After many weeks of hard work, the first major update for Power to the People has arrived! Here is the changelog, in all of its glory:
NEW FEATURES
- A brand new level: "Río Grande, Argentina"! Level description: "At the world's end lies one of the most unlikely factory towns. Thanks to some tax exemption shenanigans, 25% of all laptops and smartphones used in Argentina are being produced here."
- New "Micro Substation", which only takes 1x1 tiles. It has low power output and only moderate efficiency, though.
- New "Screenshot Mode", that allows players to hide the UI in order to take screenshots. By default this is bound to the F11 key.
- Substations can now be upgraded to increase their power output and efficiency. Some of them have 1 and some of them have 2 upgrade levels.
- Lots of new random world events, that will affect power generation costs for different types of power plants (e.g. "a new coal deposit has been found in the area, so your coal-fired plants will have lower operating costs for a few days")
- New "historic city power usage charts", that show how much power each city has tried to draw from the grid during the past 7 days. These can be found inside the company information window or by clicking the little icon next to the city name.
- 3 new buildings for cities in all levels: Library, Theater and Industrial Complex.
- Players can now see where the next city is going to be built 48 hours in advance. It's shown in-game as a big construction site.
- Substations now have a setting that allows players to configure for how long they have to be overloaded before the automatic shutdown takes place.
IMPROVEMENTS
- Diesel generators no longer need to be placed close to water, as they are direct drive and they do not require a water source to generate steam or for cooling.
- High voltage power lines now cause unhappiness to city buildings if placed directly adjacent to them.
- Sandbox games can now be configured with any number of special modifiers, from 0 to 3. Before it was mandatory to always select 3.
- Leaderboards now also show "money left in the bank" category.
- Switching stations now have a higher capacity (300 MW) to make them more useful.
- Power plants and substations now remember the last time that was set in the automatic turn on/off setting if they are turned off. Before, the times would always get reset to 5:00 and 22:00 if they were disabled.
- Fixed bug that caused land leasing costs to be calculated incorrectly when placing high voltage power lines within city limits.
- Fixed bug regarding the "composite turbine blades" technology in the research tree. It was supposed to let wind turbines operate at lower wind speeds but it wasn't working. It was only providing a 10% power generation boost.
PERFORMANCE
- Small changes to the shader used for rendering cables, in order to reduce draw calls and therefore GPU load.
- Rewrote the code for NIMBY calculations from scratch, in order to make it multithreaded for improved performance.
- Moved some small housekeeping functions to a separate thread for improved performance.