supersoup:

Lone Pine worked some magic last week. The average framerate saw a significant surge across all circumstances and situations. New, fresh maps run at peak performance. Small to medium sized cities often see double the average framerate than they previously did. And large cities… well, they’re playable.

Most “end-game” city testing was performed with the Linux build of the game. For reasons neither Lone Pine nor I have been able to make sense of, the Linux build outperforms the Windows build by a significant margin. We’ve tried to narrow the gap, but as for me and my Windows-based friends, we’ve had to make do with some difficulties when our cities got huge. Part of the Early Access process. And it’s always our goal to do better.

With some of our largest in-house city saves used for testing, I now get 20-30 fps instead of less than 10. By all metrics, it’s playable. Even beyond a million citizens.

You might notice the large discrepancy in framerate between a blank slate map and a populated map. That’s to be expected. And frankly, performance used to struggle in both situations. The fact that they’re so cleanly differentiated now is a major victory. From our perspective, this means we’ve made some meaningful improvements to the rendering side of the engine. Now it’s time to turn our attention to optimizations in the simulation.

As for me, I’ve been largely focused on the Steam Workshop support. It’s turning out to be bigger than I had anticipated. At least to do it right. I don’t want to set any dates or offer any hollow promises, but rest assured it has been and remains my highest priority. Thank you for your patience. I know you’re just as eager as I am to see your creations being shared with and subscribed to by the rest of the community.

Soon.

Gainos:

Hello wonderful people, a quick update from Gainos, the team’s artist, on what’s currently happening on the polygon side of things. This week, just like the previous week and the week before that, I’ve done work related to our next big update (which is pretty close!). Quite a few exciting things happen when that update lands such as the animated palette but on this post I’ll talk about the aquatic side of things.

If you wonder where people are, they are all in the ice cream shop not in the picture.
If you wonder where people are, they are all in the ice cream shop not in the picture.

This week, before I got started on my work on the decorations and the aquatic vehicles (aka ships) I’ve done quite a bit of research on the subject and after all that, I have to say that I was quite clueless about anything related to boats. While I still wonder how those magnificent metal vessels manage to stay afloat, I do know a bit more about container ships. Oh yeah, we’ll have container ships.

From my research, ships are mainly categorized by what sort of cargo they carry, how much they can carry, which is generally measured in DWT (deadweight tonnage or just deadweight), or simply by their size (in comparison with some waterways, such as the Panama Canal). While it is a bit tough to categorize the container ship I made, based on my research it would probably be a bit smaller than an average Panamax.

Not the final version, but you can see that it’s pretty big. From left to right: container ship, cruise ship, fishing ship and red sedan.
Not the final version, but you can see that it’s pretty big. From left to right: container ship, cruise ship, fishing ship and red sedan.

In my research I also learned more about the process in which a ship approaches a dock to be unloaded/loaded (in the case of a container ship). That process seems to be called quite a few things, but they all include some way of tying the ship, most of the time including permanent structures on the wharf called mooring posts (I already added a few as decorations!). Other than the mooring posts, buoys can be used for that same objective and even specialized boats (tugboats) to ensure that the ship can dock safely.

Coming back to the actual game, the container ship currently has a few versions that change mostly how much cargo it is carrying, while also having different colors for the containers (each one is a tiny mystery!). While, like I said, the container ship is not the biggest type of container ship out there, it is most certainly the biggest decoration currently in the game and as such, use it wisely (don’t spawn 500 of those if you don’t have to).

There are many things to talk about and I could just keep telling you guys about all the other exciting things happening with the water related buildings or the palette, but honestly, those things are pretty close so you guys will see for yourselves soon. Gainos out.

Questions? Comments? Feedback on the game? Sound off on our Discord.

As always, we’re incredibly thankful for our great community across the web. We love seeing the hard work and attention to detail you pour into your cities, and it inspires us every day to keep building. Thank you again for your support.

If you want to play the game and haven’t got it yet, head over to our Steam page. We’re also on Reddit and Twitter. Give us a follow if you haven’t, and we’ll keep you up to date on what’s new with NewCity!