GearCity News

Greetings everyone,

The fourth full release candidate is now available. With this update, all first-party game-related items are considered complete. I have finished the maps that will ship with the game and fixed several bugs in this release candidate.

With the fulfillment of the map data, the game is complete! We're ready to remove the Early Access tag from GearCity and step forward into the post-release phase of the game.

But there is a problem. It's a matter of timing. Q4 is probably the worst time to release a non AA game. This time of the year, major studios are releasing their big-budget games for the holidays. Most games will have weeks of discounts for Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years' sales. In short, it's difficult to gain sales and attention when you have to compete with 90% discounts on past blockbusters.

With that in mind, even though I'm ready to remove the Early Access tag from GearCity, I won't be doing it this quarter. However, I am willing to confirm a release date! Assuming it does not conflict with a Lunar Sale, GearCity will be officially out of Early Access on January 14th, 2022.

This is a fitting date, as official work began on GearCity around mid-January 2010. (Work on the engine predates even the idea of making a GearCity.)

I won't be spending the time idle. I plan on continuing to fix bugs as you report them to me. I've also been working on the manual http://wiki.gearcity.info, and it will give me time to work on business, marketing, and community-related tasks that I have put on the backburner. Such as reopening our official forums, setting up an IRC-Discord-Matrix bridge, etc. Then there is the matter of the planned post-release feature bounty system that I need to set up. The small delay will also give time for any remaining translations to finish.

The journey is almost at an end.

You can find the full changelog here.

Sadly a few things slipped through testing:

[h2]Hotfix #1[/h2]
-Bugfix: Fixed Random History New Game Crash.
-Bugfix: Fixed Stock Detail Panel not showing for Player's company.
-Bugfix: Fixed Italian Flag crash on European Test Map.
-Bugfix: Fixed Map Logos not loading on 64-bit builds.
-Translations: Added Japanese Review Text.

Quick hotfix today fixing two typos of mine that prevented the player from buying stock shares if they already owned shares of a company. And another that kept tutorial videos playing after you closed the window in the Office. Easy fixes, so I thought I'd slip them in a hotfix before moving on to more complex stuff.

The third full release candidate is now available. This update fixes several bugs the community and I have found, and it includes a bit of text content that I put off for several years.

Looking forward, we're going to have a Release Candidate 4 to finish the Base Territories, Europe Test Map (name will change to Europe Map), and the Old School Territory map. I hoped to get these done for RC3 but ran into time constraints. In addition to that, work has begun on updating the game manual.

After RC4 is released, I will finalize a release date and begin marketing efforts. I'll address any bugs that pop up after RC4 with a just before-release patch.

Some RC3 highlights:
-160% increase in the review text system.
-200% increase in filler newspaper articles
-A few additional news articles for Base City Map and Classic Map.
-33 Japanese subtitled Tutorial Videos are available here or by clicking "Help, Video Tutorials" in the game.
-30+ bug fixes are minor game tweaks.

You can find the full changelog here.

A save game corruption issue has forced Release Candidate 2 out a couple of weeks sooner than planned. But that is the purpose of Release Candidates. So we're likely to have 4 RC's now unless more major issues pop up.

If you have a save game that was corrupted in RC1, it should work in RC2.

I also worked on a few other items users reported to me over the last few days. I did not update translations, edits, or the new data that I planned on. I'm saving those for the next update.

-GUI: Show all player vehicles in the magazine class challenge.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug that prevented AI companies from getting factories and branches in some cases, if the player did not start on the old starting years.
-Bugfix: Fixed digit rounding issues with bored, stroke, and research team skill values. Digits should round to 2 decimal places instead of 2 integers.
-Data: Changed some reviews from untranslatable to translateable.
-Bugfix: Fixed error checking issue with AI contract production system that could cause AI not to produce anything if the player has contracts but isn't using the autoproduction system and is using other autosystems.
-Bugfix: Fixed issue that could prevent sqlite from moving some databases (save games) to memory, because the optimize system did not fully complete its run previously. This typically happens when the player exited the game.
-Bugfix: The game will repair any save files corrupted by the above bug when you select a save game from the load list.

It's been a long time since there was an update. And for good reason!

With the game nearing completion, much work went into creating the in-game video tutorials, playtesting, and cleaning up more text files.

With the additional amount of playtesting over the last few months, I am more confident that the game is at the stage where I can release it as a final product.

So we have entered the release candidate phase of development. Or "going Silver," as some call it. This phrase means that the game is "code complete" and nearly ready for release. I won't be touching any part of the program except to fix bugs or gameplay issues. My entire focus now is playtesting and finalizing English edits, documentation, and a map or two.

That's not much different than the state of the game for the last several versions. The big difference with Release Candidates is that it is a candidate for release. Any one of these updates could be the version we use as "Full Release" or "Gold," as some call it.

"Full Release" will mark the end of guaranteed development of the game. The keyword there is "guaranteed." I plan on providing support and bug fixes for the game for the foreseeable future. But with life, one never knows what can happen. Being a good steward of my software, I'll probably Open Source the game if I am no longer able to provide continued support. I also hope to continue feature development for the game well after release in what I call the "Feature Bounty System." Some of you may have already read about that some on our forums when requests pop up. I'll release more details on that after Full Release.

The current plans are to have at least 3 Release Candidates, but it may go higher depending on if any unacceptable bugs appear in the software. Roughly around RC2, I will begin PR efforts and set a release date for the game. In the meantime, I am continuing my third round of English edits, which will extend to news articles this time. I'll be adding more data to the magazine, news, and DYK articles. And of course, more playtesting.


The changelog is too long to attach to the announcement. You can find a copy of it here.