What are we working on?
Time for a small preview of an upcoming update to Gas Station Simulator.
Despite Food Truck Simulator ramping up to its release in September and our Winter Survival entering Early Access soon after, Gas Station Simulator is still very high on the team’s priority list and we are working on new content and optimisations for while now. We reached a point where are pretty confident what will make its way into Update #7 of the game and that is a good point in time to let you know at least about some of those things. And we do have nice mix of things planed for you :)
[h2]Stability & Performance[/h2]
Aside from various fixes, especially those related to random crash issues, we continued the work from Update #4 and major optimisation overhauls. We tackled both CPU and GPU optimisations as well as physics related performance issues. Those combined should greatly improve the performance of the game especially on medium and high spec systems.
[h3]CPU Optimisations[/h3]
While the game isn’t really bottlenecked by the CPU in general, we addressed a lot of instances where the game on occasions got severely bottlenecked. Just for a moment or two, but that in turn caused the GPU performance to falter and then the recovery phase from those performance dips wasn’t short either. We rewrote a lot of code, especially in areas where the CPU is constantly kept busy to make some breathing room for the performance spikes that will occur no matter what - especially in the later stages of the game.
Depending on the system and CPU, we freed up even as much as 40% of CPU resources which is quite massive. This will not only result in overall better performance and more stable FPS, but also alleviate most of the massive performance spikes.
[h3]GPU Optimisations[/h3]
With the optimisation on the CPU side, we are now seeing much more stable GPU performance. This in turn allows us to optimise GPU even more, since the performance spikes caused by the CPU are dealt with. This is still ongoing and while we are not certain that all the optimisations we planned in this area will make it into the upcoming Update #7, a lot of them will.
GPU performance will also benefit from another source. We are internally working on a native version of Gas Station Simulator for Macs and especially the changes required for Apple’s own silicon (M1/M2) are also beneficial performance-wise for the PC version of the game - especially on the low end of the machine spectrum. So when it comes to GPU performance, there will be something for every system tier.
[h2]New Features[/h2]
While Update #7 is mostly about optimisations and stability of the game, there will also be new things when it comes to content. Here are some of the highlights you can look forward to:
- An additional employee to help around the gas station.
- Open and close areas of the gas station separately.
- Remote accessing to the PC.
- New boosts for popularity levels.
Yes, you will be able to not only access the PC inside the gas station from anyplace with a tablet like device, but you will be finally able to open or close each of the parking spots separately (which in turn are responsible for the customer influx at the cash register or the toilets), the car wash, fuel pumps (also separately) or the work spots in the garage.
We will give more details about the added features as we will be getting closer to the release of Update #7, but we hope what we already provided today enough for you to get a taste what’s coming and whet your appetite a little. Yes, the food pun is here for a reason as there will be some cool Food Truck Simulator related things that fit a gas station nicely added as well…
