Songs of Syx News

V63 - Tourism

V63 is now stable and on the default branch of steam. To continue V62 saves, you must check out the EA62 branch as a beta in the steam client.

Hello!

I'm finally done with the new patch.

The patch is currently in the beta branch on steam. To enable it, right click the game -> properties -> betas. Select "ea V63". It might be unstable, but has been alpha tested.

With it, I'm pretty happy about the city building experience of the game, and now feel ready to start on the world map and its mechanics that I've promised.

I kept notes this time!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]New Stuff[/h2]

Sweet and salt water are now environments.
Blight and bountiful harvest events added. (+2 years playing) 25% chance per year
Droughts events. (+4 years playing) 6% chance per year-
Fishing events for improved/decreased fish output.
Upgrades for all mines + small fixes
Difficulty settings for random game.
New resource: Machinery. Used mostly to upgrade rooms.
Outdoors added as a building preference.
New workshop added. Makes the machinery resource.
New UI for individuals. Added a gimmic that generates biographies to each subject. Also added opinions as to what individuals want improved in the city. Each race can have their own template, and there are templates for scared, normal and confident subjects. Can be easily modded to add infinite flavour. If someone do, please let me know.
New thing - tourists. Tourists can come to see the marvels of your city. They're attracted by large scale industries that have a high work preference with the race of the tourist. Tourists will leave some cash and a review. You must build an inn to be able to accept tourists.
Thanks to Victor Baker, who wrote a lot of tourist review texts.
Strikes added as an alternative to emigration and riots.
Two new monuments. Flower beds and humidifier.
New road: festival square
New thing: Benches. Idle subjects will search out benches to sit on in a small radius. Useful for letting them absorb the environment.
Fullfillment from tourists.
Individual crime statistics.
Micro and macro actions for your people. Free drinks, money handouts, day off work and arrest. Can be used to temporarily boost happiness.
New growable resource 'Herbs'. Used in the ration maker. Will be used in cooking services for the nobility in later updates.
Serial killer event
3 scripts added

[h2]Reworks & Improvements[/h2]

Climate and weather redone. Now with fully simulated cycles. Snow and ice added. Terrain has been redrawn and will respond to weather and wind. Map generation improved. Wild growing things adjusted and remade. One should now no longer be able to support maximum 100 people through harvesting.
Water now increases fertility around it. Irrigation is scrapped.
Farms have been re-coded to make more sense. The coming harvest is the result of many factors, clearly listed.
Homes now need a structure, the ugly walls are gone. Easier to copy and handle. Poor isolation leads to more furniture degrade.
Animals now have fixed spawning points. These replenish at a slow rate. Animals will stick to these points. Animals will attack people near them, except for hunters. Once you build near a spawning point, no more spawning will happen.
Hunter room simplified. The rate is nerfed.
Corpses bleed.
Room rates have been improved, now showing produced per day per room.
Shape for rooms are now individual for each room, and it's possible to please everyone regarding squareness and roundness.
Refiners remade. Are now upgradable. Unlocked from start. Production lowered. Early survival tactics is to use grain + bakery.
Accidents more rare, but more deadly.
Workshops have been converted to the new sprite system. Visually improved. Has their own storage, same as refiner. Some have upgrades. They are more space efficient.
University has gotten a face lift and is more space efficient.
Upgrades for service rooms, although, I've only enabled it for lavatories so far. Lavatories got a facelift, with sanitary lids for the toilets.
The throne can no longer be instantly moved, but must be constructed. Trapped people can still function and find jobs in their vicinity.
Changed the trade controls a bit.
Reworked exposure to work differently. Exposed people will seek services or shelter. In shelter they are still exposed, but at a lower rate. Prior to death, that can also go insane.
Made trees and other growth be able to grow randomly when fertility is increased by irrigation.
Added different sizes to wells, and an upgrade. And emitting of sweet water.
Gave hearths the same treatment as wells.
Added fulfilment modifiers for all monuments, meaning you can get happiness from specific monuments per capita.
Law remake. More detailed and more options.
All punishment types affect fulfilment differently for races.
Stocks added as a compliment to punishment. This shortens prison time by half.
Guard post now come in different sizes. They now have a visible radius. The chance of arresting a criminal is based on distance to guard post.
The enemy kills stat increases neuroticism and crime rate.
Guard posts remade. Now work with a radius. The closer a crime is committed, the greater likelihood for catching them.
More crime, and more penalty from it.
Added stuff to the tutorial.

[h2]Bug Fixes & Quality of Life[/h2]

An attempt to fix shuttering mouses on certain PCs.
Buildings can be built next to deep water.
Overlays have gotten some love.
Minimap improved + flawless zooming in/out.
Copying items is easier.
Room panels and priority panels have been improved. Now possible to prevent employment by setting priorities to 0.
Lots of effort put into the new sprite system for room. Making it more moddable.
People will not try to fetch corpses that are in dangerous zones, such as a animal spawn point.
Workload calculations improved.
The use of walls when building rooms have been improved.
Huge refactorings, making the game less error prone.
New Housing panel panel with improved overlay and tools.
Oddjobbers will find homes faster.
Improved the top panel.
Remade and improved bottom panel.
Wiki improved + moved race info to new wiki and improved them a bit.
Fixed Maintenance overlay
Added a type swapper to room copying and saved blueprint placer.
Industry recipes will revert if the recipe is re-locked.
Added population to save game files.
Fixed buggy Workstations
Ability to set punishment for prisoners manually + better ui for managing criminals.
Fixed broken steam achievements.

[h2]Aesthetic[/h2]

An in-game palette that lets you change colours of roads and structures for visuals.
Unique sounds for all animals. sorry about the volume, WIP.
Sounds will play when fast forwarding.
3 new soundtracks
Made openings of buildings a bit clearer.
A light cycle toggle in the settings.
Improved overlay for minables
Added some visual help to room construction.
Made roads go diagonal next to diagonal walls.
Improved the text rendering engines, taught it some new tricks, and better looking text.

[h2]Modding[/h2]

New script engine. Now possible to inject java code, and package them as mods. See pdf in installation directory of how to get started.
Big refactoring with rooms. Room files now in folders. Modders, check out the new way of specifying rooms in other files.
Made titles be able to lock rooms (requested by modders).
Updated external libraries.

Cred to steam user FroshVII for formatting the notes!

What's cooking?

I shall tell thee a bit of what's going on and why.

The main focus of this update has been polish. I thought it was just a couple of things, but once you open one Pandora's box, it leads to others.

A lot of work has gone into a brand new climate simulation, that allows for snow, and a living world that looks much better. Wind stroking the grass for instance. Animals have gotten an overhaul, with fixed spawn spots, and hunters work more predictably. Animals are also quite dangerous, so heads up.

I've dug through all UI panels, rearranged them, fixed them up, added new ones, removed others. Adhering to countless suggestions and bad reviews.

A big thing has also been to refactor code, so all rooms use a new sprite system that allows for upgrades. All refiners now have upgrades and some of the workshops.

Other from that it's just been about refining systems, and make sure everything works well. When this update is done, I consider the city-builder game to be very close to 1.0. That doesn't mean it's done, but in an acceptable state.

Heck, I'm sorry, I'm not good at this, I refer just toiling away at the code. I realize polish might sound bleak to players who have already made the effort to understand the game, but I'm sure there's something here for you as well. And, I'm getting close now to checking the last item on the list, in which case I'll start adding some new content.

The new content will be the ability that, through choices, get a public image that is either tyrannical or beloved. Choices can be public handouts, buying subjects drinks, or have your guards shake down a neighbourhood. Being a tyrant will be good for law and loyalty, while beloved increases happiness.

There will also be tourists, which will rate your city and throw you a coin based on their experience.

There will also be a lot more monuments, decorations and benches for your subjects.

Now, unfortunately, this is going to be the longest wait you'll ever had to endure. I plan on releasing V63 in early January. The reason for this is I'm on a working holiday for a few months, and I don't have the equipment to make my technically marvellous release videos. I'd also like more time doing this update, In the long term, it's a good thing, since a release is a lot of overhead.

Alpha testing will start mid December though, so if you're up to that, keep eyes peeled for the call, and join the discord if you haven't already!

Next version is going to be all about the world map. Factions, diplomacy, trade, and region development. I'm looking forward to that.

Fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx adds diseases, makes you care for the elderly

Songs of Syx is a fantasy city-builder that made a bit of a splash at release selling a few thousand copies pretty quickly, but as always many more games appear and some fall off the radar but Songs of Syx continues expanding.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/08/fantasy-city-builder-songs-of-syx-adds-diseases-makes-you-care-for-the-elderly

Sickness & Health

Greetings, noble ones. Thank you for your patience and confidence. A bunch of new features and fixes are now available for consumption. I've started alpha testing with this patch, so it's pretty stable. I will be at the bug reporting section for a week or two before I start working on the next batch.

We now have:

Personal homes
New tech tree
Elderly care
Disease & health
World camps
A new species and religion.
Balance and fixes

Full patch notes can be found in the game's launcher.

Special thanks this round goes to all the alpha testers, and for Fatmice for leading the testing, and Buildus Maximus for his astounding balance overhaul. I hope they'll both stick around for the future.

Check it out by right clicking the game -> preferences -> betas and look for V62

Here's a video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

V62 sneak peak

I thought it was time to check in before you start lynching me.

First off, I'd just want to say that I'm officially not keeping up with the community. I used to read everything, but there's just too much now. That's why I've created a special sub forum:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1162750/discussions/3/
Please, don't hold back from posting there if you have anything directed to me, it's what it's there for. I don't want to be left in the dark. I'll also read bugs and suggestions of course.

Progress regarding V62 is slow but steady. The primary feature is health, and I haven't gotten around to that yet, but here's what's in so far:

Private housing:

All subjects will require their own 3x3 house to live in. You get to set what race and class lives where. They require materials, which the subjects will go fetch for themselves if allowed. This visually upgrades their houses!

I've also remade techs and the tech tree, according to rewarding discussions here on steam.

Now each node has the possibility to be upgraded several times. Some nodes are one-ops though, that contain special stuff and unlocks.

Bonuses can now be either factors or terms, making for more interesting combinations. And the hideous forgetting mechanics is scrapped, you now get a penalty towards all bonuses instead.

Health will be easy enough to add, so I'm not to worried about that. I would like to catch up with my backlog regarding quality of live and suggestions though, so this might still take some time.

A potential problem with housing would be space. I've estimated that you'll need 25% of the map dedicated to housing for a 10k city. We'll see if this is a real problem or not from your impressions later on. The map can be expanded, in fact a 1500x1500 map has been tested, and performance is ok, but I haven't decided. RAM usage will be severe and there will be slowdowns.

Edit:

Since there seems to be a lot of nay saying, I just want to clarify a few things.
Dormitories and apartments are removed. Apartments will make a comeback later as an inn for tourists, but that's much later. Sleep as a need is removed. Instead, people have a need to have homes. Every single person will want to their own home, I can't make multi-homes. Not if you want to be able to set what type of subject sleeps where.

This is how it works. Build your industry:

Build some homes to accommodate it, this takes about 1.26 seconds:

Build a hundred homes in 0.56 seconds

If you feel creative, build creatively:

This is what 500 homes look like, in a boring grid:

It still looks much more like a city than any Dormitory or Apartment complex would look like.

Finally, skip homes, why not. People will find somewhere indoors and sleep with a blanket, no big deal having some of your people homeless. More or less expected.

I'm not going to do families, at least not in this update, and maybe never. This is an upgrade from the current Dorm / apartment system, making people a bit more individualistic. In fact, it's pretty close to what apartments used to be.

Chambers will still be available for nobles.

edit 2

Still little love for the new housing! I've spent the night thinking about how to technically allow for more residents per house, and I think I found a way that I will examine next week. Also different sizes make sense in that regard, so I'll add that as well, going from "homestead" to "longhouse". The only restriction will be that only members of the same race can occupy a house. With 2 people per 3x3. This will result in twice the area needed compared to the apartment room in previous versions. Actually a bit less, considering you don't need walls, and I think this is a good thing. Housing should make up a good chunk of a city. To compensate, I'd rather make other rooms (services and workplaces) more space efficient.

I don't know if the different sized rooms should have increased efficiency in terms of capacity. It makes sense that a 4x4 room has space for 4 people, but that would only prompt the player to use the largest size? But if so, this can be mitigated by having race specific penalties/bonuses according to size. That would limit creativity based on race preference however.

Still having dormitories as a shelter/backup is a good idea in theory, but I don't think it works in SoS. It would work in a capitalistic game, but in SoS you can choose between building houses or a dormitory, and why would you build a dormitory if it's just simply an inferior choice?

this is how I see it, feel free to argue:

[h2]Pros:[/h2]

They use resources that you allow to upgrade their house, going from slum-looking to something really nice.
The resources adds a new, familiar from other games, depth to the simulation. A lot more resources will have bigger meaning and demand. Cantors wants gems and cut stone, very expensive to keep happy. Garthimi requires a slab of clay for full upgrade.
The thin walls and detail makes it look much more detailed than the 1x1 tile walls of Dormitories/apartments. It also takes less space that say an apartment complex.
Need 5 more beds? No need to refurnish a room and evict everyone. Add dynamically
No need to build a city with dorms, unlock the apartments and have to tear everything down to add them. Now the houses can stay. You upgrade them by allowing for more furniture resources.
"Communist ant simulation" gets a hit. Everyone will have their own little space they go to, uniquely furnished (automatic) by the individual.
Easier to decide where, and how big services to place down.
Zoning, getting to decide exactly who lives where (if you want to). If you don't, the game will work out the most efficient placement of your citizens, and move them about as you change your workplaces.

[h2]Cons:[/h2]

More space requirement (x2)
Dormitories and Apartments gone (Chambers still available, and you can still mimic the apartment room if you want.)

Regarding map size. Indeed, the idea is to have this as an option. You computer specs doesn't really matter regarding this, since it's mostly dependant on the performance of a single CPU core. And CPU cores today are mostly similar, it's the amount of cores that increases with price. It has nothing to do with your graphics card, that only affects what you currently see on screen, which will be the same. So, state of the art PCs might only benefit 100-200% compared to a potato.

The reason I don't want to add it ATM, is mostly because I don't need more bugs. Map size has the possibility to increase current bugs by multiplication. It will definitely be a thing later on though.

edit 3

Thanks for all the feedback. I suppose you all have been right, so I implemented the following:

Apartment - 3x3 - 2 residents ~4.5 tiles/person
Homestead - 4x4 - 4 residents ~4 tiles/person
Dormitory - 5x5 - 8 residents ~ 3.1 tiles/person
Longhouse - 5x7 - 16 residents ~2.1 tiles/person

So, space won't be a problem (if it is, I can increase max residents). And you'll have "families" living inside. I suppose in the future that those who procreate naturally could do so in the privacy of their homes. Nursery still makes sense for Garthimi I'd say though.