Trophies Are Coming to Your Studios!
Hey everyone!
That's it, I've added trophies to studios for those who win awards, obviously! Now it's a bit more complicated than that, so let me dive right into it!
[h3]This Week's Recap[/h3]
First things first, the big highlight of the week: when you win a Game of the Year award, you earn the right to place a trophy in your studio. This trophy boosts your team's morale! That's the good news. Visually, I tried to create something nice, and since it's isometric 2D, it's always a bit tricky to draw trophies. But I think the result is there, and it turned out pretty well!
Now, I know you would have wanted more. And honestly, I would have loved to add information about the trophies when you hover over them. It's technically doable, but the computational cost for this simple operation can become a bottleneck, especially for players who have many studios. The thing is, the way Game of the Year data is structured in City Game Studio 1 doesn't allow for efficient information retrieval. Simply put, it wasn't designed for that from the ground up.
So yes, it's possible by making several different function calls, but it's too expensive to implement. The problem remains the same: City Game Studio 1 uses Godot Engine 1, and therefore a programming language that isn't the most performant, to put it mildly. The bottom line is, for City Game Studio 1, I prefer to display a trophy without indicating which game it's from or the year. As I mentioned, it would be too complicated because it's not just a simple entry to add to the trophy since the game stores the number of trophies you've won and not the year you won them.
Before having trophies, the game simply stored the ID of the game that won Game of the Year, and no other information was needed. Sure, retrieving the year is simple enough, but we'd need to link the trophy to the game, or at least to its ID. And from there, we could perform operations.
But that would mean we'd be pulling all the information from different models and aggregating that information to display in the studio. And an object placed in a studio already depends on several models: the studio itself, employees, objects, and static objects too. Adding another dependency would further slow down studio management, and the game doesn't need that.
Anyway, I also made fixes related to fullscreen mode and borderless mode. I think you'll appreciate these changes, as they'll fix two bugs that are currently listed on the Steam forum!
There were other small fixes, but this announcement is already quite long.
[h3]What's Next[/h3]
So what's coming up is going to be technical. I know I promised you I'd work on the studio director, but I want to tackle technical bugs before adding new features.
I want you to be able to select the game's refresh rate, namely between 60 and 120 FPS. There won't be any other options, that's the best I can do.
Next, I want to test changing the graphs on the right panel a bit. Specifically, using bar charts instead of a curve. Just to test it out and see if it looks better. I still have one more bug to fix regarding game ports. And once all that's done, I'll tackle the options panel. I find that panel isn't super clear and deserves a complete overhaul.
After all that, I'll work on the studio director, and I think we won't be too far from the v1.25 release!
That's all from me, thank you for reading,
See you next week,
In the meantime, take care of yourselves
Xavier aka Binogure
That's it, I've added trophies to studios for those who win awards, obviously! Now it's a bit more complicated than that, so let me dive right into it!
[h3]This Week's Recap[/h3]
First things first, the big highlight of the week: when you win a Game of the Year award, you earn the right to place a trophy in your studio. This trophy boosts your team's morale! That's the good news. Visually, I tried to create something nice, and since it's isometric 2D, it's always a bit tricky to draw trophies. But I think the result is there, and it turned out pretty well!
Now, I know you would have wanted more. And honestly, I would have loved to add information about the trophies when you hover over them. It's technically doable, but the computational cost for this simple operation can become a bottleneck, especially for players who have many studios. The thing is, the way Game of the Year data is structured in City Game Studio 1 doesn't allow for efficient information retrieval. Simply put, it wasn't designed for that from the ground up.
So yes, it's possible by making several different function calls, but it's too expensive to implement. The problem remains the same: City Game Studio 1 uses Godot Engine 1, and therefore a programming language that isn't the most performant, to put it mildly. The bottom line is, for City Game Studio 1, I prefer to display a trophy without indicating which game it's from or the year. As I mentioned, it would be too complicated because it's not just a simple entry to add to the trophy since the game stores the number of trophies you've won and not the year you won them.
Before having trophies, the game simply stored the ID of the game that won Game of the Year, and no other information was needed. Sure, retrieving the year is simple enough, but we'd need to link the trophy to the game, or at least to its ID. And from there, we could perform operations.
But that would mean we'd be pulling all the information from different models and aggregating that information to display in the studio. And an object placed in a studio already depends on several models: the studio itself, employees, objects, and static objects too. Adding another dependency would further slow down studio management, and the game doesn't need that.
Anyway, I also made fixes related to fullscreen mode and borderless mode. I think you'll appreciate these changes, as they'll fix two bugs that are currently listed on the Steam forum!
There were other small fixes, but this announcement is already quite long.
[h3]What's Next[/h3]
So what's coming up is going to be technical. I know I promised you I'd work on the studio director, but I want to tackle technical bugs before adding new features.
I want you to be able to select the game's refresh rate, namely between 60 and 120 FPS. There won't be any other options, that's the best I can do.
Next, I want to test changing the graphs on the right panel a bit. Specifically, using bar charts instead of a curve. Just to test it out and see if it looks better. I still have one more bug to fix regarding game ports. And once all that's done, I'll tackle the options panel. I find that panel isn't super clear and deserves a complete overhaul.
After all that, I'll work on the studio director, and I think we won't be too far from the v1.25 release!
That's all from me, thank you for reading,
See you next week,
In the meantime, take care of yourselves
Xavier aka Binogure