Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. As the weather gets colder, our heating plants in Slovakia start to fire up their boilers. That means we are again closer to October, the month we have in our calendars as our deadline for release of the upcoming update containing GUI overhaul and lot of improvements for existing features including some new ones. The latest version is now available for our internal testers who have taken the job to check the game and are doing their best to find anything critical that the development team would be able to fix that before we get to public beta test phase. Just stay patient, new version should be released next week for public testing!
With upcoming update our young workforce will be able to relocate into new residential areas throughout the map and it posted some new challenges as many time your residentials may not be ready for residents to move in. Because of that we needed to add new flags for residential building and city/area windows, to give you options to restrict new residents to move in. This will help you to avoid unnecessary loses of workforce in case if your heating infrastructure or citizen facilities are not ready yet. In addition, you will be able to change “get citizen” flags for buildings during construction phase.
We also added new option for your passenger scheduling. Many of you were asking for a way to allow transfers of passengers without need of building two platforms/stops. Now there will be a new checkbox for your stops in the schedule, which you can use to force your passengers out of the vehicle and change for another one inside the platform they have got off. We also added a warning to platforms/stations if they are full.
Another thing we changed is the construction office’ logic for sending truck to pick up resources. In case you have only little of resources in your storages used for construction purposes, but the construction site requires large amount of them, multiple trucks were sent and only few of them were able to load there as there was not enough material to load. The rest of them were practically travelling empty and burning your precious fuel. After update only one or few of vehicles will be sent if there will not be enough material available. This may not help that much if you have multiple construction offices taking resources from the same storage but in the end, it will really make a difference, because even if 2-3 construction offices send 3-6 trucks it is not the same as if those construction offices would send 10-20 trucks. This should even work for construction offices working on the same construction, but this check will be disabled for asphalt and concrete as those are always stored only in small amount and are produced on-demand when the vehicle is being loaded.
Then we added some new optimized parking lots which will allow movement of multiple personal cars inside the parking lot. We hope these will be a great inspiration for modders as there are already some great parking lots available in the workshop which worked quite well. And we have some great news for those who love T603 and T613 cars. We improved their models and added new colors. There will no longer be only black ones which most people use for secret police or some roleplay. Now you will be able to provide them to your workers and if you wish you can reserve the black version for those who will be respected by your loyal citizens.
In last report we mentioned that we started to work on mirroring of buildings. Many of you may wonder what that means for you because not everybody is discussing these things on Steam Forums. You may notice that buildings in game are mostly asymmetrical with different connections (roads, pathways, factory connections etc.) and quite often it may be challenging to place these facilities in a way that you can get most of your connections right. As example we can use the small aggregate storage which would be better to placed flipped. And that is the case mirroring is going to used for. We are working on allowing you to flip buildings without need of adding additional mirrored version of them to the game. It is not that easy though as it would look like, and we are encountering lot of issues with this feature from the very beginning. We want this to be applicable to modded buildings too.
We hope you will enjoy these improvements and we will be able to proceed to public test without any significant delays. Until then enjoy the life and stay tuned for the next report.
Thank You for Your Support
3Division Team