Reworked ground shader and texture optimizations soon live in latest update
Hello,
Will be pushing an update to update the footprint/ground shader. Way back, all details on ground textures were done via the diffuse map. This meant that there would be seams between each building's ground texture. Later on I moved grass over to a kind of alpha mapped world based texture so that there would be no seams between grassy parts of the texture. Now I've moved on to the next step and added a 4 world texture per material system allowing stuff like asphalt and cobblestones to be added on a world coordinate basis. This means that additional seams can be removed (between industrial zones for example). There's still some work remaining in adjusting textures, but overall it's starting to look quite good. Another added benefit is that it has allowed me to cut all gloss maps, instead adding this information based on the world based textures instead. Effectively cutting out 55+ gloss textures.
This system also allows player customization of building tiles a bit, as seen below. This is still some ways off, but will be added in around february next year.
Most of my dev time last week was taken up by these changes (adjusting 55+ diffuse textures and coding the new shader takes time). In doing this work I also started doing some overall graphical optimizations. One such optimization was to drop the realtime reflection probe. I found these reflections, although "correct" would look subpar since they take time to update - leaving a kind of stuttery look on windows when moving the camera.
Atmospheric scattering was also found to be taking up quite a bit of processing time, and as such the quality of this has been lowered a bit. The scattering effect is fairly sparsely used in the game, so it makes sense to drop the quality.
For some reason, the resolution scaling asset in the main menu was set to 4x, making gpu load very high although very little that is scaled is rendered in the main menu. This has now been fixed!
A side effect of the new ground shader, is that making these textures will become much easier, as will changing existing ones. So I can hopefully ramp up building production a bit as well as spruce up some of the old ground textures.
Update to fix research missing in Atlantis mode live in a bit!
[nt]
/ Nick
Version 0.43 is live!
Hello,
I've set a new update live. This update adds in a bunch of 3x3 industry mainly:
- Lower tier industry 3x3 second and third densities added. - Middle tier industry 3x3 densities 1-3 added. Minor polish remains. - High tier industry 3x3 densities 1-3 added. Minor polish remains. - Texture memory reduced further. Lowered resolution for main texture, but reduced compression for better fidelity. Lowered resolution of gloss and normal maps as well as adding a fade out of mips. - Reduced fog density.
/ Nick
All industrial zones finished.
Hello,
Decided to really push forward with 3x3 industry and now all three tiers are finished. Will have these live through an update tomorrow.
Lower tier industry was added in last update, but only the first density. Now all three densities are finished (bar some polish).
The middle tier is also finished, as is the upper tier:
There's still some additional prop work to be done, but overall they are pretty complete and fully functional.
With the 3x3 industry added, all industrial zones are now complete. I might return to add 4x4 variations in the future, but that will be post full release in that case.
I've continued optimizing textures, since there are still quite a few buildings to add and preserving memory is key before adding more stuff in. I'm fairly content with the balance between texture size and quality now. Overall normal maps and gloss textures have more compression and less resolution, while the main texture now has less compression. I find this is a good balance.
Next update around I will have finished the remaining hotel buildings as well as polished up the UI. Hopefully also finishing up on blimps (long overdue)!
0.42 is live!
Hello!
Here's the changelog for 0.42:
- Hotels 2x2 density 3 added. - Velodrome road piece added. - First dirty industry 3x3 buildings added. - Meters of road is now shown in the city stats window. - Fast tracked widescreen support. This affects UI look overall. UI in general is something that will be seeing a lot of improvements and refinements later on. Currently certain areas are getting cramped, but it will undone work to put extensive effort into it before the game is (more or less) feature complete.
- Culture output increased for culture buildings. - Entertainment output increased for all entertainment buildings. - Carbon storage cost and output increased. - Parks now absorb slightly more pollution. - Certain decorations now lower pollution, marked with a leaf on the icon. - Decorations now cost upkeep. - Adjusted high skilled labour requirements for utilities, special buildings and production buildings. Fewer are now required. - Education "seats" output increased slightly (all education buildings). Area effects adjusted down slightly for university and community college. - Meshes for prop buildings and roads in movement tutorial had gone missing, fixed! - Fixed modifiers being deleted if they had been lifted and entered the delete icon, although not dropped there.
- Fix for textile factory info not opening (due to incorrectly named icon). - Hotels now show up properly in the type view - Flower/dyes/textiles now show up in the type view as production buildings. - Fixed tooltip for community college.
- Forrest decoration deprecated - if it exists in your city it will still be there, but new ones cannot be built. (Essentially the one tile grass/small park deco is identical anyway)
Overall, this version is a bit short on some things I had planned to get added, but instead has a few tweaks and additions that were initially outside of the scope of the update (widescreen support for example). I hope to get the remaining things intended for this version in fairly soon.
/ Nick
New specialty roads, 3x3 industry and more
Hello,
Next version is just around the corner! There are some things that I had planned to finish, but that didn't make it in as a result of shifting priorities - adapting UI to wide screen for example.
One new addition is a type of velodrome type road piece to transition to sideways roads. There's a similar twisted road piece already (seen below), but I think this one adds additional city customization.
Aside from a couple of roundabouts I've been prototyping, I'm pretty much done with all the custom road pieces now. Next up will be adapting some of them to allow trams.
As 1x1 and 2x2 buildings are now all finished, I've started working on the 3x3 sized sets, getting industrial buildings out of the way first. As of now, I've only finished the first set of first density dirty industry:
There will be three densities of 3x3 industry, with an alternate for each. That means another 16 buildings to go!
This version tweaks most of culture and entertainment output and also adds some minor tweaks to entertainment output as well. Certain decorations will also absorb pollution similarly to parks (makes sense, since some decorations are essentially parks). Decorations have also been added into the budget, so they will start costing money.
I'm gearing up to get the remaining 4x4 hotels done, 6 buildings in total. Hoping these can be done for the next update. I'm also toying around with some ideas for larger (6x6) power plants, starting with a larger solar power plant.
More hotels (and other stuff)
Hello,
Missed last week's devlog, since I was moving to a new place. Dev has been a bit sidelined due to this, but is now back on track. Version 0.42 will see the last density of 2x2 hotels, as well as the third 4x4 hotel set. New hotel buildings pictured below.
Since tourism is now getting fairly well tweaked, a tourism tutorial will also be added - as usual, english version will come first and additional languages will be added later on.
I plan on also getting a first set of 3x3 industry implemented to add more variation to industrial areas. Since remaking the growth system for zones, it's much easier to add "unfinished" sets, so I can add them in as I go.
UI is starting to need a proper clean up, so that is something that will be started up too. There are also some clarifications that need to be added to certain parts of the UI (like showing off when a building can and can't grow for example).
I've still not finished work on blimps, so that will be seeing more work and hopefully there will be a somewhat functional blimp movement system going in the game.
Small update
Hello,
I'm updating the game to add the middle class, second density 4x4 hotel.
The update also tweaks revenue from residents by offsetting unemployment.
There'll be another small update on sunday to add a small timed event. :)
/ Nick
Version 0.41 is live!
Hello!
Version 0.41 is now live. Here's what's new:
- Halloween is around the corner! Theme added! - Hotels density 2 added. (Middle class missing, see below) - Sand garden added. - Square free roam level added! - Custom cursor added. - Animated and added additional billboards. - Added exact counts for number of 1x1-4x4 zones. - Wood burner ambient sound added. - Increased advisor window size to minimize text overflow. - Increased vehicle count.
- Continued tweaking building texture import settings to find a good balance of texture memory and visual quality. - Footprint texture import settings tweaked. - Tweaked alpha settings on prop texture imports. More work on this to fix aliasing on prop cutouts in upcoming versions. - Further policy tweaks and fixes: - Capped taxi fares now positively benefits tourism, but negatively affects commerce. - Leagalized gambling now yields a substantially higher revenue. - Tourism calculations tweaked. It should now be easier to grow tourism. - Hotel tax revenue adjusted.
- Fixed a couple of textures (university among others) that were displaying some visible seams. - Fixed rare null occuring in city statistics window. - Fixed tea, coffee and cocoa farm footprint disabling at distance. - Fixed material issue on rocks in water world retro level.
I will push a minor update in a few days, adding in the middle class hotel, a little halloween themed addition as well as an adjustment to tax revenue from residents. Should be live on wednesday or thursday!
/ Nick
Tourism and hotels get a much needed expansion.
Hello!
Almost time again to update the game. This time around, the main focus has been on expanding tourism!
Tourist influx has been tweaked so that the baseline is higher. There will be additional tweaks to this in the upcoming few versions, but I found this is a fairly good level to start on. There should be substantially more tourists entering the city if there are hotels built. Hotel tax revenue is now also higher. Tourism related policies have also been tweaked slightly.
The 2x2 sized second density has also been added. The lower and upper class 4x4 second density hotel buildings have also been added. If there is time, I will also finish up the middle class 4x4 second density building.
I've continued tweaking import settings to increase visual fidelity while trying to keep texture size down. Thus far, I've primarily focused on gloss maps, as these have had a lot of artifacts on them from compression. I think I've now found a good balance to keep windows shiny and nice, while not boosting size too much.
Overall, this (version 0.41) is a fairly compact update that primarily adds new stuff with some additional tweaks and fixes. Moving forward to 0.42, which I estimate will be live on the 9th of november, there will be more stability work done as well as continued work on ideology now that policies have been fixed. I should also get around to finishing up blimp work. The reason for the three week brewing time, is that I will also be moving and setting up a new home office, which will need a few days.
