Dear Retailers,

Since the last update, players have reported a number of bugs as well as severe lag in certain areas. So before starting a longer sprint for the next major update, we wanted to address those issues first. While doing that, we also managed to add a few smaller features along the way.

This update has been focused on two main areas: balancing and optimization.

--- New features

New features are always more exciting to read about than technical improvements, so let us start with that.
Even though our main focus was elsewhere, we still managed to add some new things to the game.

1. Voices
Many of you said you missed the customer voices from the first game, so we have added them back. Both customers and employees now have voices again.

2. End-of-day milestones
The end-of-day screen now shows different milestones. You can track your best days as well as your all-time stats. It also now has proper sounds, along with a few bug fixes.

3. Tutorials
We are continuing to improve the tutorials. We have changed the text to be more entertaining and less instructional, and we have removed some of the repetitive tasks.

--- Balancing

Our last update nudged the game in the right direction in terms of gameplay feel. Based on your feedback, we have now made further improvements.

- Customers will now ask for help more often with low-help articles, and less often with high-help articles. This keeps supermarkets active while making electronics less overwhelming.

- Fresh Start now begins with more money, so you can open stores with more expensive products.

- Buildings at the lower end of the city now add more population, meaning stores in those areas will generally be busier.

- Electronics are now easier to sell overall, and they no longer receive such a large "luxury" penalty.

- Rent now takes both game speed and difficulty into account. This means it is less punishing on faster speeds.

- A starting "boost" gives you more customers during the first few days of opening, to counteract the low awareness in empty stores.

These changes are primarily meant to create an easier start, as well as a more active and fair experience no matter which products you choose to sell.

--- Optimizations

I have gone through many areas of the code to find where the game could be optimized, and I found several opportunities.

The long loading time was primarily caused by terrain generation. Terrain was generated in chunks, and each chunk was generated one at a time. This process is now spread across your CPU, allowing for much faster level loading.

Then there is the navigation mesh, which the AI uses to move around.
It was previously generated across a huge area to make sure even giant stores would always be navigable. It checked all objects in the level and generated across all 26 buildable metres vertically.
In most cases, this meant a lot was being calculated without any real need. That was the cause of the first 10-second lag spike when loading your store.
This has now been rebuilt with a new system, where it generates on your property and per floor instead, reducing that delay to around a second even on medium-sized stores.

Some menus also had long loading times because of the sheer number of products in the game. Using displays, looking at storage units, and similar actions could take several seconds to open, but they should now open immediately.

We have also made optimizations to graphics rendering, physics updates, object generation, and other lower-level CPU/GPU systems.

--- Community stores

I have also come across some exceptional community stores that I would like to share, in case you are looking for inspiration.

ColossalNomis creates very detailed stores. In this case, he built a castle!

And Jold shows what it takes to dominate the leaderboards. Made without any cheats! Very impressive.

That was all for this update. I hope you enjoy the improvements, and please continue to provide balancing feedback, as it is very helpful when adjusting the game.

So unless something new comes up, I will now continue working on marketing, which is by far the most requested feature in the game.

Have a great weekend, and some great sales.

Kind regards,
Daniel

----- Here is the update log

Minor
- Adjusted weather generation to be sunnier overall
- Adjusted weather generation so the same weather is more likely to last throughout the whole day
- Simplified product collisions to render faster
- When buying displays, you now have the option to duplicate an existing display
- Adjusted help message color to be more attention-grabbing
- You can now end the day when the store you are in is closed
- Clicking the search product tool now also shows ghosts of empty products
- Removed repetitiveness in the "Day at the Store" tutorials
- Changed tutorial texts
- Receive a warning when an off-site store is running without leadership
- Added milestones to the end-of-day screen
- Added sounds to end-of-day screens
- Added notification for the first customer entering the store
- Adjusted notification blur levels
- Customers should no longer ask for help immediately after being suggested a product
- Added voices when helping, asking for help, and checking out at the register
- Cleaned up the supermarket tutorial level
- Instrumental music is now enabled by default. Lyrics can be toggled on

Balancing
- Increased the average population of low-population buildings
- Luxury penalty is now scaled by game difficulty
- How often customers ask for help by category type is now modified by difficulty
- Rent is now collected based on game speed and difficulty
- Reduced repetition in the "A Day at the Store" tutorial
- Increased customers' base question level
- Customers' base question level is now based on segment type
- Customers will not seek help for low-need products they are evaluating
- Game difficulty now affects team score
- Increased "Fresh Start" starting funds
- Added a first-week ramp-up effect for more starting customers

Optimizations
- Optimized how the "Use Display" screen calculates across all products
- Optimized how the "Use Storage" screen calculates across all products
- Examine Product now updates products over several frames instead of one, which caused hitches in larger stores
- Optimized terrain generation so the city and stores load faster
- Adjusted how the navigation mesh is generated to reduce lag when opening a store
- Some units were updating the navigation mesh too often, causing it to be rebuilt many times
- Adjusted object distances and sizes for ray tracing consideration
- Changed elevator navigation settings so they do not trigger navigation mesh changes as often
- Updated product culling so products are no longer rendered at certain distances
- Reduced physics updates per second for customers

Bugs
- "Set All" in the ordering menu is no longer one input behind
- Cart items are no longer one input behind
- Adjusted bad collisions on products that caused them to block in the wrong situations
- Register 2 no longer claimed a larger area than its visuals showed
- Store schedule combined alignment now falls under the proper hours
- High-end GPUs should no longer try to over-optimize Nanite
- Fixed end-of-day behavior when stores and concepts exceed their max level
- Fixed progress bar behavior when switching screens