Yello.
We had an unusually hands-on March, which mostly went into improving the existing content, but a few new things were added, too.
The biggest ones are:
1. Traffic System. Standard feature for this kind of game; no need to elaborate. There are roads, AI cars drive on them. A classic, standard feature, but we've implemented it, so we're letting you know.
2. Game Structure. The loop roughly looks like this:
cutscene (a few dozen seconds) - mission (a few minutes) - grind (a few minutes) - cutscene (a few dozen seconds)
Of course, the time spent on missions or grinding will depend on your skills and preferences. I recommend imagining the flow of Taxi Simulator as something similar to what’s known from Underground 2. So, we have an open world with missions to trigger (which can be repeated in case of failure), and in between missions, we can do taxi orders to earn money, upgrade the car, and approach missions with a better handicap.
Right now, we're focusing on skills and phone handling. We’ll probably finish these features in April.
Here’s what the March patch looked like; maybe someone will be interested:
- We improved the loading and saving situation when the player has an accepted client or is in the vehicle.
- Fixed the issue where Nitro wouldn't auto-reload when its level reached 0.
- Fixed the bug with the tuning icon visible on the player.
- Fixed the triggers in buildings.
- Improved the hiding of indicators when entering the pause menu or journal.
- Improved waypoints on the map.
- Fixed the issue with the incorrect input behavior when entering tuning.
- After loading the game, Nitro doesn't reload and can't be used.
- Fixed the problem with icons – they disappeared and reappeared unexpectedly.
- Added visibility for the zone icon.
- The visual effect of the zone has been restored.
- Fixed the issue with tuning not loading from save in the build version.
- Improved the map size.
- Fixed the bug where sometimes clients were missing.
- Removed the crash-causing problem in Quest Graph Taxi.
- Updated the map.
- Improved the navigation system (handling intersections at different heights).
- Added the ability to navigate to objects.
- Introduced dynamic navigation – if the zone is unlocked, you can navigate to it, otherwise, the option is not available.
- Added automatic generation of navigation on roads/intersections and exclusions for sidewalks, etc.
- The selected icon stops at the corner of the minimap, indicating the navigation target.
- Added the ability to navigate to the client without prior acceptance.
- Fixed the reset function behavior.
- We removed the issue with the vehicle bouncing at the car wash.
- The journal window can now be closed with the same key it was opened.
- Improved vehicle behavior at high speeds.
- Changed vehicle parameters.
- Increased fuel and oil consumption depending on engine RPM.
- Added the traffic system (Traffic System currently available on the test map).
- Added new barriers and improvements to the map.
- Fixed the issue with empty references.
- Fixed the issue with target icons disappearing after entering and exiting the journal.