Door and window frames are now generated for rooms, lobby and facades. We've been working to reduce the amount of separate objects, since we aim to let you build 200+ floors in a building. The glass is changing color depending on the time of day and the room light. Note that you also can see the clouds move in the sky in this picture, and it's possible to build above the clouds. Each room can switch on or off lights separately via scripting. We will allow modding in the future and it will be possible to change light etc via JavaScript for each room.
It's now possible to place items in rooms, and a room might have several layout options where furniture may be placed. The item placement is not selected by the player in rooms, but you will be able to place items in the lobby and outside later. You can also see the door frames in this picture. The items are only placeholders and we will get better models later. We will also tweak all wall and floor textures. Rooms will have predefined layouts (different floor and wall material) and furnishings (chairs, tables, kitchen equipment, etc). The layout and furnishing in rooms will be selected via JavaScript methods which will be available for modding. Furnishing and layout might be replaced if a room switch owner or if the room deteriorate for some reason.
We've added World edges and the current map is 200m x 200m, which is about the same size as a normal city block in Manhattan. The map size depends on scenario settings, but we expect that most scenarios will have similar sizes. It's possible to build below the ground and there will be some rooms that must be placed underground. Buildings doesn't have to look like towers as the picture illustrates, but we will implement that people are being more happy if they manage to get some daylight from windows, etc, so you might not want to build rooms without windows.
First image of the GUI. We have not decided the final layout of the GUI yet, but this is the current default view. You have the time and game speed lower to the left. There are 5 different game speeds that you may choose from: pause, slow, normal, fast, very fast and light speed. We currently having a 3 day week, 1 week per month in the game calendar and the minimum time unit is 1 minute, so months should pass by quite quickly.
You may select room categories to build rooms from in the lower center area or expand the lobby. Rooms are always placed in the lobby. All the categories are dynamic it's possible to add other classes when writing mods to the game. We still need to add spaces in the GUI for economy, population, star-rating, achievements and statistics.
This picture describes how lobby is constructed. You simply select the lobby builder and drag out the area where you want to build your lobby. It requires that the new lobby is connected to the building. You need to have something tiles built below when constructing above ground floor.
The following picture describes how to place rooms. We've decided to place predefined rooms since it will too much micromanagement to build a complete skyscraper with 200+ floors if you should place each window, door, toilet, etc. The right area describes the figure of the room. We will add arrows that indicate which side that must have free space towards the lobby. Rooms must always have access to the lobby.
Other things that we've started to implement are some back-end JavaScript callbacks for various things like checking if a room type is available to build, setting AI behavior when creating rooms or persons, etc. Each person will have a set of interests (food, sports, shopping, etc) and a set of attributes (hunger, sleepiness, etc). Each room will have a set of influences (feeding, etc) that hopefully should satisfy interests and attributes for the person. The AI script will then decide actions that the person should perform, such as go to the store and shop some food or go to the theater.
