keeping the day/night cycle on at all times.

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I got the save/load menu fully implemented too. The UI still needs work, but in terms of function it's all there, thumbnail of the city and all included. I also managed to clean up some lousy placeholder code because of this too as well as removing what used to be a "loaded city"-scene and a "new city"-scene. This is now just one gameplay-scene, if it's loaded with no city loaded, all the new city stats and resources will be loaded as well as a solitary building block placed in the center.

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As an additional visual feature, I will implement several different skyboxes and day/night gradients. Exactly what types there will be, I haven't yet decided, but there should be quite a few to add more variation.

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Having done quite a bit of code optimization (some scripts were lagging behind in terms of optimization), next week I will get into refactoring some of the newer code, like drag and drop for building blocks etc. This code is rather messy atm and requires a good cleaning. I've also done quite a bit of UI-optimization, splitting up large canvases and also getting rid of some graphic raycasters on canvases where there are no clickable objects.

Local economy should also be finished enough to get it into proper testing next weekend, after which I will be able to set up conglomerate and citizen demand systems. Overall, I am behind schedule, but should have time to catch up after christmas. The game is not quite as finished as I would like for late alpha/early beta, but it's good enough I reckon.

 

Hello!

Another week of mostly systems work, but there should be some eye candy too.

I've focused quite a bit on performance this week. One of the main issues I've had has been global fog and sunshafts being fairly bad in terms of performance. So I decided to phase these out in favor of newer assets that hopefully are more performant. To replace the old global fog I decided to shift from version one of the post processing stack to the new version which includes global fog. This meant redoing some of the post processing effects. I consider this work worth the time though.

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I also implemented Aura for better looking lighting. I think it gives the game a softer look, which works fairly well. Replacing the post processing also meant I gave the effects another look and did some tweaking to get performance where I want it.

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I've also started working on separate profiles for the normal view and the efficiency/owner/density views. I want the latter ones to be rather clean and simple looking and give the city a sort of "model of a city"-type look.

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Since I've updated to Unity 2018.3, I've also started looking into the jobs system to add more improvements in terms of performance. I spent a great deal of time trying to implement traffic onto its own thread but had no luck with this sadly. I will probably revisit this idea after the initial EA release since traffic performance is fairly ok as is anyway. I did, however, move traffic raycasting over to the raycastcommand feature, and this seems to have improve things a fair deal.

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I've continued to work on the local economy system. There's now a system in place to allow conglomerates to buy/sell property from eachother. This means the conglomerates that establish themselves in your city early on, won't be clustered there over time. I've also started working on the conglomerate demand/offer/bribe system. Conglomerates will demand you change policy from time to time if they are unhappy. If you decline their demands they will half production, slow growth in buildings or not construct new ones. Conglomerates will also make offers for you to buy resources that you might need off-market, or offer to buy resources you have a lot of. Lastly, they might attempt to bribe you into making a policy change and in return give you money or resources. There's a chance you will be discovered doing this, in which case citizens will become unhappy and maybe move away.

The last bit of systems work I've done this week was to start implementation of the trade system. Aside from buying/Selling resources directly on the market you can place long term purchse/sale orders. This means you'll have a slow but consistent import/export of resources, which doesn't affect pricing as much. This will allow players to make steady sales when they have a lot of goods stored, or if they are running low, start a steady import stream without affecting the price too much.

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A maximum of 5 sale orders and 5 purchase orders can be held at the same time. Each time unit buys/sells 100 units of a good, so at most, users can ensure imports or exports of 500 units per time tick. This will allow players to make up for big surpluses or when they are running dangerously low on something in high demand.

Next week, I will be finishing up the trades system and also add the bonds system (a loan system essentially). Aside from that, the local economy will get more work as well as starting work on the budget panel.

 

Hello!
A somewhat shorter week of dev, given christmas is just around the corner (merry christmas to all!), but there has been some progress with the game.

First off, the bond and trade system has been fully implemented and now works with saving and loading. The bond system allows players to lend money, that after 100 time units, needs to be repaid with interest. The interest rate is calculated from the global economy and the economic status of the city.

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The options menu has been expanded to feature more settings. Aside from splitting things up into different categories, depth of field now has a focus distance setting. The camera rigidity settings has been implemented into the options. This setting allows players to set whether the camera is rigid or floaty.

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I've added a demolish building Icon, to move demolition from the right mouse button. This makes much more sense given the controls in general. There needs to be a marker added to show what is going to get demolished though. But that will be done next week.

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I've started refactoring and optimizing some code, namely the UI related code and the car code. The car code is almost refactored, but in doing so I reintroduced a bug where the cars loop around, so this will need to be adressed soon.

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Overall, the game runs fairly well on my main rig now. It will be interesting to see how it runs on other rigs, and how other people experience the game, now that the early beta test is just around the corner!

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Hello!

Given christmas was this week, I've only had a few days to work on the game. But the game did you out to a handful of testers on tuesday, and so with the response given, I've been able to make some improvements to the game and fix a handful of bugs. So moving forward, each update will include a changelog. This week's changelog:

New features:
Autosaving implemented. Can be toggled in options.
Resolution scaling implemented into options menu.
Cars optimized to not run when off screen.
Early implementation of offers/demands/bribes from conglomerates. Currently conglomerates will only issue offers. Unlike demands and bribes, these can be declined without any negative effects. Accepting an offer improves the happiness of the conglomerate. Offers will be made if there are more than 3 active conglomerates in the city, if you are short on a specific resource, or if you have an abundance of a specific resource.
Added unemployment insurance and health insurance welfare systems to policy panel.
Added tax for pollution, which affects industrial output for goods, labour requirements and pollution levels.
Note: Save files drastically altered. This means old files are no longer viable. Start a new city!

Changed UI/UX:
Pressing escape closes open windows (as does right clicking). If no window is opened, opens options menu.
Rightclicking when building concrete foundation or roads cancels current build process. If no build process is running, deselects concrete foundation or roads.
Removed the constraint for max amount of concrete foundations that can be built in one go.
Building cost info locked to upper left position. This will be redesigned in the near future.
Conglomerate mappings added to owner display.

Glitches/Bugs fixed:
Cars looping around themselves and going into roads fixed.
Sound for construction is no longer overlapped when building concrete foundation or roads.
Correct text for concrete foundation now set in the cost display window.
Issue where concrete foundations wouldn’t be built if assigning to a large area fixed.
Wood processing plant now has to correct size (was scaled 1.5x for some reason).
Issue where image in the options menu would go full white fixed.
Construction guide for buildings, concrete blocks and roads now closes properly.
Commision rates when buying/selling resources were incorrectly calculated.
Save/Load menu would display all but one cityfile, fixed.

Other Changes:
Wood processing plant moved from category ”other pollutant” to ”other neutral” and can now be placed next to farms, absorbents and forestrys (etc.).
More tree variants added.
Linux version added, possibly unstable/broken.
Daytime post exposure scaled back.
New issues/Known issues (an outtake):
Sun is vaguely visible through concrete foundations.
Possible math bug when calculating happiness level, if you receive massive values all over the place – save the city into a new file and send this over for debug.
Offers are currently not saved.
Density shader still glitched.

Pushed to next update (an outtake):
Quicksaves.
Additional concrete foundations, fancier concrete foundations.
Demands and bribes (awaiting confirmed function of offers).
Property tax policy implementation.
Demolition indicator.
Fix for density shader glitch.
Fix for sun (currently breaks on build…).

One move toward making conglomerates more visible in the city, is adding their names to the owner display mode:


Of course, once the local economy panel is ready, they will be much more visible, since you'll be able to check out stats like company value, number of buildings owned along with their moods etc.

Another change this week has been the addition of a message system:


From time to time, conglomerates will make offers, demands or attempt to bribe you. Currently only offers have been implemented. Offers are only made by conglomerates that like you and aim to help you, either by selling you resources you're lacking to a slight discount, or by offering to buy large amounts of resources from you at a favorable bulk price. Declining an offer comes with no downsides, but accepting them further boosts the conglomerates happiness.
Next up, the demand system will be fully implemented. Demands will generally be made by conglomerates that are unhappy. Demands generally concern unfavorable policies like minimum wages and property taxes. Accepting demands will boost their happiness (and lower the risk of future demands), while declining a demand can come with a limited time stunted production rate or slower growth rate.
Last part of the message system is for bribes. Conglomerates will offer to pay you hefty sums of credits to change a policy. Declining a bribe doesn't come with any negative setbacks, while accepting one runs you a small risk of capture which will lower citizen happiness for a period of time.

The bug where cars would loop around themselves, get stuck or run into streets has been fixed. Along with this fix I've also coded cars to not run when not visible. If they remain outside of the camera frustum för an extended period of time, they will instead respawn at their "home position". That way the traffic system will be less performance heavy, while still adding some visual flare.



I've also done some tweaking to the day night cycle. I've lowered the post exposure setting during day time, to make it less bright:


Another issue has been that nights and shaded areas have been too dark, which has made construction and navigation during night time more difficult. This has also been tweaked, and is hopefully more managable now:


Moving forward I will put more effort into finishing the remaining buildings. Upper class residential and commercial tiers are my main focus. On the systems end of things, demands and bribes will be implemented in the upcoming week along with the local economy panel, including an early iteration of the budget panel.

 

Hello!
It's been quite a productive week. I'm about to push version 0.44. This is the full extent of these two updates:

New features:
Services implemented. Commercial zones provide services demanded by residential zones and some public amenities. Naturally, these cannot be traded like normal goods and cannot be stored.
Conglomerates make demands if policy targeted at them is too strict (high taxes for instance). Only unhappy conglomerates will make demands, so ensuring you don’t demolish their buildings and keeping taxes fair will make them less inclined to make demands. If you decline a demand, you may run the risk of a short period of lower production of goods or services. The rate of lower production and the duration depends on how unhappy the conglomerate making the demand is.
Bribes have been implemented. Conglomerates will try to give you things in return for changes to policy they dislike.
Property tax has been implemented. This puts a percentage tax on the value of conglomerate buildings. As your city grows, taxing property can amount to a fairly substantial source of income. But it’s also a source of discontent among your conglomerates.
Conglomerate happiness now affected by policy and dependant on conglomerate memory.
Conglerate information panel (local economy) available.Services icon added to resource panel.
Corrections center building added.
Safety indicator added to city stats panel.
First iteration of crime added. Crime currently doesn’t affect any values around the city, but has been made visible to the player via the city stats panel. Crime is (currently) managed with police departments and corrections centers and calculated on a citywide basis.
Conglomerate happiness now indirectly affected by business cycle, wage levels and unemployment. This will be developed more later on.

Changed UI/UX:
UI adapted to allow 16:10 aspect ratio. A minor issue with positioning of hide/reveal side panel arrows remains, as does a positioning issue with the message panel at the bottom of the screen.
Corrected a discrepancy between actual values and displayed values in UI.
Added tool tips to building info panel.
Moved scrool wheel from zoom to translate (scrolling moves camera forward/backward). Zoom function on keys Z and X moves camera anchor and changes the rotation center.

Glitches/Bugs/Poor optimizations fixed:
Further vehicle code optimizations and refactored code.
Fixed bug in text display for health and environment indicators in city stat panel. Text display would sometimes be incorrect.
Fixed a bug where sky rotation change when switching to day/night only mode.
The sound trigger code was incredibly inefficienct, especially when the camera was close to many buildings. This was the source of significant slowdowns. Now, only one building will be fetched at any time using a different (and faster) method.
Sped up performance of calculation thread.
(the two above mentioned fixes lower the fps-drop when running the game in 4x or 8x speeds)
Fixed faulty calculation of unemployment insurance cost.
Health values were persisting over calculations meaning ever improving health. Corrected by value not persisting over calculations.
UI for trades, bonds and offers update when panels are opened. Before they updated regardsless of whether the windows were open.
Fixed glitch in concrete foundation manager causing a null.

Other changes:
Changed calculation of efficiency when missing resources. Before, missing one out of three resources (for example) would cut 1/3 of efficiency. Now completely missing a resource will set effieincy to 0.
Fixed overlapping buttons in options panel.
Fix for density shader glitch.

New issues/Known issues (an outtake):
Minor issues with menu in 16:10 aspect ratio as mentioned above.

Pushed to later update (an outtake):
How control schemes are affected during construction will be tweaked.
Quicksaves.
Additional concrete foundations, fancier concrete foundations.
Fix for sun (currently breaks on build…).
Remainder of 16:10 aspect ratio fixes.
Demolition indicator.

Some of the bigger changes this time around is the addition of services as a resource. Commercial buildings not only provide work places for your citizens, they are also more valuable for conglomerates than residential and industrial property types. As such, they also add more income if you tax property. Aside from that, they produce services which are consumed around your city. Currently, only residences consume services, but in the next update, some other buildings will be added as consumers of services as well. In the next update the rate of service production will be affected by commercial taxes as well.

A first iteration of crime has been implemented as well. Crime currently doesn't affect anything in the city, but in future releases crime will affect property values, production and the rate of construction for conglomerates. It will also affect health levels marginally. Along with the addition of crime, comes the corrections center building:


This, together with the police department, combats crime in the city. Crime levels grow linearly with the population, but also exponentially from unemployment. Other factors will also be added in future updates.

Conglomerates can now be viewed in the first iteration of the local economy panel. Here you'll be able to view the currently building count and value of each conglomerate, as well as variables such as happiness, patience and memory. Patience and memory are tied together with the ceo of the conglomerate, and since this position changes over time, so do these variables. The conglomerate happiness on the other hand, depends on how well they feel things are working. High tax rates will drop their happiness, while good cooperation and fortunate global economy will raise their happiness.


The last offertype has also been added - the bribe. Conglomerates will from time to time attempt to bribe you into changing policy they dislike. Unlike demands, bribes can occur even when conglomerates are happy with the current levels of taxes, but want you to lower them further. Currently, accepting bribes do no harm, but the idea is that this will lower happiness for a brief moment and increase the base line crime rate (setting a bad precedent for corruption).


I've also managed to fix a handful of bugs relating to production not being calculated correctly and in particular ui bugs relating to efficiency and production rates not being displayed properly. There's still some work remaining, but overall, most of these issues seem to be fixed now.


Next week I will push to finish up the residential and commercial tiers completely and continue work on the budget panel. I'm also finishing up text documentation so that I can start sending out all text elements to translators.

That's it for this time!

 

Hello,
It's been a long and productive week for sure! Testing is in full swing and I've made plenty of changes according to the feedback I've received. One of the bigger changes is that I've started redoing the UI to make it easier to more directly find the items you are after and to lower the amount of scrolling required when building things.

Another change (that I'm still working on) is moving more values over to text and icon displays. For instance, instead of displaying city happiness as a value from 0 to 100, the value has been divided into five smiley levels. To avoid the confusion behind "negative unemployment" (labour shortage), this will be changed into categories of severe and mild shortage/unemployment and a neutral state.

The thinking behind this is to get players more focused on the bigger picture. The actual values can still be found in more precise panels, like city statistics and budget.

I've started working on buildings again as well. The entire roster of standard residential buildings available at early-access release are finished. I plan to also finish the small footprint residential buildings as well (about 6 or so, and more added after release).

The upper-class tier of residences can be seen here, along with a very WIP version of the new UI.


The entirety of the residences can be seen here:


Another change this week has been the addition of adaptive depth of field. Unlike before, when depth of field was always set at a specific focus distance (modifiable via options though), distance is now set depending on the distance to a building being in view of the camera. If no building is found, focus is always set to the sky. This way, there will never really be blurriness where a player is facing the camera.


I've also managed to fix a couple of bugs and glitches, from both feedback and own discoveries. Moving toward the mid January update (scheduled for Wednesday or Thursday) these are the current changes:

First iteration of new UI. More adjustments to come.
Upper class residences implemented. Their full requirements are not finished for the time being as some more resources need to be implemented.

Fixed null in conglomerate window panel.
Fixed null when a new conglomerate establishes itself via trade of property.
Fixed null causing file entries to not load in the save manager.

Reverted to old way of calculating efficiency to avoid ”ping pong” values – efficiency swaying from 100% to 0%. Might revisit this later on.
Added adaption rate to building effiency changes. This makes building slowly transition from one effiency state to another instead of instantly switching from one to the other.

Camera shake when constructing buildings now works properly in paused mode and 2-8x speeds.
Education values now scale properly with city size.
Crime levels now depend on unemployment, education levels and size of population classes.
Crime level added to happiness calculation.

There will also be the addition of Spanish localization, a selection screen that allows players to select start layouts for foundations and a toggle for depth of field. The missing icons in the UI image above will also be implemented.

 

Hello!

Skipped last week's update, because there was mostly system work done and not a whole lot to write about at that stage.
This week however, there's a bunch of new things going on!

Firstly, I've started working on the connectivity system, which will check connectivity between buildings and sections of the city and calculate production and consumption based on what is available in connected parts of the city. Currently, the system divides the city into small "cubes", and connectivity is then checked between cubes. Next week, I will start dividing these into groups, so that calculations for produces and consumed goods can be done on a group by group basis. For most players, I reckon the entire city will be interconnected, so there will only be one group, but should a player want to do so, cities will be able to be divided into separated sections. This system will also check travel distances for labour, so that all labour needs to be able to reach a workplace within a specific distance. This means that unemployment and labour shortages can arise, if there's a difficulty in reaching work places. This is to simulate having to have reasonable travel times to get to work. The vactrain system will extend the travelling distance and allow labour to travel further to get to work.

Here's an image of the system, when mapping the city:



I've also overhauled parts of the policy system. This is mostly to allow faster implementation of new policy. These were hard coded before, but now there's proper code to handle a handful of different types, that can just be added to an array. This also makes saving them into the data file easier later on.

I've finished up the remaining commercial buildings as well! With that, I only have another 18 buildings left (out of 111) to make for the early access release. Next up will be the industrial zones, after which I only have another 11 left to make! I've already started expanding the list of buildings that will be implemented post EA-release though, including a sixth density for each residential and commercial zone and a set of smaller zones and parks.



For the upcoming beta-release (scheduled for the 4th-6th of february), the budget panel will also have been implemented. Currently I'm working on the data struct that will collect all the data necessary during the calculations cycle. This includes fetching costs for sets of buildings such as healthcare buildings or education buildings.


I've also started receiving some early version of Music from the composer. It's all sounding very promising and fitting! It's going to be very exciting to start getting some music implemented into the game.

 

Hello!

It's been a rough week battling with both day job, game and also a massive cold (which seems to be winning...), but there's been some Atmocity progress nonetheless.

Like the past few weeks, a lot of focus is currently on systems work and finishing up features. A lot of work this week went into finishing up the connectivity system in its current state. This will need some further tweaking further down the line when I'm done redoing the roads and the road system (more on that further down). The connectivity system now finds the divided sectors of the city, tests connections between them and then groups connected sectors into units. These units can then be used to calculate production and consumption.

Here's the system working out what is connected and how:

Something that has been on my mind a lot recently has been to lower the grid size yet again. Those who have followed the game for a longer period of time, know that this has been done once before. Then it was done to get rid of the blocky look of the game as well as to get roads in. Had the grid remained the same size, roads would have become gravely oversized. Over time, I've started feeling roads are STILL oversized. This coupled with me now thinking about what will go into the game once all the main buildings are finished, has prompted me to cut the grid size down even more. This will allow roads to be smaller, buildings to be placed with greater detail and with smaller offsets, and the introduction of a lot of small decoration tiles etc. once all the main structures are finished. This will increase what players can do in terms of city customization and decoration.

Here's the smaller grid size in action (roads not adapted yet).

And here's the proposed new road system (a quick mock-up):

Following last week's policy system overhaul, I've now started adding in new policy options faster. For the upcoming week I'm hoping to have a whole set of funding options added, so that players can control the funding for different types of educational facilities and healthcare for example. I expect most of the early-access version's policy will be done for the 0.46 version (which has been moved from the 6th of February to the 17th due to revamped systems not being quite ready, but more features will be included).

I've received more feedback from testers, a set of bugs have been found as well as some QoL features have been suggested. These include tweaks to controls and placement of panels etc. Aside from this I've also started working on some QoL features that I've been thinking about myself. Among them is a range display when placing buildings. All buildings perform a vicinity test when built to check if there are any good or bad buildings nearby. The range display will show the spherical range of buildings as well as light up what good and bad buildings will be within range when placed.



Lastly, I've gotten the mid tier industry finished. The mid tier industry is less pollutant (only has marginal pollution). When finishing these buildings, I decided to split industry into three different types so they can be managed differently in the vicinity check. Dirty industry is disliked by all residential and commercial zones. This mid tier industry (called neutral in code, even though it isn't quite) can be accepted by lower class and lower middle class residences and commercial zones. The high tech industry can be accepted nearby by middle class and upper middle class residential and commercial zones. The upper class residential and commercial zones are very picky, so they don't like any nearby industry at all.

 

Hello!
Like last week, some time this week was sadly lost to being ill. Luckily, the second half of the week has been really productive and I’ve managed to finish up some of the lagging systems.
The main focus the past few weeks has been to overhaul the traffic system. This is now fully complete. The old system relied on raycasting between each road tile to determine viable routes. This was obviously bad design, but done to have “something” for Dreamhack. Now, the system instead registers nodes from road crossings, turns and road tiles where traffic will leap over an edge. Using this information, each node can be given viable exit directions that is fed to vehicles.
Where the old system could handle something like 50 vehicles in view at the same time, the new system has been stress tested to run 1000 vehicles visible in scene at 60 fps. Given culling etc, this is a number unlikely to ever occur in any given view, but it’s good to see how well it can perform.
Here’s the system being tested:



And going crazy of course:



Being able to display a large number of vehicles is of course nice, but was not the only ambition when overhauling the system. I’ve been struggling to work out a good way to see what buildings are connected to eachother. Using the registered nodes, I can now compile a full network. Basically checking every node in the system, so if node A has exits to B and C, then A, B and C are naturally in the same network. If every road is connected, then there is only one network in the city. But if there are two separate systems, then two networks are formed instead. Using this information I can now divide the city into two or more sections and have production and consumption calculated on a section by section basis. When built, each building is assigned what network it belongs to. All the network calculations etc. are done on a separate thread so they should scale very well.



Next week, the final step in the road system overhaul will be changing the actual tile size.

Having finished the mid tier industry buildings last week, I’ve moved on to finishing the high tech industry this week. With that, only 10 buildings remain for the EA release of the game. That means I’m actually a bit ahead of schedule and should be able to start making a few decoration tiles for city customization. Here’s the high tech industry and an early decoration tile:




Following the changes to the policy system, I have now started implemented more policy and should have a decent set of policies finished for the update next week. The main issue at the moment is being able to present them in an appealing way that makes clear what they are for. But that should be a process over time.

 

Hello!
This week I'm updating the Steam beta builds to version 0.46 which adds/changes/fixes the following:

Changelog V0.46

This versions breaks old save files, the old files can still be accessed in game, but will load a corrupt city. Old save files can be removed.

New features:
- Connectivity between sections of the city now implemented. More work and tweaking will follow.
- Additional taxes. The code behind the system has been revamped as well, to allow for quicker implementation. This breaks old saves!
- Commercial tier fully implemented. Like the residential tier, demands are not final, as some buildings are still missing.
- Mid tier industry added. Demands are not finalized.
- High tech tier of idustry added. Demands are not finalized.
- Road size, road system and traffic system revamped. This breaks old saves!
- New traffic system. The old system used raycasting and was not scalable. This was mainly a for-show system. The new system uses threading and allows traffic to be scaled up. It also improves the connectivity system in that they can share information. Movement is a bit more floaty, which will adjusted in iterations.
- Decoration tiles - a first decoration tile has been added.

Changed UI/UX:
- Fixed text overflow/truncation in Spanish localization.
- Fixed a couple of incorrect references in the localization file.
- Added load function from main menu.
- Window backgrounds changed to make visibility better.
- Budget panel implemented. Also, values for cost and revenue for each policy slider added.
- Policy window layout changed. More polish will be added to this over the upcoming few updates.
- Fixed bug in building info display for commercial buildings.
- Escape opens main menu in game.
- Build hologram when placing roads now incorrectly becomes red when location has a building.
- Fixed display for road (and blocks) is not red
- ? button in main menu fixed.
- Change res when in windowed fixed.
- Double resolution sets in options drop down fixed.

Glitches/Bugs/Poor optimizations fixed:
- Calculation bug affecting middle class labour fixed.
- Calculation bug affecting happiness (and bugging out several other values) fixed.

Other changes:
- Demolition indicator. Will be tweaked further later on.
- Reintroduced constraint for size of foundation volumes that can be built in one process (much larger than before). This is to avoid accidentally placing large volumes when raycasting against nothing.
- Building vicinity check now disregards buildings on the opposite side of a block, allowing you to better plan cities.
- Added range display for building vicinity check.

Possible fix:
- Issue with hologram shader on Linux. Shader has been replaced.
- Post processing stack has been updated, which might fix a performance issue on Linux.

Known issues:
- Certain aspects of the Spanish localization missing (because of new text items).
- Worldsize of templates not variable. As such, it is not possible to build to the full size of the current templates. This will be fixed in the next update.
- Performance issue when starting threads for calculations and connectivity.

Pushed to later update (an outtake):
- Quicksaves.
- Additional concrete foundations, fancier concrete foundations.
- Fix for sun (currently breaks on build…).
- Updated spanish localization.

- Russian localization.
- German localization.​

- French localization.


The new traffic system is performing as well as expected! It does need the addition of culling cars that are far away and don't need to have their positions updated, but all in all it's working quite well. Aside from a few visual tweaks, it is more or less finalized. There will be a handful of more vehicles though, later on.
Following the traffic system overhaul, I have now also changed the road tile size and changed the overall grid in the game. Buildings now make up 4x4 of the grid, and roads are 1x1. Essentially roads are now 1/4 the size they used to be. This makes cities look denser and also allows for more interesting city layouts.



With the smaller grid size, I've also started implementing decoration tiles. These have no function for the city, but is also a way for plaers to customize their cities.



The policy window has been getting some work. Although a lot of work remains both in terms of layout and adding more policy to adjust, it is getting closer to its final layout. Implementing policy moving forward, should be much faster given that I've overhauled the code behind the policy system. I'm hoping to get quite a lot of policy and funding options added in before the next update.
Here's the budget panel:



And funding options:



The vicinity system that checks whether a building is within range from a good or bad building has been changed to allow, for example factories, to be built on the back of blocks without negatively affecting buildings. This way, players will be able to build denser cities nd also plan their districts in a different way.



A first iteration of the econopedia has also been implemented!
Unfortunatly I've missed the target of improving on sounds and implementing the localizations, but I am otherwise ahead of Schedule. Localizations are quite simple to implement, so once I get the French, German and Russian ones they will be added fairly quickly. I had also planned on adding music for this build, but music is a bit behind schedule but has been coming along really greatly recently and there should be some tracks added for the next build.

 

Hello,
Following last weeks update, I've had to spend time fixing some unfortunate glitches that followed. Not unexpected since the update was rather substantive, but it did mess with my planning a bit. Oh well!

I have started finishing up the remaining buildings. One of the buildings finished this week was the Fusion power plant seen here:


The fusion power plant needs to be researched before you can build it. While expensive, it does produce heaps of power in a clean way.

I've also started reworking water production in the game. Currently you build absorbents that absorb moisture from the atmosphere to gather water for your city. This system will now be part of a future climate system. Pollution and moisture will now play a role in the city living conditions. If pollution rises too much (like a lot) you'll achieve a green house effect and people will dislike living there. There will also be a limit to how much water you can absorb from the atmosphere in a given time unit. So in order to produce more water, you will be able to build water treatment plants. Also, you will be able to build cisterns to store water, unlike now, when water is never stored. A water district can be seen here:


The food production Buildings are all finished. The last one that has now been added is the Food processing plant, which takes cereal, fruit and legume and outputs processed food. Processed foods are required to keep your upper class citizens happy.


I've found a number of bugs in vicinity testing when placing buildings. For example, residences would sometimes register industry, although these were placed on the other side of a block. This should be functional now.


Lastly, I've started working on improving performance when building large scale cities, since I won't be breaking any saves from now on. What is on the list for next week is culling cars when they are outside of view

 

Hello!

This week I've started adding in the waste management system. Depending on the policy implemented in the city, goods and foods consumption generates trash which will need to be handled. This can be done either by recycling centers, or by using incinerators that produce electricity, but also a bit of pollution.

Recycling center:

Incinerator:

I've continued working on the conglomerate display and local economy panel. There will be quite a few additions to this moving forward, but mostly behind the scenes stuff like calculating construction speeds for zones and how conglomerates react to different types of taxes. There's already quite a lot done on this system, but since there has been and will be quite a few more additions to policy it needs to be updated a bit.

For graph nerdiness I've added a graph displaying historic values of conglomerates.



I've also started working on the city stats panel. Currently it's quite underdeveloped, but it should be finished up next week. This is basically just a breakdown of different city stats that the player might find interesting.


As a performance improvement I've also added cars being recycled when they move out of view and spawning new ones in view. This is basically a way to keep the number of vehicles down, while still making the roads look fairly busy. There will be many tweaks to this over time, but it's good to have it working fairly well.



Next week I'll be starting the music system, along with an adviser system to help players. Lastly, The board of citizens system will be started. This will be similar to the how conglomerates make demands for lower taxes etc. The board of citizens will ask for lower taxes, improved healthcare and welfare etc.

 

Hello!

The 0.47 version will be up shortly!

Changelog V0.47

New features:
- Food processing plant added.
- Cisterns and water treatment plants added. This allows storage of water and cleaning ”used” water.
- Recycling center and trash incinerator buildings added.
- Trash “resource” added.
- Board of citizens added. When the city has more than 10k citizens, citizens will form a group that will make requests and demands similar to those of conglomerates (lower taxes, better services etc.). This will be expanded upon in future updates.
- Nuclear waste storage facility added.

Changed UI/UX:
- Issue where hologram shader would be nearly fully transparent when seen from certain angles fixed.

Glitches/Bugs/Poor optimizations fixed:
- Threads moved to background threads to avoid garbage production upon starting the calculation and connectivity threads.
- Bug where vicinity check fails when building “bads” on the other side of blocks fixed. (Thanks to RedEventStudios for finding this issue!)
- Bug where roads built in the corner between two blocks would not connect to the rest of the road system fixed. (Thanks to TheGeekCupboard for this obscure discovery!)
- Bug where bugs built in the corner between two blocks would cause blocks to not be demolishable fixed.
- Worldsize variable added to templates.

Other changes:
- Crime calculations changed.
- French translation implemented. The translation is somewhat incomplete, so some text elements are missing.
- Spanish translation updated.

Known issues:
- Roads cannot be built facing other roads when the distance is only one grid unity wide. (fix scheduled for v. 0.48).
- Spanish translation missing a few text elements (scheduled for v. 0.48).
- Decoration tile causes a null reference error (fix scheduled for v. 0.48).

Pushed to later update (an outtake):
- Quicksaves (scheduled for v. 0.48).
- Additional concrete foundations, fancier concrete foundations.
- Fix for sun (currently breaks on build…) (scheduled for v. 0.48).
- Russian localization implemented (scheduled for v. 0.48).
- German localization (scheduled for v. 0.48).
- Nuclear power plant (scheduled for v. 0.48 along with the remaining buildings).


This week, I've mostly focused on various fixes, both bug fixes and performance fixes. A few issues remain to be fixed for the next version, but overall, the game should be more stable now. Aside from fixes, I've also added in a few more systems. These will be developed further for the 0.48 version.

Cisterns are now fixed, so that water can be stored and consumed later on. Having fixed storage for water, I have now been able to add the nuclear waste storage facility. However, there's no use building it yet since the nuclear power plant hasn't been added yet. But it's a nice looking building.


I've started working on the translations more. I received the French translation and have started implementing it. Some things are still missing, but it's getting there. The spanish localization still needs to be updated and the german localization is still behind schedule.



I've started finising up the policies available at the early access release. Some funding options are still missing, and some of the policy options are not fully implemented and tweaked yet. But most of these now affect things like labour availability or health.



I'm still working on fixing some value stability issues. At times, the economic calculations will cause things to spiral out of control (more so than I would like ). These issues should be fixed in the next update.


Aside from what has already been mentioned, the next update should feature the remaining seven buildings. Achievements will be added in the upcoming week. One of the big remaining features is the so called "retro" mode. Which is retro in the sense that cities are built on the ground. It's still uncertain whether this will be finished for the next update, but I should have some more information about it in the upcoming weeks. The 0.48 version is scheduled to drop the 31st of march!

 

Hello!

Short entry this week, as I've mostly done fixes for minor issues (not really news worthy).

First bit of news is that I've postponed the release of the game by one month (from april to may). This is due to an overall heavy workload, but also because I want things to be really well functioning and polished when the game releases into Early Access. This grants me some extra time to add a good deal of fine tuning and polish.

I'm in the process of finishing up the last few buildings. The nuclear power plant has been finished:


The nuclear power plant outputs a lot of electricity at a fairly decent cost, but it also outputs spent fuel that needs to either be stored, or neutralized. The storage facility (second from the right) and the neutralizer (right) can be seen here:



Most of the remaining buildings will most likely be done next week and will mean I finish up resource production and education. The vactrain station includes a lot of new code, so that will be done after next week.


Overall, things are coming together, but as the delay suggest, a bit slower than I would have wanted. But I'd rather release a stable game than an unstable one.

 

Hello!

The latest version will go up in a few hours and features quite a few new things:
​

V 0.48 Change log

- Nano structures plant implemented. Creates nano structures required for the top density buildings.
- Advanced circuitry plant implemented. Creates advanced circuits used for complex machinery.
- Complex machinery plant implemented. Creates complex machinery used in hospitals, the nuclear waste storage facility among other buildings.

This means all resources meant for the Early Access release version have been implemented. More resources might come post EA-release.

- University building implemented. Adds a city wide education bonus.
- Theatre building implemented.

- Movement option to shift camera up or down has been added – CTRL + W/UpArrow to shift upwards, CTRL + S/DownArrow to shift downwards.

- EA release welfare programs implemented. More tweaks to come in the following versions.
- EA release discrete policy options are all implemented and functional. These will be tweaked in upcoming versions.

- Music implemented. Currently it only shuffles the tracks. The system to trigger music based on events is in the works.

- Spanish localization updated.

- Budget calculation errors have been fixed.

Aside from the above, a handful of minor issues have been fixed.


I'm closing in on finishing all the buildings meant for the EA-release of the game. The remaining ones that will be finished in the upcoming few weeks are the atmoport and the vactrainstation.

The University is used to increase education levels across the city. They don't need to be built next to specific buildings or anything.


The Theatre building is required to keep upper class citizens happy. In future versions, theatres will produce culture, which will be used to increase happiness across the city.



The nano structures plant produces nano structures that in future versions will be required to get the top density residential and commercial buildings.



Complex machinery is used in nuclear waste storage facilities, hospitals and in future versions is required for high tech industry.


Finishing off the production buildings set is the advanced circuitry plant, which produces components for use in the complex machinery production plant.



There's been a lot of work put into value calculations, specifically into the discrete policy options added into the game recently. All of the policies now affect values in the game, from electricity consumption to health and education values.
This will receive further tweaks in the upcoming version, as the policies need to be balanced in cost and effect.

Music has also been added into the game finally. The music has been composed by Joshua Szweda and in my opinion fits the mood and theme of the game perfectly!
Currently the music is just randomized, but there will be a mode where tracks are picked based on context. Like if there's an economic downturn etc. Currently, the system works, but the tracks are not linked to the events yet.

In the upcoming few weeks, aside from working on tweaks and balancing, I'll be working on the vactrain system and implementing achievements into the game.

 

Hello!
There will be no extensive devlog this week, since most of the work I’ve done involves system stuff and generally surrounding systems already in the game.
I’ve continued working on the vehicle system and squashed a few visual issues. Moving forward I can now start culling vehicles properly to allow more vehicles shown in any given view without tanking the FPS.
I’ve now also implemented a proper calculation of the wage level. The wage level affects the demand for labour, so if wages are high, demand gets a slight hit. Conversely, if wages are lower, demand gets a slight boost.
With welfare systems such as unemployment insurance, health insurance and retirement, these are generally designed in such a way as to replace wages while a person cannot work. As such, the city’s wage level is now a part in calculating the cost of these benefits. If the city has a high wage level, these benefits will cost more when people are unemployed for example.
The next step will be to incorporate the wage level into the tax income from residents.
Another thing that I’ve aimed to incorporate into the EA-release of the game is a vactrain system. I’ve started coding this into the game, and aside from registering stations, it’s almost ready to be tested. For next week’s devlog there should be a finished concept up for display.
There are still some bugs to be fixed here and there, and some UI adjustments left to make. But overall, what was intended for the EA-release is starting to get rather stable and polished. That means I can move onto doing some optimizations here and there to make sure the game runs really well.

 

Hello!

Like last week's devlog, this one will also be rather short. I'm currently under a fairly heavy work load and on top of that, most of the work that goes into the game now are to system tweaks and improvements.

Work continues on tweaking calculations. More or less all systems, such as health, wages, unemployment and happiness, are interconnected. As such, balancing these systems out and avoiding extreme results is a bit tricky, but it's getting there. The real test will come once the game releases into early access and a more diverse set of play styles is being tested.

I've also been polishing up the shaders in the game, adding vertex displacement to building footprints and making minor performance adjustments. I've also changed import settings for textures to decrease their size.



More localisation work has been done. Spanish has been updated, which means it's almost finished. A first iteration of the russian localisation has been added, but will require some work (text size etc.). I've also added the Swedish localisation into the game. Work on the german version is ongoing and the remainder of the french translation should be done fairly soon.



I will be trying to get some more buildings into the game before the EA-release. Primarily decorations, like this forest:



There's also been some minor stuff added. Cities can be named. The ui has gotten some minor adjustments and will continue to be improved in the upcoming week, especially the statistics panel which has been placeholder.

 

Hello!
It's been a while since I made a proper update. The previous few weeks have been very hectic overall, and on top of that most of the game progress has been on fixing bugs and making minor tweaks here and there, so not really update worthy.

But now there's been some visible progress! Vactrains are now a thing. They're not quite functional yet, but I've managed to get building them down, and added the station building into the game. Vactrains are used to connect remote parts of the city.


I've rebalanced the entire set of buildings changing pricing the resource requirements as well as some of the output levels. The next step in building management will be to add in the availability conditions. Some buildings will be locked from start, requiring a specific population for example, or that the building is first researched in a lab (which is a building that itself requires a specific population). Given that the vactrainstation has now been finished, only one building remains to be made for the early access release (atmoport). The atmoport will be a building placed when you enter a new city. This building will be the place where goods and citizens can travel to and from your city.

Another thing I'm working on, that has been prototyped earlier, is being able to set different skies. This won't affect gameplay, but can be used to add variation. Each theme comes with it's own skybox, and sun color temperature etc.



One thing that I've noticed will be important is to convey when things are missing or going poorly in the city. Currently, I've added specific songs from the soundtrack to play only when things a recession occurs. I've added a feature that the city doesn't light up at nighttime when there's no electricity. When you're low on electricity, a set of buildings will randomly not light up at night time. That way you get a visual queue that you need to expand power production. Once I add cop cars, ambulances and fire trucks, these will be more prominent on the streets when crime is high, health is poor or when fire safety coverage is low.


I've continued tweaking the economic system, changing costs and effects of policies and how long it takes for policies to reach full effect. Messages sent from the board of citizens and from conglomerates are now also saved.


Next week, vactrains should hopefully be finished completely. I also count on having most of the translations added into the game as well. I'm also adding some quality of life improvements like auto benchmark and some more options.

 

Hello!

Work continues on the game! Focus this week has been to finish up the vactrain construction and getting it to section the city properly so that resources are shared in the connected parts of the city. The only thing that remains now is to have actual trains travel through the tubes (will be done next week). Here's a test with determining what is connected and assigning different network codes to each interconnected system:


The vactrain system will make it easier to section off parts of the city, such as dirty industrial areas, and connect remote residential areas.


The French, Spanish, Russian and Swedish translations have been updated. I'm hoping to get the remaining translation (german) next week, so that this can be implemented as well. This is the last remaining element to get an approved build on Steam. There's been more work put into policy effects and costs. These adjustments follow a fairly substantial test city that I've started building.
I've also added some QoL enhancements such as a max output information display when hovering over buildings in the building selection menu.


Another QoL improvement is a grid displayed when placing buildings, blocks or roads. This will make it easier to plan cities.



Next week I will also be working on squashing some bugs and making some minor improvements to systems before I move on to a bit of optimization work. This will lead up to the next version, which releases next weekend.

 

New build is up! No huge additions, but quite a few important fixes and overall polish.

New stuff:
Wage level implemented - this might cause higher unemployment than before. I've attempted to offset this by increasing abour demand overall, but it might not perfectly offset things.
Unemployment welfare affects wage level.
Health insurance cost is now affected by overall health levels.
FDat file type deprecated from saves.
Changed plop costs and upkeep costs for each building.
When there's no power or a lack of power, less of the city will light up at night time.
Health yields from hospitals and clinics increased.
Policy costs adjusted.
Funding for crime prevention added.
You can no longer place buildings when out of Money.
Russian translation implemented.
German translation implemented (some parts are missing still).
Other translations minor fixes.

Optimizations:
Road and vactrack paths calculations improved

Minor fixes:
Retirement funding is now calculated properly.
Road construction bugs fixed: Roads could be built through blocks. Roads could be on uneven blocks.
Camera movement still when inputting city name.
Fix for dissolve shader when close to buildings and blocks.
Fix for cost information not updating when in paused mode.

QoL improvements:
Grid displayed when placing blocks, buildings and roads.
New demolition indicator.
Cloud saves.
Loading speeds improved.

Known issues:
Blank messages from nowhere. These don't affect gameplay and disappear when reloading the city.
Text size in local economy panel oversized.

The vactrains have gotten a minor face lift:

I am almost done with everything vactrain related. What remains (still) are the trains. These should be finished next week.

I've started tweaking building outputs even more, to ensure that output makes sense. For example, absorbents have not been outputting enough water, so this has been changed a bit. Health yields from clinics and hospitals has been increased as well. This means that it will be easier to keep health levels up, but clinics are still necessary to keep residents happy.


There's also been a great deal of work put into shaders in terms of performance and look. Things overall should be a bit shinier now, but more importantly culling objects when they are far away works better now.
The number of shadow casters has been lowered and poly counts have been lowered for some of the more common props, like trees and cars.
Another performance improvement is the way road (and now also vactrain) networks are calculated. This runs on a thread, so it hasn't been too important to keep it performant. But it has been pushing what is acceptable in terms of poorly performing code so I opted to make some improvements. This should come in handy when people start building huge cities. I've also moved this away from being calculated every time step in the game and instead only when a road or vactrain network has actually been changed.


Policy keeps getting minor adjustments. I want policy decisions to matter, while also being costly. So the effects need to be tweaked. It's also important that not all policy can be implemented at once, but rather implemented as the city grows larger and can afford it.



I'm closing in on finishing up localisations. Russian, Spanish and Swedish are more or less completed. French and German have a handful of elements missing. The Russian localisation required a bit of extra work due to the sizing of text elements being larger. This has largely been fixed, but a bug where the local economy panel isn't adjusted correctly slipped into the build (whoops!).

I've also decided to change the road check for each building from a sphere to a box. This allows buildings to be placed in corners as pictured below. This means that denser neighborhoods can be built and the need for roads is lowered a bit.


Next week, I mentioned vactrains will be finished up. The atmoport building and hopefully also function is on the schedule. Hopefully there will be time to start working on the objective system for the campaign as well. Should I finish those things, only one urgent things remains for the early access release of the game - the retro mode.

 

Hello!
It's been a while since I posted. Mostly this is due to not having very interesting things to post about (mostly done minor tweaks, fixes and optimizations recently), but also due to an extreme work load recently.

Hopefully things should clear up a bit moving forward and I should be able to dedicate more time to finishing up the remaining features I want to add into the game before it goes into early access.

The last EA building has been finished - the atmoport:

This is a must have building that will accept goods and citizens to your city. There will need to be one for each network in the city. So if everything is connected properly, there's only a need for one, but if the city is scattered across different islands, then you will need more.
I've yet to finish ships landing etc, but I've started working on a path finding system that should make the remaining work fairly straight forward.


I've started working on sculpting tools and being able to place smaller building blocks right away. This will make things a bit more interesting and allow more customization to cities.


One of the remaining things to make is a "land" mode of sorts. There will be a few different variants to this, but one idea I'm working on is a straightforward constructed island in water. The image below is an early concept.


I've also reimplemented some atmospheric scattering and am fairly happy with how it looks:

This will require some more work be put in to the day/night cycle, but should be worth it in the end.

Next week, aside from finishing up the sculpting and block placement tools, I will also be finishing up ships landing at the atmoport and also adding in some more decorative buildings such as an obelisk, a small hedge "park", a sloped park and a small border piece that can be used to decorate the side of blocks (to remove that concrete look)

 

Hey!

Work on the game is progressing steadily. This past week I've finished up work on the new block placement tools. It's now possible to click and drag to place the smaller building blocks. If a bigger block has been placed, this can be cut in half (sculpting). This will allow players to build more fine tuned foundations for their cities and will also open up for some interesting decorations later on.


On the subject of decorations, as can be seen in the image above, I've added in a very simple park tile. I've also added another "geometric garden" type tile that can be used to decorate the city. The new one (and an older one) can be seen here. Prior to release I will try to get a handful more decoration tiles in. Suggestions are welcome!


Here's another image of the park tile in the same context:


One of the remaining features to add is research. I've gotten rather far with this during the week, adding in most of the UI (along with most UI related code). I should be able to finish this up next week and get the research yield functions in as well.

Research is enabled once the city has 15k population and a laboratory building. It is required to unlock some production buildings and power generation Buildings, such as nuclear and fusion plants. Aside from building unlocks, there's also research that enhances buildings, like lowering pollution from carbon power plants and improving carbon dioxide capture and storage. Once enough has been researched to unlock the bottom tier of enhancements, players will be able to improve education, health and water/power conservation.



Since the current test city is getting rather large, I've also been able to start adressing some optimization issues and have started cutting tris and improving slow code. Fixing the new block tools also allowed me to reorganize that code and make it more efficient and also more well-functioning. Among the fixes there have been removing the risk of accidentally placing an area of blocks when only clicking to place one.

 

Hello!
Just a brief update this week. Like a lot of work recently, most of it has been focused on code and getting things up and running flawlessly for the early access release.

But there's been some picture friendly work done as well. One thing I'm putting a lot of work into at the moment, is expanding the number of decorations and customization items available at EA-launch. I've added a few more decoration tiles along with a sort of step decoration inspired by rice paddies:

This can be used to cut off some of the blockiness. There will also be a sort of "edge" decoration made to hide the concrete look of the blocks. Some more decorations can be seen here:

Starting next week, I will start adding in a few more RCI buildings. These will be small footprint versions, instead of 4x4 they will be 2x2 in size. They will appear only in two densities for starters, as opposed to 5 for regular residences and commercial buildings and 4 for industrial. Also, they will only be available in 3 classes, as opposed to 5. This might change once the game has been released and more content gets added.


Research is more or less finished now. I need to add the save function to it, but that should be fairly straightforward with the system I have going. The research tree features 32 items, some of which unlock buildings and some which improve the functionality of buildings. Improving building efficiency comes in increments of 5%, so although it takes time and resources to research them fully, it can surely be worth it.

I've continued to polish block placement and made some adjustments to avoid misplacement and other annoyances. All in all, the system works much better and allows for more flexibility. The campaign mode is now properly in the works too. The campaign will feature fairly simple levels that are meant to ease the player into the different systems in the game (building/sculpting, planning, trade, taxes/economy and research among others).

 

Very pleasant to look at, specially night version.
Considering some sort of modern street lights (not traffic lights)?
Like glowing road marking maybe, or road kerbs.

 

Hey! Yes, I had that in the old (bigger) roadtiles and will implement for the new, smaller tile too.
Something akin to this:

 

Yep. Definitely lights on streets / glowing lanes adding to life and feel of modernism.

 

Hello!
Another week of dev came and went, and things are coming together rather nicely.

Research implementation is now finished. There are a few bugs remaining, but it works well enough to have these ironed out in the upcoming week or so. Research times and costs will need to be tweaked based on feedback once the game releases, but should be fairly well balanced.

I continue to add more decorations, props and new "extra" buildings into the game, since I have a bit of extra time for this. There's now a set of small Residences, commercial and industrial buildings in the works. These add a bit of varition to zone size and can be used to mix things up a bit or create more suburban type areas.
Some of the new residences can be seen here:


As mentioned, I'm also working on new props. These props will be seen when zoomed in fairly closely and may include stuff like park benches etc. For starters I've made a road sign that lights up during nights:


Current ongoing work includes trains for the vacuumtubes. This is currently only in a boxing stage and so there are no images yet, but I have high hopes for trains as it will add more life into the cities. On the same subject, I'm reworking the car system a bit to allow for cars to respawn in new positions fasters. That way I can have densely trafficed streets without actually having too many running at the same time. At the moment this has been trickier than expected (getting it to look good that is), but hopefully there should be packed streets next week.


I've also finished up on some remaining UI work. The UI should be more or less completely finished now, but will likely see several changes and tweaks once the game releases into early access and I get feedback from players.



Bug hunting and optimizing is an ongoing Project, mostly relating to messages and the new research stuff. But there's been the regular minor stuff too.

Next week I should have the trains implemented and possibly the atmo fleets too. The two remaining features to implement is the campaign and the "landmode", I should get around to working on this next week as well.

 

This feels to me a bit too gloomy.

But hey, there are street lights

 

It's been a long week, maybe it shows in the image!
It should "light up" a bit once I get a proper number of cars back again.

 

Hello!

It's been a good dev week for sure. I've managed to finish up some things that have been put on the backburner for a while (things that should have been done, but have been tricky and thus been difficult to motivate doing).

Among these things is the movement for the vactrains. Getting this to work required reworking a fairly complicated part of the code, where connectivity between tracks and stations is managed. Luckily, in doing this I could also remove some things that were redundant and speed the whole process up.
Although not completely finished, the progress so far can be seen here:

https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1142528564748857344

I've reworked health policy settings, so that they now affect clinic and hospital output instead of just affecting Labour availability (this is now instead indirectly affected from increased health output).
While doing this change I also changed the overall effect strengths and costs.

Research is, as far as I can tell, fully functional, but does show the odd bug every now and then, but nothing game breaking. I've made some more adjustments and fixes to make the code more logical.


I've also touched up on the localisations. German has been overhauled, spanish and russian have been expanded. This also meant fixing some oversized textboxes etc.


Next week I'll be fixing the atmofleet movements, so that a fleet comes in to the city and lands at the atmoport to transport citizens and goods. In preparation for this I have redesigned the atmoport slightly. The previous one, I felt, was too tall and since it is a required building when you start a new city (and later too) it looks better not being too big.



I also gave it the same color theme as the vactrain station so that they are easily identifiable.

I've added sounds to buildings when they are clicked. This is too add a bit more life but also make identification easier. Residential buildings trigger a doorbell sound, commercial zones a cashregister sound etc. I think it works fairly well, but a few more sounds are needed for the different types of industrial buildings.


Lastly, I've added the lower class, middle class and upper class residential, commercial and industrial smaller footprint roster of buildings. Initially I had planned for this to be added after the EA-release, but I managed to make them rather quickly. Currently there's only one version and one density. I will be added another density along with alternative versions for variation once the game has been released. Once the game has been released the mixed low/mid and mid/upper versions will be made as well.

Here are the current buildings:

Aside from these changes, I've managed to spend quite some time playing the game and finding minor issues that have been fixed as they have been found.

 

Hello!

One month to go until the game goes into early access! eek
There are still things left to do, but the list is shrinking on a day to day basis!

This week I've focused on fixing minor issues, annoyances and performance issues. The research ui should be behaving properly now and all the unlocks and research effects are functional now.


I've implemented the game's achievements completely. I will need to adjust some of the conditions, since they are rather low. For example, running a deficit of 40000 is not difficult once a city gets larger.


I've added a photography function so that screenshots can be snappen easily. There's now also a skybox picker:


I'm currently working on the campaign. The winning conditions have been planned out and I've mapped what kind of "lessons" to display for each of the campaign levels. The code for checking if a condition has been met has been finished since before, but the ui still needs work. The entirety of the campaign should be finished next week.

The atmofleets still need work, before I can show them off. But the vactrains are now modelled, textured and moving around:

See them in action here:
https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1144980888037539845

Lastly, I've gotten the fire department building added as well. This was intended for later on, but I found some time to get this added already. This means that some of the building demands have been changed. Neutral and high tech industry will demand a nearby fire station to reach max efficiency. Disasters are planned after EA-release, so currently there is no risk of fire occuring in a city.



More on the campaign and fleets next week!