The Christmas Content update for Gas Station Simulator features specific content for Christmas along some bug fixes and optimizations. And if you look around, you might already find the spot where the airstrip will be. You can also expect the new pre-recorded stream that should be live later today, so stay tuned. Without further ado, let's get the Christmas started!š
Christmas Content
Adds Christmas themed wallpapers.
Adds a Christmas themed landmark.
Adds new decals to the game, most of which are Christmas themed.
Customers now have Christmas hats (can be disabled in Settings if thatās too much Christmas for you). Pssst... I advise to check Gustav as well.
Santa now flies with his sled above the gas station (can be disabled in Settings if thatās just too much cheer for your taste).
Bug Fixes
Fixes a rare issue when cars would not drive to Fuel Pumps.
Customers now should correctly stand in the Cash Shop queue.
Trash stuck under the ground should now be removed after loading a game.
Optimizations
Dynamic shadows for NPCs will now be cast from a new low poly mesh designed specifically to cast shadows instead of their original detailed geometry to improve performance.
We downsampled some textures that were unnecessarily too large in order to lower VRAM usage.
Party Bus and Party Spot Bus will now load NPCs asynchronously to improve overall performance and reduce stutter.
That would be it for today's development update, folks. We hope that you'll enjoy the new content, and charge up your batteries so you can welcome 2023 with a blastš„Also, the whole Drago Entertainment team would like to wish you a Merry Christmas. May this time be filled with joy, love, and excitement, for what is yet to come!
Last but not least, if you already spot where the airstrip will be, but still somehow didn't manage to add it to your wishlist, you can freely do it by clicking the link belowā¬ļø
P.S. Gas Station Simulator along with the Food Truck Simulator is part of the Winter Sale that is currently running on Steam. If you were looking for a chance to get if for yourself or maybe someone else as a Christmas gift, now is the perfect time to do it!
Quick information about the upcoming Christmas Updateš
Hey, Gas Jockeys!ā½
Recently, we've announced that today you'll be able to enjoy fresh new content related stricly to Christmas. Unfortunately, we ran into some technical issues. As a result, we're not able to release the update in its current stage, so we have to delay it a little bit. The good thing though ā the team is doing his best to fix the issue, so the update should be available soon. We're really sorry that this happened, since we know that you've been eagerly waiting for both fixes and new content as well. As soon as everything is ready, we'll share the news with ya all! For now, stay tuned for more information. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
We need your help, Gas Jockeys!
Hey, Gas Jockeys š
First of all, weād like to let you know that your constant support and feedback mean a lot to us, and your comments, suggestions, and ideas push us forward to further develop and improve the game. Gas Station Simulator was always meant to be developed with the players, so once again ā huge thanks to you. šš
As weāre already working on Airstrip DLCāļø, which will bring you the unique possibility to build a small airstrip next to your gas station, weād like to kindly ask you to fulfill the survey. The idea is simple ā weād like to add the specific country-related planes to the game, so roll up your sleeves, fuel up your car, kick Denis out of your station, and check the survey by clicking THIS LINK. You can also proceed to the survey, by clicking the image below:
But wait a secondā¦ I think Santa Claus is coming to to... Gas Station Simulator, I mean. As weāre getting closer and closer to Christmas š š I managed to steal something from the devs that will be coming on the 22nd of December. As I canāt help myself to not share it, here is a little sneak peek of what you might expect with the Christmas update. Just donāt tell the devs, OK?
Thatās it for today, fellow Jockeys! ā½ I hope you like our little sneak peek. Donāt forget to tune in on the 22nd of December, to see what else we might have for ya. Donāt hesitate to drop your comments below, and if you still didnāt manage to add Airstrip DLC to your wishlist, feel free to do so now ā¬ļø
Food will be playing more of a role in Gas Station Simulator in the future. Apart from the food truck idea we asked the community about recently and that we plan to add to the game, some food will also be coming your way from the connectivity between Gas Station Simulator and Road Diner Simulator and later even Motel Simulator.
The team working on Road Diner wrote a bit about it that you might find interesting as it might be of some relevance to your gas station as well:
We are far from adding cooking as such to the gas station, but the way we set up Read Diner and Motel to work together with Gas Station Simulator will provide some new opportunities at the gas station when it comes to food in the future.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1747470/Road_Diner_Simulator/ Getting some sandwiches and such from your Road Diner to generate some extra income at the gas station is something we are looking forward to, but even more important might be the role of how the gas station will influence the diner. There is quite a bit to look forward to in the future :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1792100/Motel_Simulator/ While the motel wonāt do much for the gas station in terms of dishes, food there plays an important role that leads to the motelās expansion and that in turn will have quite an impact on your gas station. Here we are especially looking forward to the new types of customers that will āmigrateā from the motel to the gas station. Like those truckers who will need a place to fill their massive tanks.
Now, the things described in the Road Dinerās DevLog will take a while to arrive as they are obviously bound to us releasing the game as such, but the food truck idea is something we want to add to the game between the Airstrip and Shady Deals DLC already :)
Update #8 is here!
Update #8 comes with some significant GPU performance improvements that should increase FPS across the board and a series of bug fixes.
Optimizations
We have optimized a vast amount of assets in order to significantly lower the number of primitives displayed by GPU at once and thus increase the frame rate.
We further optimized instancing of products displayed on shelves to allow better performance inside the gas station.
Several objects and the landscape had their dynamic shadows adjusted.
Culling has seem some serious work to further improve frame rates all around. Due to quite large changes made in this area, on some systems or configurations there might be some visual glitches or some in-game objects might appear later than intended. This is something we are currently working on and will improve in another update later this month.
Bug Fixes
Fixes an issue that caused the game to crash when painting pillars in the warehouse.
Fixes an issue that could potentially cause the game to crash during autosaving under certain conditions.
Fixes an issue that prevented the triangle parts under gable roofs to be painted.
Fixes a crash that occurred when the painting service was removing Denis's art.
Fixes a bug that caused the game to freeze after playing for a very long time.
Fixes a bug with RC Car track 1 which caused players to receive an infinite amount of money while falling off the map.
Fixes a bug that refreshed the number of available lockpicks when canceling a mini-game.
The Painterās Truck now has the steering wheel in its correct place.
Warehouse is again correctly robbed when you leave the door open.
Fixes an issue that prevents the shelves in the Workshop to display their names correctly and showing āNone" instead.
Removes the unknown green light near the Dust Bowl sign.
Fixes the spelling for Cigarette Stands.
Fixes a bug that caused services and deliveries to be duplicated when calling the UFO.
Fixes fueling cars with pumps not assigned to their station correctly.
Scratch doctor is now correctly used after fixing a carās door.
Spark plugs dropped on the ground will no longer increase in size.
Workshop notifications will now correctly remove only one entry when customers get annoyed by waiting too long rather than clearing all workshop notifications.
DRAGO EGGS Sale is coming!
Each Game Goes Sale!
Starting on December 8th we are launching our first publisher sale. It will not only feature some neat deals on our own games and bundles, but also some special offers on selected games from our friends. You will be able to safe up to 90%!
Join us between December 8th and December 11th!
Cyber Monday Bundle -40%
Itās Cyber Monday and for the next 24 hours, our bundle containing Gas Station Simulator and Food Truck Simulator is available at a 40% discount!
With the Black Week arriving, we are now not only offering a new discount on Gas Station Simulator, but also a new bundle with Food Truck Simulator. Save up to 35% on this deal. That is the biggest discount we made on our games so far :)
Sometime in the next year, we will add new customers to the gas station. We always felt the customers could use a lot more depth, say something unique for them, let us in on what they are about, where they are heading etc.
We know we will need a lot more depth for customers for our Road Diner and later for the Motel, so we figured we follow through on the concept of all these working together and implement them in all of them. They are currently being worked on in Road Diner and the folks prepared some more information about them here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1747470/view/5025482135624468074 Have a read and find out what sort of customers will be coming to Gas Station Simulator, too.
In case you missed our recent DevLogs, two games we are working on are Road Diner and Motel. While both are separate games, they are connected with each other as well as Gas Station Simulator. Which makes a lot sense, since they are location close-by. The road diner is just across the highway and the motel will be close to the side of the gas station. When you own any combinations of those games, they will work together, influence each other, provide bonuses and allow you various interesting interactions. This also means that a lot of things we are creating for the road diner and/or the motel will also be adding additional content and features to Gas Station Simulator in order to make this happen.
And now we are going back to working on the Airstrip DLC. We hope to be able to provide you with some interesting stuff about the airstrip in few weeks time as some really cool things are happening in this project we are quite excited about :)
From the feedback so far we noticed you like the airstrip idea, but are also wondering why we went with planes.
There are multiple reasons for that. We figured planes fit nicely into the workflow on the gas station since you are already dealing with fuel and some light repairs. And planes would really work well to provide some variety, especially as they arenāt meant to be a frequent occurrence like cars.
Another reason is to expand on something we started doing. As you might have noticed, by adding Halloween content to the game earlier this week, we also made sure that if you bought the Can Touch This DLC that you see a difference between having the DLC or just the base game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2137370/Gas_Station_Simulator__Airstrip_DLC/ With the Airstrip DLC weād like to take it a bit further. As you might know, the rather large Shady Deals DLC is scheduled later next year after Airstrip. What we want to do is having Shady Deals offer some additional content if you also have the Airstrip DLC. Thematically itās just too good a fit to pass it up. Not many things go so hand in hand with shady deals then small private planes. Every good drug movie teaches us that :P
To get the Shady Deals DLC to use the Airstrip DLC when available is the reason we decided to switch some things around and release it way earlier. There were always two ideas for how to expand the gas station that were on our minds from very early on: an airstrip and a junkyard. We always planned to do those, but never right away, more like way, way later down the road. Before that we wanted to add more conventional content like handling electric vehicles, trucks etc.
