Hello, and welcome to Country Architect's first Steam Update!

First things first, thank you so much for wishlisting my game! It really gives me hope and confidence to pursue the development of CA.

And now, on to the Update!

Heightmaps & Biomes

A central element of this game is terrain elevation -- deciding where to place towns, factories, and the roads connecting them, which are all separated by terrain of various size and "difficulty".

The previous method I've used was Godot's TileMaps. This however, proved to be less than optimal for my game's needs. For CA to have truly large maps, I needed to write my own systems, my own engine -- and this took a while. Now, it's ready.

I can easily load up a 2000x2000 tiled map, have it looking acceptable while outperforming everything I've tried before. The way it works is a bit technical, but basically the engine takes snapshots of a 3D shaded mesh (the terrain), stitches them together, keeps the low-res version in the RAM, while the high-res chunks only get loaded when the player zooms in on them. This way, I can create maps that are way bigger and more realistic.

For a bit of a comparison, with the old system, I could load up a 1000x map at the expense of a constant 6.0+ GiB memory usage. The new system only uses ~1.3 GiB of memory on a 2000x map!

That is well within older hardware capabilities.

Biomes are essentially the terrain types I've included so far. We have:

• Flatlands,

• Hills,

• Foothills (around mountains),

• Old Mountains (eroded, blob-like), and

• Young Mountains (sharp, tectonic ridges).

Teams & Vehicles

Each town can now generate "teams". A team is a pawn that runs around on the map doing tasks.

The player decides what each team's vehicle composition is.

The concept is basically that these teams, depending on their skills, can construct buildings, town blocks and roads. New Vehicles appear each week in the Vehicle Marketplace.

This skill and vehicle composition system is basically finished, but I will need to play around with it more to get a better idea of what's actually fun, what should be kept or removed.

I've found that this system needs more tweaking and rework, so I won't get into too many details right now.

That's all for now. I could have written an Update about Teams sooner, and in hindsight, I should have. I will try to write these things more often, but rest assured, hard work is underway to get the Demo out ASAP.