Report for the Community #31

Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. It is a hot summer here in Slovakia so the workers from our heating plants can enjoy their sunbath on the beach, but our Firefighters have some extra work due to lightning storms. During these past weeks we are continuing to work on the new GUI. It was our focus, and it will not take too long until we will be able to release it to public test branch.

So let us talk about some improvements we made. First, we added quick stats, you will be able to see when you hover your cursor over elements on upper toolbar. You will be able to see quick stats about your citizens or economy and that should help You to make faster educated decisions to bring glory and prosperity to your Republics. Pictures are more than words in this case so you can check these screenshots. We think you will find good utility in these.

Then we were doing some changes for in-game window openings. We implemented automatically closing windows for different facilities. You can see a road vehicle depot as example in this screenshot. When You click on the facility to open its window the window opens on the right and automatically closes if you choose a different facility. If you want to keep the window open, you can move it or pin it. There will also be a setting to disable this feature and switch to current old version.

Next thing we were working on, was the rework for S1203. The model we had in the game was not the best. It was remade and more skins were added. In addition, we made new skins for other vehicles too. You will be able to use different skins for LZ100 truck. And there is more. Black skins for certain personal cars which were used by secret police were added too.

We continue to work on GUI for now and we hope it will be out on public test branch soon. Enjoy the life and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team

Report for the Community #30

Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. After a short vacation we are back at work and we have some good news for You, that can have significant impact on quality of the gameplay. We want to introduce the new GUI overhaul and tell you something about the upcoming justice system. But first, let us talk about current version which is 0.8.4.24 now, and it is available on stable branch.

There were several fixes for fountains implemented in past weeks and now they are not working during winter. There were also some rendering issues with their particles, and we changed the colour of water in fountains to be blue. Then there were couple of fixes regarding handling of brand-new vehicles while loading in production lines. Now if you have a certain vehicle with fixed schedule to transport new vehicles into a certain facility, it should load only vehicles which are suitable for that facility. For example, personal cars will be picked if it delivers to car dealer, cable cars if it delivers to cable car station, or trolleybuses if it delivers to trolleybus depo etc. We also tweaked train pathfinding to prevent unreasonably long detours and extended the range for emergency helicopters working for fire stations and hospitals to 3000 metres.

Besides fixing existing issues we decided to make a major GUI overhaul. Until now you had most of the tools available on top of the screen. We know it may take some time to get used to new interface but if you understand the logic behind it, it will be worth it.

You will have 3 main areas on Your screen. On the top you will have general information about you Republic, number of workers and their general state, current weather, date, and Your balances. On the left You will have access to advanced information about Your inventory, workers, production, trade and facilities or vehicles. There will also be the access button for settings, screenshots, help centre or construction assignment. On the bottom of Your screen, you will have the construction menu. You will have all the different kinds of structures sorted there and You will be able to use them faster with less obstruction in the centre of your screen, and with less clicks as these menus will remember last things you were doing. We hope this change will not be that painful, and You will get the hang of the new GUI faster than You think.

Note that all images are WIP and many things may be changed!

Then we want to share more information with you about the new justice system we are working on. For now, we have the respective buildings exported into the game and they are somewhat working. A citizen can commit a crime and the police can investigate these crimes. Then when the crime is investigated the person is charged at the court and can be put to jail as punishment.

This is the basic of this mechanic and we need some time to tweak it, because we want crime investigation and justice to have good impact on gameplay to motivate players to build police stations and connected infrastructure. This feature will be optional for You to turn on or off similarly to education. This may offer additional playability and depth for You.

As You can read and see, we are working hard to make the game better, deeper, and thus greater. We know some of You spent thousands of hours playing this game and as the game is so complex already, you can spend hundreds of hours playing while developing a small industrial area. We are proud of the progress we made, and we are going to continue until the game is finished and fully released. Just consider how much time You need to make Your republics great and compare it to what we need to make the game great. We need lot of time to achieve this, and without You we would not get that far.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team

Report for the Community #29

Greeting Comrades of the Soviet Republic. This week we officially had the first day of this summer and the temperatures in Slovakia climbed way over 30 degrees Celsius. But the weather is not the only hot thing we want to mention in this report. We have few great news for You, and we are not going to write about bug fixes because there was no update released except the switch of public test version into public stable version. So, we have now only one version out there and that is 0.8.4.21.

What is new and hot then? We are now working on new features, and we made a new police station and few police cars. You can see them in these pictures. But for now, we cannot tell you anything about mechanics. It is work in progress and we would be able to reveal more about these in upcoming weeks. It should be about security and order, but everybody can have his own opinion about what it may mean in Soviet Republic’s concept.

We also made one important improvement for existing stuff. Until now we read a lot of complaints regarding restrictions for vehicles moving inside certain buildings. We updated the safety protocols and blueprints of certain facilities to allow movement of more than one vehicle inside. These facilities include hospitals, farms, and parking lots. Unfortunately, it is not possible to replace old structures automatically, so this change will not impact existing vanilla buildings, but You may rebuild Your facilities if you have enough room for that. All new buildings will have this feature after release.

This game offers You some challenges You cannot experience in other games if you decide to take them. In other games You can simply delete and replace vehicles or structures, but You do not have other options. In this game You can deal with micromanaging reconstruction by pausing supply routes or redirecting them and go with slower step-by-step rebuilding of your facilities using construction offices. You can always do it using auto build for money, but we think it can be fun to do it in the other way. It is not that easy though, because you need to think about lots of details during planning process.

As the game is complex, we also need to face lots of different issues players find during gameplay. Our goal is to complete the game and we want to do that as soon as it can be possible. Because of that we made some changes regarding technical support.

We updated the official Technical support page to simplify identification of reported bugs. There are several categories of issues players may encounter and it is not necessary for developer to deal with all of them because there are player related issues where other players or our inner circle members may help to solve the problem. Sometimes it is enough to simply delete a vehicle or remove something else and the game will work again. We want to allow the development team to have more time to deal with code related issues and work on new features. Because of this we ask You to use the form only when you encounter a bug which can be somewhat reproduced and use Steam Forums or the Discord community server for other issues or suggestions.

We want to make the whole process of dealing with issues smoother by allowing non-developer inner cycle members to help. This may take a while to implement new routines, but in the end, it will help the development team in longer run. We hope things will improve and You will enjoy the game and have more fun while playing. Stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your support

3Division Team