This update features new content for Halloween and covers the base game and the Can Touch This DLC.
Base Game
The update adds the following Halloween themed content to the game:
New decorations.
New landmarks.
New wall paint.
A spooky ghost visitor.
Can Touch This DLC
If you have the Can Touch This DLC, this update also adds:
You can now turn the gas station into a spooky mansion.
Lots of spooky decals.
Other
In addition to the Halloween content, there are a few bug fixes as well:
First Party Spot bucket should now correctly display items.
The Dachshund landmark should no longer block the path for RC car mini-game.
Paint splashes from painting roofs should now be correctly spawned on the floor.
It’s now possible to place decorations on roofs.
We added a new employee variant to prevent the situation where you might end up with just 5 employees due to firing the 6th one at some point.
Fixed an issue where an employee might get stuck on top of the cash register.
Halloween stream starting Wednesday
October, 26th aka this Wednesday we’ll launch a new stream showcasing in details all the cool things we have added with the Halloween update. The stream might be quite long since we intend to show you all the decoration and Halloween themes and the update adds quite a lot of them for the base game and the Can Touch This DLC as well.
Join us tomorrow at 19:00 CET and enjoy!
Gas Station Simulator and Animal Shelter
There are a few teams here we have closer relationships with and often when their games are discounted and we are running a discount on ours, we make a bundle and let you know. It's just a way for smaller developers to support each other and let our communities know about it.
So here we are, presenting you a sweet deal on Get Gas Station Simulator, Animal Shelter or both at the lowest price ever:
If you are missing one of the games or the DLC or even don’t have any of them, now is the opportunity to get them at a significantly reduced price in the new bundle. Save up to 29% with this bundle! And to do the bundle's name justice, both games and the DLC are getting Halloween content on October 25th.
Food Truck Simulator gets a large update next week on October, 25th with various improvements to the game and Halloween related content to get you in the mood.
With Halloween and Steam’s Scream Fest just around the corner, we decided to give the gas station some spooky things. There will be landmarks and decorations to fit a Halloween theme, but there is so much more coming. Like how about a ghost visiting your gas station? You're going to love that one.
Just a selected few decorations to show you...
We haven't forgotten the inside, either...
The Can Touch This DLC is also getting some spooky love bringing a set of Halloween themed decals to the gas station, but why stop there? How about changing the entire gas station into a spooky mansion with its own Halloween themes sound ambience?
[I]Yes, that's the gas station as a mansion there...
The Halloween update for Gas Station Simulator is scheduled for next week, October 25th right in time for the Scream Fest.
Airstrip DLC
We are very happy to announce a new DLC for Gas Station Simulator where you’ll be able to open up an airstrip behind the gas station!
Airstrip DLC is going to be more story-driven than what we did in the past and will introduce a new character named Joe. An old pilot flying an old single engine plane that is need of a place to land midway to his regular destination. In return Joe promises to make it worth your while.
We decided to announce Airstrip now and release it earlier than initially planned, as our Shady Deals DLC is growing quite a bit and will need well into next year to be released. We didn’t want to leave you without new content, so we decided to move more manpower to Airstrip to provide you some cool content right there in January. While we have not set a price for the Airstrip DLC yet, it will certainly be on the cheaper side.
There is one more bit of news we'd like to share with you: Gas Station Simulator is coming to consoles tomorrow! Now you will also be able to enjoy it on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch :)
Make Dennis Your Friend
We know how much you all love Dennis and you just can’t get enough of him… Oh come on, that was a good one.
Anyway, Dennis will also be featured in Road Diner Simulator with a lot new ways to annoy you, but also new ways to deal with him. No, we will not be giving you a shotgun. We have seen this frequent suggestion from the community, but that would be wrong on so many levels :P That being said, e think we came up with something even better. Have a look at today’s DevLog over at Road Diner Simulator to get a better idea:
Now, since Gas Station Simulator, Road Diner Simulator and Motel Simulator are separate games that will work together, support and influence each other, decisions in certain aspects there will also carry over to the gas station.
One of the interesting options to deal with Dennis at the diner is to befriend him. Yep, we knew you would love that. Since we can’t have Dennis being a menace at the gas station and nice and helping at the diner just across the street, the decisions regarding Dennis made in one game will carry over to the other.
As you might have noticed, we are really excited about the concept of these 3 games working together and are constantly coming up with new interactions between them.
In case you aren’t aware, two games we are working on are Road Diner Simulator and Motel Simulator. While both are separate games, they are connected with each other and Gas Station Simulator. 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.
A hot fix for both the base game and the free Party Time DLC fixing some issues. This hot fix also fixes two game crash issues we have been tracking for a while now and were finally able to find what caused them.
Bug Fixes
Fixes an issue where employees would stop working after being talked to.
Fixes an issue where Party Time would show as greyed out on Level 6 in certain circumstances.
Fixes a game crash related to driving "Rudy" if an autosave has been triggered at same time.
Fixes some minor sound related issues with the Party Spot and the Ice Cream Stand.
Fixes a bug that caused customers not wanting to go home after you would close the Ice Cream Stand.
Fixes a physics related crash when broom would overlap a soon to be destroyed trash object trying to apply physics it it despite the object bering no longer valid.
Gameplay
The small Fiat is a little bit easier to clean in Car Wash from now on. (About 10% less of car cleaning required).
Product Delivery Crates have been moved to a slightly better position so they aren't halfway into the truck geometry.
Visuals
Police car textures increased in quality a bit so it doesn't look blurry at high settings.
Ice Cream mini-game now has quick key legend visible in the bottom right corner for easier assistance.
The cleaning skill level should now be displayed correctly.
Party Time DLC is here!
We just released Party Time DLC for you to enjoy some new content and boosts to the popularity that the community requested:
You can now build a party venue and bring another revenue stream to your business. When things get a bit more relaxed in the late hours of the day, you can now crank things up with the new party content. We hope you'll enjoy that party!
Amount of sandy footsteps created by visitors have been reduced significantly and they should no longer spawn when the customers are standing still.
Employees should no longer clean the warehouse related items (Music Sets, Giant Teddybear, etc.).
Customers using toilet should now again pay $1.50 to use the toilet.
Fixed a crash related to Car Wash which caused the game to crash when closing Car Wash, the whole Gas Station or occasionally calling the UFO.
Fixed a crash that occurred when the player was driving Rudy and the game tried to access the player’s inventory.
And just to round everything up nicely, we now have a 10% discount on our first DLC:
Update #7 is here! While the major goal of this update has been stability and especially CPU performance, we also added some new features and general gameplay improvements. The CPU focus allows us to further increase frame rates going forward. We also moved to an updated version of the game’s engine and switched to DirectX 12 which in itself should provide even further improvements.
This update also introduces some changes to the AI. In order to avoid problems with traffic or customers, it might be necessary to reset the traffic using the Big Red Button at the Dust Bowl sign when you first start the game after the update.
Features & Content
There is now a management tab on the PC that allows you to open/close all areas of the gas station. This allows you better control of how busy you want things to be at any given time.
A new caravan section has been added allowing you to hire an additional employee for a total of 6 employees helping you out on the gas station.
Enjoy even more freedom to customize your station thanks to the new Landmark list which allows you to hide any large decorations around the station.
A new landmark has been added. It’s a wreck of an old food truck.
A new unique NPC has been added. Clara is a reference to our other game Food Truck Simulator where she plays a major role.
Gameplay
Sprint is finally here. Serve your gas station customers even more efficiently thanks to faster movement by using the SHIFT button.
A new AI task randomization system has been implemented that should provide a bit more randomness in customer arrival orders to make it feel a bit less superficial.
The thresholds for popularity levels have been significantly lowered across the board. We also added 9 new popularity levels in preparation for the upcoming Party Time DLC that will further improve the popularity situation many players complained about.
Fuel Capacity saving/loading should now always be working properly. In certain cases when loading a saved game you could lose the fuel in the truck that was about to deliver it to your gas station.
Warehouse Capacity should now be calculated correctly when saving/loading games. In some conditions they did previously show the wrong values.
Visuals
The “artworks” created by Dennis will now be destroyed after customizing a new wall with the hammer tool and paying the price.
Tools in hand should no longer wrongly rotate under certain conditions.
Fixes an issue that caused customers to "drive in air" while returning to their vehicle.
Employees
Employees should now be smarter when cleaning and will no longer go for the same trash items or objects all the time.
You can hire one more employee for up to 6 total.
The scanner and baskets will now appear when an employee is serving customers at the cash register.
Stability
We did quite a lot of small fixes in many areas when it comes to stability and you should see a significant improvement in that area. As for the bigger fixes, this update does:
Fixes an issue within the physics subsystem that was responsible for a significant amount of crashes, especially in later stages of the game.
Fixes various memory issues within the UI that would eventually lead to the game crashing.
Fixes another nasty memory leak when invoking the in-game menu (ESC) on system with 8GB of RAM or less.
Performance
Gas Station Simulator has been moved to a new engine version and now by default supports DirectX 12. This helps with some of the performance improvements. Should your GPU not support DirectX 12, you can still run the game in DirectX 11 mode by launching the game with the optional parameter -d3d11.
Switching to the new engine also allowed us to use various package and asset optimizations which resulted in reducing the size game assets take on your SDD/HDD (about 3-5GB depending on DLCs). Storage space saving however were not our primary consideration, but the fact that the less storage space game assets take, the less time it takes to load them.
This update also features a series of optimizations and improvements across the board when it comes to CPU, GPU and memory usage with gains up to 40%.
We greatly optimized all physics systems in the game so that they’re now a lot more efficient when performing calculations on the CPU.
Many of the gameplay related calculations have been reworked and more things are loaded and handles asynchronously now. This should result in less hitches and smoother overall gameplay performance.
Car Wash related calculations were rewritten for better performance and strain the CPU a lot less now. Car Wash related game logic and calculations take about 90% less CPU resources now.
VFX and Lighting systems has seen major improvements to avoid a situation when in certain conditions those system would cause high performance costs over time on the entire level.
Optimized the lighting system and settings to consume less resources in general.
Optimized the character animation system to costume less resources as well. This should help with performance especially in later stages of the game.
Certain heavy textures were downsampled to further speed up loading times. These alone should decrease loading time by about 10-15%.
LODs on most vehicles have been improved to look better at closer distances or lower settings.
LODs for characters have been reworked to reduce the amount of weird clipping at lower settings.
LODs for most objects in the game world has been improved upon to further improve GPU performance.
Many optimizations to quest condition checking have been made. Cases where certain objects (like: the grandfather clock from the beginning of the game) when not removed could keep checking overlaps for the remainder of the game causing a minor drop in performance. While each drop on its own was indeed minor, they could add up which would make a noticeable difference especially on lower specs systems.
Other Bug Fixes
Discord link in the main menu should work again allowing you to join our Discord community.
Minor translation fixes in various languages.
Can Touch This DLC
New roof selections have been added to allow you better match roofs with walls.
We are very interested how the fixes and especially performance improvements are working for you. Please let us know. And while you do that, we continue working on update #8 that will focus mostly on GPU improvements.
