Major changes
- Online multiplayer!
- You can now customize every difficulty setting individually, including turning off taxes and removing the impact of lead designers
- There's a new logo editor, which uses a much more intuitive layer-based system. It is not as powerful and efficient as the old editor, but the old editor is still available.
Multiplayer
You can play up to 4 players on a map at a time. Each player starts on each side of the map. You are all playing in the same market, with the same competitors, deals and distribution platforms. You can outsource tasks to other players, and trade stocks, plots and intellectual property.
Price change
The game's price has increased, not only to reflect the addition of multiplayer, but also the size of the game at this point. I initially wanted to release the game for $20 after working on it for about 3 years. We're coming up on 10 years next year, and the scope has gotten so much larger than when I started. I expect to have a launch discount when multiplayer releases officially. If you don't care about multiplayer, there's a cheaper LAN-only DRM-free version available.
Patch notes for Beta 1.7.1
Changes
- Added multiplayer
- First day now starts at 7AM and employees will arrive same day if they are hired before their scheduled arrival
- Overhauled difficulty structure, difficulty mods will no longer work until updated
- Added ability to customize difficulty
- Disabling taxes, removing effect of lead designers, removing fires and removing burglaries are now difficulty options
- Added new simple but less powerful logo editor
- Added ability to enter precise amounts when buying stock
- Added option to auto save every x minutes in build mode
- Server choices for design, updates, contracts, deals, etc. are now saved to file
- Added ability to send employees home for several months by using scroll wheel on the send home button
- Added compass
- You can now see how many tasks a team is assigned to during assignment
- Awards will now end up in inventory when they are not directly being sold, but just removed as a result of other actions
- Employees will also start complaining about computers that are slow due to age, as well as condition, to warn player of old computers
- Employees will now react immediately to player changing a room's team assignments
- Added lightstrips to conveyor belts to make it easier to see which are turned on
- Changed how company assets are divided among shareholders when a company bankrupts, so it will be distributed even if less than 10% of the company is listed
- Quit confirmation dialog now asks whether to save instead of whether to quit
- Bug handling has changed to use method Product.ChangeBugs(startBugs, bugs) and Product.FixBugs(fixes), data mods will be auto upgraded on load
- Updated Steamworks SDK
Fixes
- Fixed shortcut panel not clearing after moving or duplicating furniture outside of build mode
- Fixed player work on design and development deals not actually applying to end product
- Fixed not having to pay for licenses when updating software if not also fixing bugs
- Fixed furniture rotation sound stacking after placing multiple furniture at a time
- Fixed placing a room duplicate in an existing room charging for all walls of the new room instead of just the necessary split
- Fixed wall mounted furniture being placed on top of each other when duplicating room inside another
- Fixed cases of doors and windows not getting copied over when cloning rooms
- Fixed all undo bugs when dealing with awards
- Fixed issues with basement rendering in first person mode
- Fixed subsidiaries failing to retire lead designers
- Moved security desk from Staff to Security function category
- Fixed game saying tutorial has more steps than it had due to skipped parts
- Fixed not being able to use close window shortcut with tutorial active
- Fixed furniture modding tool breaking mod when refreshing mesh in Model menu and then saving
- Fixed issue when a furniture's point of interaction inside an atrium resided in an adjacent balcony
- Increased window margin to the left of the screen so titlebar doesn't become inaccessible
- Fixed rooms becoming inaccessible to all teams if it is surrounded by other rooms outside
- Fixed game not fetching all languages that share language codes from Localizor
- "Missing qualified employees for a project"-message now specifies whether it is in regards to an update, to clear up project management issues
- Fixed all interior doors not coming back when undoing selling plot
- Reduced compression of character animations to remove foot sliding
- Fixed noise visualization not working when rooms don't have default floor mapping