Report for the Community #4

The Fall of Socialism

Last work week in Slovakia was shorter. On Tuesday 17th November we had a national holiday which we celebrate to remember the fall of socialistic regime. This is important to mention because many people may misunderstand the inspiration we draw when creating the basics of this game. We are glad that the regime has fallen because there is more freedom than there was before.

We are living in a country where you can see what was created in the past by soviets and we have certain appreciation regarding the architecture and you can see that in the game partially.. But we do not like the political aspect of soviet era because it limits freedom of people and probably there would not be such a game if we would not have the freedom to decide to do something which is not in 5 year plan of the Republic and invest our own money and time we to create some profits for ourselves and offer entertainment for people.

There are calls for implementing those terrifying political aspects of soviet era into the game because people want to repress their workers and control them instead of taking care of their needs and making them happy. The game itself is an utopia which cannot exist in real world as there are always people who want to have power, who want to control and satisfy their own selfish needs at any cost by repressing and manipulating with lives of others in name of some ideology they use to gain power. If you look back socialism is never about what people want and need but what political leaders proclaim as their ideology. Because of this, workers in the game have more freedom than many people in real life have and players are responsible to take care about their people first to be successful economically. If you do not care about your workers, then they may escape, and you lose your workforce and thus the economic power.

This is important to remember in future developments because there may be new things implemented regarding citizens. Maybe there will by some tools how to control your population but if you will do too much against them, the response may be significant affecting your workforce and reminding you this is Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, i.e. workers and their welfare are important.

We want this game to be great in offering you some reminder about soviet era. There may be options added which will offer players more repressive playstyle, but the workers’ happiness and government loyalty can be utilized as tools to make the regime’s life a bit harder as consequence of player’s choices. We are against human rights repression in real life, but it can be somewhat tolerable in game where you play with pixels and algorithms.

BTW: If you would like to see some historic and authentic videos about socialism in Czechoslovakia, we recommend to check out this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/jaffarski

Planes had some issues

Most of the time during last week we were concentrating on planes and their mechanics as there are still issues regarding their pathfinding on taxiways and runways. They tend to behave strangely and choose wrong way or get stuck. Four new cargo planes were added, then the Tu-144 which is an alternative to French Concorde. Then sound engineers implemented the basis for plane sounds. For next week we will able hopefully finalize

The current version of the game is now 0.8.3.3. The profits from tourism were decreased again. Some inaccurate calculation with bused from Construction offices when they took not as many workers as were needed in construction, were fixed. The range of substations powering lights on taxiways and runways was doubled. Then some issues Construction offices had with constructing runways, taxiways and plane parking were fixed.

Thank You for Your support

3DIVISION Team

Report for the Community #3

Internal Test Branch updated to 0.8.3.2

There were lots of bug fixes and improvements made during last week thanks to reports and suggestions of our internal testers. The team was focusing on bug fixes, adjustments and was even able to add something new. The list is long, but we can mention some interesting points for you.

We have now lights on runways and taxiways. Currently they work similar to road lights and are on only if they are in range of a substation. Maybe this will be adjusted a bit as having several substations around the airport does not look very nice.

Modders will be able to add lights of different colors or intensity to buildings and even allow them to blink on high structures as warning signals for planes. Then parts for building editor will allow several different textures (skins) which allows people to have the same kind of balcony or window in different colors and thus add variety when creating a building in the editor.

Now you will be able to see the city/area highlighted while you open its window. It will help players to see where are the borders of that area which is useful when you want to have local stats available in your town hall.

Some adjustments were done for train pathfinding because sometimes trains chose to go on a long detour caused by red signal on shortest way. This should not happen anymore.

Then new icons for buildings window were added which will allow players to sell all vehicles or place them all home. This was highly requested feature.

New Railroad Production Line

One bug players were encountering a lot was the limitation in Railroad Production Line when they tried to make trainsets which were too long and not able to fit into its railyard. Now there is a new model available which allows much longer trainsets to be built and there is a new script which should not allow you to construct trainsets which cannot fit there anymore. But the length should allow you to build trains of any reasonable length.

There is an aggregate unloading and a ER1 trainset in the picture for length reference. A

Some balance changes

Tourism was found too profitable, so the amount of money tourists are spending especially in hotels were decreased. The chemical consumption for aluminum chain was a bit high so the amount of chemicals needed for alumina and aluminum plant was decreased while the amount of electricity required in aluminum plant was increased. Planes take-off and landing distances were increased, and airport terminals now require heating.

We still cannot tell you when the update will be released for Open Test Branch on Steam, but we hope it will be a matter of one or two weeks to allow you to enjoy these new features in the public test and give us your feedback. Then we would like to release these updates for Official (Stable) Branch, at latest, before Christmas.

Thank You all for Your Support

3DIVISION Team

Report for the Community #2

Update 0.8.3.0 released for internal test branch

Right before the last weekend hit, we were able to release the last version of the game for internal test branch on Steam. This way more players got an opportunity to test new features throughout the weekend and thus help us find some bugs. As expected, the flood of bug reports became the thing to focus on for the next week. Besides that, the Government in Slovakia conducted Covid-19 testing of all citizens during the weekend and all the team members are fine reporting negative test results, which means we are not locked down and are more or less free to move.

Testers found out that construction offices have some issues with building of airports and mechanisms were not able to reach construction sites all the time, observed that planes land in a bit weird way or the warning messages about planes can be confusing. Then some issues about passenger trains scheduling were found when the train had custom house as a stop. They found some issues with Plane production line or empty notification messages about events in game. We are thankful to all participating in this.

Besides all new reported bugs we were working on stuck camera bug during vehicle follow in tunnel and adjusting the follow camera.

Building Editor Introduction

We want to introduce the new Building Editor which was added to the game because we think it has a great potential for future. There are several ways how this can be utilized:

• Modders can use it to edit their structures created in Blender. It helps adjusting connections, allows adding particle animations (smoke) and setup properties of the structure (storage sizes, construction process, worker requirements etc).Then they can use the output INI from editor and put specific lines into their own building scripts, because right now building editor does not have all features scriptable, but it already has almost all things which were required previously to be manually copied and pasted from Blender to building's INI.

• Modders can create sets of parts which can be used to make custom buildings with different sizes and basic features but in similar design. There will be support for that in workshop to allow you to create sets of panels, steels, or whatever you want and publish them for other players.

• Players can use different sets of parts to create their own buildings. Currently you can make few different prefab buildings with different sizes in similar design and there is also option to create custom platforms. This can allow people to have something like modular buildings when they use some sets of parts and create their own platforms, storages, or other buildings according their needs or wishes.

Those are just few options how this feature can be used. It is still in early stage of development so bear in mind it is incomplete and not very user friendly at first sight. Here are some screenshots to showcase how it looks like while editing a building. The maximum size of building created in editor is 40x40m now and each square is 1x1m. Buildings are made of floors (layers) and you basically edit each floor by adding, moving, rotating or removing parts. You can simply copy the floor. Then you can adjust features of that structure like number of inhabitants or workers, storage capacities, connections, smoke particles, construction process stages, material inputs or outputs etc.

For now there are only 3 sets of parts available (+1 in the workshop as sample for modders), but more will be added especially when modders will be able to create their unique sets. And of course, we want to make the editor more user friendly. We hope there will be some good suggestions about it from those who will use it the most.

Thank you all for your Support

3Division Team