Work has stated in 3.10. The main feature of this version will be new systems to make planet gameplay more interesting.
The usual list of small features goes first tho, so here's what been brewing since the release of 3.9.
*EXPERIMENTAL* support for OS rendered glyphs
We want to make our game localizable to the greatest number of languages, but at the same time we are limited by a years old, very simple custom text renderer. In particular we must bundle all fonts with the game. This makes it impossible to support asian languages, since the required fonts are hundreds of MB.
(For the more technically inclined and/or with gamedev localization experience: we could do font minimization to fit a given translation, but we are also allowing players to input arbitrary text in the names of officers. It would suck to remove this feature for the languages where it's not feasible to bundle a full font.)
After some experimenting it's now possible to fallback to the OS font renderer when the game encounters a missing glyph in the font, in any context:
Since the OS has access to its installed fonts, and it's very likely an user wanting to use a translation will also have those OS fonts installed, it means we can support virtually any language, at least at the glyph level. Languages that require specific shaping and layouts will still look bad, but the situation is much improved in any case. This feature is currently inefficient with VRAM so more testing is required to see if it fits in most users setups.
Direct deposit of factory products on nearby pallets
Factories are already capable of directly sourcing ingredients from pallets adjacent to them, and now they are capable of directly depositing their products too:
This means officers won't have to deliver the product themselves, further speeding up manufacturing. This action doesn't lock the pallet so several factories can dump on the same pallet. And the factory will also consider the neighboring tiles for the worker, so the setup in the screenshot will work just fine.
Noise
A new room-wide mechanic has been introduced: noise levels.
Most objects will be silent, but some will produce some noise, indicated in their description. The noise level of a room will be the simple sum of those noise values.
Some vital tasks will be affected by noise. They are, in order from most affected to least: sleeping, reading, eating and drinking (which is not inebriation, your bar can be noisy just fine). Sleep will be disturbed by any level of noise above 0, while eating will tolerate the noise of one kitchen so your initial hall can be simple.
Interrupted tasks show up like this:
And they also add a negative feeling:
Stock charts
What's a management sim without charts?
Translucent docks on mouse hover
"Finally" :)
