Hello!
Had a rather slow two weeks, but did manage to make some progress.
Middle class residential tier is almost finished, here's the fourth density. Fifth one should be finished today.
Last week I started working on a graph system that will be used for the global economy among other things. With this I've been able to fine tune the global economy system to behave sort of like I want it to. Enough so that I've been able to fully integrate it into the other systems.
This means that when global economy is booming, commercial zones will request more labour. All production buildings (both your own and those you have zoned, but are owned by conglomerates) will increase their demand for labour and if there's enough labour they will increase output of goods (and pollution! :O).
From a city management perspective this means you will be able to earn more tax income and have lower unemployment in a booming economy. But if you expand your city too much you might run the risk of high unemployment once there's an economic downturn, which depending on policy might end up being costly.
The next step in all of this is to tie in a wage function. High unemployment represses wage demands and the opposite. A high wagelevel lowers demand for labour.
The global economy system can be seen here (graph is WIP):
And here you can see a sped up version while fine tuning it:
As seen in the above image, I've also started incorporating roads. At first I was not going to have any roads, but rather just have flying cars and stuff. People seem to like roads in city builders so I've decided to add them. This also meant that I had to redo a lot of the foundation for how resources are calculated in the city. Before, everything was global, but now things will be calculated by 5x5x5 chunks called "Islands". There will be a check to see if these islands are connected with eachother and if they are, resources and demanded resources will be calculated together, otherwise they will be isolated and calculated on their own. This means that, as a player, you can build one big connected city, but if you wish, you can also build smaller isolated communities that work on their own. Once you reach far enough into the game, you will also be able to build atmoports to connect different parts of the city without using roads (each building will require a road though).
I recently started changing the texture atlases for all the Buildings and have FINALLY finished all of them. I did this to be able to pack textures more. Each "footprint" of a building is the same size, fitting four into the same texture. Having building footprints in the same texture means I use those textures 100%. I can then pack the rest of the building textures more tightly. I estimate I can cut down texture usage quite a bit by doing this. It also allows me to compress the building footprints more if needed, since this part of each building doesn't require quite as much detail.
That's it for this week!
