Games [Early Access] Atmocity

Spoiler

Hello!

Missed updating here when launching 0.27 (hectic week). I'm making progress on the upcoming 0.28 version, here's some of what's going into 0.28:


A new type of decoration that adapts to surroundings, allowing some nice looking curves around corners. These allow for a softer look and can be a good compliment to other types of decorations. Above is the grass version, but it also comes with a regular conrete version:


The building info window is now completely finished. I've added the building icon as well as the zone density. This window used to be disconnected from the regular window system, meaning that it had to be closed and opened separately. This meant a bunch of extra code and was becoming a bit of a hassle as new stuff gets added. I've now added it into the window system properly and also added ui sections so that different types of panels can be opened at the same time.
Lastly, the range of a building is now also displayed when a building is clicked!


The new additions to the window system were necessary to be able to redo tutorials efficiently. There's been a lack of screen real estate to display tutorial info without stuff overlapping and without having to code extra conditions for closing stuff. Now I'll be able to get the new tutorial stuff into a panel similar to the building info panel and manage it within the new window system effectively. I'm hoping the new tutorial(s) will inform new players well enough, unlike the current ones. Hopefully I can get them translated into other supported languages as well, if not, translated versions will be in for version 0.29 for sure.


Buildable water is a new feature in the upcoming version. Getting this to work properly has required a lot of shader work, which has taken up a lot of time. I've also needed to redo a part of a mesh merging system as well as adding to an existing system that checks and adapts meshes to neighboring meshes (like roads). It's not certain atm if the new buildable water will be complete, but it will be usable enough.

 

Spoiler

Hello!
EA.0.28 is live! Here's what's new since 0.27:

EA.0.27 -> EA.0.28
- New tutorial added! Non-english versions coming soon!
- Two old tutorials deprecated.
- Backtracking on how to rotate when plopping buildings. Only scrollwheel is back!
- First iteration of water blocks added!
- Weightier building destruction!
- Additional decorations added.
- Football field added - early game entertainment building.
- Added fountain to one of the decorations.
- Clarified what option is selected in the camera tutorial.

- Fixed slow loading times (particularly for tutorials, but overall when starting new challenges, templates or campaign levels) due to replacing old types of blocks to the new smaller block type. Tutorials will be overhauled in the next proper update.
- Fix for stadium and pub showing 0 efficiency
- Fix for weird directory structure for Win 32 build.
- Fix for building info panel displaying over certain ui items.
- Fix for items in save/load window not being properly sized at some resolutions.
- Fix for connection not retesting properly if building was unconnected when loading city.
- Grid now follows the cursor when placing roads.
- Fix for flickery particles (clouds and far away dust in retro modes).
- Fix for blocks not being built on temporary blocks.
- Football field now has correct sound when clicked.
- Removed continuous trade from trade window when there is no customs house.
- Fixed long term trades so they are no available when there is no customs house.

- Tweaked colliders for new decorations.
- Changed atmosphere material.
- Changed so that camera can move further outside of the atmosphere.
- Building icon now displayed in building info panel
- Building range now displayed when building info is active
- Window system overhauled to allow for a more efficient code structure when loading icons and to allow multiple windows to be displayed at once.
- Tweaked water shader - added foam.
- Russian localization updated.
- Cleaned up what buildings are available in certain modes.


The addition of water blocks is one of the major new features this version. This is the first iteration, so there are tweaks and fixes still to come, but they can be plopped into your city now!


Another central part of this update is updating the tutorial system and updating the practice tutorial and adding a new intermediate tutorial. The new tutorial delves deeper into some of the central aspects of the game, than the old tutorials did and should hopefully shed more light on some of the more tricky parts of the game.


A football field has been added! This is an early game entertainment building. More entertainment and culture buildings are still to come!


Some new decorations have been added, among them this L shaped decoration that can be used to create grassy overpasses over water or vactracks.


This version also adds a bunch of fixes and minor additions, such as a range display when clicking buildings and the density being displayed in the building info panel.

 

Spoiler

Hello,

This week I've started working on hotel buildings. In terms of code, tourism is more or less already functional, although it needs some tweaks here and there, but hasn't been set live since there haven't been any hotel buildings.
I'll be added the 1x1, 2x2 and 4x4 versions lower, middle to upperclass at the same time, one density at a time.

Here's the lower class first densities:

The middle class, first density hotel buildings are also "done" (some tweaking remains):

I've also incorporated click and drag construction for all building types now. Previously, this was available only for 1x1.


Some new resources will make their way into the game in the next version: Flowers, dyes and textiles. Textiles will be a consumed resource in hotels. Dyes are made from flowers, and textiles are made from wood and dyes.


I've started changing import settings for textures (primarily normal maps and gloss maps), to make room for additional textures. I've also tweaked existing shaders to remove some stuff that is no longer in use and to make materials less heavy. The tree shader has also been changed so that trees now receive shadows properly!

 

Spoiler

Hello,

New update is live!

EA.0.29
- Two new decorations
- Hotels and tourism are in! To begin with only one density for each tier. Additional densities will be added in the upcoming versions.
- Tourism policies added.
- Differentiated road upkeep costs. Plain roads are cheaper than the fancy avenue.
- New resources - flowers, dyes and textiles.
- Click and drag placement added for all buildingtypes, not just 1x1 buildings.
- Optimized building placement code.
- Reimported textures to decrease texture size in game.
- Fixed clinic collider
- Fixed tree shader so that shadows work properly.
- Fixed bug where blocks could sometimes be placed in the same location.
- Fixed bug where pub couldn't be destroyed!
- Fixed issue where sometimes building info would show production occuring, when there was none.
- Removed water foam effect on Metal (Mac) pending a proper fix. This avoids water looking glitchy.

On the surface a fairly small update, but introduces tourism (which will get many tweaks over the upcoming few updates). There's also some under the hood stuff fixed with how things are calculated. Currently only one density of each tier hotel can be grown. You can currently also only import the necessary resources (next version will add the production of flowers, dyes and textiles).


Two new decorations have been added:



There were some issues with unconnected buildings sometimes showing production output. This should now be fixed and unconnected buildings should have an efficiency of 0.


I've started going through some of the existing code and cleaning some stuff up to make things more performant. When adding click and drag placement for buildings regardless of size I have also been able to remove a fairly sizable chunk of code. I've also cleaned up some of the shaders and changed import settings for textures to improve fidelity while also lowering size.

 

Spoiler

Hello,

This week a lot of work has been put into the new resource tree of flowers -> dyes -> textiles. Currently, flowers are used to produce dyes and dyes and wood go into producing textiles which are used in hotels. Additional uses may be added in later on.


The flower farm has a 6x6 foot print and is fairly pricey - overall resource production for hotels and hotels themselves are rather pricey, but tourism can also add a lot of revenue to a city.


Once flowers are produced, dyes can be produced:


I've started working on expanding public transportation as well. Currently there's only vacuum trains. I'm working on expanding with trams, which will be an early game public transportation system. Trams are built on roads existing roads (not avenues) and stations are 1x2 sized and also placed on roads.
I'm also adding in a monorail system. The monorail system will be larger capacity than trams, but also require more space (stations etc.).
Vacuumtrains will be made a bit more costly, and will be the highest capacity system and will also allow resoures to be shared across different city "islands" unlike trams and monorail.
The tram system can be seen below as well as a WIP of the textile factory.



When working on the trams I also decided to overhaul the look of roads. So gone are the square roads, and in are roads with some curves.

 

Spoiler

Hello!
I'll keep it short this week as most of the work put into the game this week has been on preparing existing systems for new additions.

One such new addition is the tram and monorail systems mentioned in previous logs.

What will differentiate the monorail from the existing vacuum train system, is that it will need to be built nearby blocks, only allowing shorter bridges across gaps etc. In terms of code, they otherwise share many things but monorails will need to add some additional complexity. So I've spent time this week cleaning up the vacuum train code to allow for better pathing and a faster calculation of routes.


Once I'm not updating the vacuum train/monorail code, I will get back to work on regular traffic to try to improve paths there as well. This will be a bit more difficult, as there are way more cars at any given moment, so care needs to be taken to keep it all efficient.


Since trams, monorails and vacuum trains will (hopefully) all be in and functional in the next update (due the 7th or 8th of june), I've also added a local area effect for public transporation. Since there are now very many local area effects (including crime, health, education etc.), I've also redone how they stack. Previously they all carried the same weight, given that now there are so many, it was possible to get good building efficiency even if one was completely lacking. So now they are now partially multiplicative, if one is missing it doesn't make much difference, but if two are missing it will have a large effect, and so on. This will make it more important to build well rounded neighborhoods.



Once I've gotten the next version up, I will most likely do another version focused primarily on bug fixes and performance, as there has been a lot stuff added recently and a lot of systems that have been cleaned up (possibly introducing new bugs).

 

Spoiler

Hello!

Ea.0.3 will be live soon!
Changelog:

New stuff
- 3x3 concrete, steel and glass production facilities added.
- Flower farm added. Flowers can now be produced.
- Dyes factory added. Dyes can now be produced.
- Textiles factory added. Textiles can now be produced.
- Monorails added! They currently don't spawn trains though. This is an early iteration, so many changes still to come.
- Local area effects now non-linear. Before the effects of for example crime, poor health and poor education would be added up. Now a neighborhood might have poor health levels, without taking quite the same efficiency hit. However, when more than one aspect is poor, then it takes a bigger hit instead.
- Vactrains updated. Some more tweaks coming as tram/monorail/vactrain systems receive more love.

Tweaks
- Vactubes made smaller (-25%)
- Changed modifier crate drop frequency and they now only appear near buildings. They also give off a light when they appear.
- Camera controls and gameplay tutorials french localization added.
- Moved farms to its own category (food prod.)
- Trash notice was displayed on load, fixed.
- Better and more consistent collision detection when placing/demolishing buildings.
- Improved loading performance. Improved on placement times (the first part of the loading bar). Also improved road connection calculations. This is the last bit of the loading bar. More work on loading performance remains, but this should take a fair chunk out of loading times.

Bugfixes
- Fixed buildings sometimes not registering a nearby good (collision layer mishap).
- Fixed bug where nested vacstations weren't working.
- Fixed buildings not displaying production despite being in a network connected to a vacstation.
- Fixed vactrack train not spawning on load.
- Fixed bug where click and drag placing blocks in the center would not work.
- Fixed modifiers being mapped oddly (cereal modifier added fruit for example).
- Fixed descriptions of crates in the modifers and crates window.
- Fixed glossmap for 1x1 tier one residence
- Fixed traffic timestep being a bit slower than it should be when city has been loaded.

Aside from the newly added resource tree with flowers farms, dyes factories and textiles factory displayed in previous devlogs, public transport has been a big project this time around. There's a lot of work involved in getting this working properly, so it's not all there yet. But you can now construct monorails!


I had initially meant to add trams in first, but this requires a bit of additional work on how roads and road bound vehicles work, which I will be finishing up for next update. There's been some work done already, but this part of the code is currently a bit slow so it needs to be optimized before I can move further with it.
Monorail stations and connections can be built though, but won't spawn trains currently. Monorail trains will be a bit funky so they require a bit of additional work on top of the vactrain code that's already in the game.


On the subject of vacuum trains, they now have wagons! I've also made the movement a bit stricted so they stay in the vactube! More work is still needed to tidy up everything and make it look nicer, but it's getting there! Here the train and wagons can be seen in a user made city (and an amazing build it is!!).


In this city there was an issue with nested vac train stations not tying together different road networks. This has now been fixed so that vac train stations work properly. Cities can now be spaced out on different islands and share resources as long as there is a station and proper connection. There still needs to be an atmoport near one of these stations.



In the next update, there will be more public transport, some new decos, a first implementation of disasters (fire) and a bunch of other things. I'm hoping to have this version out monday the 15th!

Here's another user build that I find really nice:

 

Spoiler

Hello!

0.31 will be live tomorrow. This version will add in the monorail trains, a bunch of new monorail track pieces and fix a bunch of performance issues and slow loading times.



In adding the monotrails, I've had to rework how vactracks work - since they share systems. Part of this work has been to fix slow connection calculations, trains sometimes occupying the same track and imprecise movement. Part of this work can now be ported over to roads and cars to start making traffic movement nicer looking. This will be done after trams have been added in (version 0.32).



Monorails being more or less finished (obviously tweaks will be done), trams are the next step. Whereas monorails share systems with vactracks, trams will share the road system. This system has been incredibly slow to calculate what roads are connected and what road system belongs to which road network. In the test city (a huge city with lots of roads), the process of checking road connections when loading the city took 68s. I've now managed to cut this down to about 3s. This is a huge performance improvement noticable both when loading cities and when playing the game, as things will connect together much faster now. Some of the techniques I used to improve performance have also been moved over to vactracks, making them faster to calculate too.



Since I've been working on a lot of performance related fixes, I've also looked into cleaning up the project to remove files not used and also improve import settings. This should hopefully push in game performance a bit. I've also looked into the post processing effects.



I'm hoping to get an additional free roam template added as well as some minor decorations. Aside from that, this update will mostly be performance focused. 0.32 on the other hand will add more features, this one is set to release a week after 0.31, on monday the 22nd.

 

Spoiler

Hello!

V0.32 will be live tomorrow.

One of the goals was to add trams into the game. I've noticed while working on them, that it would be much easier to add them in if I started reworking the road connection system first. So the actual tram vehicles will not be added. But the station will be there:



I'm hoping to have the improved road connection system in the next version already, so trams should hopefully not be too far off. This way, the traffic system gets an overhaul too!

I've added another set of decoration blocks:


A lot of work has been put into refining some of the systems already in place - the way goods tickets are generated as well as the demanded resources has been reworked and what foods are demanded by different classes of citizens has been changed.



The city stats window has gotten some additional info - The amount of resources produced in the city can now be seen there, as well as the amount of education and health produced compared to how much is required.



Demand for resources and their pricing has also been altered. Instead of the price and demand of a good diminishing very quickly when selling them, now the amount you can sell before price is drastically dropped depends on the city's population (a proxy for the world population basically). Once a resource has been sold, the time it takes for price to return to normal, will depend on how much has been sold.

 

Spoiler

Hello,

Just a brief update this week, as I'm currently in the process of reworking the traffic system so not much new stuff to show yet. This is in preparation for better traffic simulation, but also to make trams easier to implement.



The fundamental changes are more or less finished. Traffic simulation was pretty messy before, with cars only javing access to the position of the target road tile. This meant things like driving on the right side could only be handled by offsetting the tile position. Same with leaping over edges, which included a lot of vector math to find whether the next road tile was on an inner corner or outer corner. All of this had to be done on a per car basis, which ended up being a bit heavier than I like. The results were also that traffic was rather floaty, due mostly to the lack of information to guide cars to the next destination.



The way roads work in the game is that only ends, turns, T and X intersections as well as straight tiles where there's an "edge leap" are registered. So cars assume that between the current position and the next is a straight path. This would sometimes get messed up making cars travel diagonally when they failed to find the next tile. All this has now been tightened upp, and baked into each registered tile is a node system that forces the car to travel from and to each individual node in the correct order. This makes traffic simulation much tighter and cleaner looking.

With these changes I've also been able to add more information into road tiles, so that cars know whether they are nearing an intersection or if they are in the inner or outer lane of a curve (unlike before, when this was handled with clunky offsets). All in all, about 70 lines of code have been cut from cars, mostly vector math. I've also been able to add in a simple system of traffic rules, so that cars take turns at intersections.



This is not all that's in the works though, as seen above I'm also expanding on the information presented in the city statistics window. Among them a slider for the availability of education seats and hospital beds per student and ill person respectively.



How much is stored in cisterns and batteries has also been added into the city statistics panel. I've also expanded the budget window to add a breakdown of hotel taxes as well as other taxes and costs. This is for 0.33, but beyond that I'm going for a more expansive budget window.



I've currently no release date for 0.33, but july 6th is the goal!

 

Spoiler

Hello,

0.33 is almost ready. On the surface it's a fairly small update, but it features the complete new traffic system as well as trams, which has taken quite a bit of work and time to implement.



Trams will get some polish over time, but are more or less finished which also means all public transport systems have now been implemented.



I've started adding in additional early game entertainment buildings - baseball fields and tennis courts.



There's also been a lot of work done on fires - the first disaster added into the game, but these will not be triggered in this version as some features are still being tweaked.



Overall, the addition of monorails and trams, as well as changing the traffic system, has added a lot more life and movement into cities, as well as some much needed city detail. As development moves on, I'm hoping to add more and more props and buildings that are more on a detail level.

 

Spoiler

Hello,

A bit of a later than usual devlog.
The game had a small update the other day to fix some bugs, among them a rare crash bug that occured when threads would deadlock when exiting to the menu. This is now resolved! The update also tidied up some of the building placement code and fixed some issues with the UI not updating resource costs etc.

The upcoming version is in the works, and I will detail some of the things I aim to have added into the game for 0.34.



Indoor stadiums! This one is finished already and a given addition in the upcoming update.



I've managed to get a system working for turning animated stuff on during the night and off again during the day. I will be using this system for billboards, which I aim to start adding into the game in the upcoming version.



Some new decorations will be added as well. This will autoadapt to surrounding decorations of the same type, similarly to the rounded blocks. I'm also adding a flat block that can be used transition between different heights and add even more variation into city design.



The second density for hotels will be added in, and I should also have a functioning fire disaster in as well as mechanics for putting fires out etc.



Since public transport will be put aside for a while, next up in terms of systems is to expand on ideology. So that will be getting a bit more work moving forward.

 

Hello!

Updated the game the other day to fix a bunch of bugs. Having gotten that out of the way I'm now focusing on new features for the upcoming 0.34 version of the game. Central to this version is the addition of some new road variations:



I've updated the road system to make better use of the newly added node system that is used by traffic. Using nodes I can now add roads with curves etc. Granted, they still need to adhere to the grid and are not customizable, but will still add plenty of design options. Pictured above is a new ramp leading up to the new half sized flat block that will also be added in the upcoming version.



While working on the new road compilation system, I've managed to also optimize it greatly. Compiling roads is no longer a bottleneck, however, roads still take quite a bit of time to load. Overall performance will be a focus in 0.35, with work going into LODs and also performance when roads are being pieced together while loading.



Along with the onramp, I've also added some curved road pieces:



Later on, I will be adding in a sort of highway type road, with different types of on/offramps. There are also a set of possible and really strange road types, like the twisted road variant pictured below.

 

Hello!

Version 0.34 is brewing! Here's the changelog:
- Indoor stadium added
- Halfsize (flat) blocks added
- Small wind generator added (primarily an early game clean energy building or for use in small neighborhoods).
- Tweaked performance of spacer block shader.
- Road onramps, curved road tiles and twisted roads added.
- Tidied up and made road compilation more robust.
- Improved performance of road compilation further.
- Deprecated old save files (pre early access release). These files will no longer load as it's become too difficult to maintain compatibility.
- Buildings would assign road connections to straight roads although they were in reach of an already registered road connection (for example a turn or intersection). This meant more roads needed to be processed overall when compiling roads. This has now been fixed. This also affects loading times positively as buildings don't assign and reassign their connection to roads repeatedly. It also has a moderate positive performance impact on traffic as fewer nodes are travelled by cars when travelling over straight roads.
This change makes it so that the city, once loaded, is connected in steps. As such it will at first display a lower population than when saved, and then in steps establish all connections.
- Additional low poly LOD added for each residential building added. This will not affect performance too much, since residences are generally simpler than commercial buildings, but should cut some tris in the city scene. I've also fixed a few instances of buildings having double shadow casters, or missing LODs (and as such overlapping building objects).
- Adjusted lighting to make the "underside" of cities a bit brighter
- Ordered challenges by difficulty.



A set of new road ramps have been added, among them an inner and outer slope and some twisted roads (pictured below).



As seen above, a small wind turbine has also been added. This one is not disliked by local citizens and can be used to power small scale neighborhoods.



There's a great deal of under the hood work going into this version, specifically regarding roads and how buildings connect to roads to determine what resource network they belong too. I've not reached a point where compiling roads is pretty much as efficient as is possible given the way the road system works. When it comes to spawning roads when loading the city, there has also been some improvement in speed. There's still some room for improvement, but essentially this is now as fast as it can be, given that Unity needs time to spawn road tiles.


Additional road ramps will be added later on as well as the ability to attach trams on ramps as well.

I've started implementing the low detail LOD:s. In this version all residential buildings have low poly versions triggered when the camera is far away.



Lastly, old save files (prior to EA-launch) have now been deprecated and will no longer load correctly. This is because it is no longer feasible given ungoing changes in underlying systems, to maintain these save files.

 

Hello,

It's been a year since the game went into early access! It's been a long and challening but fun journey thus far. Although many things remain, there have been many additions to the game since. Water blocks, odd roads, monorails, trams, more than 200 new buildings and a lot more.

The game is now at version 0.35 which features:

- Modern museum building added.
- S ramp added for roads.
- Population condition to grow new densities of zones increased.
- Day/night can now be set using a slider.
- New fountain decoration added.
- Added alternate monorail t-piece to allow for a different rotation. This is more of a temporary fix, due to some restrictions on rotations for vactracks and monorails. A proper solution will be added later on.
- Snow and dust added to retro mode levels snow earth and ruined earth.
- Fireworks added to stadium (trigger randomly) and city hall (trigger every fourth night).
- Building manager script is removed when demolishing buildings so that buildings, when growing or being demolished, are not accidentally saved (causes double spawns on the same location when loading).
- Flat blocks are now merged into a regular 1/8 block when stacked. Existing stacked blocks are not affected by this.
- Happiness formula tweaked.

- Happiness calculation bug fixed. This meant health and education provided way too much happiness.
- Fixed a few special cases where roads would appear as if they connect to a ramp via the side.
- Fixed roads incorrectly connecting from a regular block to a road on a flat block.
- Fixed roads not spawning streetlights (this was due to restricting roads sometimes respawning when new buildings were placed).
- Fixed not being able to build zones near straight monorails, even though placing the monorail after placing the zone would work. (inconsistent collision detection)
- Fixed destruction hologram for lots.
- Fixed materials for some 1x1 and 2x2 residences where normal map was not correctly offset.
- Fixed shadows on water shader for waterprops on buildings.

There's now a modern museum that will help boost culture in cities:



Culture has been a bit difficult to increase without plopping operas all over the place - the modern museum should hopefully help increase variation. Culture will be easier to manage once ideological buildings are added (many of which will increase culture).



I've also added some minor details like snow and dust trails in the retro mode levels and some fireworks that trigger in the outdoor stadium and city hall.



There was a bug related to the new flat blocks and roads, where roads would sometimes thing there was a neighboring tile although that tile was on a different height on a flat block. This has now been fixed. Likewise, sometimes roads would try to connect to the onramp or the twisted road. This too has been fixed.



I've also added a new type of ramp, an s-ramp to make smooth transitions between different heights.



Overall, this is a rather small update coming directly after 0.34 last weekend. I'm hoping to keep up this pace with smaller, but more frequent updates, for a while to finish up some of the smaller items on the roadmap such as buildings and details. I will try to work on systems stuff in the background, such as disasters and the ideology system.

 

Hello,

The next version of the game is almost done and should be live on tuesday. This one is primarily focused on performance and preparing for further optimizations on the graphical side of things (code is fairly optimized already).

The only new feature in the upcoming version is the addition of seasons. This called for recoding the ground texture used in the game, which also meant that seams between buildings could now be replaced. Grass is now mapped in by world coordinates, so building rotation won't affect grass like before.



Seasons currently don't affect trees, that shader work is still ongoing. But here's autumn:



I've also continued work on LOD:s, but think I've gotten to a point where I might need to also rethink shadow casters and baking more things into grouped objects to improve performance further. Verts/tris are also a bit of an issue in some larger scenes.

(New ground shader also makes it possible to set specific colors in the scenarios, like dry grass or snow)





I've also decided to cut normal maps from building footprints as a lot of them are mostly grass or concrete and the unique normal map does not add much. Instead I use a generic noisy normal map to add a bit of roughness.

I noticed unity also now removed the startup window without a replacement, so I ended up having to incorporate some of the graphical settings into the options menu, primarily texture and shadow quality, as these were set in the window before.

 

Hello,

Skipped the devlog last week as I've mostly been focusing on boring optimization recently. But now I'm finally getting back into adding new features and improvements.

First of all, billboards are being added in finally. Currently, I've only added a handful of static billboards, but will be adding more of these as well as animated billboards.



I've changed tram tracks from meshes to a texture overlay which removes a bunch of unnecessary tris, but also makes them look better at a distance (less aliasing). I've also managed to get monorail emission to draw at further distances.



A result of the graphical optimizations is that I've now been able to increase draw distance. To keep the game running well on lower spec rigs, I've added draw distance into the options.





I've started implementing upgradable buildings - nuclear power plants, police and fire stations for starters.



I've also added a bulldozer mode that destroys blocks as well as buildings placed on the destroyed block. This makes destroying stuff faster. There's more stuff underway, hoping to also get fires added in properly for the next update - which will go live August 31st.

 

Hello,

Work on version 0.37 has really picked up this week and it's now almost ready. It should be live tomorrow as planned!

It's fairly balanced between new features, optimization and bug fixes. One of the more apparent fixes it that cereal and legume can now be produced by two different types of buildings. The previously available greenhouses are still available but are now more expensive, while also producing more. They are primarily intended for bigger cities. Early on, there are now more traditional looking farms that are cheap, but produce less.



I've also now added in an overpass that can be built on. These function similarly to bridges, requiring a connection on two sides. Once built, they function just like normal concrete blocks.



In this version, fires are enabled. If a building has very little coverage from fire departments, or crime is exceptionally high, it will run the risk of catching fire. Buildings on fire will be put out over time, but fire might also spread to neighboring buildings. Buildings that are owned by the city need to be repaired manually. Zones on the other hand will be repaired over time. Buildings can also burn down completely, if they are owned by a conglomerate, this will cause unhappiness. More disasters will be added in version 0.38 and onward, starting with minor stuff like heatwaves, blizzards, crime waves and ending with meteor strikes and nuclear meltdowns.

There's now also a new mode - Atlantis - where the aforementioned disasters are disabled. In this mode, the economy is always booming and most of all - you have the perfect amount of cash at hand at all times!



Two modes of bulldozing are now available. The original one where blocks, buildings or roads are selected for destruction and a mode where blocks are destroyed, but whatever is built on these blocks is automatically destroyed as well. This will speed up restructing areas.



Most of the work on optimizing graphics is done for now. Pretty much every building now has a low poly LOD version and a very low poly shadow caster. This has allowed for a better draw distance that can be set from the options menu.
Trees now look a bit nicer too, after some shader adjustments and tram tracks are now textured instead of using a mesh, which is more effective but also reduces aliasing. Resolution scaling options were off causing some performance trouble, this has now been fixed and it should now also work better with TAA to prevent aliasing.

I've also fixed a bunch of bugs, among them roads connecting through bridges when placed on the side of a block that also has a bridge and block placement being offset when resolution scaling is not set to 100%.



Overall, this is a fairly large update with a bunch of new features and fixes. As mentioned, it will be live tomorrow!
As for version 0.38 - this is planned for september 21st. This is fairly far off, but it will also be a fairly large update with plenty new features that require time to brew. After that, I will go back to the two week update schedule I've had before.

 

Hello,

Was initially going to have a longer dev stretch for the next version, but found a bug I wanted to fix so I've uploaded version 0.38 early! It's a fairly small update overall though.

- 2x2 second density industry added.
- Rebalanced 2x2 first density industry.
- Proper cereal and legume farm icons added.
- More street noises added.
- Icon for upgradable buildings added to cost info.
- Building collapse sound added when buildings burn down.
- Sport props added to tennis court and baseball field.
- Proper fix for block placement offset bug.

- Flowers added to flower farm.
- Fixed issue where nested vacstations would not connect networks properly when nested.
- Fixed being able to build more than one city hall etc.
- Fixed fire sound not despawning.
- Fixed notices going haywire when changing resolution when a city is loaded.
- Fixed vegetation shader not lighting back of (cereal, legume, flower) particles properly.
- Fixed being able to click and drag to place several city halls (for example) and other

The bug I wanted to fix was where nested vactrainstations sometimes wouldn't figure out what was connected and what wasn't. This should now be functional. The scenario below would not work properly:



Not in the update, but something I've worked on this week is the mayors house - an upgradable building that adds a bit of culture, but mainly boosts surrounding property value.



I've managed to fix the issue with the vegetation shader where the "backside" of the billboard wouldn't be properly lit. Now it's consistently lit regardless which way the billboards are facing.



Using the same technique as above, I've also added in flowers to the flower farm:



I've also added in more street noises, fixed the block placement issue (properly this time) and fixed notices losing their anchor position when resolution is changed in game, among other things.

 

Hello!

Recently I've been getting to work on the aeronautics station that will spawn blimps and can be used to connect "islands" of the city with resources and labour. The aeronautics station will (understandably) not connect electricity and water, but allow labour to travel across the city and resources to be moved around the city easily.



I've added additional disasters that can be triggered manually or occur randomly: Heatwave, blizzard, crime wave and epidemics. There's some more work needed to visually convey heatwave or blizzard, but currently it uses the vegetation shader to display dry grass or snow.



The next version will feature another 2x2 park and plaza building as well:



There's a bunch of bug fixes going into the next version as well; among them a fix for research stalling, a fix for 2x2 second density first tier industry being incorrectly mapped when loading cities (and as a result, the building is not loaded) as well as a fix to the goto home/work feature in the citizen representative panel.



In version 0.39 the current university building will be "downgraded" to a community college and a new university building will be added in. More billboards are being worked in, as well as hotel LOD:s and (hopefully) another density for hotels.

 

Hello,

A new version is going live in a bit! It doesn't feature quite all of what I wanted to have done, but there's been a lot of stuff done to prepare for these additions, so they should be in fairly soon.

What IS in then?

EA 0.39
- Mayors house added - can be upgraded!
- Added another 2x2 park and plaza.
- Palm tree avenue added.
- University building changed to community college building. New University building added.
- Aeronautics station added. Currently they only add the public transport area effect. Connection to other regions of the city and blimp functionality will come in the next version.
- Heatwave, blizzard, crimewave and epidemic disasters added. Additional heatwave and blizzard effects to be added later on.
- Heat now affects risk of fire.
- Added a season toggle into the options menu.
- Vacuumtubes now have color settings!

- Public transport area effects of tram (lowered) and monorail (increased) stations tweaked.
- Building resource plop costs increased (generally with the exception of nano structs).
- Increased building credit plop cost for a small selection of buildings.
- Added LOD:s and low quality shadow casters for hotel buildings. More hotel props also added.
- Added LOD:s and low quality shadow casters for less frequently occuring buildings like the coalpress and batteries.
- Texture streaming tweaked.

- Vactrackstation was missing public transport area effect. Fixed now!
- Fixed flower farm, dye and textile factories not enabling in build menu.
- Fixed bug that was stalling research.
- Fixed citizen rep goto home/workplace not working (remnant issue of recent SSAA update).
- Fixed avenues not reverting to regular road when tram was built.
- Fixed fires burning out when saving (then loading) city during a fire.
- Fixed disappearing second density 2x2 first tier industry buildings.
- Fixed bug where setting monorail/tram color would set the wrong material.



Small additions like a palm tree avenue and palm tree prop that is added around hotel buildings have been added, along with the football goal prop to the stadium building.



The aeronautics station is in! Currently it only adds the public transport effect to its surroundings. Getting it to connect to other regions of the city with an aeronautics station so that labour can be shared all over will require work on the core of how things are calculated in game, so I have held off on doing this to not rush it and risk breaking stuff.



Not seen in the image, but added afterwards is a new shader that will allow players to set custom colors to vehicles such as the blimp, vactrain or trams. This aside from being able to set a custom color on tram, monorail and vactrack networks.



The old university building has been "downgraded" to a community college and a new university has been added. Currently, the community college provides as much education as it did previously, but with the addition of a new university as well as new education boosting buildings once ideologies are added there will be a small adjustment made to these values in upcoming versions.



A bunch of bugs have been fixed too. Most notably a bug that caused research to stall.

 

Hello,

A brief devlog this week!

After rebalancing building material requirements for buildings, and after reviewing overall demands for resources, I felt that the wood resource is fairly underused compared to how easy it is to obtain.
So I added a wood burner power plant! It's less pollutant than the carbon power plant, and carbon neutral if the wood is grown in the city. It's a bit more expensive in both plop cost and upkeep cost, but is a fairly good early game power plant.



I've started working towards implementing the ideology system, and a first step towards this is to clarify the function of all policies. Descriptions have been written for all of them - initially only the english version will be added, but over time I will get translations added in for the currently supported languages.



While working on the policy descriptions, I've also another round of tweaks and ensured that they function as planned. Quite a few have been made either cheaper, or more effective, and some were missing certain effects that have now been added in.



In preparation for a fully functional aeronautics station, I've started restructuring the calculation thread. This is to allow networks to be partially calculated (as opposed to sequentially as is the case currently) so that labour can be shared between them. This also involves splitting what used to be pretty much one solid chunk of code into more managable pieces and cleaning up redundant, repeated and unused code.



On the visual side of things, the blimps now spawn properly and aeronautics stations are registered and given a port number so that they can be connected in a system. Getting blimps to find and go to different stations is quite a bit of work, but should be fairly straight forward.
I've also gotten some visual annoyances out of the way, among them how there was a seam between water block sections. This issue popped up out of nowhere quite a few versions ago, but I've not been able to find a solution until now. But now it's back to normal again.

 

Hello!

A new version of the game is just around the corner! In order to optimize dev time, I've decided to always update the game on mondays from now on (every second week, unless major changes are being made, in which case it will be every third week). I've done this a few times lately, but from now on that will be the rule.

In 0.4, which launches tomorrow, policies have gotten a much needed addition of proper descriptions of their functions. Currently in english only, but translations will follow. In writing up descriptions, I've also taken the time to check the function of each and every policy. I've added/removed/twekaed/fixed effects for 16 of the game's policies. There are a handful remaining to be checked - this will be done for 0.41.



Aeroport (formerly aeronautics station) function is now implemented. Labour is now shared across all networks where there is an aeroport. You'll still have to provide electricity and water in these areas, but labour being able to be shared means districts can now be built completely separately from each other (on islands, so to speak).
Recently a small wind turbine was added to make it easier to build small neighborhoods separate from others. There's now also a water tower that can be used in a similar way, but for water supply.



Consumption calculation was extremely slow, so this has now been optimized. Generally, this will not be noticable as this calculation runs on a thread. However, if a city is very large and these calculations would not finish in time for the next time tick, they would be skipped. This would mostly be noticable when running the game on 8x speed.
Overall the entire calculation system has been changed up a lot to accomodate aeroport functionality, but also to improve readibility on my end and to optimize it. Hopefully, these changes don't produce new bugs!



The wood burner will be in, as well as a bunch of smaller decorations, like the container lots seen next to the warehouse. Two types of parking lots (industrial and commercial) have also been added:



There have also been changes made to how health is calculated, making the number of ill people variable (it used to be static depending on population size). Also, happiness will affect the residential growth condition. This condition used to be that a residence would only grow if it reached 90% efficiency (and was in a dense area...). Now this condition is set to 100% - happiness in the city (from 0-20). So if citizens are very happy, a residence will grow even if local area effects are not fully met. If citizens are very unhappy, then it will be more difficult to grow the city.
Obviously, good health levels etc. improve happiness, so it all goes hand in hand, but policies can be used to push happiness further.



Version 0.4 will be live tomorrow!

 

Hello,

Short update this week! Most of the work this past week has been focused on systems work, so que mostly random images!



First of all, the billboard shader has been expanded so that I can animate images. The animations are different types of sweeps from image to black and different types of fade in and swapping images.



While wrapping up the recent changes to the calculation thread, I also got around to adding in exact counts for the number of 1x1 through 4x4 zones in the city.



Vehicle counts have also been increased. More can still be done to fill streets, but since I've gotten performance up both in general and in vehicle code, I think this can be increased more fairly soon.
On the subject of vehicles, I'm in the process of reworking aircraft code to implement blimp movement. Currently I'm still working on path finding, since this has been very dodgy for the airfleets that land at the atmoport. This should hopefully be improved in the upcoming version, and can then be used by blimps as well.



Hotel density 2 is underway as well. Tourism will get a lot of tweaks in this version to get it up and running in a more balanced manner.

 

Hello!

Almost time again to update the game. This time around, the main focus has been on expanding tourism!



Tourist influx has been tweaked so that the baseline is higher. There will be additional tweaks to this in the upcoming few versions, but I found this is a fairly good level to start on. There should be substantially more tourists entering the city if there are hotels built. Hotel tax revenue is now also higher. Tourism related policies have also been tweaked slightly.



The 2x2 sized second density has also been added. The lower and upper class 4x4 second density hotel buildings have also been added. If there is time, I will also finish up the middle class 4x4 second density building.



I've continued tweaking import settings to increase visual fidelity while trying to keep texture size down. Thus far, I've primarily focused on gloss maps, as these have had a lot of artifacts on them from compression. I think I've now found a good balance to keep windows shiny and nice, while not boosting size too much.



Overall, this (version 0.41) is a fairly compact update that primarily adds new stuff with some additional tweaks and fixes. Moving forward to 0.42, which I estimate will be live on the 9th of november, there will be more stability work done as well as continued work on ideology now that policies have been fixed. I should also get around to finishing up blimp work. The reason for the three week brewing time, is that I will also be moving and setting up a new home office, which will need a few days.

 

Hello,

Missed last week's devlog, since I was moving to a new place. Dev has been a bit sidelined due to this, but is now back on track. Version 0.42 will see the last density of 2x2 hotels, as well as the third 4x4 hotel set. New hotel buildings pictured below.



Since tourism is now getting fairly well tweaked, a tourism tutorial will also be added - as usual, english version will come first and additional languages will be added later on.



I plan on also getting a first set of 3x3 industry implemented to add more variation to industrial areas. Since remaking the growth system for zones, it's much easier to add "unfinished" sets, so I can add them in as I go.



UI is starting to need a proper clean up, so that is something that will be started up too. There are also some clarifications that need to be added to certain parts of the UI (like showing off when a building can and can't grow for example).



I've still not finished work on blimps, so that will be seeing more work and hopefully there will be a somewhat functional blimp movement system going in the game.

 

Hello,

Next version is just around the corner! There are some things that I had planned to finish, but that didn't make it in as a result of shifting priorities - adapting UI to wide screen for example.



One new addition is a type of velodrome type road piece to transition to sideways roads. There's a similar twisted road piece already (seen below), but I think this one adds additional city customization.



Aside from a couple of roundabouts I've been prototyping, I'm pretty much done with all the custom road pieces now. Next up will be adapting some of them to allow trams.

As 1x1 and 2x2 buildings are now all finished, I've started working on the 3x3 sized sets, getting industrial buildings out of the way first. As of now, I've only finished the first set of first density dirty industry:



There will be three densities of 3x3 industry, with an alternate for each. That means another 16 buildings to go!

This version tweaks most of culture and entertainment output and also adds some minor tweaks to entertainment output as well. Certain decorations will also absorb pollution similarly to parks (makes sense, since some decorations are essentially parks). Decorations have also been added into the budget, so they will start costing money.



I'm gearing up to get the remaining 4x4 hotels done, 6 buildings in total. Hoping these can be done for the next update. I'm also toying around with some ideas for larger (6x6) power plants, starting with a larger solar power plant.

 

This thread should receive more love from others
Such a great progress past 3 years.
I assume you are solo dev?
Congrats for early access on steam.

BTW. I watch this thread on mobile. Many screenshot are not loading. Maybe they are broken. Or overloading memory. Some maybe worth put in thumbnails.

 

Thanks a lot! It does help to look back and see the progress to boost moral a bit when things feel like they've stalled. Yes, I'm a hobby solodev. I've noticed the issue with images too, I think it's a memory thing since reloading usually helps. I've tried to put images in thumbnails as the thread progresses, but have been a bit lazy as of recent. Will get to it in time for next update again so that it loads reasonably fast again.

 

Hello,

Decided to really push forward with 3x3 industry and now all three tiers are finished. Will have these live through an update tomorrow.



Lower tier industry was added in last update, but only the first density. Now all three densities are finished (bar some polish).



The middle tier is also finished, as is the upper tier:



There's still some additional prop work to be done, but overall they are pretty complete and fully functional.



With the 3x3 industry added, all industrial zones are now complete. I might return to add 4x4 variations in the future, but that will be post full release in that case.

I've continued optimizing textures, since there are still quite a few buildings to add and preserving memory is key before adding more stuff in. I'm fairly content with the balance between texture size and quality now. Overall normal maps and gloss textures have more compression and less resolution, while the main texture now has less compression. I find this is a good balance.



Next update around I will have finished the remaining hotel buildings as well as polished up the UI. Hopefully also finishing up on blimps (long overdue)!

 

Hello,

Will be pushing an update to update the footprint/ground shader. Way back, all details on ground textures were done via the diffuse map. This meant that there would be seams between each building's ground texture. Later on I moved grass over to a kind of alpha mapped world based texture so that there would be no seams between grassy parts of the texture.
Now I've moved on to the next step and added a 4 world texture per material system allowing stuff like asphalt and cobblestones to be added on a world coordinate basis. This means that additional seams can be removed (between industrial zones for example). There's still some work remaining in adjusting textures, but overall it's starting to look quite good. Another added benefit is that it has allowed me to cut all gloss maps, instead adding this information based on the world based textures instead. Effectively cutting out 55+ gloss textures.

This system also allows player customization of building tiles a bit, as seen below. This is still some ways off, but will be added in around february next year.

View attachment 741823

Most of my dev time last week was taken up by these changes (adjusting 55+ diffuse textures and coding the new shader takes time). In doing this work I also started doing some overall graphical optimizations. One such optimization was to drop the realtime reflection probe. I found these reflections, although "correct" would look subpar since they take time to update - leaving a kind of stuttery look on windows when moving the camera.

View attachment 741826

Atmospheric scattering was also found to be taking up quite a bit of processing time, and as such the quality of this has been lowered a bit. The scattering effect is fairly sparsely used in the game, so it makes sense to drop the quality.

View attachment 741829

For some reason, the resolution scaling asset in the main menu was set to 4x, making gpu load very high although very little that is scaled is rendered in the main menu. This has now been fixed!

View attachment 741832

A side effect of the new ground shader, is that making these textures will become much easier, as will changing existing ones. So I can hopefully ramp up building production a bit as well as spruce up some of the old ground textures.

View attachment 741835

 

Hello,
Skipped last week's update due to a heavy work load. But dev has been ongoing!

New hotels (third density of 4x4 size) are finally finished:


Once the last density of 4x4 is ready, tourism will be getting some further tweaks to make it more financially rewarding and more well balanced. Currently getting the necessary inputs is rather pricy, so that needs to be tweaked a bit.



Work on ground textures is almost completely finished. Only some minor tweaks here and there remain, other than that, most things are seamless and nice looking now.

I've also added a few additional road variants - roundabouts!





These are currently available in two variants, but once the UI has been reworked a bit, I will most likely add more and allow players to cycle through different sizes between 3x3-7x7.

 

Hello,

A new version of the game is now live!

0.45
- Roundabouts (mini, small and large) added.
- New decorations added.
- Added control for resetting out of bounds camera when autosaving, saving and loading a city.
- Further work on ground textures done. Most of it is now complete.
- Decoration with warning stripes added.
- Hotels density 3 4x4 added.
- Adjusted entertainment and culture calculations.
- Theme specific reflection probes added. No more blue sky reflections despite red sky.
- Monorail stations and vactrain station that have no connections to other stations no longer produce public transport and density area effects.
- Moved monorail-train deregistration to occur directly when monorail tracks have been registered as changed to avoid ghost trains staying around.
- Blizzard and heatwave disasters don't randomly occur in retro mode Ruined earth and snow earth.
- Fixed LOD and shadow casters for dirty 3x3 industry. Also fixed import settings on some of the meshes so they are smoothed properly.
- Fixed shadow casters being glitched on a handful of 2x2 residential buildings.
- Fixed upgrade icon getting stuck in building info.
- Fixed cost multiplier not reseting after placing roads.
- Fixed missing destruction hologram on 2x2 density three commercial buildings.
- Fixed missing hologram for decoration bridges.



Texture work is now pretty much completed for the ground textures. Pretty much all seams between stuff like concrete, grass and pathways are fixed.



Roundabouts have been added. Sizes 3x3, 5x5 and 7x7 are currently available. Additional variants will be added later on.
Culture and entertainment area effect calculations have been tweaked to make them a bit easier to max out. This will help hotel growth as well as higher density residential growth.



Monorail and vactrain stations no longer produce area effects if they are not connected to other stations. Makes sense as why would you go to a station if you can't travel anywhere?



Some new decorations have been added. A type of stair/warf type decoration that has been hinted before. I wanted to add some sort of automation so that pieces figure themselves out when being placed, but there were some combinations that ended up being impossible to automate as they could go several different ways, so I ended up opting for manual placement.



There's been a lot of work put into underlying UI code in preparation for an overhaul. First thing that will change is allowing specific buildings to be favorited as well as being able to cycle through construction options using mouse wheel. That'll be in the next version!

 

Hello!

It's now time for the first devlog of the new year! I've taken some time off from devlogging over the holidays (and some time off from dev too!), but from now things are back to normal.

Version 0.46 will go live tomorrow! This version primarily focuses on a much needed UI-overhaul, but there's also some new stuff to build - like this one track vactrain station:



Obviously, UI work is rather time consuming so there are still a lot of things left to do. So for starters, I've cleaned up and revamped the in game UI as seen above. Status indicators have been moved down, as have the buttons to access stuff like city statistics etc. This opens up the entire upper part of the screen.



Building options can now be favorited and stored under one menu (with the heart icon). This still needs a bit more refinement, but should be fairly functional.



A lot of the windows in game still need to be reworked, but have been ported over to the new UI for the time being. One window that has seen some changes is the city statistics window. Now that there is more screen space, I've been able to expand the size of the window to allow things to fit in better. This is something I intend to do for all cramped windows (trade and policy windows will be fixed up first).



A new industrial type decoration has been added - a miniature fan.



Overall, mixing decorations and zone sizes can make for some pretty nice looking industrial areas!

Working on the UI, I've noticed and fixed a handful of bugs. The new UI also adapts better to different resolutions.

 

Hello,

Didn't post an update last week, as most of the work recently has gone into minor refinements and fixes for the UI. Although still heavily into UI work, I've tried to vary the work a bit by adding some new buildings and tweaking systems a bit.



New bridges! This is a more classical look - a golden gate bridge type. There's also a new bridge with a more futuristic look being added - but that one is not quite finished yet.



The econopedia is getting some updates, most recently I fixed the input/output panel. This one will be getting some additional features after the upcoming version.



I've been tweaking collider sizes for icons - previously the status icons would overlap the building category buttons a bit, which meant you could get incorrect inputs. This is now fixed, as is the fire and welfare safety icon blinking red even though conditions have been met.



Using shift + mouse wheel now switches buildings within the same category. This also meant I needed to move the building name to the small cost bar so that it's easy to keep track of what building you have selected currently.



The tutorials have also been tidied up a bit since some recent additions. There will be some more work put into these before the next tutorial (on tourism) gets added in.

 

Hello,

Brief update - I've finally overhauled the way atmoport fleets find their path in and out of the city. The new system makes it possible to cheaply perform path finding in the city as well so that blimps can find their way around.



Blimps check against blocks, water and buildings. Like everthing else in the game, this is made all the more complicated by the fact that everything works in an open volume. The way I decided to go about the whole thing is to have a path seeker that continously tries to get from point A to B. The path is then smoothed to avoid stuff like can be seen in the above picture (zig-zagging). Paths are constantly being checked for changes like new blocks or buildings that have grown and positions are then loaded to vehicles when they've landed. Blimps are quite slow moving, so they will occasionally clip through stuff until their paths have been updated. This will be refined later on!



Above is a path that has been changed since a building has grown in the way of the old path.



Another issue I'm working on is that blimps need to gradually shift over and face the proper direction when landing on an upside down station for example. I've got this planned out, but it's not fully functional yet. The idea is to have blimps gradually turn to the next station's up direction over the course of its travel.



Atmoports are functional with the new system as well. Generally, things look fairly similar, with the main difference being that fleets will better find their way out when atmoports are placed in more closed in locations.



There are still some situations that take too many positions to figure and as such "time out" leaving vehicles inactive, but they are generally quit few.

Further refinements will be added over time, as well as some optimizations to the system.

Initially I had planned on launching 0.5 tomorrow, but I've decided to post pone it a week to finish up the remainder of the UI stuff as well as adding in a fully functional and animated goods port. My target date for the update is the 15th of february instead of the 8th.

 

Hello,
0.5 will be live tomorrow. New additions are generally centered around flying vehicles and changes to how they find paths. I've also reworked some of the vehicle code to make it less difficult to maintain on my end, this fixes some bugs and issues that have arises since last time I worked on traffic.



Blimps are fairly well functioning after some additional testing. What needs to be added over time is some additional raycasting so that the path finder has an easier time navigating from the topside to downside of areas. Currently it needs to kind of circle in on an area to find it's way which is very inefficient. This will be fixed fairly soon as it only requires some minor additions to existing code.



The goods port has been added into the game. This building will more or less expand on what the atmoport does today. It will be essential to increase the number of maximum trades that can be managed at the same time, and determine the capacity of how much can be imported/exported per time tick.



Currently, goods containers are only loaded onto the freighter, but come next update freighters will also come into the city loaded with containers that will be unloaded.



The game now features cars, trams, monorails, vacuum trains, atmofleet, freighters and blimps - additional vehicles I'm adding in are helicopters, small hot air balloons and some boats that will appear where there is water. After that I'm calling it on adding vehicles.



I'm still making some minor tweaks to the UI, I still need to make some graphics and update some of the icons, but will add most of this in for the next version.

 

Hello!

Short update! The next version of the game will be live on sunday. In line with the previous one it is a rather small one while the roster of ideology buildings is being expanded.

My push to overhaul the UI is more or less finished. For the upcoming version, the main menu has been spruced up. Only some minor tweaks remain, but will do as more things getting added into the game in future versions.

I've prepared a short tutorial for tourism, as well as fixed up the recently added path finding system for blimps. Blimps should now have smoother movement when nearing stations. I now also have a functional hologram type shader that will be used for additional billboards!



Next devlog I'll share some more details on the different ideologies that can be adopted and what pros and cons they have!

 

Hello!

The game was updated earlier today. The update finishes off the remainder of minor UI work for the main menu and fixes some minor bugs.

Work on implementing ideologies is progressing fairly well. The most recent building addition is the Stock exchange:



The Stock exchange is available when adopting liberalism and laissez-faire liberalism. The building produces additional revenue for the city.

Ideology buildings will output production as long as the ideology is still active. If ideology is changed after the building has been placed, then they will become dormant and only output culture. A sort of "remember back in the days of [ideology]" historical bonus for the city.



When adopting an ideology, the city will enter into a revolution during which revenue drops, costs increase, crime increases etc. Once the revolution is over, the ideology slowly comes into effect after which upkeep costs, crime, culture, education, happiness, health, labour, revenue, safety and wages will be affected.



Depending on the characteristics of the ideology, these parameters will either be increased or decreased. For example, in communism, everyone has a job, but upkeep costs increase as a result of increased corruption. In Laissez Faire liberalism upkeep costs are lower as a result of effictivization and revenue is increased, but wages drop, happiness drops, crime increases and culture also takes a hit. Each ideology has its pros and cons that will need to be offset by expanding on for example education or health, or by increasing revenue to counteract increased costs.



Once the ideology system has been added in, I will start adding a handful of unique residential and commercial buildings that will randomly grow in the city while it is run under a specific ideology. Given the amount of buildings needed, this will be done gradually.

 

Hello,

0.54 is live! Here's what's new:

0.53 -> 0.54
- Decorative pathway added
- Added a decorative panel.
- Added frame around category buttons in trade panel to indicate they can be clicked.
- Bridge max build length increased.
- Atmoports, goods ports and aeronautics stations can now be rotated.
- Non-symmetric buildings can now be rotated (180 degrees).
- Area information added into building info window.

- Lowered baselikelihood of heatwaves.
- Heatwaves now more common if pollution is high.
- Vehicle code separated into vehicles (cars etc.) and complex vehicles (atmofleets etc.) for memory usage reasons.
- Crime policy costs lowered.
- Residential revenue lowered, commercial, industrial and hotel(ial?!) revenue increased to compensate.
- Cost of unemployment increased.
- Hydrogen power plants now included in green energy category in the budget.
- Convention centers now boost hotels.
- Third density hotels now have night time lights on.
- Ads added to new vactrainstation.
- Parks nerfed.
- Carbon storage facility output increased.
- Citizen reps. now disregard there being no welfare, if there's instead a UBI.
- Property sales tax added. When property is sold, the revenue for the city is shown in the notice. High property sales tax will generate fewer building trades.
- Storage capacity and public transport added as visible outputs.
- Total storage space now visible in trade window

- Absorbent footprint updated.
- First density lower skill commercial footprint fixed (seam).

- Stalled cars should now correctly remove themselves when out of view.
- Fixed block type decorations interfering with roads
- Fixed incorrect distance in density calculation.
- Fixed lack of education, health and wealth (among others) lowering output on power plants. Buildings are generally affected by crime, fire safety and public transport, not the other aspects.
- Fixed bug where adaptive decorations would not load properly.
- Fixed citizen rep. happiness generally being higher than the average happiness for the city.


This update adds some new decorations - a sort of pedestrian pathway and two types of metallic panels that can be used to decorate the side of blocks.



Buildings that could previously not be rotated (atmoports and non-symmetrical buildings for example) can now be rotated. Non symmetrical buildings can be rotated around 180 degrees, as that requires no additional free space.
I've also extended the maximum range of bridges.



There were some missing emission maps, primarily for third density hotels, that have no been added in. On top of that a bunch of textures have been spruced up and edges/seams have been fixed.



A property sales tax has been added. This tax allows the city to make some money when conglomerates purchase buildings from one another. Adding this, I've also changed the likelihood of them purchasing buildings from eachother.

Storage space is now indicated with an icon, so the amount of storage "output" from for example warehouses is apparent. The city's total storage space is also displayed in the trade window.

Area status has also been added into the building info window. So it's now easier to see area statuses that lower the efficiency of a building.



There are also a bunch of fixes, like removing cars that have been stalled and citizen rep happiness being higher than the average happiness of the city.

 

0.56 goes live!
Hello!

0.56 is now live, here's what's new since the last update.

0.55 -> 0.56
- Expropriation policy now fully functional. Costs of destructing zones are higher when enabled, but conglomerates retain their happiness levels.
- Goodsport now has full animation.
- Goodsport function now fully implemented. If there's enough capacity, more can imported in shorter time. Import rate 25-250 units per time tick.
- Added small aeroport station (less of a growth boost in surrounding zones, but can be placed on small islands).
- Added basic city planning tutorial
- Added building sound when it is placed.
- Added low poly shadow casters and LOD for convention center,
- Added low poly shadow casters for hotel third density 4x4 buildings.
- Increased car count per building.
- Added unique color for supply buildings in view modes when viewing demand for education, health and crime safety (for example).
- Improved performance of viewmodes.
- Updated german localization - addition of missing text elements coming later on.

- Fixed blimps landing in the same location.
- Fixed roads sometimes connecting through decorations placed on edges.
- Fixed cogwheel not spinning in building info window.
- Fixed cars despawning incorrectly.
- Fixed cars stalling when spawned.
- Issue with sliders not displaying in the building information window should now be fixed.

The small aeroports are in this version, making small, unconnected islands more viable.



The recently fixed goods port animations have been tidied up and code has been cleaned up.



I've also continued working on traffic code after having separated vehicles into two classes - regular vehicle and complex vehicle. Cars (regular vehicles) have been a bit buggy since, often stalling or despawning. Most of these issues have now been fixed. Cars no longer stall for example, but may remain inactive but visible for a while before receiving their paths - this will be polished up for the next version.

The amount of cars active has also been increased now that it's more predictable how many are active in the scene when they don't despawn incorrectly.



A new tutorial has also been added in - a basic road and city planning tutorial giving some tips on how to make things grow and ways to place roads effectively.



The tutorial also briefly mentions how building reach works - both in terms of buildings reaching roads, and the reach of a building's effects.

 

Hello!

I got caught up with work yesterday, so last week's devlog ended up being posted today instead!

Current work is focused on some new additions, namely diagonal roads!



They are placed the same way roundabouts and either special road pieces are placed, so they are quite as flexible as the regular straight roads, but still offer a lot of possibilities for customization. More work on diagonal pieces will be done later on, and I'm also planning for some special zones that can be placed in the triangular spaces left on the sides of the digonal roads.



Since vehicle performance is fairly solid now, I've upped the amount of active cars in view as well. A thing that remains to be done is to fix cars spawning very closely to eachother, but that is more of a visual issue rather than functional, so it has less priority.



I've also added a way to place outer corner pieces for decorations:



I'm making further adjustments to tax revenue from zoned buildings. From the next version they will start generating slightly less tax revenue to promote the use of other means to make money. In order to avoid this making the early game too difficult, there's a bit of a revenue bonus that lasts quite some time into the game.



Next version should be live next monday!

 

Hello,

Another update will be live in a bit! This time around, I've focued primarily on fixing bugs related to placement of buildings and decorations. Stuff like overpasses not being possible to build over flat blocks for example. Or overpasses and bridges sometimes building with 0 length (basically spawning an overpass/bridge object, but without and segments).

There's also some new stuff that has been detailed in previous devlogs, like diagonal road pieces.

0.56 -> 0.57
- Added adaptive tax revenue. Higher tax revenue early on to help boost cities in the early stages.
- Adjusted health insurance cost (down) and parental benefit cost (up).
- Added diagonal road pieces.
- Corner piece added for one type of decoration.
- Changed vehicle intersection behavior. Cars should now be a bit less illbehaved (not stopping) at intersections.

- Fixed main menu not translating when switching languages in options.
- Fixed efficiency penalty calculation when resources are missing.
- Fixed bridges with zero length being possible in certain conditions.
- Fixed side decoration collider so that it can be placed after roads have been placed.
- Fixed side decoration so that it removes road connections if placed over road.
- Fixed overpasses not working over half blocks.
- Fixed flat blocks merging incorrectly in certain instances.
- Fixed not being able to place half blocks on the otherside of other half blocks.
- Fixed being able to destroy overpass block, without destroying the overpass parent object.
- Fixed main menu panel not moving out properly in higher resolutions.
- Fixed overpasses not interacting properly with water blocks.
- Fixed cars being stalled when a building is placed.
- Fixed wrong building sounds playing (for tennis court for example).
- Fixed missing mesh for a 1x1 commercial building.
- Fixed commercial footprint low detail LOD texture (density 5, wealth 5).



I've added in an outer corner version of one of the side decorations. For the remaining side decorations, the outer corner will be available soon (it requires some further adjustments to work properly).



Since increasing traffic density, it has become more obvious that some vehicles go rogue and decide that basic traffic rules don't apply to them. Essentially they just skip through intersections with no regard for other vehicles. I've started adjusting some timing values that should make this much less common and should improve the visual look of traffic.



As mentioned above, overpasses we're a bit buggy and have therefore been receiving some fixes. In conjunction with flat blocks, overpasses would not calculate length properly. In testing, I also discovered that flat blocks would sometimes merge incorrectly, leaving blocks that we're in between the regular grid size. There were also issues with placing and destroying overpasses and flat blocks using the click and drag destruct function.



It's a feature, not a bug! I've also discovered that buildings will connect to roads that are built directly under an overpass. This means that houses can be built on top of tunnel like areas and function properly. I found that even if this was not originally intended, it does make sense and it will be left in.



Alongside the ongoing ideology work, cars will receive further improvements moving forward. Also, another tutorial is being added in for the next update as well as the aforementioned outer corner for the remaining side decorations.

 

Hello,

0.59 is just around the corner (live tomorrow!). There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff fixed in this one to prepare for a change in how worlds are handled. But there are some other fixes as well.



The decoration tile has been fixed so that the corner piece that was added a while back can also be fitted together with a corner.



A standing vactrain station has been added. This one, like the small 1x4 one, doesn't boost storage and has only a small public transportation effect on surrounding buildings. But given its small footprint and how it's quite space efficient in terms of getting vactracks built away from buildings it fills a function regardless.



I've also added a flip object function for certain objects like decorations and certain special roads (twists for example). That way some objects can be moved away from the building menu and is now instead accessed by pressing and holding alt while an object is selected. Not all objects can be flipped however,



I'm also rebalancing the challenges in the game as there have been a tonne of changes to the game since these were added in. For example, local area effects of (for example) entertainment and culture wasn't implemented back when the challenges were added. So the challenge levels have gotten progressively less and less fair and balanced over time. Starting with 0.59, a few challenges will have been rebalanced.



The tourism tutorial now also has a new level, more fitting the theme of tourism.

 

Hello,

A small update is coming tomorrow already! I had initially planned on doing a 2 week leg of dev, but found some minor annoyances that I want to have fixed.
What's new will be the addition of more corner pieces for decorations. Tiles can now also be flipped, adding more customization alternatives.



I've continued work on ideology buildings, taking some time off from the big buildings to make some of the decorations.



I've corrected block-like decorations, like the U shaped side block, so that they correct to the U-shaped road piece.



A sanctuary building is making its way into the game as well. This is an early game culture building - helping fix the lack of culture buildings available for small cities.



Also continued working on adjusting challenge level and main campaign level objectives to better fit with newer systems.

 

Hello,

I'm taking a short break from ideology buildings until I regain some design inspiration. In the meantime I'm going back to working on the last density for 4x4 residential buildings - the super tall 6th density!



First finished one is the lowest tier, the lower class. This one holds just above 1400 citizens at maximum efficiency. The sixth tier won't grow until the city has reached a population of roughly 315k. In other words, these are later stage buildings.



I'm hoping to have all 6th tier residential buildings in by next update, due out next monday.



I was informed of a money bug on the sixth campaign level. This was an easy fix and an update will be up fixing this later today.



There was also a bug where corner decoration pieces would sometimes not work properly with angled pieces due to a slightly oversized collider. The sanctuary on place and on click sound was also incorrect, but now fixed.

 

Hello,

I'm updating the game to add a few more of the sixth density buildings.

Upper class:



Mixed tier (middle/upper class):



This means all of the tier 1-5 sixth density 4x4 (wow that's a mouthful!) residential buildings are finished. I still need to add in the night time lighting and fix the LODs, though.



I've also made some adjustments to the density requirement in order to grow these buildings. Density, like all local area values, are ranged from 0 to 1. In order to grow the sixth density, a density value of 0.9 needs to be met, alongside the population requirement of 312,500 citizens.



As usual, depending on how happy the citizens are, the residential building also needs to reach a certain efficiency (or output), in order to grow.



I've now started working on the sixth density for commercial buildings and I'm hoping to have all of these done, along with the LOD:s, night time lighting and shadow casters, by the end of the upcoming week.

 

Agreed, it should definitely get more attention.. Something I'd play for sure.

 

Thanks man!

 

Hello,

The upcoming version is a few days away still - I plan on having this live on wednesday evening or thursday around noon the latest (Central european time).

The upcoming version adds the remainder of the 6th density for 4x commercial buildings. From there I will continue work on ideology buildings as well as the remainder of hotel buildings (a 4th density as well as 3x3 sizes).





I've added in a new type of block, which is a kind of half way decorative side block that can be built on.





I'm also working on a block type with a round hole in it to allow for vacuum train tracks to pass through - however, I'm not yet certain if this will make it into the next update - it depends on how much of a problem they cause.

The upcoming version also boosts tourism, which previously has been very low. Cities that have quite a bit of entertainment and culture should now attract quite a few tourists!
Construction material and consumer goods prices have been tweaked.



Factories producing building materials have been boosted a bit so that they produce slightly more each time tick. This is especially the case with concrete factories. Upkeep costs have also been tweaked slightly. The idea is to make it more expensive to constantly import building materials, making own production more viable. This also means trading becomes a better source of income in dire times!

Prices for food and raw materials have not been tweaked, but this will be done in the version after the next. These changes will not be as dramatic however.