City Corner #2 - Upcoming Gameplay Updates

Hello Mayors!

Welcome back to the second City Corner! As we talked about two weeks ago, we are back with another installment in this series, with more information about our first patch.

In this City Corner, we go through more additions and bug fixes that will be included in the next Patch. We will also answer some of the questions you sent us after the last City Corner.   

Before we dive into all the juicy details, we want to thank you for all the feedback we received after our last City Corner! Your feedback really helps us to make the updates even better in the future.

Now, let’s get to the main course!   

Until now, the Grim Reaper has been working hard, but only between 0-6 am, which you might have noticed as massive deathwaves across your city. We have adjusted the system, so the deaths are now distributed more evenly over time and don’t happen at the exact same time. This means more work for Grim, but less for your hearses.

In addition, the citizens in easy mode were breaking records in lifespan and almost refusing to die of old age. As much as we love our elderly inhabitants, we have now fixed this in a way that older citizens will eventually pass away and give way for the next generation to move into your city.

When making big changes, we want to make sure that all of you have the option to choose. We noticed after the last City Corner that many of you wanted to keep the look of the UI, which inspired us to implement more Legacy Toggles for other changes that we want to implement in the settings. Legacy Toggles will exist for various settings that you can turn on or off, depending on your preference!

Our plan is to extend these types of toggles to other features as well, so if you ever feel like you prefer the old setting compared to the new one, you have the option to keep it as it was. The main changes that you will see with this patch will be the Legacy Toggle for the new UI look, and that Autosave is toggled on by default.

Although bikes are good for the environment, sometimes you wish there were fewer of them. That is why we have now reduced the amount of bike traffic in your cities by 80%, which means no more large amounts of bikes blocking your roads! We are aware that there are still more issues and bugs left with bikes, but we are looking into different solutions to fix them. 

The bicycle traffic on a busy road before…

The same road, after our first patch!

We are also investigating traffic on a more general scale, like pathfinding, cars changing lanes at the last second, and making unnecessary U-turns, for example. While we have made good progress, these fixes still need some more time and tweaking before we can release them.

Using the terraforming tools might’ve sometimes felt like digging yourself into a hole; maybe you wanted to create a small little hill, but instead ended up with Mount Everest. With this in mind, we have improved the terraforming tools for our first patch. Now, when you switch between different tools, the values of the previous tool will be saved and are not transferred to the next tool you want to use. The strength of the tools has also been adjusted to better reflect the percentage, and the brush size can now be reduced below 10.  

Brush size reduced to 1.

A hill created in the current version of the game.

A hill created with the improved terraforming tools, using the same height and strength settings. 

Bug extermination is an important job, and while some types of bugscan be hard to fix, we have and continue to make progress with getting rid of the pests in your game. 

On top of other things there are a couple of new visual improvements. We have improved the screen flickering during sunrise and sunset. In addition, the way shadowmaps are calculated has changed to better use the full resolution available. This makes the shadows look sharper on high quality settings.

Some of the bugs we are still investigating and working on are the performance issues, trains getting stuck at city borders, and the visual ghosting while using DLSS, for example. We know that there are a lot of bugs you have reported, and while we haven’t found a way to fix all of them right away, we are actively looking into them and trying to squish them as fast as possible. Meanwhile, we want to thank you for reporting any issues to the forums, since it helps us to make the game better!

We really appreciated the amount of comments we received from you after the last City Corner, and wanted to answer a few questions you sent us regarding the patch. 

A lot of you asked questions about the new UI design, and whether it is possible to change the transparency or edit the colours in it. The short answer is not in this next patch, but we are planning to develop the UI even further with future updates, which would include transparency and more color options. However, as mentioned earlier, you do have the option to change back into the Legacy UI if you prefer to use that instead! 

Another question we got was about the snow and how it lands on vehicles and roads. We are currently working on the snow building up on the roads as well, but this still requires some more work. While the cars also need to be looked at more thoroughly, we have decided to remove snow buildup on them for the time being. This means you can say goodbye to cars driving around with snow covering their windshields! 

Last but not least, some of you were asking if it would be possible to change the color of buildings and vehicles by the color’s hex value. We are happy to announce that we have modified the color customization tool based on this feedback and added a hex input, which you can use to customize the color of your assets! 

But what about the date, when is the patch coming out? The goal is to release it already next week! Naturally, we will keep you posted about this as well.

See you soon!