Hello!
Version 0.15 is live and in it, fall has finally arrived to the floating cities of Atmocity!
Aside from the fall theme, this version fixes a bunch of performance issues and bugs, but also adds the final set of buildings planned for the initial stage of the Early access period. On the subject of plans, I am slightly behind on the road map, primarily due to adding QoL-improvements from requests, but also due to certain aspects of planned system additions being slightly trickier than expected. I expect to make up for the delays in december, when the overall work load is lower. All in all, the roadmap for 2019 should be completed along with a bunch of unplanned feature additions. So what is new and fixed in 0.15?
New major features:
- Second density for medium scale commercial zones added.
- New challenge level added - new challenges will be added in more frequently moving forward.
- Additional tutorial added - basic production.
- Additional policy added - Financial stability. Includes universal basic income, fraud monitoring among others.
- Wealth and financial transactions taxes added.
- Planar movement mode added. This keeps the forward/backwards movement aligned to the height the camera is currently on. This is on by default, so if you are used to the relative movement scheme, this can be changed in the controls options.
- Offers/demands/bribes are now monitored for a while so that a tax or policy can't be changed directly after accepting them. If tax is raised after accepting a demand to lower it, you will incur a happiness penalty.
New small features:
- Production buildings can now be turned off.
- Added vizualisation mode to find unconnected, unpowered, unwatered or disabled buildings.
- Number of available trade slots increased.
- Accepting bribes and getting caught now affects citizen happiness (which causes people to move etc.).
- Pollution generated at 100% efficiency now listed under output in info panel for buildings.
- Icons in building and cost info panels sorted.
- Added loading icon in save/load UI.
- Avenues can now be built to directly replace ordinary roads.
Adjustments:
- Removed high skilled labour requirement for electronics factory.
- Health otput from clinic and hospital increased.
- Service production of medium scale commercial buildings lowered.
- Residential tax revenue adjusted.
- Effect of labour policy lowered.
- Changed road building to always be allowed on blocks, earlier building roads near the edge of the city could be prevented incorrectly.
- Music ducking removed.
- Adjusted the time it takes for industry to adjust production after a resource is missing or after the economyto takes a hit.
- Removed clamping to allow zero production if all inputs are missing.
- Demand curves for individual resources tweaked.
- Unemployment and labour shortage effect on wages tweaked.
Major bug fixes:
- Flickery values and connection issues should now be almost completely resolved.
- Fix for camera jerkiness during fps-dips.
- Building type view fixed.
- Fix for production sometimes being displayed incorrectly in building info panel.
- Fix for certain production buildings working although there is no labour.
Minor bug fixes:
- Fixed Saving text blocking construction.
- Fix for cars stalling.
- Fix for cars "randomly" throwing null refs.
- Changed consumption priority order for absorbent and lots to prevent deadlocking when water or electricity production is low.
- Fixed hide HUD icon being hidden when enabling HUD with escape button.
- Sell/purchase buttons now locked when reached the max amount of trade contracts.
- Fixed notice on hover text getting stuck halfway.
- Size of colliders for medium scale residential lots adjusted.
- Size of colliders for full scale residential lots adjusted.
- Collider position of density 2 of medium scale residences fixed.
- Collider issue for parks and plaza fixed preventing overlapping placement.
- Fixed issue where rotating buildings would sometimes cause a slight clip in building footprint.
- Fix null ref error occuring when destroying Correctional center.
- Fix for missing texture on medium scale high tech industry building.
- Fix for roads not compiling properly on loading city with only roads.
- Global happiness, happiness penalties and conglomerate embargos are now saved properly.
- Fix for tax revenue "sticking" even if production seizes in goods industry.
- Employment numbers clamped to -100% to 100%.
- Unemployment insurance welfare system can no longer generate income (of course!).
Known issues:
Vehicles sometimes taking shortcuts and spam spawning. Visual glitch only, this will be fixed in the next update along with a bigger traffic optimization.
As can be seen, there's a heavy focus on addressing issues. Some of the issues fixed arose after optimizing the connection system. There have also been some calculation errors and issues with displaying the correct amount of production under certain circumstances. These should hopefully be a thing of the past now.
Of the new features, the medium scale, second density commercial buildings are one. Another is the addition of new taxes and policies and a bunch of tweaks to tax revenue and policy costs.
Most notably, residential tax revenue has been tweaked a bit (down) to accomodate changes made in how wage levels are calculated (should generally be higher now, meaning more tax revenue). The newly added wealth and financial transactions taxes can also be used to gain additional revenue when finances are tight.
In line with requests, I've also added another movement mode refered to as "planar movement". This moves the camera forward/backward along the horizontal axis, instead of moving it relative to camera rotation. There's now also a basic production tutorial and a new challenge level.
Production and commercial buildings have now been changed to require labour input. Before, some production of goods and services would still occur even if there was no labour available, but now these buildings must have at least some labour to function properly. Logic being that you wouldn't get your hair cut with no barber or taxes done with no accountant.
Among the smaller QoL additions in this version, there's the ability to turn certain production buildings off. There's also a building status view to check for unconnected, unpowered, unwatered or disabled buildings.
There's also been quite a few optimizations done to avoid stuttery framerates (which sometimes was an issue when building stuff or when buildings grew).
