Greetings dear Comrades of the Soviet Republic. It has been a while we started publishing these reports for You, as we have the 25th report out now, and after almost half a year doing our best to keep up the pace, we started considering that it is a bit too much from time to time. By too much we mean the frequency of reports, because sometimes we struggle to give you more meaningful information and we do not want just to publish reports for the sake of publishing them. The development process is not always that exciting and there are not great achievements every week. Because of this we want to make a small adjustment and we hope it will raise the quality of these reports because there will be more time to prepare graphics and think about talking points. We are changing the frequency to once in two weeks; thus, the release will be every second Saturday from now.
Today is May the 1st and we are celebrating Workers' Day (Labour day) here in Slovakia, a well-known holiday all over the World. It is one of the days in the year, we have all shops closed here to give workers time to rest and remember how important the work-force is for the Republic and the economy. You know very well how your Republic would be without satisfied and healthy workforce. You cannot do anything for Your workers in game except provide them all the necessities they need, but maybe if you are doing the bare minimum for them, this may be the time you give them something extra, just to make them happier, because Your Soviet workers deserve the best, as well as You Yourself, their great manager and leader.
Now back to our development process. The list of fixes, adjustments and additions is quite long this week. First, we want to mention one important change all of you will love. It will be an ability to build pipes underneath existing structures. Do not bother with figuring out how our Soviet engineers and workers can carry this out. It is our superior Soviet Technology and Methodology which allows such construction process. You know we can move mountains using few dozers and excavators in matter of days or weeks in game. But you need to wait a bit until our engineers refine the process and get it into public test version.
We added a double track signal which will allow you to place signals on double tracks by one click. It happened by accident because it is an untested feature, and it was meant to be published in internal test version first. We added new old city buildings to landscape editor and a Helicopter tutorial. Then the Mi-10 passenger helicopter was reworked and Stalinec and KT-50 bulldozers were tweaked to match their price. We also corrected flatbed wagons and the space for vehicles on them was increased. And finally, the Technical services have fuel storage too.
We also successfully fixed some crashes in current Public Test Version (0.8.4.8). One was happening while a burned down building was being rebuilt, another one while helicopter was sent to infrastructure construction, and another one in building editor. Then we fixed an issue with slow construction and slow fire progression due to latest optimization introduced in 0.8.4.X version. Then we fixed an issue with fire stations preventing sending of fire engines if they had a helicopter without access to water. We also attempted to fix an issue with distribution and technical building vehicles being stuck at entrance. It should not happen again, but if you encounter this issue often, then please try to rebuild the structure. Then we attempted to fix an issue with vehicles taking longer routes due to recently added rail crossing penalty to pathfinding algorithm. But these are only some of changes we published in public test version. You can check release notes for more information.
Besides all these there were fixes and changes applied on Internal Test Version (0.8.4.10). We added factory connections and more pedestrian connections to alumina plant. First version of working building SFX was added to conveyor and pipe engines. We adjusted the water source requirements for fire stations, to allow smaller bodies of water as supply. We optimized terrain tools because there was too low FPS while using them in case there were many fields on the map. Then the building of pedestrian rail crossings will be allowed again. We are also testing RMB click on message for its removal.
This is not an exhaustive list of all changes, but it may not be so interesting or exciting to read through. As You can see, the development continues at high pace. The release of Public Test Version unveiled issues which need to be fixed as soon as possible, and when the most of these will be resolved, then the focus will switch to next content update. Until that we will focus on fixing, tweaking, and refining what we already have. And the next report will come out on 15th May if nothing unexpected happens. Until then enjoy the life and have fun.
Thank You for Your support
3Division Team