I've decided for the next set up updates I'm working on something that has been bothering me for a while, the vehicles. Before this update they all simply drive around aimlessly until they are stopped by the outbreak.
Now civilians will use these vehicles to commute to where they want to go, whether that is home or work:
They will also park on the sidewalk when they reach their goal:
Vehicles can now overtake these parked cars to get past:
This makes the traffic so much more interesting and is the first steps towards having a smarter vehicle system. It's the framework that I intend to build upon to have things like police + ambulance responses, vehicle hijacking + looting, etc.
As this is an early version at the moment only the civilians that have spawned in a vehicle will drive to work, and they will walk back, but that is coming very soon in the next updates over the coming weeks.
If there is anything else you want me to add when it comes to changing how vehicles work please give me your suggestions in the comments!
Version 0.23.6 is now live!
Hi everyone! This week's update is a follow up for last week's performance update.
Some new settings have been added to the Performance Settings screen (also the screen can now be accessed before the sim is running where before it would only open while the sim is running).
Users can now choose to disable VSync if they wish to maximise their frame rate (It is still enabled by default.)
I've also added an option to disable the Dynamic Slowdown that I added last week. The main reason I added this is because if your game regularly runs at less than 20 frames per second the slowdown will reach 100% and the sim will not run. Unchecking this box will bypass this option.
Trying to get the game running nicely on as many machines as possible has been a challenge while constantly adding new content that lowers performance, it's a see-saw struggle where I end up having to weigh up the value of a new feature vs the cost of performance.
I hope you enjoy these updates and soon I will be adding more new content! Have a good week!
Version 0.23.5 is now live!
Hi everyone!
I had to upload a small bug fix for the last update where players locked to 30fps with vsync would have sims slow down to 100% and not function. I've lowered the threshold for the slowdown to occur to 20fps to try and quickly counter this until I can add more options in the next update. Please keep me informed if you have issues running the game and I'll try to fix it ASAP!
Version 0.23.4 is now live!
Hi everyone! I have a very exciting update to bring to you all this week!
I've been giving the performance of the game another overhaul and I've added a feature that should really help.
The game will now automatically detect when the sim is running below 30 frames per second and will slow down the simulation in order to catch up.
It's a little more complex than simply slowing the sim down - the game detects when it is being overwhelmed with AI updates and will momentarily stop to allow the sim to catch up rather than letting the AI requests pile up and up. This stops the frame rate from tanking due to a situation where slower frame rates means more AI updates per frame which causes an exponential slowdown.
In the image above I was previously getting 7 frames per second on a very high settings sim. With the new update it'll slow down 57% but will bring the framerate back up to 35-40 fps, a huge gain!
The timer on the bottom left will now turn red when it detects the game is running at less than 30 frames per second and will show how much the sim is slowing down in order to compensate and keep a good frame rate.
If you are getting a constant red timer and seek to improve performance you can go to the Performance Settings screen while the sim is running:
From here you can tweak the Action Cooldown (higher will give better performance) and slowdown the sim yourself until you get a level you are happy with. (Turning off the blood is another way to gain performance.)
The Speed Adjustment Tool attempts to automatically do this but it does not take advantage of the new system yet and will be updated in a future update.
If you are having any performance issues with this latest update or the sim is running into issues on your machine please let me know as I haven't had the chance to check this update out on other machines yet.
Thanks for playing and I look forward to seeing you in the next update!
Version 0.23.3 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got a highly requested feature for you this week!
The blood effects are now visible on every floor instead of just on the base floor.
This was a little bit more complicated than things usually are and that's because of the nature of how the blood system works, but now it's here! It does come with a little bit more of a hit on the GPU for video memory but I'm going to be working on some optimisations on that end soon.
I've also fixed a visual bug where glass windows were appearing over the top of the nuke visual effect.
Thanks for playing and I'll see you in the next update!
Version 0.23.2 is now live!
Hi everyone! I hope you are all having a good week!
This week I have added a little button to the charts screen that says More Stats:
When this button is pressed a new window will pop up that shows new stats that haven't been shown before!
I plan to add more stats in future updates but for now you can see who has killed who, the peaks of infection and the methods the infected have been destroyed.
I hope this adds a little bit more interesting information that shows the kinds of things that are happening in your sims and help you determine what you can change to get different outcomes, say for example if civilians are killing too many zombies you could give less of them weapons and see how that goes.
I've also made a small AI change:
Cops will not evacuate civilians from the police station when they are in last stand mode. Previously cops would evacuate civilians from the building which kind of threw them out to their deaths when the police station was the last building standing so now they will not throw them out. I've been thinking that perhaps the cops will tell people to gather at the station or that people who don't have homes to hide in will seek it out.
Other fixes:
Fixed some bugs where clicking on certain icons was causing them to look clicked on all the time.
If there are any more stats you want to see added to this list I am open to suggestions in the comments! See you all next update!
Version 0.23.1 is now live!
Hi everyone. I messed up in the last update and the videos weren't included in the patch and just showed white screens. Oops! It's hopefully fixed now!
Hi everyone! It's been a few weeks as I've been working on something rather large for this latest update so I hope you enjoy it!
I've been working on a rework of the interface to make it clearer how the whole simulation works. I have created several little cutscenes to introduce the concepts of the game and broken the screens down into different phases:
The phases are:
CITY GENERATION PHASE
Creating the city and choosing which kinds of buildings it has. I want to add an update where users can name their city and load premade ones, as well as giving people more options on how buildings are placed.
POPULATION PHASE
This phase is where the number of civilians in the town are added and given stats. Cops are also assigned in this phase and certain civilians are given vehicles.
Those last two phases most of you are familiar with, but I've broken up the Zombie stats page into two different phases explained below.
VIRUS DESIGN PHASE
This is a screen where you specifically design how the virus works. Zombie stats will go here as well as information about how the virus spreads.
VIRUS DISTRIBUTION PHASE
This is the phase where you can choose how the virus is distributed amongst the population. You can pick individual units to infect or choose to spread it randomly amongst the population.
By breaking the different screens up into these categories I hope to expand on each one individually and add more options for each, as well as helping new users figure out how the game works via fun cutscenes.
I will also be adding options to roll back to different phases which sort of exists via the New Population and Reinfect buttons but presenting them in a more organised manner.
Do you like the changes or want to see more added? Let me know in the comments! Thanks as always for playing and I will be getting back to you with more updates soon!
Version 0.22.1 is now live!
Hi everyone! I have family visiting this week so things have been a bit hectic but I've managed to get a visual update for you this week!
All the outlines used have been thickened from one to two pixels wide:
I still have single pixel lines for the glass panels as I think they look better for the glass effect, as well as single pixels used for the grid.
I hope you enjoy the latest update and more coming soon!
Version 0.22.0 is now live!
Hi everyone! Got the beginning of an interesting series of updates for you this week!
Civilians that are aware they are in an apocalypse will now go home to hide if they have one. At the moment 50% of the civilians in a scenario do have somewhere in the city designated as their home, the rest are considered commuters / tourists / shoppers / other and do not have a home to retreat to and will try to find somewhere safe the same way they used to previously.
This is the beginning of a series of civilian updates where they are going to be more interesting and varied things in order to try and survive. As a result of this update the dynamics of the base scenario have shifted far more than I initially expected. Now they stand a much better chance of surviving the outbreak as they have removed themselves from the city streets causing the zombies to reach less people over time meaning the cops are better able to quarantine.
Once I've done future updates I will consider rebalancing the default settings to make up for this but because I'm making frequent changes I'm not committing to changes just yet.
