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