Worldwide Rush | Blogpost 5

[p]Hi everyone! [/p][p][/p][p]Last week I mentioned the new gameplay meta, and today I want to tell you what is being added. It is quite exiting seeing how the game evolves with the feedback. [/p][p][/p][p]Note, that this is not yet in the demo build.[/p][p][/p][h2]Zoom In[/h2][p][/p][p]First things first, you will be able to zoom in 3 times more than before. We needed to make the world bigger to fit our new meta.
[/p][p] [/p][p]This little change required changing how world chunks are being drawn. Before, they were big sprites with parallax occlusion mapping. This unfortunately breaks downs the more you zoom in. I made the whole world 3D to resolve this issue, instead of sprites per chunk, I opted in for instancing varying-quality planes. Overall, it became faster for the CPU because the GPU does all the calculations. Hopefully, it will not impact lower tier GPU's too much.[/p][p][/p][h2]Cities[/h2][p][/p][p]The main reason for the zoom in is adding more cities. The demo was great for testing densities and overall perception of what feels right for players. We figured out a nice "formula" for cities quantity per country accounting for population, visual country size, development and for now, it works nicely. In general, city count will be probably tripled from the initial plan, but with destinations generating fewer passengers it does change performance impact.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Adding more cities means more clutter and for that city names are drawn differently. Capitals and important cities will be drawn first, while other ones will be less prominent with smaller size. With more zoom in, we can make these names smaller, which helps.[/p][p][/p][h2]Destinations[/h2][p] [/p][p]Look, there will be indications of where to and from where passengers want to go once a city is selected. It will also show fulfillment with color and traffic amount with thickness. The look is not finished. [/p][p][/p][p]Destination generation was improved once again. Now capitals, manually marked, and some random cities will be marked as important. These important cities will be much more likely to be chosen as a destination. Cities around the important one will prefer to go to it as the first destination. And finally, cities around the important city will mimic most destinations choosing of the important city. This will create natural hubs and incentive to drive people to the important city from the surrounding ones and use big and profitable vehicles between these important cities. Like always, there is more logic and variation to this, but the main idea should be clear.[/p][p][/p][h2]Fulfillment[/h2][p][/p][p]And the final thing to mention is fulfillment. Now it will use a rolling average calculations instead of resetting fulfillment to 0 each month. The logic is simple, calculations are reusing past results with diminishing returns to get the current value. The only problem here is that the value now goes both up and down, not sure how that will be received. Personally, I find it much more clear, some arrows would be great to show the trend and it should be complete.


Next Friday we will push these changes to the steam build.[/p]