We are currently working on some major optimizations and fixes for the game. These are quite significant and go really deep into the bowels of the game, hence the upcoming updates #4 and #5 take longer to prepare than we needed for previous updates. We’d like to give some insight into what we are doing and what you can expect in the upcoming weeks in terms of stability and performance.
One of major goals for update #4 is a drastic improvement of loading times. It took us quite a while to track down the cause and thanks to some very helpful players we were able to pinpoint the sources of the problem. As you might be aware, some players experience extremely long loading times, be it to start the game or load a saved game. This however is not a simple matter of the game not performing that great on a HDD or something like that. As it turned out, all kinds of players are affected, both with SSDs and HDDs. This occasionally is even the case on very beefy machines with seriously fast NVMe SSDs.
While at it, we are also having another look at the handling of saved game files and improve various behaviours players have experienced in the past, especially when it comes to stability of saved games. We are also addressing a problem some players noticed that the game crashes on rare occasion after performing an auto save. So quite a lot is happening in this area and we can already see great improvements in internal testing.
Another major goal for update #4 is further addressing of random crashes. While the previous patches helped a lot of players already, some players are still suffering from random crashes mostly in later parts of the game. We are reviewing a lot of the saved games sent to us by those players and are getting some really good results from that. A lot of crash instances have been identified and fixed already, more are being worked on. It is likely that we will split the fixes between update #4 and #5 as to not delay the deployment of the fixes unnecessarily.
For update #5 we are working on quite large improvements when it comes to performance. It is a combination of smaller optimizations in terms of how visuals are handled and large changes on the technical side, that will result in a significant increase when it comes to FPS.
One of those larger changes is reworking how vehicles in the game are being handled. Right now, all customer vehicles are treated equally. This in turn means, that a vehicle of a customer that only wants to shop or fuel has the same complexity as a vehicle that is meant to be repaired or washed in the upcoming car wash. These vehicles eat up a lot more resources and thus FPS than a simple vehicle would.
What we are doing now is redefine the vehicles and split them into different groups, so that vehicles not meant to go to the workshop or car wash don’t contain all the complexity. Visually it doesn’t change anything, since you don’t see those bits and pieces either way, but it affect performance quite a bit, especially the higher the level of your gas station’s expansion and the more customers arrive.
There are also a lot of smaller optimizations being done to lighting and processing of objects in the scene which in turn greatly reduce the amount of draw calls in later expansion stages of the gas station. These things, while small in itself, add up very quick and provide a very noticeable improvement in FPS across all systems.
Yet another thing that is being done is improving the vehicle behaviour in order for The Red Button to become less of a necessity to use. The way vehicles approach certain areas has been redesigned and vehicle movement in general has seen quite a few improvements. We also found multiple issues in this area that at later stages of the game were responsible for random crashes and these have been fixed, too.
While we don’t have precise dates for update #4 and #5 yet, we expect to be able to deploy update #4 sometime next week followed by update #5 one or two weeks later. Once the optimizations from these updates have been deployed, we will release the car wash next. It’s already good to go, but it relies on the vehicle optimizations, so we can’t release it before those make it into the game.
