Version 0.0.58.15b ALPHA

1. The Art Update:

• Building designs have been overhauled to present an all-new art style.
  
• Designs have been reworked as "Design Packages." Editing designs, assigning textures, and designs distribution are now more convenient and intuitive. (Additional changes to the Steam Workshop integration to support this are forthcoming.)
  
• Textures (albedo and illumination) can now be assigned to designs via an intuitive texture picker UI, and will "stick" to the design.
  
• The UI has been revamped for ease-of-access to tools and information.
  
• Load Menu now has options for "New Game," "New Scenario," and "New Design."
  
• Changed core game palette and mod decos.
  
• Changed terrain trees to be textured billboards (planes that always face the camera).
  
• Terrain trees are now visible from a longer distance.
  
• Polluted water is no longer shiny. Instead, it's as opaque and murky as 2020-2022.
  
• Several bugfixes and improvements to the tutorial system.
  

2. Building Designer Changes:

• The Config Panel now displays units.
  
• Corrected building height in the Design Organizer.
  
• Design Organizer now uses the pointOnLand function to place designs.
  
• Searching with the Deco tool has been improved.
  

3. Gameplay Changes:

• Some amenities have slight changes to their costs and effects
  
• Earthworks has been reworked to default to "Raise/Lower" mode. Hold LMB or Alt+LMB to Raise/Lower terrain respectively. You can still toggle back to "Level" mode via a button.
  
• Earthworks cost per tick has been greatly reduced (from 200 to 2).
  
• Hard mode is now easier. You start with more money, and there is less crime and traffic.
  
• Scrolling a list in the UI is now a bit slower. It is a user-modifiable variable (CScrollSpeed in data/constants.lua).
  
• Clicking on an achievement message now selects the responsible amenity.
  
• Traffic now provides less pollution by almost half, and pollution has half as much of an impact on health.
  
• Density now degrades Community
  
• All NewCitizens are now speedwalkers. Their walking speed has been buffed from 5 to 20m/s, which will positively impact the distance at which transit stops are viable.
  
• A small random factor has been added to routing to help break bad routes loose.
  

4. Engine Changes:

• Performance has been improved in situations where there are lots of visible vehicles.
  
• Various bug fixes and stability improvements.
  

5. Known issues:

• The initial load time for the game is longer in this version. It's due to a loading step for design textures. Improvements to this process are already in the pipeline.
  
• Due to the top-to-bottom change in designs and amenities, it will likely break compatibility with existing cities. YOU MAY EXPERIENCE A CRASH WHEN FIRST LAUNCHING THIS VERSION AS A RESULT. If this happens, select "Start a New Game" during the recovery launch. We advise making a new city for v58.15, and will offer a beta branch (pre-art-update) which will remain at v58.14 for backward compatibility.
  

Rules:

1. You must post a VOD (Twitch or YouTube) of the entire speedrun from map generation to the Skyscraper achievement, on or before October 30, 2021, at noon Pacific Time. Commentary is encouraged.
   
2. The winner has the earliest game date and time at the moment the “Skyscraper” achievement appears. Speedrunners should provide a screenshot showing the achievement, the skyscraper, and the game date, for ease of verification.
   
3. The map may be a randomly generated seed, or superflat. It may have neighbors turned on or off. You may use a known seed. You may use any size map.
   
4. You may play on any game speed, and can pause the game as much as you wish.
   
5. All vanilla game features are allowed and encouraged, including blueprints and budget shenanigans. It is NOT a “glitchless” speedrun.
   
6. You must play on Hard difficulty.
   
7. You must NOT use the Scenario Editor, modpacks, custom buildings, in-game console, or any modification of the game files.
   
8. You must play on version 58.14.
   
9. Lone Pine Games reserves the right to disqualify speedrunners for any reason.
   
10. Have fun!
    

• All New Tutorials covering basic gameplay, transit, expressways, economy, education, heatmaps, blueprints, and winning the game.
  
• Streamlined new player experience.
  
• Several bugfixes and improvements to the tutorial system.
  

• The toolbar is now positioned along the left edge of the screen, with labels for each tool, making it easier to navigate.
  

• Roads and rails are now always built at a height relative to the terrain.
  
• This may prevent certain bugs where roads didn't quite snap to one another, and were offset vertically.
  

• Pollution spreads further.
  
• Increased Community's protective effect on Health
  
• Neighboring cities will no longer affect the Density and Health heatmaps. Neighbors create less Crime and Pollution.
  

• Mixed Use zones can now spawn Residential, Retail, and Office buildings, in addition to Mixed Use buildings. Mixed Use zones cannot spawn Farms or Factories.
  
• Added the Summer Spectacular winner names to the list used for random citizen generation.
  
• Added many newspaper articles focused on you as the Mayor, funny characters in your city, and economics.
  
• Added a Design Organizer to help organize building designs by zone, density and value. The Design Organizer can be accessed from the Building Designer.
  
• Search in Controls Options.
  
• Markdown can now display charts and animated images.
  
• Various improvements to performance and stability.
  

• Fixed a memory leak when reading blueprints.
  
• Fixed a memory leak during building illumination texture cleanup when resetting textures.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when rendering multiline text in the UI.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when rendering span UI elements.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when caching building decoration information.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when reading the Designs directory.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when drawing the cursor.
  
• Fixed a memory leak during tree cleanup when resetting terrain.
  
• Fixed a memory leak for family members when resetting people.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when reading the RenumTable.
  
• Fixed a memory leak when finishing a RouteRequest.
  

• Fixed a bug where reading binary data from the input file would result in reading zero-length or invalid length data when copying to cache.
  
• Changed how Steam API functionality is shutdown to prevent race conditions and fully clean up state.
  
• Fixed a potential crash when attempting to load a preview image for a city or design that doesn't exist.
  
• Added some Windows specific error handling in certain situations to prevent CTDs (Crashes to desktop) unless absolutely necessary.
  
• Added better error checking to the isEntityActive check.
  
• Changed the frontBuffer flag to an atomic boolean to prevent certain bugs related to multithreading.
  

• Fixed a bug where the Route Inspector said citizens value their time at "$0.00 per hour."
  
• Fixed a bug in Planner Mode when building expressways that caused a "Bad Angle" error.
  
• Fixed the Traffic Infoview, which was not displaying correctly.
  

Version 0.0.58.13 ALPHA

And we're back! We've got a light update in terms of changelog items for v58.13, but expect to see that grow in the updates yet to come on the road to v1.0.

Improvements:

• Overhauled our input management system to use KeyBinds composed of Actions and Keys. These are gathered into a KeyMap which allows players to customize binds to suit their playstyle.
  
• UI buttons with an associated action now show the key assigned to their bind.
  
• Implemented a new binary file format for reading and writing data; it will be field tested first with the keymap and other input data.
  
  Fixes:
  
• Repositioned key labels to better suit new system.
  

• Friday Facts #83: Spectacular Summer
  

• Create and share a piece of NewCity-related content! It can be a photo, video, music, building design, modded content or other piece of art celebrating NewCity in the summer!
  
• Entries will be accepted from June 22nd to July 5th. Submit your content here on Discord, @ us on Twitter, or post them to Reddit or the Steam Community! Use the hashtag #NewCitySummer to highlight it for us and community voting.
  
• Participants can enter up to 5 times(one per category)
  

• Live-Action Photo: A non-edited photograph of NewCity or city-building related content
  
• Multimedia(Audio and/or Video): Edited content including but not limited to music, video, photo manipulation, or any combination of the three.
  
• Mod/in-game content: File submission
  
• Screenshots
  
• Other
  

Version 0.0.58.12 ALPHA

Development News


• Starting next week, we'll be starting the NewCity Summer Spectacular! Pay attention to our social media to see how to participate and what prizes you can win!
  
  Improvements:
  
• The terrain grid has been updated. We're going back to dots for the smallest grid size, and there is a compass rose pointing North. The grid can easily be modified by editing or replacing textures/land.png
  
• Small cities can now support more density.
  
  Fixes:
  
• Autosave is now enabled by default.
  
• When generating terrain for a new game, if hills are turned off, the maximum height is now CSuperflatHeight. This fixes a visual glitch some players noticed.
  
• Fixed a crash-on-launch.