Hello everyone!
Road Building Performance
Polishing continues and this time our programmer Sepehr fixed something that has been a long standing issue when you build long roads, especially in already large cities: Road building performance!
It used to be that every time you place down a road via mouse click, the game would hang for a short while, leading to quite the stuttering experience. We looked at all the different areas that need to be done when placing a road:
- Calculating the shape of the road
- Splitting the road into multiple segments
- Connecting it to the nearby intersections
- Removing any grass that might be below the road
- Calculating the small decals beneath the road for better looks
- Updating the nearby terrain to fit to the road if necessary
- and much more
We optimized most of the slow parts and got from 400 milliseconds down to 60 milliseconds (6.7 times faster!) when building a road in our test case:
This is a relatively long road performing quite well in a city of 50k inhabitants.
Decorative Parking Lots
Thanks to our artist Lasse, we got some nice looking parking lots!
Unfortunately they are only decorative, since we’re spending our programming time on improvement and it’s not entirely clear how trucks would use the parking lot in InfraSpace. After all, the most efficient thing is to go directly from source to target building for production purposes.
Still, it looks really cool and if you have some creative ideas for applications, let us know 
Polishing / Decorative Update Release
Currently it seems like we might be able to release our current progress as update in 3 weeks, on May 12th. That way, you can already play with a lot of the improvements. Wish us luck, we’ll keep you posted!
Happy playing!