Games [Early Access] Atmocity

Hello,

This week's update will be a brief one, as there's been another one of those "under the hood" kind of dev weeks. (as such some images are more random than usual this week )

First of all, the work on the atmo fleets that are to land at the atmo port has taken a bit longer than expected, so no update on that this week.

I've overhauled part of the template loader to allow for the campaign, retro mode and free roam mode to all use the same foundation. The template loader checks if there are objectives for the "level" loaded, and where to place preplaced objects such as blocks in the free roam templates etc.

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Work on the campaign has progressed well. Essentially, the campaign stuff being finished marks the last bit of code that goes into the main menu (retro mode has been finished too).

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When loading a campaign level, a small additional UI is loaded into the scene. This can be hidden using the arrow button. Things are still WIP, especially there's a level tutorial and objectives description window missing. This will be made in the upcoming week.

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I've also overhauled the message system. So instead of messages appearing in lower middle of the screen, messages now appear in the shape of icons to the right of the screen. When hovering over them, the actual message can be seen. Clicking icons will open up a relevant window (like the budget window if your economy is poor) or transfer the camera to a building.

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Overall, things are progressing fairly well. I've had a few ideas for additional buildings that will be available only in the retro mode. These will be made in the upcoming week along with finishing up the campaign, retro mode and fleets. If I can manage those things, the game is essentially the Early Access version I had intended with the addition of a few extra buildings.

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Until next time!

 

Hello!

This week I've finally gotten around to fixing up the traffic system. Before I had set the amount to 2 times the amount of buildings in the city with a max limit of 100. This usually looks ok when a city is small, but once the amount of roads increases, the streets would start looking quite empty. I've now changed this to assign 1-3 cars per building depending on the type of building. Running this amount of cars is quite taxing on the city though. So I went the Truman show route halting cars and returning them to their home position as soon as they are out of view. Once they can be seen again, they start moving. This gives an impression of city streets with plenty of traffic.

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I've continued work on the campaign mode. All UI elements have now been implemented. There will be some further polish in the upcoming week and another round of overall UI polish later on.

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I've done more work on trains, ensuring that they can only travel between stations, and making sure they update their position sets once a change is made in to the vactrain system.

Atmo fleets are still not quite finished, but they are getting there. The movement is currently a bit strict looking, but I should get this to look better in the upcoming week. I hope to have a well fuctioning system up and running next week so that I can have some images and gifs.

I've now also implemented bridges. Currently only a plain bridge has been implemented, I intend to add more later on (after EA-release).

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Bridges allow players to tuck vactrain system away a bit. My intention is to add more functions like this as I keep developing the game.

The last remaining feature, the retro/"land" mode is currently also underway. Once the campaign is completely finished, I will round it up too. This mode will require a few extra buildings, so I will need to put in a lot of effort this upcoming week to finish the remaining items on my todo list. But the game will release fairly soon, which is exciting.

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Hello,
A bit more than a week to go before the game releases into Early Access!
It's been a pretty rough week due to a bunch of Unity related issues. Among them scenes corrupting requiring a lot of time to find the source of the issue and issues with colliders.
As such, some images this week will be a bit random.

One of the issues with colliders caused roads to suddenly stop working requiring a bit of rewriting of the code that checks if the road is connected to another road tile as well as the code that checks if buildings are connected to a road and what road network it is connected to. Not the kind of stuff that I like doing when I still have a few more things left to do before the game releases, but on the upside, it meant that I could also remove some ugly code and also improve load speeds a bit.

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I've started doing some last minute fine tuning to tax yields, upping yields from industry and commerce and lowering it a bit for residence. I'm hoping this evens out the yields a bit and incentivizes more planning.

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The campaign is now finished and tested. There are a few things that might need to be added into it post EA-release, but mostly regarding instructions etc. There are a few things that can perhaps be explained a bit better. Should there be time in the upcoming week, there will be some more polish added to it as well.

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Atmo fleets are now implemented. There's some minor work still needed for path finding, so that they don't fly through things. But they function as expected now. I will be adding some more bling to them to make them a bit more interesting.

https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1150840295933861888

The land mode is coming along nicely. I've made the necessary changes to the UI and started adding items to the mode. The buildings will be made this upcoming week. There will be a set of excavators to replace the atmospheric particle filtration plant, a sand collector and I'm also adding a wave power plant. The mode itself will be more fleshed out over time and it will eventually diverge a bit from the main modes of the game.

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There's been a tonne of work put into optimizing things and speeding things up in game as well as fixing music and texture imports. I'm hoping that the game will run well enough on target machines.

Next week will be the last pre EA devlog, so stay tuned for that. Here's a shot from an early campaign level:

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Hello!
Well, release into EA is just around the corner and the builds are now up, waiting to be launched on tuesday.

This week I've done some additional polish to the campaign, and added one of the retro modes. This retro mode is a "flooded Earth" type scenario, where resources are mined from small islands (mountain peaks).

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Instead of the particle filtration plant, in this mode there is instead a mine/excavator and a sand extractor:

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Initially, this mode doesn't play much differently from the rest of the game except builds are flat. What will be worked into the mode though is a greater emphasis on environmetal care and citizens will demand you treat the remainder of the environment with care.

I've started working on the future feature list for the game. There will some additional res/com/ind buildings of different sizes. These are being worked on currently. I'm also adding citizen representatives that will be assigned to buildings across the city and will advise you on things they need.

Moving forward, updates will mainly be biweekly so that I can focus more time on adding features and fixing issues.

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The game is now out in Early Access!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/779380/

 

Wow this is incredible!
Just been looking through all 4 pages at the progression and it's amazing to see.
How have you been developing this for? - Wasn't sure how long before the OP that you spent on this.
How many hours a week did you manage to put into this game?

Look forward to seeing it progress even further!

 

I started working on the game in august 2017, so a few months before the first post in the thread. Hard to say how much time per week, but I have a full time job as well, so I'd say at most 20-30h in general (more during vacations, less in stressed work weeks).

 

Hello!

So work with the game moves forward. In the current build that just launched (EA 0.12a) there are a bunch of fixes and new features:

Feature additions:
- Alternate versions for small scale residential, commercial and industrial buildings added.
- Building type view added.

General bugs and glitches fixed
- Block destruction was broken in the tutorial - fixed!
- Destruction always displayed in red.
- Flickering of destruction hologram minimized. There can still be minor flickering.
- Ghost messages from conglomerates and board of citizens should no longer be sent.
Changes based on player feedback:
- Rebindable keys added earlier, and expanded with rebindable mouse rotate and pan actions. NOTE! This resets player preferences, so you will need to rebind keys and set graphical options.
- Controls for panning and rotation changed. Panning is now a one button action

Other:
- Performance improvement in car movement system. Changes should improve performance of car movement significantly (around 30 %).
- Reorienting camera stops when player presses pan/rotate mouse button.
- Fixed bug where researched buildings were unlocked from start.
- The tips from the campaign have now been gathered and added into the econopedia under "general tips". More tips will be added along with additional text.
- Eye adaptation early implementation.

The small scale RCI buildings now have alternative versions:
Industry:

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Lower and middle class residences:

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Full residential set:

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Commerce:

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All of this to add a bit more variation. In a future release, probably around the end of september, the small scale RC buildings will be getting another density. So they will be able to grow into slightly bigger buildings with more residents and workers. This will add yet more variation.

For the upcoming full 0.12 version, scheduled for next weekend, there will be a wave power plant and wind power plant placed in water added into the retro mode. Currently, there is also an issue where two buildings not available in the retromode are researchable, this will be corrected in the upcoming version. I'm also looking into more camera control fixes, expanded tutorials and more help documentation.

 

Hello,
The latest build will be live in a bit! It features a bunch of additional features, some QoL improvements, UI fixes and some other things.
In the retromode, there's now an alternate version of the windfarm that can be built in the sea. Similarly, there's now also a wave power plant.
In the retro mode, the research for the centrifugal particle extractor has been replaced with research for the resource separator building. This building is available in the standard mode without research too.

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Features:
- Click/drag demolition.
- Windpower plant, seabased - Retromode.
- Wavepower plant, seabased - Retromode.
- Recycling centers now return small amounts of metal and sand.
- Separator building, all modes. Researchable in Retromode. Recycles trash and outputs a small amount of all base resources (metal, sand, carbon etc.).
- Goods crates now randomly spawn. If found they grant a reward. Currently missing some UI items displaying what has been found.
Performance:
- Fixed issue with controls settings always saving on window closing.
Controls
- Fix for camera panning reversing when letting go of mousebutton and moving the mouse pointer.
Bugs:
- Fix for laboratory not registering after load.
UI
- Close windows button (marked with x) added.
- Info button (marked with ?) added for each panel in game.
- Camera sensitivy slider reversed in options. Moving it to the right makes the camera floatier.
- Mine and sand extractor descriptions and names added for French, German, Russian and Spanish.
- Fixed some text sizes in russian.
- Fix for campign objectives UI blocking clicks.
- Property tax revenue per conglomerate added into local economy panel.
Other
- Research in retromode fixed to include and exclude buildings specific to mode.
- Research times cut by 10-50%.
- Rich presence expanded.

 

Hello!

First of all, I've updated the roadmap and added some additional items to it:
Some things have been implemented since the last roadmap, multi building destruction, rebindable keys etc.
Some of the items are given a more extensive description below.

August:
Goods tickets.
Additional tutorial work.

September:
Expanded set of small buildings, second density with alternates.
Mini zones (10 residential, 10 commercial, 6 industrial).
4 additional challenges.
Demand cooldowns.
Accepting bribe consequences.
Inflation. Interest rates, additional bonds options and currency depreciation.
Expanded policy.
Additional tutorial work.

October:
Cursed earth retromode scenario.
5 additional challenges.
Early iteration of laissez faire capitalism.
Changed trade system.

November:
Floating islands retromode scenario.
5 additional challenges.
Water blocks.
Early iteration of communism.
6th density for residential and commercial zones.

December:
Additional citizen board demands.
Additional conglomerate demands.
Citizen representatives.
Updated localizations for Spanish, French, Russian and German.

Goods tickets are an expansion on the current system where conglomerates sometimes ask to buy or sell goods to you. Like in the current system, tickets will be timed. Each ticket will contain a handful of resource types. To complete a ticket, you need to have all resources available.

Following the addition of the national bank building in the next update, the next step is to add inflation into the game. This will require a lot of work, as there will need to be separate sets of purchase and sales prices for each resource and an interest rate. A currency rate will be added as well, which will affect pricing and wages.

Mini zones are single family residential buildings, small business type lots like convenience stores and small industry. (Smallest square is the mini zone...)

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Atmocity currently incorporates a fairly complex simulation of what is commonly refered to as a mixed economy.
Mixed economies feature private enterprise, but also has public systems to cover up in areas where private enterprise might not be viable, or in areas where there is opposition to private business.
In Europe, for instance, we see private business in telecommuncations, manufacturing etc. Oftentimes, healthcare and education is completely or predominantely run by the state.
In Atmocity, the policy window along with taxes and welfare options can be used to adjust how mixed the economy is. But this adjustment is only marginal. In order to implement economic systems such as communism and laisse fair capitalism, more comprehensive changes need to be done to the core of the economic simulation.
The first step, which is a somewhat simpler affair, is to implement an early iteration of laissez faire capitalism. The plan is to have a very early and basic implementation of this in October, and have ongoing expansions on this and the policy system in general from then on. Communism is trickier to implement, but should see an early iteration implemented in November.

Mayors will be able to place water blocks to add more customization to their cities. This is planned for a November release.

By December I hope to catch up on translations for the game. The reason this is taking a backseat at the moment is because the above mentioned changes require a lot of new text. It's very time consuming to have only a handful of items translated at a time, rather than a big batch. So moving on new text will be in English, and then given a translation around a mid December release.

Obviously, if there are QoL requests, these will be added in for the upcoming release. There might also be some misses in the schedule, but hopefully, this should all have been implemented by the end of the year.

As for this week, there's been progress made on the 0.13 version, which among other things will add a few new buildings that play a role in the upcoming changes. Among them the customs house, which will unlock the long term trading contracts (unlike now when they are unlocked at all times). This marks the first step in expanding the functionality of trade in the game.

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Modifiers have been added into the game! Modifiers are currently found in loot boxes (free ones, not the icky kind) that spawn around the city randomly. Later on, this will also be awarded when finishing goods tickets. Modifiers are unique to the player, so they can be used in any city in free roam mode, campaign or retro mode. Below is how it currently looks. Like all UI it will get more work later on.

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I've continued adding more decorations into the game. This week I've added a type of wharf type decoration to spruce up those dull and grey foundation blocks:

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A national bank building is also in the works, this will mark the start of the implementation of proper inflation into the game. I'll also be adding a new water production building. This one will be a later stage water production building that isn't sensitive to polluting buildings, produces more water, but is more expensive and requires more resources.

 

I love your UI design.
One thing I would comment on is this screenshot

The mid UI panel is unclear to read. Too little contrast, as all are in blue/gray shade. Probably adding some contrast frames, around icons, would help to look at it.

Also, very top red / orange text is bad to read. Too low contrast.

 

Nice idea with the frames! Definitely adding!
As for the red text, I can adjust it and see if I find a red with more contrast (it's part of a gradient so all colors need to work). Thanks for the tips!

 

You are welcome.

Then only options are background under text, shadowing, or bordering around text letters.

In other words, when you desaturate image, you should be able to read every image and text clearly.


That not what you got atm

 

I think I'll try to go with a background, since the UI is also slightly see through, so in particular the sky affects the lettering. A slightly dark box surrounding the text should work quite well.

 

Hello,

Version 0.13 is uploading! Here's what's new:

New features:
- Customs house building -> in the next version this will unlock long term trade.
- National bank building -> in the next version this will unlock unlock bonds
- Super absorbent. A later stage water production building. More expensive, but produces more water and can be built near pollutant buildings without production penalty.
- Side decoration, to spruce up those concrete blocks.
- Modifiers implemented. The first batch of modifiers include increased tax revenue, increased production, lowered production costs among others. These are valid for 20 time cycles. Modifiers are saved on a per user basis, so they can be collected in one city and used in another with the exception of super challenges. Building info may be off when mods are activated, this will be fixed in the next version.
- First challenge added. Challenges are tricky scenarios that will require a lot of planning and skill to complete.

Visual:
- Day/Night cycle adjusted to hide some of the TAA ghosting.

Construction:
- Temporary blocks now autodestruct also in paused mode.
- Temporary blocks can be demolished.
- Parks and decorations were missing prices - fixed.

Controls:
- Rotation can now be performed on either mouse or keyboard, rebindable in the options menu.
- Fixed issue of accidentally anchoring to buildings when rotating view.

UI:
- Crates now display icon of reward.
- Added background to text in upper stats bar to increase contrast and readability.
- Tidied up the controls tutorial and added a few more control items to it.
- Objectives are now hidden when using visibility modes. Unhidden when opening panels.
- UI panels location moved.

Other:
- Two new achievements, found crates and challenges finished (this one can't be done yet, as there are not enough challenges atm, but soon!).
- Increased zones' road reach slightly, allowing small scale zones to be packed more densely.
- Increased number of active trade sales/purchases from 5 to 20 each.
- Electronics plant production yield increased.
- Tweaked density check that allows buildings to grow to the next density.
- New basic building practice tutorial - humble beginnings. Practice makes perfect tutorial will be back in the next update, but then as a more in depth tutorial.
- Objective skip bug in campaign fixed.

As can be seen, goods tickets were not implemented this version. This is due to prioritising further tutorial improvements and additions based on feedback. They should be in with the next version.

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The major additions this time around are challenges. Currently only one challenge has been added. Challenges are tricky scenarios, similar to the campaign levels, but way more difficult. Often they require some clever solutions both in terms of policy to make money and maximizing the space available.

On the subject of tutorials, the old "basic" tutorial has been replaced with a simpler one that is more direct in how to get a city going. For the next version, another more in depth tutorial will be added too.

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I continue to tweak controls and systems. This week I've changed the anchoring mechanic, as well as adding camera rotation to the keyboard as well. I've noticed that most movements can be performed with WASD and panning and rotation with the mouse, which will be added into the movement tutorial as well as a hint.

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There is now also a later stage water production building. It's more expensive, but produces more water and can be placed in dirty industrial areas with no penalty.

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The next version, 0.14, will not add as many new features, but rather focus on changing things that are already in the game. Primarily the trade mechanic, which will be expanded quite a bit, and there will be an addition of timed delay when trading directly as well as a purchase/sales price that later on will depend on the strength of your currency.

There will also be a focus on optimization of systems, old and new. As well as fixing minor bugs and issues that I've noticed.

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Last screen is gorgeous.

While you have indeed improved appearance of the text,
My eyes have focused on other things.
My little concern is, about Right bottom icons.
They are nice, with details. But I am not sure, how they will be handled on lower resolution screens?
Will these details make them less apparent?
If I look at these Icons on the forum picture, without clicking and enlarging, They are not so clean anymore. Meaning is lost. Sure, maybe that wont be the typical, or lowest resolution that players will play. But Even twice as, still make it blurry.

How is handled UI scalability, I would ask?

 

Thanks! Yeah, I found adding a background field to the text was the best way to go. Otherwise you get issues depending on the background etc.
Scalability is a good point. I've not noticed an issue with this neither on desktop or laptop regardless of resolution. This could possibly be an issue with the screenshots (taken in engine and not at full res). I will check it out a bit more on my rubbish laptop and see what it looks like. There are some icons that I'm in the process of scaling up a bit though (and did in the latest version a bit as well), since they are a bit undersized.

 

Hello!

Work on the next update is on-going! This update will primarily focus on expanding trade and a basic addition of currency and inflation. In this version, the "mini"-sized zones will also be added. These are single family homes, small business and small industry. They only have one density, so they won't hold many people (4-6 each), but can be used to fill small leftover areas or add variation to bigger neighborhoods.

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The trade overhaul is in the works. Mainly, this week I've worked on separating the bonds related functionality from the trade panel. What is currently known as the resource panel has also been added into the trade panel. This should prove more logical once it's finished. Trade and overall resource management will be under one panel, and joining bonds will be currency, currency depreciation and interest rate setting. More on the latter next week.

Trade functionality has also been changed a bit. First, what has been refered to as "direct trade" has been removed. You can no longer buy resources and instantly receive them. Now, you can instead place an order of 500 units of a resource and it will be delivered over time. This, like the direct trade, costs extra. To enable trading contracts, a customs house has to be built. Trading contracts work the same way as before, except you will now be able to set indefinite contracts that expire only when you cancel them. This will allow players to build wealth using trade in a much more natural and less time consuming way.
Trade yields have also been raised. This means you can expect higher costs when purchasing resources, but also higher revenue when selling.

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Another feature that is in the works, is that unlike before, each resource will be given its own demand function. Before, the pricing on a resource depended on the global economy and on how much you had traded in recent time. Now, there are four demand functions - raw materials, building materials, foods and consumer goods - that determine the demand of the respective groups. On top of this, a random demand offset will be added to each resource. Like before, the amount you have traded will also affect demand slightly.

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Inflation is also making its way into the game. This means cities will now be given its own currency that needs to be managed. Generally, things that are isolated to the city itself will not be affected much by the strength of the currency. Building maintenance costs will remain the same, as will tax revenue. Where the presence of a currency will mostly be evident is in trade, where a strong currency allows you to buy resources cheaply, and a relatively weak currency will be benefitial when exporting. Wages and production output will be affected slightly be the strength of the currency.

Overall, these changes will add a new layer of complexity to the game, but with the additional help documentation I'm working on and after giving it a go, I think most people will find it nifty.

I've also continued work on controls, tutorials and help texts. More on this next week, as well as more on trade and currency.

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Hello!

Work on 0.14 progresses. Quite a few things remain, but a lot of things are falling into place.

As mentioned in last week's log, I was working on adding separate demand functions for each resource.This is now fully implemented. Demand is set in two steps: each group of resources has a demand function. The groups are raw materials, building materials, foods and consumer resources (like eletronics or plastic). These run along a random sin curve similar to how the global economy works. The other step, is that buying and selling large quantities affects demand. There's also a bit of randomness implemented to make things develop independetly on a per resource level.

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The demand curves will be able to be toggled on and off (in fact they can be already, but the picture is from before that ). All these things combined, trade can now be part of a player's strategy to make more money.
Goods tickets, which have been mentioned before are also in the works. These are requests for three resources (one from each of the four groups). If you can deliver them in time, you will be given a resource or modifier as a reward. Delivering on them also boosts conglomerate happiness, which boosts output. Here's the trade panel along with one goods ticket (work in progress, thus a bit messy). As can be seen, you can now also add trades that are not timed, so they will run until cancelled.

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The mini size zones are also in the works. Industry and residences are now finished. You can now fill those small left over spots with some small single family homes.

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I've come across some performance issues, primarily in the new click n drag demolish function. This was a recent discovery, so it has not been fixed yet, but I'm hoping to have it fixed for 0.14.

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Other than that, there's a bunch of smaller things done, like the addition of a restore default controls button in the options menu as well as an FOV slider.
In the upcoming week I will be finishing the goods tickets, working on currency, inflation and interest rates for an early implementation of this as well as finishing up the mini sized commercial zones and a bunch of other smaller fixes and additions.

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Hello!

Version 0.14 is now live.

Changelog:

Features:
- Trade overhauled. If you had active trades in your save file, then these will disappear. There have been quite a few changes made to the underlying systems (demand, pricing etc.) so there may be glitches!
- Resource demand. Global demand for goods now affect pricing. Global demands are divided into four groups, raw materials, building materials, foods and consumer goods. Demand for each resource follows the group demand, but with a random offset.
- Goods tickets are in. These are bigger orders for resources that give rewards like resources or modifiers.
- Small family homes/businesses/industry implemented.
- Local economy factor added. Ensure that conglomerates are kept happy (don't demolish their buildings, deliver goods via goods tickets and keep taxes on a fair level) to ensure that production of consumer goods and services are kept high.
- First iteration of inflation and currency value added. There will be more additions to this in the upcoming few weeks. Initially it won't affect gameplay much, instead values are fixed. National bank building required to unlock bonds. The UI will see several changes in the upcoming few weeks.
- Corkscrew pieces for vactrack added. Icons will be updated in the next version.
- Because issuing bonds now requires a National bank building (which is available at 10k population) when you reach minuscredits you are allowed one emergency loan to get things going.

UI:
- UI performance increased.
- Open objective panel on start of campaign level.
- Fixed tutorial text panel being offscreen on certain resolutions.
- UI can now be hidden.
- Fix for hint texts for windows being cut off.
- Updated hint texts for trade to accomodate new trade and bonds options.
- Food production tier added to econopedia input/output info.

Minor bugs/glitches/fixes/changes:
- Long term trade bug where resources would not be sold or purchased fixed.
- Fixed missing texture for medium sized industrial building (mid density).
- Spawn conditions changed for crates. Crates only spawn once the city has grown to a specific size.
- Fixed issue with challenge achievement being granted if five campaign levels had been completed (due to loading the wrong data).
- Mid tier industry bug fixed. Lack of firedepartment penalty counted twice.
- Performance when demolishing several buildings at a time improved. More work on this is required.
- Carbon power plant carbon consumption lowered (8 -> 4).

Localisation:
- Brushed up on german achievement localisation.
- Adjusted a few achievement names slightly.

Controls:
- Possible fix for camera moving long distances when there's an FPS hickup. More work will be done on this.
- Reset to default controls option added in optionsmenu (bottom button that says "Allow tilt", reference to the wrong text element, will be fixed for the next update).
- Fix for camera jerkiness and spinning out of control when looking straight up or down when tilt i disabled (which it is by default).

Tutorials:
- Updated movement tutorial.
- Added basic production into the humble beginnings tutorial.

Other:
- Reverted to TAA from SMAA.
- Goods requirements for schools dropped.
- Base trade prices increased. Resources will cost more, but also allow for greater profits when trading.
- Achievement "Dopey" renamed.
- Added field of view option in options menu.
- Added some atmofleet bling.

The central change of this version is an overhaul of trade. This was initially scheduled for mid october, but it seemed vital to get this implemented earlier to make sense of other upcoming changes (currency, inflation etc.).
Goods tickets are also finally in. Completing these will grant resources and modifiers and also make conglomerates happy, which boosts production for a while. Tweaks in the reward structure will be made over the upcoming few updates.

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On the subject of currency and inflation, a first, very early iteration has now been implemented. Currently these additions do not affect gameplay much as the values input are fairly consistent. As such, there shouldn't be any major surprises with stuff like sudden onset of hyper inflation. Since currency and inflation is tied in with bonds, the national bank building is required to unlock bonds. This means it's not possible to loan money in cities with less than 10k population (this is the prereq. for the national bank building). As an extra precaution, an emergency loan is granted to the player once, if credits go below 0.

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I've continued working on tutorials and controls. The changes to the controls are mostly to ensure that what is there functions well and behaves the way one might expect. There's been a rotation issue when the camera faces straight up or down that has now been fixed. This should prevent sudden jerkiness and unexpected behaviour.
The tutorials have been expanded to include some more information. The controls tutorial has been cleaned up a bit more and the combination of spinning and panning has been added as a hint. This is a movement option I find is one of the most efficient ways of getting around in the game along with just panning and using WASD.
The Humble beginning tutorial has been given a small building materials tutorial. In one of the upcoming updates in october, I will be adding a more intermediate tutorial that delves deeper into production and other resource and trade related topics.

There are some QoL improvements in this version too, FOV slider, the ability to hide the HUD, being able to reset controls to default (although the I missed the button text element on this one... d'oh!).
I've taken time to also make some minor brush ups here and there. The atmofleets now have some additional bling with trails and particle effects when landing and taking off.

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The vactrack system now also has a slightly inclined turn piece that can be used to make cork screw like tracks.

Make sure to take motion sickness pills before getting on this commute.

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As can be seen, there are a few items that were initially planned for this version that didn't make it in. The mini commercial and industrial buildings among others. This was a tradeoff for getting the trade overhaul in earlier.
Moving forward, the next few updates will be posted weekly, starting the 29th of september, then october 6th and october 13th. These updates will be smaller, and focused a bit more on consolidating feature additions made up until now. So they will be less feature heavy and more geared towards fixing issues and improving newer features.

 

Hello!

This week's update will be rather brief, as there's not been a whole lot of visible progress. I'm working towards improving performance in some of the newer features as well as fixing some existing bugs.

Among the few new things added are the mini-size commercial zones. So now you can fill in those left over areas with commercial zones. As they won't grow into bigger buildings, they don't provide that many workplaces for your citizens, but they also don't have many demands.

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The mini-size industrial buildings have also been added:

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The bonds and currency panel is in development still. I've started adding in the option to set interest rates, which affects inflation. Currently, the whole system is still in the works, so it is currently not generally necessary to make adjustments.

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With the ongoing development on currency, trading prices are now affected by the value of currency. This means that when the currency value is low, it is expensive to import goods, but beneficial to export. When the currency has a high value, imports will be relatively cheaper, but exports will suffer.

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As mentioned, focus this week has been on optimization and bug fixes. A bug that has been around quite some time is that buildings would sometimes not display the correct amount of production. This should now be fixed, and the entire system calculating production and consumption has been optimized and simplified a bit.
Another long lived bug is that buildings would sometimes incorrectly receive a penalty for a nearby bad building when loading cities. This has finally been fixed.

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Hello!

This week marks one year of posting (near) weekly devlogs in this kind of five image + text format! So lots of progress has been made I feel. By this time last year I was working my way towards getting a stable enough build for Dreamhack Winter. I had just cut the block size and started adding roads, the carbon pressurization plant and police station buildings had made it into the game and I was also working on merging blocks to create a shadow casting volume to keep down the amount of shadow casters.
Although there's still a lot to be done in the game, it's nice to see that it has come as far as it has.
The devlog can be seen here for those interested in a blast from the past: https://www.indiedb.com/games/atmocity/news/progress-update-5-atmocity

To update on current matters though. This week has been almost solely focused on squashing bugs and optimizing the game. With the amount of new things added over the past few months, it's been high time to take a step back on feature additions and trying to fix some old and annoying bugs.

Change log:

- City hall building added.
- Halloween prop added. More time specific props will be added over time.
- New vactrack icons.

- Fixed bug where sometimes loading a city from the main menu would stall.
- Fix for bug where roadtiles on bridges would not connect to road network on loaded cities.
- Fix for bug where destructed bridges would leave surrounding road tiles unaffected.
- Fix for bug where buildings would sometimes not connect to roads when loading cities. This might still occur in rare situations.
- Bug where notices would not move out smoothly fixed.
- Fix for building props not being removed correctly when demolishing.
- Further optimization when demolishing several buildings at the same time.
- Minor slowdown from sound stopping when demolishing a building playing an ambient sound fixed.
- Performance when deregistering cars when owner building has been demolished improved.
Known issues: Traffic is being optimized and a few bugs are being ironed out, so there's unexpected behaviour at times.

One issue has been with bridges not registering road tiles properly and messing up buildings registering to a road network. There's still an issue that sometimes buildings will still not connect to a proper road network, but it should be all but fixed now.

Here's an image of my test build, fittingly featuring lots of bridges:

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The city hall building has been added. Currently it doesn't do anything except swallow some mid skilled workers, but it will be given a proper function fairly soon. As can be seen in the following images, I've also added a bit of a halloween theme (temporary of course):

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Another bug that has been fairly tricky to find a solution to was that sometimes cities would not load, instead the game would freeze on the loading screen. This has finally been fixed. I've also found some sources of performance issues, among them fading out sounds when buildings are demolished and deregistering cars that belong to demolished buildings. These issues are now fully fixed, which cuts down lag when destroying buildings, especially when destroying many at a time. I've also managed to fix the multi destruct bug that was particularly noticable when destroying many mini zones.

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Traffic still shows off some odd behaviour, which will be given some time next week. Hopefully I can improve performance further too, although it is pretty performant as is. Next week I will also go back to working on inflation, currency and wages, getting a proper implementation in. This will be a stepping stone towards adding some new policy options and adding more economic management options. Until next time!

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Hello!

The new build will be up soon! Like the previous two weeks, I have focused most of the time this week on fixing recurring issues with performance and also bugs, but I have also managed to get the second density of mid scale residentials in:

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This is the maximum density for the mid scale residential zones. They generally demand less utilities and aren't as demanding when it comes to nearby buildings like parks, schools and clinics, so they can be a good way to fill out narrow areas with little room for anything else.

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The above image shows the low, lower mid and mid tiers mixed in with some full scale buildings.

On the performance side of things, I've finally managed to resolve the bug that caused major slowdown when buildings grow and in particular when many buildings are destroyed at once. One of the issues was checking for nearby buildings. Way back, all buildings were on the same layer, so buildings were fetched and then the type was tested. If a residential building was next to an industrial building, it would get an efficiency penalty (fewer residents). Over time, buildings have been separated to several layers, but all layers have still been checked. However, residential and commercial buildings (for example), never need to check for other residential or commercial buildings. So depending on the type of building performing the vicinity check, layers are adapted so only relevant buildings are checked. This speeds things up dramatically, as fewer colliders need to be checked.
Also, this is all now performed with NonAlloc, to speed things up further.

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Another improvement using NonAlloc, is when buildings have either been placed, or grown. When checking for a nearby road tile to "attach" to, buildings now use NonAlloc, preventing FPS-hickups further.
There's also been a recurring issue with buildings registering a nearby "bad" building, despite there not being one. This should now have been fixed completely.

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I've also tweaked economy and found a few areas of optimization. In doing so I also found an issue where, specifically industry, could get efficiency levels that were too low and also too high (in the range of 6 to 300%). This has now been fixed and industry will rarely go below 60% unless an input (water, power or labour) is missing. Further tweaks to economy will be done in the upcoming version.

I've also fixed a bug where loading cities was bugged out on Mac, and while doing so also found a null ref that was fixed on Mac as well.

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As for overall progress, I am slightly behind on inflation, currency and wages, due to a heavy focus on bug hunting and optimization. I do think, however, that I will be all but caught up come next update!

 

Hello!

This week has seen a mix of optimizations, bug fixes and additional features.

First off, the second density for medium scaled commercial zones is now finished complete:

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I've continued work on inflation, currency and wages, finishing up on the UI implementation and additional functionality. There's still some ways to go, but it should be ready for next week's update to version 0.15.

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I've also put more work into the demand functions of individual resources to add more variation between resources within the same group.

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With the complete implementation of wages, currency and wages, there will now be a few extra policies added. Among them universal basic income and fraud monitoring. I have also added two new taxes - wealth tax and financial transfers tax. Since these two taxes will add additional routes for the player to add to the city revenues, residential tax revenue will be adjusted down a bit, specifically for middle and upper class residents.

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I've continued working on camera movement, and have now added a planar movement option. This means that pushing forward/backward will move the camera over the current plane instead of relative to the camera rotation. This means that the camera remains stable in height. To lower and raise the camera, the player can either pan using the mouse or use keyboard inputs. Overall I find this new movement mode works very well.

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Lastly, there have been a bunch of building connection fixes and bugs squished. There full extent of these fixes will be posted next weekend, as the new update is up!

 

Hello!

Version 0.15 is live and in it, fall has finally arrived to the floating cities of Atmocity!


Aside from the fall theme, this version fixes a bunch of performance issues and bugs, but also adds the final set of buildings planned for the initial stage of the Early access period. On the subject of plans, I am slightly behind on the road map, primarily due to adding QoL-improvements from requests, but also due to certain aspects of planned system additions being slightly trickier than expected. I expect to make up for the delays in december, when the overall work load is lower. All in all, the roadmap for 2019 should be completed along with a bunch of unplanned feature additions.

So what is new and fixed in 0.15?

New major features:
- Second density for medium scale commercial zones added.
- New challenge level added - new challenges will be added in more frequently moving forward.
- Additional tutorial added - basic production.
- Additional policy added - Financial stability. Includes universal basic income, fraud monitoring among others.
- Wealth and financial transactions taxes added.
- Planar movement mode added. This keeps the forward/backwards movement aligned to the height the camera is currently on. This is on by default, so if you are used to the relative movement scheme, this can be changed in the controls options.
- Offers/demands/bribes are now monitored for a while so that a tax or policy can't be changed directly after accepting them. If tax is raised after accepting a demand to lower it, you will incur a happinesspenalty.

New small features:
- Production buildings can now be turned off.
- Added vizualisation mode to find unconnected, unpowered, unwatered or disabled buildings.
- Number of available trade slots increased.
- Accepting bribes and getting caught now affects citizen happiness (which causes people to move etc.).
- Pollution generated at 100% efficiency now listed under output in info panel for buildings.
- Icons in building and cost info panels sorted.
- Added loading icon in save/load UI.
- Avenues can now be built to directly replace ordinary roads.

Adjustments:
- Removed high skilled labour requirement for electronics factory.
- Health otput from clinic and hospital increased.
- Service production of medium scale commercial buildings lowered.
- Residential tax revenue adjusted.
- Effect of labour policy lowered.
- Changed road building to always be allowed on blocks, earlier building roads near the edge of the city could be prevented incorrectly.
- Music ducking removed.
- Adjusted the time it takes for industry to adjust production after a resource is missing or after the economyto takes a hit.
- Removed clamping to allow zero production if all inputs are missing.
- Demand curves for individual resources tweaked.
- Unemployment and labour shortage effect on wages tweaked.

Major bug fixes:
- Flickery values and connection issues should now be almost completely resolved.
- Fix for camera jerkiness during fps-dips.
- Building type view fixed.
- Fix for production sometimes being displayed incorrectly in building info panel.
- Fix for certain production buildings working although there is no labour.

Minor bug fixes:
- Fixed Saving text blocking construction.
- Fix for cars stalling.
- Fix for cars "randomly" throwing null refs.
- Changed consumption priority order for absorbent and lots to prevent deadlocking when water or electricity production is low.
- Fixed hide HUD icon being hidden when enabling HUD with escape button.
- Sell/purchase buttons now locked when reached the max amount of trade contracts.
- Fixed notice on hover text getting stuck halfway.
- Size of colliders for medium scale residential lots adjusted.
- Size of colliders for full scale residential lots adjusted.
- Collider position of density 2 of medium scale residences fixed.
- Collider issue for parks and plaza fixed preventing overlapping placement.
- Fixed issue where rotating buildings would sometimes cause a slight clip in building footprint.
- Fix null ref error occuring when destroying Correctional center.
- Fix for missing texture on medium scale high tech industry building.
- Fix for roads not compiling properly on loading city with only roads.
- Global happiness, happiness penalties and conglomerate embargos are now saved properly.
- Fix for tax revenue "sticking" even if production seizes in goods industry.
- Employment numbers clamped to -100% to 100%.
- Unemployment insurance welfare system can no longer generate income (of course!).

Known issues:
Vehicles sometimes taking shortcuts and spam spawning. Visual glitch only, this will be fixed in the next update along with a bigger traffic optimization.

As can be seen, there's a heavy focus on addressing issues. Some of the issues fixed arose after optimizing the connection system. There have also been some calculation errors and issues with displaying the correct amount of production under certain circumstances. These should hopefully be a thing of the past now.


Of the new features, the medium scale, second density commercial buildings are one. Another is the addition of new taxes and policies and a bunch of tweaks to tax revenue and policy costs.
Most notably, residential tax revenue has been tweaked a bit (down) to accomodate changes made in how wage levels are calculated (should generally be higher now, meaning more tax revenue). The newly added wealth and financial transactions taxes can also be used to gain additional revenue when finances are tight.


In line with requests, I've also added another movement mode refered to as "planar movement". This moves the camera forward/backward along the horizontal axis, instead of moving it relative to camera rotation. There's now also a basic production tutorial and a new challenge level.



Production and commercial buildings have now been changed to require labour input. Before, some production of goods and services would still occur even if there was no labour available, but now these buildings must have at least some labour to function properly. Logic being that you wouldn't get your hair cut with no barber or taxes done with no accountant.


Among the smaller QoL additions in this version, there's the ability to turn certain production buildings off. There's also a building status view to check for unconnected, unpowered, unwatered or disabled buildings.
There's also been quite a few optimizations done to avoid stuttery framerates (which sometimes was an issue when building stuff or when buildings grew).

 

These red trees gives some life to the city.

 

Hello!

Devlog is a day late because I ran out of time to write up the log yesterday. Anyhow..

The past week was pretty code heavy, so images in the post are random shots from the test build I have going currently. It's a city of 150k citizens. I use this city to test performance at larger scale.

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There are a few issues that I have found, and managed to incorporate into the update posted on saturday. One such issue is that buildings, when a city grows, would sometimes spam new vehicles and not removing them correctly when buildings grew. This would cause massive amounts of cars with poorer performance as a result. Another performance issues found and that will be fixed for the upcoming 0.16 version, is that buildings registering road connections gets rather slow when a city is of this size. I've managed to improve performance a bit in the saturday update by removing unnecessary connections being made at times. More work is required though.

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I've also managed to find some obscure issues, among them the calculation for the financial transactions tax being based on services available AFTER consumption rather than before. This tax was also not generating enough revenue.

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Progress in adding new features last week was unfortunatly quite slow. The main new feature I'm working on is the addition of water blocks to allow for building water ways and adding lakes. Currently, there is nothing to show here as only the code has been written and I'm still at the boxing stage. But hopefully this will be available in the 0.16 release, if not, it will be in the version after.

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In the saturday update I did manage to get a new challenge added. This one is a bit easier than the previous ones, but still does require quite a bit of planning.
As for the 0.16 version, it will be available sunday the 17th of november!

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Hello,

Missed yesterday's planned devlog because I was on the road. Upcoming devlogs should be posted on sundays as usual.

Work on systems continues, so like before, images this week are a bit random.

For the update due live on sunday, the game will have been moved to the latest version of Unity to allow an upgrade of SSAA and atmospheric scattering. This means there are some performance benefits in the upcoming version.

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I've also worked on some other optimizations, among them when vehicles get the position of the next road node. There's still more work required to get this up and running fully, but it's getting closer to being finished. I've also attempted to fix an issue with buildings checking their connections when the city is loaded. Doing so when the city is large bogs down the game quite a lot but briefly. I'm trying out a fix for this, but the drawback is that it takes longer for connections to get set up. Hopefully I will find a good balance for this for the update.

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I've also worked on the connectivity and calculation threads. I discovered that the calculation thread specifically was getting very slow on my current large scale build. A city of 150k citizens was clocking in at 300 ms, which gets too close to the calculation cycle time when the game is running at 8x speed. Luckily I have found fixes for these issues and now the same calculation cycle runs in 20 ms. I've also improved how the results of the connectivity and calculation threads are handled. There has been an issue where values have flickered at times, this was due to some values being modified in a thread, while also being used outside. This has now been properly adressed, and there should not be issues with this anymore.

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I've continued work on inflation, and for starters only two simulation modes will be added. One is the default "no monetary policy" setting that the city will run with if there is no national bank. When a national bank is built, this will switch to inflation targeting. I'm still working on the ability to auto set rates to compensate for inflation and to keep inflation stable. This will be important because inflation now properly affects wages negatively, which means you get lower tax revenue from citizens. There's still work left to do, but it should be ready for the update and then tweaked in versions afterwards.

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I've also gotten water blocks going. Unfortunatly it's not certain I can get these finished for the update, since they are proving a bit more difficult than first expected. There's also a performance issue in the water shader I had intended to use, so I will have to write a new one or modify the one I have, which will take time. It should all be finished fairly soon though - fingers crossed.

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Hello!

Version 0.16 will be live fairly soon. The changes compared to 0.15 are:

Changelog V0.15 -> V0.16

Halloween has come and gone! The pumpkin props have now been put back into storage.

Major features:
- New challenge added.
- Political position map added. This will be expanded upon over time as new policies are added.
- Cocoa, coffee, tea and processed drinks resources added. These cannot currently be grown/manufactured, this will be added in upcoming versions along with adding these into the citizen demands.
- Inflation now implemented. When there is no national bank, inflation will fluctuate more and affect wages more. Once the national bank is built, an inflation targeting mode is automatically applied (other modes will be added in the future) allowing players to set rates to combat inflation and get stable wages. The system will be tweaked over time as more things are added.
- Canals removed from transportation menu. This has not been active since the early alpha. Once the water blocks are implemented, the canals would be out of date anyway.

Minor features:
- Added challenge difficulty indicators in the main menu.
- Input/output chapter of econopedia finished.
- Particle effects turn off when a building is turned off.
- Autorate mode added in bonds and currency panel. This will automatically target 2% inflation. It allows players to not have to micromanage inflation levels.

Balancing:
- Carbon added as starting resource in free roam.
- Carbon added as starting resource in all campaign levels. This was necessary since carbon was made a vital resource for the carbon power plant (otherwise it forces an import of carbon before the city can start growing).
- Financial transactions tax was based on services available AFTER consumption, making it zero if all services were consumed. Now it's based on total services produced.
- Financial transactions tax revenue increased.
- Waste calculation adjusted.
- Tax revenues (res, com, ind) adjusted.
- Wage formation adjusted (this affects residential tax revenue as well).
- Trade yields increased. This is a response to move revenue creation from taxes and promote more trade. Trade commisions also increased.
- Cost of a large set of policies adjusted down. Effects have also been adjusted.

Major bug fixes:
- Fix for research effects not being incorporated in building info.
- Fix for cars behaving oddly.
- Fixed vactrains not showing up when loading a city.
- Added fix for buildings sometimes spamming new connections to roads although they already have one. This improves performance when buildings grow in large cities. There will be more of a performance improvement added to this in the next update.
- Cars now get removed properly when home building is destroyed.
- Fix for trade sometimes not registering.
- Fixed issue with completed challenge levels sometimes writing to number of finished campaign levels.

Minor bug fixes:
- Fixed issues with challenge/campaign trade objectives.
- Fixed challenge/campaign trade value being summed up incorrectly.
- Fixed incorrect on click sound for forestry.
- Fix for research progress bar bugging out when high skilled labour is completely missing.
- Fix for bug where bridges could be built under water.
- Avenues now can't be built over already existing avenues.
- Added destruct holograms for downward/upward vactrack bends.
- Fixed roads not getting street lights when built next to residences etc.
- Fix for roads not displaying street lights on load.
- Fix for double foundations being placed at start.
- Tool tips in trade panel fixed.
- Currency value and inflation value now saved properly.

Other:
- Resource requirement calculation optimized (this runs on a thread so it doesn't make performance better, but prevents issues of values not being calculated in time when the city is large).
- Resource calculation thread made safer. Should now be more stable and not register flickery values.
- SSAA and atmospheric scattering updated. This should improve performance.
- Updated Unity to version 2019.2.

As can be seen, yet again, a lot of time has been spent fixing bugs, improving peformance and adjusting balancing- This is mostly by choice, but also due to a very high work load at the moment. Meaning it has been difficult to find time to properly implement new features. Luckily my current day time job contract is coming to an end, after which my work load will be more normal and I will be able to catch up on items that have been delayed. I still project that I will catch up on the delayed feature additions in december and that the new road map will be live mid to late december.

As for what is in this version specifically:
We see the addition of a food more food resources - cocoa, coffee, tea and processed drinks. These will complement the current cereal, legume, fruit and processed food resources. These will come into play o get buildings to grow to the third or fourth density. Currently the resources are tradable, but not actually used by residents and they cannot be produced. Production facilities will come in the upcoming few versions. Once production facilities are in, the demand trees will be modified so that residents will start demanding the resources.

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I've also started adding the political position map. This shows players where they are positioned on a gal-tan map according to the policy currently implemented in the city. This takes into account tax levels and policies selected in the policy panel. This will be built upon further and lead up to the implementation of "edge" political cases such as communism and laissez faire capitalism.

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This version features a tonne of adjustments of tax revenue etc. First of all, revenue from residents has been lowered slightly and is now fully relative to wage levels. Wages are affected by inflation, so if you run a city with high inflation, wages will drop in real value, meaning tax revenue drops too. Currently there is no hyper inflation or similar. Instead inflation is clamped to max 15%. Commercial and industrial taxes have been tweaked as well but are not affected by wage levels (except industry and commerce will run at lower efficiency when wages are very high).

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Costs and effects of policy have also been changed. Mainly health and education policies have been changed, lowering costs and increasing their effects.
Financial tax and wealth tax revenue has been increased a bit and trade yields and commision have been increased (by quite a lot). This way trade becomes a more viable method to combat deficits.

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To simplify the early game, carbon has been added as a starting resource on every campaign level and free roam level.
There have also been a fair amount of bug fixes, some major fixes and some minor. A bigger fix is that "flickering" values should now be a thing of the past, since the entire calculation thread has been made more solid. I've also managed to speed this thread up significantly which prevents value update ticks from being stalled when they wait for the thread to complete, which was the case in my current large test city.

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Hello!

Another slightly delayed devlog, due to running out of time to do a write-up yesterday.

The past week, progress has been slow as I'm finishing up some remaining work at my day job. After this week, I will return to my previous position, which means more normal working hours and a more normal work load which will mean more dev time.

I've primarily fixed minor bugs and performance issues and continued working on the political map and policies. I've also added another challenge level, seen below.

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I'm in the process of adding information on what policy affects what into the econopedia. Here you will also be able to see how each policy affects your position on the political map.

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I've been polishing traffic further, and am working on a shortcut for when a building registers a road tile as it's road connection tile. This is needed to speed this process up when a city has many registered road tiles (ie, in a big city). The performance hit currently isn't huge, but a fix is still required to be able to increase the maximum atmosphere size.

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I've also continued work to fix traffic from glitching out. There is currently an issue where if a road is destroyed, traffic will still spawn from that point and shortcut to a specific road tile. Hopefully I have a fix for this going now.

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In the upcoming version 0.17, I'm hoping to have added some additional policies and also added locking conditions for some of them, so that some can only be enabled once certain buildings have been placed. After that, I will start adding policies that are only enabled once a player reaches edge cases, such as communism and laissez faire capitalism.

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More information on what will go into 0.17 and the prospective release date will follow later this week.

 

Hello!

Work on 0.17 continues. This version will be quite heavy on optimization and bug fixes, as well as additions to the policy side of the game. First off, there will be additional policies to choose from generally. I'm also working towards getting the "extreme" policies in as well. Once a player has moved their position towards to corners of the gal-tan map, this will enable a set of additional policies. If the player moves far enough along a left and authoritarian direction, they will unlock communism and related policies. Right and authoritarian unlocks fascism. Liberal left unlocks social libertarian and liberal right unlock laissez faire capitalism. Implementing these will be gradual since they have rather significant effects on some of the core systems in the game.

In the move towards these new additions I've started clarifying the role of different policies in the econopedia further:

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As new policy is added, the info in the econopedia will grow as well. Similarly, the policy selection UI has been updated. To make it easier to navigate I've added a menu structure, so that items that are of no interest can be hidden away. I've also added the policy's political direction to help guide the player how the policy affects the position on the political map. Along with a slew of new tutorials being added in the upcoming few updates, policy and policy implications will be a theme for a tutorial as well.

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I've continued working on traffic, fixing both performance and glitching. I've all but fixed the issue of cars shortcutting to off locations when roads are demolished. Cars resetting now also fetch their locations via a thread, further improving traffic performance.

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I've also managed to get health and education policies incorporated into the building information display, so that the effects of establishing a specific policy is more apparent. I've also increased the effects of these policies quite a bit and made additional adjustments to costs.

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In the upcoming version, I hope to catch up on adding challenge levels. Hopefully I can have a solid 10 challenges in the game. The last two additions are quite difficult, which should offset the simpler challenge levels added earlier on.

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The next version should be live december 15th, which is a bit later than I had hoped. This is due to the heavy work load recently, but given solid dev time in the upcoming two weeks there should be a solid version ready.

 

Hello!

This entry will be rather short, as I'm battling the cold of the decade.

Next weekend, the 0.17 version of the game will go live. This version mixes optimization, bug fixes and new features. Primarily it features a finalization of the base set of policies (more will be added later on, but there are now enough for continued development). This means, there is now a foundation on which to build the implementation of edge cases that I have advertised earlier. When policy has been pushed far enough in one direction, it will allow players to enable specific political ideologies that come with some bonuses and penalties and will offer up new playing styles.

The newly added policy features a bunch of family life and social policies:

To illustrate where a political ideology can be adopted, here is where enough progressive policy has been enacted to (once it's implemented) enable socialism:


Implementing the ideologies will take quite a lot of time, since they affect base systems quite a bit and will require specific balancing, but I'm hoping at least one or two (ie, communism and laissez faire capitalism) will make it in this year.

This version will also feature a lot of tweaking of production, costs and consumtion. Resource demand has been tweaked, and goods ticket costs are now much lower, making them more viable to gain rewards. The customs house now also enables not only long term trade items, but also increases the maximum amount of concurrent trades (currently set to 30, but will be 10 without customs house and 100 with).


There have been some sporadic issues with buildings not properly registering/deregistering when a nearby good/bad building has been demolished. This is now fixed. Also fixed is building roads under bridges. Vehicle behaviour is now less erratic when demolishing roads and vehicles properly reset to home position when they are out of view.


Challenges are being added in as well. In this version, there will be 10 challenges. This also marks the last challenges added for quite a while. I will hold off on adding more until policies have been expanded further, to allow for challenges that make use of these features.


Next week, if I'm well enough that is, I'm hoping to add the coffee, cocoa, tea and processed beverages buildings. If they are added, new resources will added to the building resource demands. These drinks will be required to grow buildings from density 2 to 3 and up. Another education building will also make it in hopefully, the preschool.
There will also be a need to build additional atmoports once the city is large enough and has resources moving in and out of the city, as Atmoports will be given a max capacity.

 

Hello!

0.17 is live and features a host of new features and fixes. The crash bug mentioned yesterday should now hopefully be fixed. Here's the changelog since 0.16:

New major features:
- New challenge levels added.
- Added new family and social policies. Some policies have also been moved to more fitting categories.
- Tea, coffee and cocoa farms added. Beverage processing plant added.

New minor features:
- Econopedia now features what policies affect specific entries such as health, education etc.
- Discrete policies now display icon for corresponding political direction.
- Policy window spruced up a bit.
- Removed building placement constraint near atmosphere. Now, if a block has been placed, a building can be placed on top of it.
- Number of max trades increased to 50 sales and 50 purchases with Customs house. Without, only 5 each.
- Added notice for when building materials are running out and a zone wants to grow.
- Atmoports now have a maxcapacity (100k citizens or 20 active trades). Once reached, population growth will slow down.
- Because it takes a while to initialize resource prices and demand curves, there's now a loading sequence when opening the trade panel after loading the city. This is to prevent starting a trade when the price is zero (which makes the commission zero).
- Resource demand values and prices are now saved.

Balance tweaks:
- Goods ticket demands lowered.
- Increased health production in clinics and hospitals slightly.
- Discrete policy selection locked until a city hall is built.
- Importance of trade increased by increased cost (more revenue on sale, more expensive to purchase).
- Currency value now properly affects trade prices. High value currency means its cheaper to buy, but less revenue is made selling. Low currency value means it's more profitable to sell, but expensive to buy. Since the currency initially is usually weak, this means it's more profitable to make the resources needed rather than buy. Over time as the city grows and the currency can be strengthened, the more viable it becomes to provide resources through long time trading contracts.
- Nano structs now required for top density of buildings.
- Rebalanced pricing, and output of all production buildings.
- World limits expanded slightly, to allow building closer to the atmosphere
- Early building roster now has slightly lower upkeep.
- Warehouse capacity lowered.
- Certain policies now affect research.
- Happiness tweaked.
- Residents now demand tea, coffee, cocoa and processed drinks!

Major bug fixes:
- Issue with buildings sometimes not registering base efficiency fixed (occured sometimes when buildings were placed near a long straight road).

Minor bug fixes:
- Cars now deregister properly when a road is demolished.
- Fixed issue where vehicles would sometimes shortcut through roads instead of leaping off the edge when switching planes.
- Cars update home nodes on a thread to avoid them bogging down the main thread.
- Fixed bug where destroying bridges would leave the road tiles intact.
- Fixed issue where bridges would sometimes not register roads placed in 90 degree angle relative to the bridge's roadtiles.
- Tweaked bridges and allowing roads to be built properly beneath bridges.
- Fixed credit icon on goods tickets.
- Health policy now adds health production from clinics and hospitals as expected.
- Education policy now adds education production from schools etc. as expected.
- Destruct icon for super absorbent fixed.
- Resource separator is no longer affected by boom/bust cycle.
- Recycling center and resource separator now consumer prioritized, meaning these buildings use resources before other buildings. This prevents trash management to not be stopped when there's a lack of labour.
- Fixed case where amount remaining in tradepanel would display negative values.
- Fixed bug where sometimes starting a trade would not directly display the new trade item in the trade panel.
- Fixed gloss and normal maps for a handful of building footprints.
- Fix for building vicinity bug where buildings would sometimes not properly deregister a nearby building when it has been demolished.
- Fixed seldomly occuring null-ref error when demolishing a building while road network IDs are being assigned.

Performance fixes:
- Optimized vehicle position retrieval, estimated sevenfold performance improvement for cars (from 1,4ms per frame to 0.2ms).

Other:
- Autoexposure dropped.
- Global time tick speed decreased slightly.
- A number of new policies have been added, forcing a redesign of the policy system. This means cities with policies enabled and saved will be loaded with incorrect policies enabled.
- Tweaked post processing stack slightly to avoid bloom triggering by sky.
- Spruced up farm buildings.

Overall, this version should be substantially more stable and less glitchy than earlier versions. It provides me with a good base to continue building on the policy system and continue adding new features. As for the road map, I've still got some catching up to do, but this version crosses a few items off the list. Remaining items are ongoing as of this version and should make it into the update early/mid January 2020, after which a new road map will be published.



As mentioned in prior posts, this version features a full ten challenge levels. Further challenges will be added once more systems get finished so that the challenges can make proper use of these.



Food production now features coffee, tea and cocoa as well as processed drinks. These items have also been added into the demands of residences and come into play around the second to third density for each building. Drinks are a slight bit more costly to produce, but less is required to keep residents happy. Aside from new farms, the existing farms have also gotten a slight face lift.



Trade and policy has been more stable. Several annoying glitches relating to trade and issuing trade have been fixed. The number of active trades now tops at 5 sales and 5 purchases when there's no customs house. Once one is built, 10 sales and 10 purchases can be made at the same time with one Atmoport. Building more ports allows more goods to enter and exit the city. To check the available capacity, Atmoports now have an efficiency indicator in the building information panel.
Policy costs and effects have been tweaked further, and several new ones have been added. Along with this, revenue from taxes and funding costs have been changed a bit as well.



For a limited time, over xmas, the game will be winter themed. Eventually I will add seasons into the game properly, and allowing them to either shift naturally via in game time or system time.



Lastly, there's been a number of fixes to glitchy traffic. There's still some tweaking left to do, but there should no longer be mass spawning of vehicles or masses of vehicles going off-road.

 

Hello!

This entry will be a short one as progress has been slow this past week and holidays are just around the corner!

I'm currently working on some optimizations for when cities have grown into a fairly large size. I'm going to create a "short cut" of sorts for when buildings need to find a road to attach to when they grow as this has been a source of sporadic slow down. I've also started implementing cross fading between lods, which means I've been able to lower the distance for the first LOD without visable pop-in etc. I'm hoping to be able to quickly add a distance LOD so that the city sky line will show even at very long distances (right now the city "fades out" when the camera is far away).


I've started reworking the post processing stack a bit for optimization purposes as well as lighting for visibility purposes. The main purpose with the latter being to have the entirety of the city properly lit, regardless of whether it is built on the "underside" or "upside".



Since the last update, the policy system is now rigged for continued implementation, meaning I can now start adding in the "edge case" political systems, starting with communism and laissez faire capitalism, as these are the most tricky ones that require reworking parts of the underlying systems in the game. More on this will follow in the next devlog.


In the next update, I will have fixed the missing translations as well as adding more tutorials. I also hope to start getting both citizen reps and advisors in. Advisors are just your "team" that will help you out in different scenarios. Citizen reps are citizens you will be able to follow and who will give you their take on how the city is doing.



As mentioned, this was a short entry. Next devlog will be up on the first sunday of next year (in roughly two weeks)! Happy holidays!


​

 

Hey, I keep watching of course. Keep up great work.

While I love city building games, I am not planning on purchasing anytime soon. I cut down on playing
But I wonder, how is your current experience with on Steam release?
Is it something you expected, or somehow surprising results, one, or other way?

I have seen your reviews, and I think they look quite good and some constructive feedback as well.

 

Thanks!

Well, overall it's been rather slow, but that's on me as I've quite honestly have been swamped with day job and dev so marketing has suffered. Will work on that next year! I've also been a bit reluctant on going full on with marketing it since some of the feedback I've received (controls, tutorials) are things I feel really need to be adressed properly and there's still some ways to go, specifically with tutorials. Unfortunatly, as always, feedback is not always consistent, so some have said the game is too complex and difficult, some have said that it is way too easy. So finding the balance is tricky.

Surprising.. not sure. But the amount of and detail of feedback has been a positive surprise. It's allowed me to fix a lot of issues (QoL and other), so many that the roadmap has suffered. But I should catch up in January.

 

Yeah, that can be a bit throwing out. Is indeed hard to keep satisfy everyone, but at least majority.
I for example love discover mechanics. As long is fairly intuitive.
But seems, some like tutorials for every single step. And that can be time consuming on your part.

I thought this will be your approach. Trying first polish as much as can, then go with marketing and all that stuff. It is a bit risky to go on steam, as reviews will follow till whole lifetime of game.
So indeed, is better get positive ones

Thx for an insight.

 

Hello!
Long time no log! Aside from holidays taking up time, I've been under the weather for much of the past two weeks, but it's finally getting better. Devlogs will now be back on a weekly basis.

The next version of the game, 0.18, will be going live next sunday (the 19th). This is a bit later than I had planned at first, and due to my recent bout of illness. Moving forward beyond that version, I'm hoping to get back to more regular updates and will be taking some time off of my day job to allow for more dev time.

In the upcoming version, a few completely new systems will be introduced. They will not be fully finished, but usable and active.
First off, local area effects will be added. The current effects are: Crime, education, fire safety, health, pollution and wealth. These effects will work in tandem with the building requirements, but overall, the number of required nearby buildings to grow a dense city will be fewer. For example. Buildings will no longer require nearby clinics, police departments and fire departments. Instead, a densely packed area will get less fire safety and thus over time require a fire department to improve the situation. All these effects are calculated in sum, and if a building is in a polluted area with high crime and no fire safety etc, then it incurrs a 20% effeciency penalty (might change over time).


Each building, when built, gets local area effect nodes around it. Each building adds or subtracts the local area effect, for example crime. If an area is dense, then a lot of crime is added. Each building then gets an average of each node's values. Below is an image of buildings negatively affected by nearby pollution.



I've also started adding citizen representatives. These are a sample of citizens from your city. Currently you can only see their stats and view their home and place of work. In future versions they will provide you with information about their neighborhoods so that you can tweak them and improve them. They will essentially advice you about local area effects and give advice on policies that affect them negatively.


Advisors will also be added in with version 0.18. Currently, their topics of advice are rather limited, but over time I will add more and more into it and they should be able to provide players with a lot of information about issues in the city. Unlike the citizen representatives, their main focus is city wide rather than local, and they will be geared more towards optimizing the entirety of the city and maximizing ouput.


Currently there's only a placeholder image for the avatars, but there will be actual images of advisors and citizen reps once I have a good idea of what kind of style I'm going for. Any ideas? Shoot!

The winter theme will also be shifted out, so now we're going back to the usual spring/summer theme. In future version, the seasonal themes will be toggleable in game.



That's it for this week!

 

Hello!
Version 0.18 will be live in just a minute. It's been a while since the last update so this is a pretty comprehensive update.

Changelog 0.17 > 0.18

Version EA.0.18

Major updates
- Local area effects added. This system will get tweaked over time, but currently crime, education, health, wealth, fire safety and pollution levels are calculated. The area effects affect quality of life for residents and businesses and will lower efficiency in a building by up to 25%. Specifics on some of the effects can be found below. Education and wealth effects are currently not updated to the new system, but can be viewed in game.
- Crime level calculation changed. Now it is based on the result of the local area effects of crime after policy effects are applied, as opposed to a calculation of total population minus policy effects.
- Similarly to crime, health is now calculated based on the result of the local area effects of health after policy effects.
- Fire safety is now also based on the sum of local effects of fire safety.
- "Other safety" is now the sum of crime safety, fire safety and welfare availability.
- View modes changed to accomodate for the addition of local area effects. Instead of cycling through modes, button now opens a menu with the different modes. Cycling can still be done using the tab button.
- Advisors added. Unlocked when building city hall. Advisors will give tips on things that need to be adressed in the city. This is the first iteration, so it's a basic implementation. More help topics and features will be added over time.
- Citizenreps added. The current implementation is very barebones. In upcoming versions you will be able to get advice from the reps regarding things that they want adressed in their neighborhood and display their places of work and their homes.

Minor updates
- Value of exports and imports (and trade balance) added into trade panel.
- Middle and upper tier residential, commercial and industrial buildings no longer require clinics, fire departments and police departments. Instead, buildings built in areas with high crime etc. will receive a penalty (see local area effects above).
- Added a 0.5 size vactrack piece. Vactracks will be getting a slight overhaul in one of the upcoming versions, so it might be a good idea to not go wild building massive vactrack systems as they might break!
- Now only one City hall, National bank, Customs house and lab is allowed per city. Saved cities with more than one of these buildings are not affected.

Tweaks
- Building range increased slightly.
- Costs of policies tweaked, specifically those aimed at crime and health.
- Tax on pollution formula tweaked and overall simplified.
- Happiness from health is now calculated in a different way.
- Trade balance now affects currency strength.
- High currency affects wages and labour demand.
- Onclick sound volumes tweaked.

Major fixes
- Fixed issue where sometimes a good/bad building would not register when built in very densely packed areas.
- Fixed bug where in certain locations, buildings would incorrectly register a nearby good or bad.
- Reduced food shelf life research effect fixed. Incorrectly increased food consumed, rather than reduce. Drinks consumtion is now also reduced.
- Building unlocks were bugged out at times - fixed!

Minor fixes
- Lab given resource priority (similar to how farms and power plants have priority).
- Incinerator was incorrectly affected by the global economy. This is fixed now.
- Destruct hologram fixed for city hall.
- Fixed bug where display price of goods would not match up with actual revenue/cost when selling/buying resources.
- Collider for recycling center fixed.

Possible fixes
- Menu crash bug hopefully fixed.

Other
- We're back to the usual spring/summer theme!
- Lighting adjusted to make "underside" of cities brighter.
- Cross fading applied for LOD:s. This makes LOD groups fade in, rather than pop in. This also means I've been able to switch LOD distances and make high poly versions of buildings visable only from close distance.
- Tweaked tree shader
- Swedish localisation updated.
- Fallbacks to english added for missing translations in German, Spanish, French and Russian to avoid missing texts. The missing translations will be added in an upcoming update making all localisations equal and complete (for now).
- Atmofleets spruced up a bit.

First of all, the update adresses a handful of bigger bugs related to buildings not registering properly or incorrectly registering as a nearby good or bad building. Building unlocking from population targets being reached were also bugged out at times before, this has now been fixed.
There's been a crash bug that occurs sporadically when going to the main menu from a city. I've not been able to reproduce the issue after making some changes to how threads are handled, so that should hopefully be fixed now.

The biggest change in this version is how crime, health, pollution and fire safety is now calculated on a local level, instead of a city wide basis as it was before. Education and wealth levels have also been added into this system, but education is still calculated based on city wide values as before, and wealth currently has no function. They are viewable in the view mode though, so you can still see for example which areas are poor, and which aren't.
More tweaks to these systems will be made over the course of the upcoming versions.


Advisors have been added. Currently they only discuss a handful of issues, but more help entries will be added in the upcoming few versions. This system will serve as a sort of tutorial for issues as they arise in a city. Advisors are available once a city hall is built. On the subject of city halls, from now on, only one city hall, customs house, national bank and lab is allowed per city.


Similarly to advisors, but available at all times as long as population conditions have been met, is the system with citizen representatives. Currently, the implementation is very bare bones and you will only see the reps in the rep panel, but they will not provide you with any information. This system will be expanded upon in the upcoming few versions and finalized fairly soon.


A smaller addition is that trade balance will now be displayed in the trade panel. For smaller cities this is not relevant, but once there's a large amount of goods moving in and out of the city, keeping an eye on the trade balance can be important as it will affect the value of currency, which in turn affects wages etc.


The upcoming few versions, aside from focusing on advisors and citizen reps, will be geared specifically towards QoL improvements, localisations and tweaking and improving the controls and adding more control schemes. These changes will be added into smaller updates released on a weekly basis, starting next sunday!

 

Hello!

Time for another devlog and another update!

Version EA.0.19

Controls
- Fix for camera balancing to horizon. Before, when rotating the camera around itself, sometimes the camera would start tilting or glitch out. Now it stays stable at all times. NOTE: This needs additional work to function well when the camera has been tilted manually.
- Fix for planar movement mode camera movement slowing down when camera facing down or up. Speed is now also more consistent than before.
- Options menu updated to clarify rotation and movement options.

Minor feature additions and tweaks
- High currency value now affects local economy.
- Citizen reps now give some advice on what they feel could be improved.
- You can now click home and work icons in the citizen reps panel to view the rep's home or place of work.
- Local area effects now affect residential, commercial and industrial buildings differently. High fire safety is more important for industry than for residences for example.
- Local effect distance fall off adjusted. Basically, the further away (for example) a police department is, the less of an effect on crime it has.

Major bugs fixed
- Global economy was inconsistent between saving and loading a city. This has now been improved and cities should load with economy and demands developing in the same way every time. There are some additional tweaks necessary in order to fix it further.
- Fix for master economist achievement. It would sometimes trigger based on a resource group demand curve instead of the global economic status.

Minor bugs fixed
- Tooltip sometimes "getting stuck" fixed.

Other
- Global time step lowered a bit (economic status changes a bit faster).
- Atmofleet now emits a particle when leaving the atmosphere.
- Traffic and props hidden when enabling a view mode.
- SFX volumed adjusted.
- Adjusted music trigger conditions.
- Super absorbent now plays proper sound when clicked on.
- List of owners in owner view pushed together a bit more so that it doesn't overlap with menu if opened at the same time.

As mentioned last week, I will be updating the game more frequently, but with smaller updates for a few weeks. The reason for this is to get some much needed QoL improvements into the game without too much delay.

Focus this week has been to start adding in some control improvements. This time around, there are no new additions, but rather fixes to existing control schemes. There has been an issue where rotating the camera upside down would sometimes cause the camera to tilt even when the control mode is set to not allow tilting. This has now been fixed and enabling "balance against horizon" will keep the camera stable at all times.
When enabling planar movement, previously when the camera was rotated down, the speed of movement would drop. This has now been fixed and movement speed is now constant. This mode has also changed name from "planar movement" to "Relative to camera rotation/Relative to horizin".



I've also fixed the global economy not being consistent between saving a city and loading it up again. Before, a city could be enjoying an economic boom, then suddenyl a recession next time the city is loaded up. There are still some related issues left to be fixed, primarily related to how labour is distributed across industry, this requires additional work to fix, so a fix will come later.



Citizen representatives are now given a home and a work place (unless they are unemployed), that can be viewed. They now also give you advice about things that they feel need to be addressed in the area they live in or policy that affects them. There will be more advice items added over time.



The local area effects are now handled differently. Instead of them being added upp similarly for all types of buildings, they are not given weights that depend on whether the affected building is a residential, commercial or industrial building (or other). Fire safety is more important to industry than residence for example. The effect distance falloff is now a bit steeper.



I've also started adjusting the system for placing buildings to allow for click and drag multiple building placement. I'm hoping to get this fully done for the update next weekend.



For next week's update I also hope to get more advisor and citizen rep advice added, an intermediate tutorial and another set of control options/tweaks.

 

Hello,
It's time again for another update! This time around I've focused mainly on QoL improvements and fixing some issues introduced alongside the local area effects added a few updates ago. As many times before, the images are a bit random, as most of the work done is "under the hood" kind of stuff.

Version EA.0.20
Minor additions/changes:
- Local area wealth is now a part of property value (this in turn affects property tax revenue). Property value calculation now also takes into account the size of a zone in a better way than before. Mini zones used to be overvalued compared to standard zones.
- Conglomerates can now leave a city if they are unhappy with how things are going. This transfers their property to another conglomerate. Transferred property will be valued at less than before for a short period of time meaning property tax revenue takes a hit!
- Conglomerate happiness penalty when one of their buildings has been demolished increased.
- Tooltip trigger time lowered
- Atmospheric particle filtration plant requires 120 low skilled labour instead of 150.
- Water rationing policy added.
- Additional labour policies added - Worksite safety legislation and Employee funds (make people happier, but adjusts labour demand down a bit).
- Eco footprint reduction for buildings policy added. This lowers water and electricity use at the expense of the building owner.
- Citizen reps now hint the presence of bad buildings near their home, or the lack of good ones. They also share some policy related advice.
- Additional financial advisor topics added.
- Fixed some issues relating to raycasts not hitting objects as expected allowing blocks to be demolished if they only had decorations on them for instance.
- Campaign levels with trade objectives now count long term trade as well as short term.

QoL fixes:
- Click and drag placement. Initially for 1x1 sized buildings. There will be some additions to this over time (not only allowing 2x2, 3x3 and 4x4 buildings), among them a better and fancier UI for where you are placing buildings. The current UI marker for the area where construction will be done misbehaves a bit and doesn't scale properly at times.
- Cancelling placement of buildings with right click now checks if there has been camera movement. Cancelling is only done if the camera has remained still, allowing players to pan/rotate (depending on button assignment) while building. This is a prototype solution, so feedback is appreciated!
- Added to options menu default time of day setting : day/night cycle, always day, always night. This is applied on newly started cities.
- Time of day setting now saved per city. If you have for example always day on, then this setting will be saved.

Performance:
- Using 2, 4 or 8x in game speed has gotten laggy over time. I've started working on fixes for this (it's not one isolated issue). The fixes I've implemented in this version should improve things fairly substantially, but more fixes will come.
- Panel ui update redone so that they update on changed info rather than fixed time tick.

Bug fixes:
- Fixed issue where healthlevels would affect growth preventing growth. This was a remnant of the old way of calculating health, before local health calculations were added.
- Fixed issue with drop down options (save slots etc.) not saving properly.
- Fix for certain policies not displaying costs and not enabling properly.
- Retro mode: Rocks would be placed randomly even when a city is loaded. This has now been fixed.
- Cost of buildings not always displaying properly now fixed (production buildings have a cost regardless of effiency).
- Health display in top bar now responds properly to changes in the city wide health level.
- Fixed bug where on extremely rare occasions a thread would try to access Unity main thread specific methods.

Other:
- Updated german localization for certain achievements.

As mentioned previously, the multi-building-placement tool has been in the works for a while and is now functional for 1x1 buildings. There is a slight issue with the marker showing where buildings will be placed - I've not bothered with this since the concept will be overhauled in the upcoming update anyway. I intend on working on making the system work for buildings of other sizes too, but this will most likely not be for the upcoming update.

The whole thing can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/CorrectureGames/status/1223670185040785408


Before, when right clicking, building placement would be cancelled. I've not attempted to make a system that checks if the button click was made to move the camera or not. If the camera moved, the placement tool will not cancel. If the camera was still, it will cancel the placement tool. This should hopefully make building while moving around a lot a bit easier.


When adding the local area effects, the calculations for health levels were moved from citywide to local. The citywide health level is then calculated as a mean of all local health nodes. Unfortunatly, I didn't clean out all the old code and some of the new values were instead fed into old methods which affected residential growth. This meant that health was essentially counted twice and multiplied and would sometimes prevent growth. This has now been fixed and growth should now be easier to achieve once wealth, education, fire safety and health is high enough and crime and pollution low enough.


Speeding up the game has gotten a bit laggy over time. This is due to many new systems being added into the game and running calculations for each becomes more taxing when done faster (of course). I've started optimizing things now and there should be performance improvements in this version. More work is required, however, and will done over the course of the upcoming few updates.


Lastly, there are some minor changes, such as conglomerates now possibly leaving the city if they are very unhappy. Advisors and citizen represenatives now have additional advice topics, and more will come in upcoming updates. Time of day default setting can now also be set in the options menu and is also saved in the city save file, so you load the city with the setting you left off with.

Next week, other than fixing the remainder of UI work for the multi building placement, I will work on some new buildings and resources as well as prepare the newly added text items for translation into German, Spanish, Russian and French. If you know any of these languages and want to help out, drop a note in the Discord!

(Build from an Atmocity player!)

 

Hello!

Version EA.0.21 will be live in an hour or so. What's new you ask?

Minor additions:
- Added option for scroll wheel function - move forward/backward or zoom in/out. Settings balance against horizon and setting scroll wheel function to moving forward/backward basically means you can accomplish almost every movement option necessary to move around the city. If you prefer combining mouse and keyboard this can be done as well.
- Modifier tool tips added. They're currently a bit undersized, but I will address this at a later stage.
- Camera follow on build option added. When enabled, the camera will follow to the last item built when placing roads, blocks or multi placed buildings.
- Added spacebar to pause and resume game
- Added intermediate tutorial about how to enable advisors and citizen reps for additional information. Also shortened and updated the other tutorials.

Major changes:
- Code that handles connections had gotten a bit mixed up with controls for traffic. Now they've been properly separated and traffic now also runs parts of the code threaded to improve performance. The performance improvement should be fairly noticable, especially in large cities. There will be fixes for cars going off road later on, but this is not a priority at the moment.
- Changed how time progresses in game. Before the game changed Unity Time to accelerate, which affects a bunch of other things, among them physics. This was a bit hacky so I've now changed it over to an internal time function. This means that framerate isn't affected as much when running the game in 2x, 4x and 8x speed.

Minor changes:
- Global time tick starting value increased. This just means that when loading a city, more values are updates right away, rather than with a delay.
- Domestic advisor advice conditions changed a bit (less spamming of certain messages now).
- Multi building placement UI fixed. Might add some additional bling over time.
- Changed how modes are handled in game, to prepare for further expansion of different modes and to make code more easily managed.
- Added extra condition for overwriting how many campaign levels and challenge levels have been completed so this data can't be overwritten with null.
- Increased draw distance for props.
- Bloom strength setting added in options menu.
- Added night lighting to dot decoration.

Bug fixes:
- Some issues with modifiers fixed.
- Fixed some ui placement issues in 16:10 aspect ratios.
- Fixed not being able to build roads over roads. This was a new bug introduced after redoing some of the construction mode code.
- Fixed issue with minister of labour staying quiet most of the time!
- Fixed random placement of islands in retro mode on load.
- Line, dot and circle hedge decoration tiles description fixed.
- Fixed a building counting bug that overstated the number of zones in the city.
- Fixed issue when conglomerates leave and don't properly hand over their property to remaining conglomerates. If this issue has been present in your city, it would have likely caused stagnation and other weird issues. When loading a city, this will be resolved automatically by reintroducing conglomerates for buildings that were left without owners.
- Fixed issue where bridges sometimes couldn't be built despite there being enough space.
- Fixed focus distance.

Focus this week has been tweaks and bug fixes. I've received a host of feedback on bugs and issues that I've focused on addressing. I've also started refactoring code, as this is long overdue and there's code that needs fixing for performance and stability reasons.


I've continued work on performance related to 2x-8x game speed. The game has now moved away from using UnityEngine.Time to speed up and instead uses an internal clock to speed up the intervals at which calculations are performed. That way I don't have to use the hackery I had to keep physics time stable. I've also started cleaning up the connectivity class - this checks what roads are connected to which buildings. Over time, code that is only remotely related to connectivity has ended up in this class, for example position checking for vehicles. The class has now been cleaned up and now only contains code relevant to connectivity. Position checking for vehicles is now in the traffic manager and has also been moved to a thread which improves performance quite a bit, especially in large cities.



Controls have been a continued focus, and I've now added scroll wheel function to the options menu allowing the scroll wheel to either zoom or move the camera. I find that controls are now quite stable and functional and you can basically get around a city using only the mouse.
I've also added an auto follow function, so that when roads are placed, the camera will automatically pan to the last road placed. There will be some further tweaking to this, but it seems to work fairly well most of the time.


A new tutorial has been added, this basically descibes where information can be found in the game and some of the common issues that will be facing a city. I find that tutorials should become less necessary, the more advisor, citizen rep and econopedia entries are added. There will, however, be more tutorials coming in the future. These will take a while to make as I intend on making lengthier ones.


A number of bugs have also been fixed. For example, at times when a conglomerate leaves the city, buildings would not be transferred to a new conglomerate. This meant these buildings were left "hanging" and could cause null ref errors and stagnate the city. This has been fixed and if the city was in this state, the "hanging" buildings will be given a new owner on load. Aside from this, there have been some minor bugs fixed, like not being able to place roads when starting from an existing road (which you could before, and now can again).



Next update will be in two weeks as I'm moving onto some bigger additions and will need more time to work these into the game.

 

Hello,

As there is no update of the game today, this will be a fairly brief devlog featuring what has been done this week and what will be done leading up to the update to 0.22 next sunday.


First of all, two new retro type levels will be added. Pictured in this log is the ruined earth scenario. I'll be working to implement a type of climate offset for each of these scenarios meaning specific buildings will be affected in certain ways due to the setting of the scenario. For the ruined earth that would be more sun = better power production from solar farms and farms but lower output from absorbents.


As I redid the calculations for crime etc., some buildings were removed as demands for residential buildings to grow. Since then I've also received ideas for adding both culture and entertainment into local area calulations so that more buildings can be removed from demands. This means that you won't need quite as many of, for example, clinics, but you will still need to provide enough health care to the city in one way or another. This, in my opinion, adds more realism and flexibility in building so I will be added this into education as well, and the upcoming culture and entertainment effects. Initially there won't be many building alternatives to add entertainment and culture, but I plan on adding pubs, opera buildings, stadiums and more.


These new buildings will use a set of newly added resources - beer and wine. These will be made in a new building each, the beer and wine maker buildings. I've also added hydrogen as a resource. It will be a while longer until it comes into use, but it will be used as a resource in a new green power plant added later on.


I'll be adding a preschool into the next version of the game. This will output education and will be used as a variation for other education buildings once education is moved into the local area effects system. The preschool will be one of few education buildings demanded by residents nearby, but will come with a smaller 3x3 foot print.


Bug squishing continues. As does minor QoL fixing like locking the scroll wheel function when a window is open.
Come next version the french and german localisations will be updated (the whole game will be properly translated). Spanish and Russian translation is ongoing and should be finished shortly thereafter. There's also a polish translation in the works!

 

Hello!

Version ea.0.22 will be live soon! Here's what's new since last update:

Version EA.0.22

New stuff/tweaks:
- Added two new retro themes - Ruined earth and snow earth. They will be tweaked further over time.
- Preschool added.
- Preschool added into demand tree of residential buildings. Theatre, library and museum removed. Citizens will continue to want to have schools nearby, even as the system for calculating education levels is changed.
- Preschool funding option added into policy window.
- Brewery added.
- Wine maker added.
- Beer, wine and hydrogen resources added.
- Entertainment and culture added as local area effects. Views for entertainment levels and culture also added.
- Local area effects weight increased. As more things get moved from the old system of requiring nearby buildings only (called the effector system), it will become more important to keep an eye on having enough buildings to cover crime prevention, health etc. in the city overall, rather than near specific buildings. The weight has increased from 25% to 33%.
- Residential, commercial and industrial priority sets for local area effects changed. The priority sets determine what a building type finds more important. Essentially a weighting system to allow commercial buildings to prioritize low crime over health levels for example.
- Density 4 and 5 now require nano structs to grow.
- Tax effects on industry and commerce differentiated between tax tiers. For example, low tier commerce used to be affected by high tier commerce tax rate. This is now changed.
- Policies targeting industry and commerce used to affect tax revenue. Now they instead affect efficiency, which in turn affects revenue. This makes the connection between policy and effect more clear. Descriptions of policy effects are coming in an upcoming version to make it more clear what affects what.
- Effector capture radius made slightly smaller (This is the radius to check nearby good/bad buildings).
- Education is now calculated from number of available seats (what is seen as produced in schools etc.) and average coverage (local area effect).
- Similar to education, health calculations have now been similarly adapted.

Minor stuff:
- Added more conditions for domestic advisor advice for missing food/drinks. For example, if you have no legume, but also no middle class citizens, the message won't trigger.

Bug fixes:
- Fixed nullref error when citizen is assigned building with no registered bads or goods.
- Fixed world constraint not working properly in retro mode.
- Fixed bug where advisor entries were not closed properly.
- Fixed cost display output bug where values for output would somehow "stick" between different buildings.
- Fixed alternate skybox themes fog setting.
- Ambient sounds trigger fixed.
- Centrifugal particle extractor locked from start as it should be. Researched building after all.
- Lots weren't displaying efficiency, now fixed!
- Fix for issue where on commercial zones and industrial zones, tax revenue would not display.
- Fixed non-duplicable notices (the little things that pop in on the right side of the screen) from displaying more than twice at the same time.
- Fixed default settings for camera control buttons not displaying correct text on first time entering game.
QoL:
- Replaced cycling buttons for resources in trade panel with a window for selecting resources.
- Scroll wheel to move camera blocked when panels are open.
- Pausing and then unpausing with space now returns to previous speed instead of x1.
- Labour requirement now displayed in cost info. This is the requirement when building functions at 100 %.
- Return camera to horizontal position button added in bottom bar.

Other:
- Swedish, French, Spanish and German localisations complete! Russian localisation is ongoing. Polish localisation in beta added.
- Updated jewelry, diamonds and nano structs icons.

This version adds a few new buildings. First off, the preschool. This building is required nearby residential buildings. This is the first building featuring a 3x3 foot print, a size that will become more common in upcoming buildings.
With the introduction of the preschool, the way education is calculated has been changed. Before, education was calculated on a city wide level based on education "produced" in schools and libraries etc. Basically a pop / education type formula. Now education also uses the local area effects. You still need to "produce" enough education to cover the amount of students in the city, but also make sure that there is coverage locally.


Health was already moved to the local area effects system, but now also takes into concern how much healthcare is "produced" in total, similarly to how education works. Unlike before, you can no longer spam schools and hospitals in one area of the city to cover all health and education needs.

I've now also added culture and entertainment as local area effects. Currently, very few buildings produce entertainment and culture (museum and theatre). In upcoming versions there will be more of these types of buildings added, among them a stadium, a pub and an opera. These kind of buildings will accept the new resources beer and wine that are produced in the brewery and wine maker (suirprise!). These buildings have been added, along with the resources, so although they currently aren't required in the city, you can still produce and trade them.


There are also a couple of QoL improvements, among them a button to reset the camera orientation in game, a fix for default controls when starting the game the first time. The cycling buttons for what resource to trade in a long term contract have also been removed. Instead clicking the resource opens a window where you can select what resource to trade. This is more accomodating now that the number of resources has increased and will continue to increase.


Localisations are finally updated as well! Swedish, French, Spanish and German have all been updated. Russian is underway and there is now also a beta version of polish. More work on localisations and fitting all text elements nicely will be done for the next version. If you find anything that is incorrect, just post in the Discord or in the forum what it is that seems to be mistranslated or mapped incorrectly in game.


Lastly, the way policy affects commerce and industry has been changed. Before, policies generally affected taxes revenue only. Now they affect the efficiency of industry and commerce, which in turn affects revenue. This makes the effect of a policy more visible to the player. How taxes affect the overall efficiency of an industrial or commercial building has also been changed. Before, regardless of what tier building, they would be affected by an average of the tax levels of all three tiers. Now each tier is only affected by it's respective tax rate. For the second and fourth tier, a mix between low/mid and mid/upper class taxes apply, depending on the density of the building.

 

Hello!

This week, I've started reworking the effects and costs of policy. This should make them more viable as an option when players want to expand the levels of education or crime prevention for example. When it comes to the effect on labour availability, the majority of policies have already been fairly well balanced both in effect and cost, so these have largely been left as they were.


Weather effects have been added. In most free roam levels, challenges and the campaign, weather has very little effect on production etc. But in the retro stages, weather settings are set to vary greatly, so in the ruined earth scenario water production will be lower due to dry conditions, but solar farm electricity output is higher due to heat/sun. Over time I intend to develop this system a bit further, adding a very basic climate factor (high pollution, pushes heat in the bubble the city is built in).


Controls continue to be a focus, and in a move to simplify the controls of the game the spin controls have been removed. I'll also be replacing the current camera movement tutorial with one that incorporates being able to test the different modes currently available and to set which one the player prefers. Additional tweaks will be made and I hope they will to simpler, but still versatile controls.


A new clean power plant will be added in the next update, hydrogen power plant. This one requires the recently added hydrogen resource which can be produced in the Hydrogen plant seen below. This allows for substantial amounts of electricity produced (more than solar and wind) and can preserve a bit of space as opposed to wind and solar, but it is also a bit more costly.



I'm also overseeing the current buildings and some will be seeing minor changes. The absorbent is one of these. I've found that it takes up too much space (height-wise) and as such it has now been made smaller. It still produces as much as before, but can now be "stacked", allowing more of them in a small area and making them more viable in bigger cities as well.


The 0.23 version will be live next sunday (march 8th) and feature the above as well as a few other tweaks and additions. I've started working on the 3rd density for the 2x2 residential and commercial zones, but they are still some time away from being finished (possibly for 0.24 scheduled for march 15th).

 

Hey!
A new version will be live in a bit.

Version EA.0.23
New stuff:
- Hydrogen production plant added.
- Hydrogen power plant added.
- EffectorType deprecated.*
- First iteration of clouds added.
- Additional props added to production buildings.
- Absorbent building modified and made shorter allowing them to be stacked and making them more space efficient.
- Absorbent building props added.
- Climate effects added (humidity, heat, wind). Primarily affects wind and solar farms, as well as food production facilities and water production.

Tweaks/minor additions:
- Food requirements rebalanced for residential buildings. Overall demands are now lower, but the highest tier had mistankenly been set to low requirements, so they now have higher food demands (in line what they should have had). Conversely, the fourth tier had very high demands, but now has lower.
- The board of citizens now demand changes to welfare levels and enacting/repealing specific policies.
- Conglomerates can now demand adjustments to the financial transactions tax. Preparations made for hotel tax level demands as well.
- Some minor tweaks in the building information panel.
- Cost and effect of policy adjusted (costs generally adjusted down and effects slightly up).
- Research tool tip now displays description in the text bar at the bottom of the research window when hovering over research icon.
- Fixed wages not displaying in stats window.

Controls:
- Camera spin/tilt controls removed.

Other:
- Polish translation expanded.
- Lighting from street lights improved.
- Fog override fixed so that retro levels have the proper fog color regardless of chosen theme.
- Fixed bridge description being incorrectly mapped in english.
- Reordered some of the production buildings in the menu.

This time around, there aren't that many new additions. I've been putting quite a bit of work into refactoring code and improvement overall performance. There's also been quite a bit of work put into simplifying code so that the upcoming additions (primarily new zone densities, hotels and also ideology-specific buildings) are easier to implement and maintain.

The hydrogen resource now has a production facility. Currently hydrogen is only used in the newly added hydrogen power plant, a pricey, but clean way to produce big amounts of electricity. These two new buildings can be seen below. Also in the picture, the absorbent building has been made smaller so that it's easier to stack together.



The effector type has been deprecated. This was essentially building type groups checked when placing a new building (good/bad nearby buildings). Previously, when a building had all nearby good buildings and no bad buildings it would run at 100% efficiency. This has now been redone to work in tandem with the local area effects system. Local area effects account for 40% efficiency, presence of all required good buildings another 30% and the lack of bad buildings another 30%. This change also allows being informed exactly of what building is required or is considered a bad neighbor, instead of buildings being grouped. This is a big change to one of the core systems of the game, so there might be some minor unexpected issues. Also, in the old system, each type of building would only be counted once, so having two pollutant power plants near a residential building was just as bad as having one. Now, each bad neighbor is counted, while good neighbors are still only counted once.



Climate effects have been added. In campaign, challenge and free roam levels, these effects don't affect things greatly. There might be a shorter period when there is less wind which means less output from wind farms for example,but overall, these effects are discrete. They are more prominent in the retro mode levels where the levels are themed. Ruined earth for example is dry, windy and warm, so farms are affected a bit, solar farms and wind farms are a good choices for electricity production etc.

Graphics are currently not a high priority, except when it comes to optimizations, but there are some new building props added, a water tank for example. Street lights now emit light as well.


Policy costs and food demands have been tweaked. Since the addition of coffee, cocoa and tea, the food/drinks demands of buildings has gotten rather costly. So I've adjusted most demands down. But in checking through all demands, I noticed the upper class residential buildings were not scaled properly, so they now demand slightly more food than before. The fourth tier on the other hand, demanded way too much, so their demands have now been lowered substantially. Policy costs were way to high compared to their effects, so cost and effects have been tweaked to make them more viable. The citizens now also demand specific policies be enacted or repealed. Keeping citizens happy will prevent them from making too many demands.


There's been some minor fixes on top of all this, fog having the proper color in the retro levels for example and some other bug fixes (listed above for the most part, but also some really minor stuff aside from those).


The next update, 0.24, is scheduled for march 22nd or 23rd. Planned for this update is a new controls tutorial, which sadly didn't make it in this time around along with some additional controls fixes and simplifications. I'll also be focusing heavily on adding the foundations for the features listed in the latest road map so that most of it can be finished around summer this year.

 

Hello,
I've been a not inconsistent on the subject of when 0.24 would release, first saying the 15th and then the 22nd. I've found an issue with building duplication that I wanted to have fixed, so I've decided to push a smaller version of 0.24 through today. The next version will then follow march 29th.

Changelog EA.0.24
New stuff
- Added third density of 2x2 residential buildings.
- Tooltip for modifiers added to panel.

Tweaks
- Plop costs adjusted (up). Primarily for tier two and tier three production.
- Hydrogen power plant given consumption priority. Also fixed that it wasn't added as an economy unaffected building.
- Super absorbent production increased.
- Pre and grammar school, clinic, hospital and police department are now prioritized labour consumers, ie. will be prioritized when it comes to being given labour.
- Commercial and industrial labour demands adjusted up a bit.

Bug fixes
- Found bug causing duplication of buildings. Affected buildings is the 2x2 middle class first density commercials. If this happens, the file size will have bloated and loading will be slow. This autoresolves if you load the city now. First time around loading will be a bit slower, a text ("Resolving duplication...") will be displayed and the progress bar will stop before reaching 100%. Just wait this out and the problem will be fixed and resaving the city will make load times normal again. Depending on how many duplication have occured, this might take a while. Should it fail to remove all duplicates, reloading the city should resolve the remaining problem buildings.
- Fix for advice when unemployment is high or there is a shortage of labour fixed.
- Fixed bug where hydrogen was not persistent (ie. needed to be produced every time step instead of the surplus being stored).
- Fixed lighting on bridges.
- Fixed the citizen board from requesting the same policy twice. Also added a cool down so that things aren't requested too often.
- Fix for road connections not working when roads were placed in a u-shape.

Other
- Adjusted top bar sliders to use the entire slider.
- Policy cost data is loaded as soon as policy window is opened (assuming things have been calculated).


The third density of 2x2 residential buildings has been added into the game. This means 2x2 residences can now start holding fairly large amounts of people. In the upcoming version their demands and the density checks for when a building can grow will be adjusted.


Building plop costs have been increased slightly, in particular for later stage buildings. Consumption priority has also been changed to ensure that some buildings are stocked with labour first - this is to avoid central utilities from not having any labour. Commerce and industry now also requires slightly more labour.


The building duplication is due to the deprecation of the effector type in the previous vesion. This is due to a script accidentally being left on two buildings. If these buildings were in a city, they would result in two buildings being saved each time, meaning new buildings were added exponentially. If this has happened in a city, the save file will be bloated and take very long to load. Performance will also be affected. This will be fixed automatically when loading a city, which means initially loading a city will take a bit longer.


I've also added modifier descriptions to the modifier window to avoid cramped tool tips. Fixed lighting on bridges and also road connections not working properly when roads were placed in a u shape in tight corners.

 

Hello,

Only a quick update this week, as it's not time for a new build yet.

I've still quite some way to go for the upcoming update, but I'm hoping to get a lot into the upcoming version. I'm planning the third density of 2x2 commercial buildings to be added. I'm also going to start expanding the roster of culture and entertainment buildings, starting with the opera and stadium.

Current progress is that I've redone the code for bridges. Before they were individual objects per length, which becomes difficult to maintain as more bridges are added. So now each type is a unique object, but then the length is generated as they are built. This meant it was fairly easy to add bridge variants in, seen below.


The density system, that would count nearby buildings to determine if an area was dense enough to allow zones to grow has been replaced. The old system differentiated between 4x4 on the one hand and 1x1 and 2x2 buildings on the other. This wasn't ideal as, for one thing, it used up 4 collision layers instead (big/small RC/I), but it also required a spherecast upon each grow test which would sometimes bog things down. Now density is calculated similar to how health and education is calculated. This means it can also run on a thread.


The system that handles storing water in cisterns has been overhauled. Water is now stored only after all buildings have consumed their water. Cisterns can now also store more water to cover up a longer period of high water demand. I've also added in a battery building that stored electricity for a simlar purpose as the cistern.



The block splitting tool has been deprecated. Instead all blocks have been translated into the smallest building block. This makes loading a slight bit slower, and also adds more faces in any given view, but these effects should be minimal compared to the benefits in terms of easier sculpting. In other words, a small con in terms of performance, but a big pro in terms of game play.


I'm hoping to restart work on waterblocks in the upcoming week, but it's still uncertain whether they can be made available in the upcoming version.

 

Hello,

First off, version ea.0.25 has been postponed until tuesday the 31st, to allow for some last minute additions and tweaks

As mentioned in a previous update, the density system has been overhauled and has now been tweaked and seems to function. Along with density, the population condition has also been adjusted. From now on, a population of 1400 citizens is required for zones to grow to density two, 11200 before density two can grow, 37800 before density three grows and 89600 before density four grows into five. Once the sixth density is added for the regular 4x4 sized residential and commercial zone, they will require a minimum of 175000 citizens.

I'm making fairly good progress in adding new buildings in general. For 0.25, a stadium will be added. The old theatre building is now the opera (as was originally intended) and a new theatre building has been added.


That means that culture and entertainment will start working as intended. Currently this is only counted as a local area effect, but once tourism is added, they will start working a bit differently.

The third density of the 2x2 commercial zones has also been added. That makes a total of ten new commercial buildings and means that both the residential and commercial 2x2 set of buildings are complete. Work will soon begin on 3x3 zones, but first some other more pressing matters will be dealt with.



I've also seperated education calculations into primary, secondary and tertiary education. Currently, these are just summed up into a total education in each neighborhood and in the city. But you can now view where each of the three sets of education types is strong, to find where there might be a need to plop down more grammar school or highschools.


Some things that I had intended to have in this version have been moved to the next one. Among them the new camera tutorial and some additional control tweaks. This will be in 0.26, scheduled for release the 14th of april (that version, too, will be quite substantial).



New decorations are also in the works. I hope to get a few ready for the upcoming version, so that you can start blinging up the city even more!

 

Hello!

Progress towards version EA.0.26 has been fairly good this week. There are some things that I had hoped to have finished but haven't, but also some things that I was going to do later that I've instead been able to implement now. So all in all I should be able to finish the items on my todo.

I've started adding in more decorations, this week with focus on a sort of pedestrian path way type that can be used to cover up and hide areas or items such as road or vactracktubes.




I've rewritten parts of the consumtion system to adapt to a change in the building information panel. Before, only information about a resource that is missing would be stored, but now all information is stored instead. The way calculations work is also a bit different. The next change to consumtion should also be finished before the next version goes live. Currently, all consumtion is done on a first come first serve basis. So for example, if you only have enough cereal for half of your residences, half of them will have 100% and half will get nothing. This will be changed so that consumtion is evened out between all consumers. Same thing will go for labour, to avoid certain businesses going completely without labour.



The new building info panel is almost finished. At the moment most of the missing items are displayed as either 100% or 0%, because of the way consumtion works. After this is changed, the panel will start making more sense and will be more important in keeping an eye an what your citizens lack.


As can be seen in the previous pictures, I've added an option to change the UI color. Other QoL improvements include a speed setting for camera movement, fixed keyboard camera rotation and faster scroll wheel zoom/move speed.

I'll be getting some more work done on camera movement and camera movement tutorials. Some changes will involve removing some of the less useful movement schemes to make movement more streamlined.

I'm also adding in more entertainment and culture buildings. Following the theatre and stadium last update, this update will see the addition of a pub, botanical garden and hopefully also an indoor stadium among other things.