Two Updates, One Announcement
Hey everyone!
So, I did not plan for any of this. But here I am talking about 2 updates in one post.
v1.26.1 brings some significant optimizations, while v1.26.2 squashes all the bugs introduced by both v1.26.1 and v1.26.0.
So yeah, there is quite a bit to cover.
[h3]Optimizations[/h3]
It started with a message on Discord and an email I received, and yes, I do read every single email, thank you for the kind words by the way. So following your reports, I noticed a pretty serious slowdown in v1.26.0 when running a lot of Studio Directors at once. The thing is, you can have up to 16 of them, which means up to 16 projects running simultaneously.
Under normal circumstances, without Studio Directors, you have somewhere between 2 and 8 projects in development at any given time. The game is optimized for that. But with 16 Studio Directors, you have 16 active projects. And that is where things get complicated. Every time an employee, visible on screen or not, produces a point, every single active project checks whether that point belongs to it. With 2,000 employees and 1 project, that is 2,000 checks. Fine. But with 16 projects, you are suddenly looking at 32,000 checks per cycle.
So I went through every possible micro-optimization to make those checks as lightweight as possible. The result is pretty solid. I will be honest though, I already have a plan to go from 1 check per active project down to a single check for all of them at once. Which is beautiful, right? But I am saving that for a future major update.
[h3]Bug Fixes and Balancing[/h3]
I had received a report about a display issue on ultrawide screens. After looking into it, the main menu was indeed getting misaligned in that configuration. That was a fairly straightforward fix.
Another piece of feedback was about the end-of-life panel for consoles you manufacture. I added the console's score to that panel along with a small animation to make it a bit nicer to look at. So less of a fix, more of a polish pass really.
On the balancing side, I had to revisit something important: online games. Up until now, online games could not expire. Meaning unless you manually pulled them from the market, they would just keep selling forever. The problem is that if you have 200 online games running at the same time, the game tanks in performance. Hard. So I introduced a condition: an online game can stay on the market for up to 20 years. After that, if it is still generating more than $10,000 per month, it stays. But if it dips below $10,000 per month for 6 consecutive months, it gets automatically delisted. I think that is a much more realistic behavior.
There are a handful of other fixes too, mostly around furniture placement in studios and employee display, but nothing worth going into detail about.
So, two updates merged into one, City Game Studio is now smoother, better optimized, and a bit nicer to look at. Thank you for your feedback, because honestly none of these changes would have happened without it.
That is it from me for now.
See you next week for the first v1.27.0-rc0. I think you are going to like it!
Take care of yourselves,
Xavier aka Binogure
[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Optimization[/h3]
[h3]Interface[/h3]
[h3]Gameplay[/h3]
[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
So, I did not plan for any of this. But here I am talking about 2 updates in one post.
v1.26.1 brings some significant optimizations, while v1.26.2 squashes all the bugs introduced by both v1.26.1 and v1.26.0.
So yeah, there is quite a bit to cover.
[h3]Optimizations[/h3]
It started with a message on Discord and an email I received, and yes, I do read every single email, thank you for the kind words by the way. So following your reports, I noticed a pretty serious slowdown in v1.26.0 when running a lot of Studio Directors at once. The thing is, you can have up to 16 of them, which means up to 16 projects running simultaneously.
Under normal circumstances, without Studio Directors, you have somewhere between 2 and 8 projects in development at any given time. The game is optimized for that. But with 16 Studio Directors, you have 16 active projects. And that is where things get complicated. Every time an employee, visible on screen or not, produces a point, every single active project checks whether that point belongs to it. With 2,000 employees and 1 project, that is 2,000 checks. Fine. But with 16 projects, you are suddenly looking at 32,000 checks per cycle.
So I went through every possible micro-optimization to make those checks as lightweight as possible. The result is pretty solid. I will be honest though, I already have a plan to go from 1 check per active project down to a single check for all of them at once. Which is beautiful, right? But I am saving that for a future major update.
[h3]Bug Fixes and Balancing[/h3]
I had received a report about a display issue on ultrawide screens. After looking into it, the main menu was indeed getting misaligned in that configuration. That was a fairly straightforward fix.
Another piece of feedback was about the end-of-life panel for consoles you manufacture. I added the console's score to that panel along with a small animation to make it a bit nicer to look at. So less of a fix, more of a polish pass really.
On the balancing side, I had to revisit something important: online games. Up until now, online games could not expire. Meaning unless you manually pulled them from the market, they would just keep selling forever. The problem is that if you have 200 online games running at the same time, the game tanks in performance. Hard. So I introduced a condition: an online game can stay on the market for up to 20 years. After that, if it is still generating more than $10,000 per month, it stays. But if it dips below $10,000 per month for 6 consecutive months, it gets automatically delisted. I think that is a much more realistic behavior.
There are a handful of other fixes too, mostly around furniture placement in studios and employee display, but nothing worth going into detail about.
So, two updates merged into one, City Game Studio is now smoother, better optimized, and a bit nicer to look at. Thank you for your feedback, because honestly none of these changes would have happened without it.
That is it from me for now.
See you next week for the first v1.27.0-rc0. I think you are going to like it!
Take care of yourselves,
Xavier aka Binogure
[h2]Changelog[/h2]
[h3]Optimization[/h3]
- Optimized game development process
- Optimized game sales algorithm
- Optimized in-game achievement system
- Optimized in-dev game panel
- Removed unused code
[h3]Interface[/h3]
- Fixed main menu display on ultrawide screens
- Replaced quality label with platform score on the discontinued platform panel
[h3]Gameplay[/h3]
- Online games now expire after 20 years
[h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
- Fixed studio item placement issue (sprites sliding away)
- Fixed employee information display from studio view