Hi everyone! I've got a big update for you this time that I've been working on over the last three weeks so let's get into it!
I've added an important functionality to buildings that has been needed for a long time. Now users can dedicate rooms as different types to decide what civilians should do with them. At the moment the types are Home and Work, as well as Indoor (which is used as connecting spaces) and detecting outdoor regions.
This required me to do a large overhaul to the level editor for the new functionality including changing the save format for the buildings (your old ones will still work, but you need to designate rooms for the system to use them or else the sim will revert to how it worked previously).
So what will you actually see when running sims?
First of all people no longer live and work on the roof, or in random stairwells. They work and live where they are supposed to work and live. They commute back and forth between these locations. After making these changes I immediately hit some issues. First off:
Everyone was getting cramped into bottlenecks.
Because all the units now correctly try to live in the apartment looking buildings, there was a huge flow of traffic into these places. This is partly because I have a lot more work spaces than home spaces and partly because I have small choke points to get into these buildings.
To try and deal with this new issue I've added a new building, the hotel, to try and break up where people go a little more:
as well as adjusting existing ones:
I would like to add more default buildings and have further adjustments further down the line. I also quadrupled the amount of time people work in a building to 512 ticks so that there aren't as many people trying to commute at the same time.
This has had a dramatic change to how people group together, move together and the dynamics of the sim. I'm hoping that this is the beginning of going in the right direction so that we can have features in the future such as designating the rooftop zones so that military choppers can land on them or people can hide on the roof. It is also the next step towards things such as having furniture and such and the dynamics of barricading.
I also want to officially designate the police station as a specific building in future updates so that will be more interesting, as well as laying the groundwork for things such as a hospital or military encampments.
Thanks for playing as always and let me know what you think of the changes!