Greetings Comrades of the Soviet Republic, we are back with another report for You after a week. As the development progresses, we are closer to switching the upcoming update 0.8.4. to internal test branch to make it available for internal testers. It will probably be a matter of weeks to get there and then to public test branch. And we also have some fixes which were released to public test branch recently and will be released to public stable version next week probably on Monday.
We successfully fixed several reproductible crashes and attempted to fix some others. One was related to deleted airplane; another one was related to missing audio device. There was a missing warning about unelectrified railway for piece of track between bridge on the one end and building on the other. And now you will be able to copy ship or airplane schedule to a brand new one, which was not possible. You can read more in the changelog.
From new things which we are working on, we want to mention notifications first. The overhaul of this was broadly requested and we received a lot of feedback concerning that. In upcoming update, you will be finally able to delete all notification at once. But there is more. You will have notifications about potential problems like traffic jams, or if a train is waiting too long, or if it is in collision, or if you do not have power or heating working reliably. You will be notified also if a citizen is sick and no ambulance can reach to him. This will happen when the ambulance will be unsuccessful making 3 attempts to reach the sick one. Then you will be notified when happiness or health of inhabitants of certain building drops below 50%. And additionally, you will have some custom notifications you will be able to set for your facilities, for example, when factory stops working, when a shop runs out of supplies, or when a construction is finished.
We were working on particles for helicopters. When they are taking water or pouring it upon a building in flames there will be animation for that. We are also working on GUI and we added dialog for saving and loading directly from the game. No need to leave into menu anymore. We also made some optimisations for the game to make it a bit smoother. We tried to reduce refresh rate for citizens and buildings in a way, that the game will not do that for all of them each frame, but only for 1/3 of them. It seems to be working fine and in a test map with 200k citizens we jumped from 19 FPS to 25 FPS on our test machine.
And one more change which is coming is related to fires. Until now if your building burns down it collapses, and you may struggle to replace that if there is infrastructure around it. We are implementing a change for these buildings. In upcoming update if the building collapses while burning down, the game will (after the debris is cleared) place a buildable blueprint of the building right into the same spot where it stood, and you will be able to easily rebuild that using money or construction offices. We hope that these additions and changes will solve some of your problems and make the game better. Stay tuned for the next report!
Thank You for Your support
3Division Team