Hello everyone!
First of all: The Decoration & Polishing Update releases in 2 weeks, on May 12th!
We are trying to get InfraSpace ready for its 1.0 release in a couple months.
Pathfinding Performance
We have posted about pathfinding performance before (see Friday Dev News #29 and #84 for example), but this week I think we’ve implemented a solution that is gonna handle any city you can throw at it!
Instead of our C# implementation of an optimization algorithm called contraction hierarchies, we are now running a highly optimized C++ library called RoutingKit, which is a research project from the Karlsruher Institute of Technology. Well, and this version is much faster.
For example, a city with 8,500 bidrectional roads is represented as a graph structure with. 17,000 edges (two edges per road). Our old version used to take 15.6 seconds to calculate the acceleration structure in the background, while the new optimized version is way faster at 0.051 seconds. Finding the actual path is also significantly faster.
We were looking into pathfinding performance, because it turned out that it has become one of the major performance bottlenecks in bigger saves. I’m looking forward to seeing your experiences once the update is out!
New Parks and Fences
While Sepehr worked on the pathfinding performance, Lasse added some new buildings to the game, the first being a new park with a nice little animation:
Second, we now have small fences you can use to visually separate parks of your city:
Update releases May 12th, we hope you’ll like it!
Happy playing!