Friday Dev News #28 - Building Snapping

Hello everyone!

This week we’re continuing our quest to make gameplay a little more fluid and give you some quality of life features. Specifically, buildings and roads snap into place and can be aligned perfectly.

Also, we’re testing an important balance change: When factories produce something, they prioritize the closest consumer much more than they did previously. This means that some consumers close to the factory will have their storage filled while consumers far away are still waiting for resources. This has some important consequences:

  • If you don’t produce not enough resources, some factories won’t get anything. Previously, all factories will get something and only have short production breaks. Now, it should be more easy to tell how much your production is off by just seeing how many factories are not supplied.
  • When habitats are supplied with new resources, the closest ones get their storage filled and can already upgrade. This allows a part of your city to upgrade, even if your production is not sufficient for every habitat. That should make progression faster and easier.
  • Less traffic should be traveling from one part of the city to the other (though it still does if all close consumers have their storage filled already)

Features

  • Road can snap to a certain length
  • Road can snap to 90° and 180° angles to other roads
  • Added tooltips to explain the efficiency of factories
  • Added tooltips to explain numbers in lower left corner of dashboard
  • Buildings can now snap to roads. If you use straight roads, you can align them perfectly, almost as if they were on a grid

Changes

  • Factories prioritize closest consumers much more
  • Some changes that reduce overall traffic
    • Oxygen takes longer to produce, but is not as consumed as quickly
    • Basic farms require more workers + power, but food is not consumed as quickly
    • Home appliance factories produce less and take more time, but appliances are not consumed as quickly
    • Computer factories produce less, but computers are not consumed as quickly

Fixes (already released on Monday + Tuesday)

  • the road tool is no longer selected when trying to edit the lane configurations and vice versa
  • the road tool is no longer selected by mistake when clicking on certain locations in buildings or on access roads
  • fixed a bug where a building would get deleted if you canceled moving it
  • fixed a bug where habitats would upgrade/downgrade every frame
  • fixed a bug where simulation speed was tied to framerate
  • improved save load speed for large saves

Our artist is on vacation this week and next week, so no new graphics for a while :slight_smile:

Happy playing!

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Really looking good, the recent changes to the roads have given the game a whole new dimension.

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