Highrise City News

Greetings Builders!

We sat together and finally updated the Early Access Roadmap on Trello again. Plans change all the time, especially with community feedback involved and we hadn't updated the roadmap since quite some time. We were now able to define the next steps for Highrise City and wanted to share the news with you. In case you are not used to Trello, the screenshot below should give you a good impression as well.

And of course: Listed are just the main features and changes. Smaller ones will be included along the way, too.



In other news: We'll be at the gamescom in Cologne this year. So feel free to say hello at the Indie Arena. And yes, a playable demo of Highrise City will be available on Steam during that time.

Hello Builders!

After a short vacation we're back at work (during the heatwave currently hitting Europe. Nice planning we have there for vacations, right?). And sorry to all of you who are from the Netherlands that todays title of the news is a joke about your country having no mountains. But we have included a completely flat map for all of you to experiment with the new terrain tool.

In addition to that, we've also added Tutorial Videos for the Terrain tool and a small button in the upper right corner to upload custom textures. This will allow you to import heigth maps as PNGs and then start sculpting with them.

Another important thing: WIth the last update an annoying crash (well, to be honest, it wasn't directly a crash, the game just freezed for a long time to calculate collision in the background) happened with the Grain Farm. That is gone now.

We've also started to re-color certain industry buildings. That process takes some time, but for the color scheme we have in mind you should take a look at the copper mine and the iron mine to get an idea.

Yet another thing we've added: Details for the people living in your city. You can now track where people are working. It is a little detail preparing the game for future content updates. We don't want to spoil too much but some of these changes will require you to think different about your city planning.

[h2]Patchnotes:[/h2]
Added an indicator for office-needs
Improved post processing (Depth of Field fog added)
Depth of Field can be adjusted in the video options
Increased speed of clouds
Added shadows for clouds
Trees are now planted correctly when loading a savegame
Added a new Sandbox Map (located in the Netherlands. It's flat. Sorry for the pun)
Added statistics for people at the buildings they live in (this will be important in the future)
Performance of Farms heavily improved
Fixed a crash when deleting a savegame
Added a button to load custom textures
Removed terrain tool costs related points from the research menu for now
Terraforming tooltips in videoform have been added
Terraforming has now lines as indicators for heigth
Position of the camera for some monitors for the "Buy New Land" Menu imporved
Sorting of savegames added
Fixed a crashbug when using the pipette
Reworked designs for Ironmine, Iron Melter, Copper Mine, Copper Melter and others
Kilometers driven with the car now get tracked globally (Oh, trust us, we'll make us of global tracking in the future)

Greetings Builders!

Time for another bigger update. Due to the success of Highrise City so far, we were able to work full time on the game and could speed up development overall. And even extend the scope a bit. It will still take time to finish the game, sure, but we were able to hire additional people to get the job done. And one result of this situation is that we were able to come up with an update we had planned for a much later stage of development.

One thing quite a lot of you did not like were the height differences of the streets and the terrain. With the new update, we changed quite a few things and the streets got improved already. They are not perfect just yet, but we're getting there.

How? We were working on another feature people were complaining about: The terrain tool. We've completely reworked the way you can shape and form the terrain. It is much easier now. We've also tested out the performance when increasing the number of Voxels the terrain is made of.

Keep in mind: Loading an old save will now take a bit on the first run as the new system will reshape every Voxel in your city. It might happen that some things turn out not to be perfect though. But with the new tools you should be able to reset most of the errors.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Improved Colors on the edges of the maps
  
• Increased resolution of the landscape textures by 30%
  
• Reworked the terrain tool from scratch
  
• Added new terraforming tools
  
• Removing streets & buildings resets the landscape below (or above)
  
• Removed costs for terraforming for now (this will be changed at some point)
  
• Ground of streets & buildings stays when using terraforming on it
  
• Adjusted color of the ocean
  
• Improved Voxel density on terrain by 50%
  
• While driving the car, grass close by gets invisible
  
• Improved visibility of small numbers in the construction menu
  
• Added water plants (for now it is grass, new plants will be added later on)
  
• New meshes for some farms which fit to the actual kind of farm
  
• Farms use bigger (and upgradeable) streets now
  
• Maps now have a difficulty advice when chosing them (1 to 5 stars)
  
• Camera does not clip through the ground anymore
  
• The option "Vehicle3DIconVisible" now gets saved correctly
  
• Maximum speed of the free cam was reduced
  
• Zooming speed of the camera has been reduced slightly

Greetings Builders!

The second major update for Highrise City is out now! "Go Nuclear" introduces Milestone 11 and quite a lot of adjustments, new content and bugfixes. Todays update introduces also a new map: Vancouver. And that's not all: Most of the changes also influence the gameplay.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Achievements (They also influence the gameplay as they give you additional research points)
  
• New Map: Vancouver
  
• Milestone 11 is now available
  
• New Building: Nuclear Powerplant
  
• New Building: Enhanced Copper Smelter
  
• New Building: Titanium Mine
  
• New Building: Deep Coal Mine
  
• New Building: Deep Copper Mine
  
• New Building: Deep Iron Mine
  
• New Product Chain: Medicine AG
  
• Further improved visuals for some buildings
  
• Images above Carriers get updated correctly
  
• Several smaller bugfixes
  
• Fixed multiple possible crashes

Since bigger cities consume a lot of resources, we have now introduced the deep mines, so that cities with more than one million residents can take care of themselves. They might be cost intensive but they can be well worth it, especially in the end game.

If you are wondering, how Achievements work and how they unlock additional research points, we've got you covered as well: If you unlock an achievement, you will get some additional points which will from there on be globally available in your account. So you carry them over into new towns as well, allowing you to proceed quicker after some time, giving advanced players the option to make progress faster with a new town.

In other news we have started working on the landscaping tool and on reworking the street system now. Our new programmer in the meantime is working on improving the editor in a way that you will be able to share custom 3D models in the future.

To celebrate the new update there is now a small discount available. Interested mayors get 15% off during the next seven days.

Greetings Builders!

A new patch is available for Highrise City, introducing some quality of life improvements especially for the recently released editor. We got quite some feedback and wanted to provide you with the tweaks we did before the big update next week.

[h2]Changelog[/h2]

• Improved descriptions in the building menu
  
• Fixed the building restoration (it disappeared with the last patch)
  
• Cleaned up the Milestone Menu
  
• Adjusted Balancing of buildings

Editor

• Buildings in the workshop can now be updated
  
• Improved photo mode when taking a picture of the building
  
• Added filters for the objects
  
• Improved various models
  
• Improved collision for quite a few objects
  
• Camera is set to free cam per default now in the editor

And yes, you've notived that we were talking about the next update already. Next week we'll release the second major update for Highrise City introducing a new map, a new milestone, some Deep Mines and Achievements.