Report for the Community #69

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. March is here and our glorious sowing machines have left their farms to do their job as it is each year. You do not need to be afraid of snow for at least half a year despite it is not the same in real life. But as it is in the game, even in real life things may happen according to schedule, and if certain period passes, then you can expect things to be done even without any special intervention despite ongoing efforts to resolve issues. Because of this we have calendars and we are so aware of the dates in them and often we are happy that certain period of time is over.

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. March is here and our glorious sowing machines have left their farms to do their job as it is each year. You do not need to be afraid of snow for at least half a year despite it is not the same in real life. But as it is in the game, even in real life things may happen according to schedule, and if certain period passes, then you can expect things to be done even without any special intervention despite ongoing efforts to resolve issues. Because of this we have calendars and we are so aware of the dates in them and often we are happy that certain period of time is over.

But we were also working on GUI to allow you to see how the Container stands are filling up. You will also be able for some container stands, after doing some research, select container types for separation.

And be aware that container stands can be overfilled and then you will have waste lying everywhere. This situation will cause a pollution in the area. You can see on the images the visualization of the default container, which every building has. You don't need to build container stands as every building will have own container, but in most cases it is useful to sacrifice some space and use container stands.

Another thing we were focusing was the visualization of differences in waste composition. The waste can have up to 10 different components, so we want to show the player roughly what the main components of the waste may be to allow them to differentiate in between different compositions and help them decide what they want to do with that type of waste.

On this screen for example you can see graphics representation of different ratio of mixed waste containing plastic waste and metal scrap.

Also, we made some changes for graphics of road with sidewalk (now more realistic asphalt sidewalk) and we removed the white outlines for asphalted areas under buildings. White line was replaced by curb. We are also planning to add asphalt panel footpaths.

That is some of the things we are working on, and we can also mention couple of things we are developing about which we will inform you about in upcoming reports. You may get much more in the next big update than you expected because we are working on couple of interesting features from which we want to mention: maintenance, building demolition, mods incorporation , research programs for universities and fertilizing for the fields.

We hope you are interested in these game features we are working on. They may become a major complication for some of you as they can bring you additional challenges and limitations. More about that in future. Until then enjoy life, have fun, stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Divison Team

Report for the Community #68

Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. Even we are going through tough times while developing the game, we decided that we can bring you some news about the work we have done recently in the game. Currently we do not have any news about takedown issue. We will keep you informed. As you can see in previous special report, the game has been taken down from Steam Store due to DMCA takedown notice in relation to recent realistic mode we added into the game. We filled a counter-notice and now we need to wait.

And as we are waiting on legal issues to be resolved, we can continue working on new features and other game related stuff. Lot of graphics in the game is outdated and needs an update. Most urgent ones in our opinion are small grocery shop, small store, pub and brick buildings. We decided to replace them by making proper details and level of detail meshes for them to save performance while they are being used.

If you are already using these buildings, they will be just replaced after the update, and you will see them in their new form.

Another reason for this step is that we are working on researches for the upcoming update and residential buildings from prefab panels will be locked behind research. That means you will probably have to use brick residential buildings when you start a new republic. But we want to remind you, that you can turn ON or OFF any difficulty level in our game. So, if you do not like to play with research you can just turn the feature off.

Then we have some useful information for you that somehow went under the radar about already existing mechanics. As not every player has a longer term republic developed many of them did not even notice why electronics became a major complication for your economy over time. When we did an update to make electronics production more challenging, we made couple of changes and one of them you may know. That is that the consumption of electronics is growing gradually until year 2000. It is simply 30% higher after year 2000 than it was in year 1960.

But we added another change which we forgot the introduce. There is a mechanic which is making the production of electronics and electronic components more expensive over time and consists of two parts. First is the production decrease over time. In 1960 you have basic production and it goes slowly down until year 2037 when the vanilla electronics assembly line and electronics components factory will produce only 30% of resource compared to year 1960. The other is the factory’s consumption increase when the factory is consuming more resources for production over time. For electronics assembly hall it goes up to 200% in 2060 and for electronics components factory it goes up to 170% in year 2030, compared to year 1960. But these values apply to vanilla buildings because modders can define these values in their factory’s .ini file.

What does that mean? If the electronics assembly hall is producing 4,5 t of electronics in year 1960 it will produce only 1,35 t of electronics in year 2037 per workday at maximal utilization. On the other hand, if it needs 1,5 t of electronic components (or other resources) to produce that in year 1960 then it will require 3,0 t of electronic components in year 2060. And this makes electronics more valuable and difficult to produce somewhat simulating the technological advance. Another thing is that this is the main reason why the price of electronics goes up so much over decades and you may consider to invest lot more into production of this valuable resource especially, if you are planning your republic to continue over in-game centuries and you may also consider using electronics as low volume and high value reserve resource (it is not succeptible to inflation as money) for rainy days, because the game can surprise you whenever you keep expanding and that is the beauty of it as we are making it more complex and challenging to play.

And that is all for this report. Even if we are facing attacks, we still have enough resources to continue the development of the game even if the game would be banned for months or years. But the truth always wins. We will keep you updated about the game development process or any publicly suitable information that may affect it. So enjoy life, have fun and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team.

Report for the Community #67

Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. First month of the year which should be the coldest in Europe has passed away which means that people can ease on their energetic concerns which are caused by raised consumption of energy for heating purposes. But why do we mention this here? It is because we want to introduce something that many of you wanted, and we have dedicated significant amount of time to deal with the problem and provide a solution. We have something special for you and this will greatly improve your power distribution, making wind and solar energy more viable, and you will also be able to manage priorities for power distribution after it will be released.

We added brand new power switches which would not be anything extra besides the option to have more variety, but we added special switches for power distribution which will allow you to set priorities. What does that mean? These switches have inputs and have outputs which can have different priorities. Those with orange power sings in the picture are the ones.

So, what is the use for these? It is simple but powerful. You may have a wind farm or solar power source and you want the grid to be using that as a source whenever available. Then you connect that to the switch and give it higher priority as a source. On the other source branch you connect fuel burning power plant with lower priority and the switch will draw power primarily always from higher priority source and only the rest of required power will be drawn from lower priority power. You can even have three sources, wind, nuclear and coal in a single switch with wind as highest and coal as lowest (as it is always the most expensive) to secure power supply at all times.

Besides that you can prioritize the outputs too which means you can set a residential area as priority for distribution with some industrial area which is not so critical as lower priority. In that case the low power situation when there may be not enough workers available in power plant to power everything, may not be so critical because the industrial facilities will be shut down first and only if there is not enough for residents then they will be out of power.

But there is another case for use of these new switches and you may guessed it right. It is great to manage power imports/exports. You can simply set the power import input as lower priority or power export output as lower priority. In that scenario you will import power only when it is needed or export only the excess of power you have. This way you will never import power if it is not necessary or export when you cannot afford it.

Another thing we can show you in picture and we successfully implemented is adding of higher quality Screen Space Ambient Occlusion which is already in the game. It is slowing the FPS a bit but most of modern graphic cards should be able to handle it with ease and you can see a real difference in pictures.

This is a full scene before and after (you have to zoom in to see the difference).

We hope these are good news for those who may have been disappointed thinking we are all in for DLC development. It is not that way. We have many other things in development besides the waste management and we will inform you in proper time as we need more than words to describe the ideas. There may be some surprises because it is not all in the roadmap what we have on our list, and in the end it is all for the game to make it even better and more interesting to play for more people even it may not be the genre for everybody. Anyway, that is all we have for you today. We wish you health and success. Enjoy life, have fun and stay tuned for the next report.

Thank You for Your Support

3Division Team