Happy holiday season everyone!
After the last couple smaller updates, I wanted to bite off a couple larger projects that I really wanted to give some attention to: Production Graphs and Performance. These have both been large beasts to tackle so sorry this one has taken a little while, but I hope they're worth the wait :)
Production Graphs
First up, let's talk about the new graphs! Graphs allow surfacing more information about what's going on with your farm, so this should bring a new level of awareness and optimization on your farming journey.
There are currently three different categories of information: Sales, Experience, and Crop Production/Consumption. Each set of data will now be tracked over your playthrough, with up to 1,000 hours of data points (for now) as well as an overall total across your entire save.
Data can be graphed across a variety of different time windows so you can see your current immediate trends as you build, or your history over longer periods. You can also toggle between totals and rates over time.
Within each category, you can see the contributions from individual crops/products you are producing. Crops can be toggled on/off on the graphs so you can focus on specific products or compare production.
- Sales will display information on products being sold. This includes your overall total income, income from each individual product, and how many of each product have been sold.
- Experience will display overall experience gains across all tech trees, as well as allowing you to drill down into the Field XP or Building XP generated by individual products.
- Crops will display the overall production and consumption rates or totals of all products in your farm.
This is just the first set of features for these graphs. I definitely have some more pieces I'll be adding later, but I want to see how this first round is received before taking further steps. As such, I'd love to hear any thoughts, feedback, or requests for future additions!
Finally, while the existing builds were tracking some of this data, it wasn't tracking everything. As such, if you load a save from a previous version, it should be able to display your total income and overall tech tree XP generation from your previous play, but it will be missing individual crop breakdowns and some levels of granularity since I hadn't foreseen to record all of this. All data will be populated and recorded as you continue, and any new saves will also include all data.
Performance Updates
This is a bit less exciting to talk about, but I've made some major overhauls to the ways all crops/trees/flora/road tiles and some other things are rendered. Long story short, much more of the data is pushed persistently to the GPU to avoid frequent copies, there should be significantly less work CPU side, and the GPU data should be laid out in a more optimal fashion for faster drawing.
In my testing, these changes have resulted in ~10-20% gains in FPS on mid-to-large sized farms, but your mileage may vary depending on your system config, farm layout, and hardware bottlenecks.
Feedback
I think I've ironed out all the bugs with the performance changes, but if you see any crop/tree/road flickering or disappearing, please submit feedback from the pause menu and let me know what you remember you were recently doing before it started.
As always, feedback is greatly appreciated on the Steam discussions, the in game pause menu. Or, if you want to chat, you can find us on Discord!
Thank you to everyone who's played, shared feedback, and supported in any way along this journey. Every little bit has helped make this all possible :)
And a special shoutout to A Boiled Beaver for the save used in the screenshots ;)
Full Patch Notes
- Added Production History Graphs!
- Massive rework to crop & flora rendering
- Added support for plots to run multiple cycles per tick, fixing a bunch of weirdness when cycle times drop below 0.033 seconds
- Added total sale value to Plot Window Storage tab data & small retheming to Storage + Logistics tabs
- Rebalance of values of some items which were significantly out of whack (Cole Slaw, Mirepoix, Aromatic Vegetables, Tomato Paste). Most are increases to the number of items produced but decreases to their values. Consuming recipes have been adjusted to maintain production ratios, income per second generally is the same, but strain on logistics is somewhat higher.
- Simple Vegetable Soup value increased and quantity decreased for the opposite reasons and to compensate.
- Fixed logistics rules not persisting between save/load. Can't restore data from old saves, but new saves will work moving forward.
- Fixed waste trucks not following logistics rules
- Small tooltip changes, including displaying building sizes, tiles / sec when hovering vehicle speed stats, and a couple others.
- Changes to the way panning is calculated to avoid silliness with doubling up mouse/keyboard movement etc.
- Fixed Market Stand & Research Center windows not displaying current data
- Fixed a couple bugs where deleting the return path behind a vehicle while it was heading to a pickup could cause the vehicle to refuse to return to the pickup destination for another pickup after the path was restored. Especially common with Upgrade trucks.
- Other odds and ends