Hello everyone. It’s time for another Friday Dev News!
Youtuber Alpha preview pushed to next week
We had planned to release a first preview version to a small number of Youtubers this week, but unfortunately Andreas, our artist, got sick today and we were unable to finish up the necessary graphics.
Once he is back on track, hopefully by next week, we should be able to get the youtuber preview out the door in no time!
Resources
Still, we got a lot done. The first big item is that we have re-added resources on our new map. When building, the mines dock onto them nicely:
You may notice that the landscape looks a lot nicer in this week’s screenshots. We adapted the lighting and the terrain colors to fit better!
New Buildings
In order to release our first preview version, we’re replacing all the programmer art buildings with some proper art. They are far from final - but they look a lot better than the grey boxes I had before 
You might still some of my old art in the background.
Basic farms are pretty self-sufficient, so they are perfect to get your outpost started.
These lofty buildings capture air from the atmosphere and break it down into oxygen and carbon. You need oxygen for your inhabitants and carbon will be necessary for steel production.
These are protoypes for some of the high-tech factories. The textures are yet to be done.
On the left, you can see a storehouse which will be filled with all the concrete and steel you need for your infrastructure.
The building on the right is an untextured stadium - once your city has grown to a stable size, your inhabitants will appreciate some entertainment in between all the hard work.
And finally you cansee a protoype for the new spaceport. This will allow new settlers to arrive and join your city.
User Interface, Main Menu, Settings
If we want to give out the game for playtesting, it needs to be playable. And part of being playable is a basic main menu with saving and loading capabilities and some settings. It’s a lot of busywork to get it done, but luckily I was able to speed it up by taking a lot of stuff from Founders’ Fortune.
Now don’t worry - once we start polishing the game, we will make another pass over the main menu and do some redesign work. This is just to make it functional.
Optimized Rendering
As always, I’m doing a lot behind the scenes programming work, which is difficult to show to you guys. This time, I spent a lot of time optimizing the rendering for our cars. We’re hoping to support cities with thousands or - maybe - even tens of thousands of cars, so this will not be the last time I’ll need to optimize it.
The roads and intersections are not optimized at all yet, so there is a lot of room for improvement if we hit a performance problem.
