Hello everyone!
There will not be an update pushed out this month. After PAX East, I had to focus on some IRL things outside of work for a few weeks. Since then, I've been hard at work on adding and improving features to the game. I hope to release the next update by the end of May, but there's no set date yet. This update will be much bigger than previous updates, though half of the work is "invisible".
The big invisible changes involve improving the core game engine. I've added LOD (load on demand) which was a lot of work, but was necessary to build larger cities. Previously, every asset in the game was being sent to the GPU, which was causing the FPS to tank once a lot of assets were outputted to the world, even if they were off screen. I also spent some time significantly improving the save/load time and file size--After the changes I made, there's been a 75%-90% improvement. There's also a handful of smaller adjustments that were causing the game to tank CPU performance. Lastly, a good amount of work went into creating color variants via the GPU (instead of creating every single sprite by hand)
Some of the visible changes that are now implemented are:
- Basic terrain output (no terrain height though)
- Unit animations, sitting positions, and color variants
- More unit activities (liking going out to eat)
- Auto grow residential zones (just like the classic city builder experience
Upcoming major additions include:
- RICO demand (this will be fleshed out over months)
- Water (terrain and pools)
- Possibly terrain height (but cant build on it yet)
- More unit activities like shopping, relaxing, chores
- Construction animations
- Possibly unit families, education, friends, etc.
- Hopefully street parking
- Possibly color variants for every item in game
There's also a big list of minor improvements/bug fixes, but I'll share those as part of update-release announcement.
- Chase