Building Warning System
I've been continually improving the UI of the game to make it easier to determine exactly what's happening with your buildings.
Currently there are two ways you can find out more about your buildings. Either hover over it to get a quick tooltip showing critical data, or select the building to view a more detailed breakdown.
With this release there's now another way for you to see at a glace what's wrong with your buildings. When your building runs into an issue it will flag a warning icon right on top of it, signaling that there's an issue you need to address.
How it works
Every building in the game now performs a series of checks for common issues and when found will flag this icon. There's a whole range of conditions in which these warnings might be flagged, but here are some of the common reasons
- Dwellings - Not enough jobs (indicates there are not enough places to work at in your city)
- Dwellings - Time to collect resources is slow (indicates that it's taking a while for your elders to collect resources and bring them back home, you may need closer industries or a resource collection / distribution building like a market to get goods to your citizens faster)
- Industry Buildings - Not enough workers to operate (indicates you need more dwellings in your city to power your building)
- Industry Building - Time to produce goods is slow (indicates that the building is not receiving enough resources fast enough to produce it's trade good)
- All Buildings - Not connected to road (your building isn't connected to any roads, ensure you have it connected to make sure it's accessible)
The Icon will remain visible until the building resolves it's current issue, you might need to provide more jobs, generated resources in a more efficient way or fix your distances between buildings.
Warning & Status Messages
As each building now performs these additional checks, it can quickly flag issues. You'll notice that you now get a status message on the hover tooltip when you hover over a building.
No jobs available warning
Not enough workers to operate
These should help you see at a glace what the issues are. You can click on the building to see a more detailed breakdown of ongoing events in the notifications section. along with the currently active status in the top right. Hopefully this should give you a good indication as to what's going wrong.
There's a rough 10 second grace period before a building starts it's checks, this should give them a few seconds to collect workers or start their normal operation before being flagged.
I know that some people might not want the visual noise this brings, so I've made it a configurable option. On the start screen, open the settings panel (top right button) and navigate to the gameplay tab. Here you can toggle the view of this system off.
Performance & Optimisations
This one has been a huge undertaking but I'm really happy with the results I've been able to accomplish.
Several users have mentioned that throughout some of the campaigns they experienced slowdown and even crashes playing the game.
After investigating I've found that the main issue was a memory leak, where the game would get bigger and eventually cause slowdown or crashes. As the game has gotten bigger, so have the images, audio and model assets. All of these compounded to cause these issues.
I've re-implemented several systems and managed to drastically reduce the memory footprint of the game. Shrinking it down from 4.7GB to 1.3GB. It should be even lower by the time you play it. I'm aiming to have this stay around 1.5 - 2GB in size, allowing extra head-room for when you make massive cities!
Before
After
You should notice about a 10%+ FPS improvement overall from these changes. These changes will be most noticeable if you have a laptop or other average power device.
I'm going to continue to improve this over time to make it even more efficient
Gaul Model Performance
Even though the game isn't graphically intensive. I still want to optimise the game maps as much as I can to ensure you get really solid FPS.
I've gone back through the Gaul maps and adjusted how the various trees and foliage are rendered. Now instead of displaying a single high resolution tree at all zooms, I now switch it out for a low poly version when you zoom out. Visually you won't notice much of a difference, but behind the scenes each tree is dropping from 1500 polygons to 300.
Performance Debugger
I've added a new option inside the settings menu to enable the performance debugger. This utility will show you your FPS, Ram and Audio usages and is a neat helpful utility you can use to visualise your performance.
Steam Integration
The Steam Integration has been re-worked. I've noticed that sometimes your progress towards certain goals don't update correctly. To get the achievement where you have created 300 Olive Oil over the lifetime of your playthroughs, I've noticed that sometimes your generated oil doesn't count.
Behind the scenes, instead of calling the Steamworks API to tell them you created X exactly when you created it, I now store all of your changes you've done in the last 30 seconds and then push them to Steam all at once. This lower frequency of calling the API has made this much more stable and I expect will resolve these mission stats and achievements!