Hello everyone!
it’s time to finally announce the release date for the environment update!
We want to release on Friday in 2 weeks, Dec 9th, 2pm CET
Our plan is to finish all the features by next Friday and then spend a week with playtests and bugfixes. If anything goes wrong, we may move the release by one single week, but definitely not longer.
It’s going to be good seeing you play with the new, larger map 
Rendering Optimization
Our new map is 4x the size of the old map, includes lots of grass and small details and features a much more detailed background. For most of development, the performance of all that, was… questionable. This week, we’ve done a large performance pass over all the environment graphics and some building graphics and managed to reduce the amount of draw calls from 3.000 to around 500 with still more ideas to optimize further. We’ll see how much better we can make it perform.
(note: this concerns only graphics performance. simulation performance for large cities (10k and more citizens) will be addressed down the road)
Grass Removal for Roads
Now that we have a lot of grass, we need to remove it when you build on it. Already made a lot of progress last week, but now it’s dynamic when create and replace buildings and roads or when you move them.
Gondola Pole Placement
The new gondolas enable you to gain access to the volcano caldera and the dried river bed. But in order to make it work, we needed to create an algorithm that distributes the gondola lines over the rocks in a way that makes it look natural and make sense. Check it out:
Habitat Level 6 Variations
And finally one of our artists has been keeping up his quest to make the city look good with new variations for habitats level 6:
We all hope you’re going to enjoy the update we worked so long on - see you next week for more details!