1.23 Progress Thread

[Eric.B]

SP2 Has been released, here are the additional tickets in it:

-Bugfix: Fixed bug causing all chassis length and with to be high in game years before 1946.
-Gameplay: Tweaked AI component design sliders for chassis', engines, and gearboxes.
-Gameplay: Optimized factorycleanup, sales report, and half of city sale's report processing time. More optimizations to come over the next few builds.
-Gameplay: Ordering more outsourced units from the AI will now cause the units per month to be regenerated. The amount of units per month is equal to the amount of units needed divided by 12.
-Bugfix: Fixed some missing variables in recent player action text.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug that caused other components to appear in "Used In" list in the View Parts window.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug that did not list parts licensed or purchased from other companies in the modification window. This caused the player not to be able to discontinue these components.
-Gameplay: Added "All Vehicles" to Model Compare and Marque Catalog. Please note, this system is slow in large save games. List pages are coming soon, to optimize large lists.
-Engine: Players can now purge old historical data from the game. This reduced the save file size by 25% which can make loading and turn times faster. Additional savings will be sought soon.
-Gameplay: Redesigned the Consolidation name generator in the hopes of fixing the "File Not Found" name bug.
-Bugfix: Fixed Outsourcing/Licensing hot keys in RnD
-Gameplay: Starting funds are now interpolated between starting years. (Funds used to be attached to fix dates that older versions of the game used to use.)
-GUI: Fixed ordering of some ratings in components/vehicles so that assisted, advance, and view panels match.

There were also several unticketed bug fixes, mostly small stuff I got in emails or chat and could quickly fix without fuss.

[Eric.B]

Regarding Intel “Meltdown” issue.

Unless you haven’t been following the news lately, you might have heard of “Meltdown”. For those that haven’t, Meltdown is a security flaw in Intel and some ARM CPU’s Speculative Execution systems.

Operating Systems will be patched over the next few weeks and months for this security flaw. For most consumers there will be very little performance impact. This is true for most video games. However, GearCity is not like most video games.

GearCity handles an extreme amount of data compared to most games. For the in-game reports, we write a few hundred 10-30KB files to the file system every turn. The save game and internal game data is written in SQLITE. Both file system IO and SQL performance will most likely degrade on every Intel CPU. How it will impact GearCity remains to be seen. I will do benchmarking on my Mac once I receive the updates. And mitigate any performance issues if I am able. Please note, our concern with Meltdown is not security related. We are concerned with performance loss due to Operating Systems fixing the security issues.

For the handful of AMD users, the “Meltdown” patches for Windows and Linux currently do not effect you. You still have security issues with “Spectre”, but that has little impact on GearCity.


And for the ethical interest of full disclosure. I hold significant interest in AMD and I am long on the stock. This post is preemptive information about possible performance concerns for the majority of our customers. I will report back after testing to confirm if the game has been effected in any significant way or not.

[Eric.B]

Hotfix #1 released.
-Bugfix: Fixed the Jams & Gap crash on some machines due to modulate scene blends in the texture.

[Eric.B]

Meltdown Update: Serhiy has finished running benchmark testing for us and Meltdown. The good news is that SQLITE's move to MMIO in 2013 has prevented heavy impact to the game. On a Windows 7, i5-3570 CPU, with a 7200RPM hard drive, we're looking at about 0.5%-1.5% drop in performance when testing against a 200mb save game.

I expect this performance drop will be a little bit higher for those of you using SSDs and NVMEs. But it is still about half what I was expecting. Some parts of the game are up to 40% slower in this test. And the main area of concern was only 3.5-6% slower. The rest of the game had little impact. This is due to structural changes in Sqlite over the years!

Continued optimizations should negate any performance loss for Intel users. Everyone else will get some performance improvements in the area of concern.

[Eric.B]

-Bugfix: Fixed decal sliders changing position when selected.
-Bugfix: Fixed View Part Window not resizing child widgets when resized.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug preventing the vehicle year to be changed to the finished design year.
-Gameplay: Disabled district locking on branches when auto production is enabled to prevent breaking the Auto Production system.
-Bugfix: Fixed crash with the "View Vehicle" button in the World Map Branch Distribution Window.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug with estimated vehicle development time when the player zeros out all sliders on a new vehicle design.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug in the save game system that was causing the file not to be saved and several SQL errors.
-GUI: Added "1/" in front of the year on the "All Time Sales" report to clarify that it is only updated once a year.
-GUI: Added delete confirmation when deleting custom body designs.
-GUI: Component Selectors when designing a new vehicle will now either select the currently selected component in the list. Or choose the first one.
-GUI: Factory Rating is now shown in World Map Factory View Details. And an average of Ratings is shown in District Factory View Details.
-GUI: Shipping Costs has been added to the Cities Sales reports. Report columns have been reorganized for better readability.
-Gameplay: Dynamic City Growth Rates have been doubled for cities under world map average population or per capita.
-Gameplay: Optimizations to the Dynamic City Growth Rate system.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug allowing AI to make vehicles with the same base name as player, thus clogging up the "Used In" list.
-Bugfix: Fixed random name generator to stop recommending names that are already used by other components or vehicles.
-Gameplay: Added a generate new random name button (Dice right above the Text Box you enter names into).

[Eric.B]

v1.23 SP3 has been released, here is the additional tickets completed:
-GUI: Added Morale back to HR lists.
-GUI: Added a "paging" system to Factory Production, Branch Distribution, and all Showroom lists. This should improve window loading times in large save games. More will be added in SP4
-Gameplay: Adjusted the quality of AI branches based on the size and wealth of the city compared to the global average.
-Bugfix: Fixed development pace slider effecting estimated finish time incorrectly.
-Gameplay: Increased AI's use of player components via platform sharing.
-Gameplay: Increased AI's minimum ratings requirements to license/purchase components from other AI or players.
-Bugfix: Fixed AI licensing signing fee exploit.
-Bugfix: Fixed licensing fees being tax free.
-GUI: Restart production system is now using the new component selection system.
-GUI: Build Components/Vehicle marque selector now defaults to your parent company.
-Bugfix: Fixed 7 appearing as 17 on non-English keyboards.
-Gameplay: Excluding Outsourced and Licensed vehicles from yearly awards.
-Gameplay: Excluding Outsourced and Licensed components/vehicles from company equity calculations, thus reducing stock price and bond evaluations due to outsourcing.
-GUI: Added Year and Active status to Marque Catalog and Model Compare.
-Bugfix: Fixed Model Compare's Bore/Stroke display
-Bugfix: Fixed issue with Furloughed employees not being added to the system.
-GUI: Added Monthly Idle costs to factory build screens.
-Gameplay: Adjusted auto-marketing system for large companies.
-Gameplay: Turn time optimizations. 20% gains for Windows, 5% gains for Linux and OSX (more gains coming to Unixes in a couple of weeks.)

Several other undocumented bug fixes that I either ran across and fixed on the spot, or were reported to me and I didn't record the fix in the ticketing system.

[Eric.B]

Released a hotfix for a couple of bugs. Also included a ticket from 1.23SP4 since I already started working on it...


Hotfix #1:
- Gameplay: 62 Newspaper images for various in game events.
- Bugfix: Fixed possible crash when closing database in Linux or OSX.
- Bugfix: Fixed Office Mega Menu district branch distribution list not refreshing.

[Eric.B]

Another hotfix, hopefully knocking out a couple of more DB bugs.


Hotfix #2
- Bugfix: Fixed Monthly report duplicating inventory of vehicles in reserve.
- Bugfix: Incorrect total factory use capacity in Factory Expense report.
- Bugfix: Possible fix to war contracts continuing production during war after the contract is over.
- Bugfix Fixed a couple of database errors in Auto Production system. This may fix a couple of the "Save" and "Save As" crashes you may have with SP3. If you run into any, please send me the logs.
-Gameplay: Increased Mega Menu and World Map page lists to 40 items from 20.

[Eric.B]

Unless I get some more log files with examples of DB errors, this should be the last hotfix for SP3.

Hotfix #3
-Gameplay: Decreased furloughed employees effect on employee morale.
-Gameplay: Renamed Auto-Benefits to Auto-Union. Auto Union now automatically negotiates both benefits and wage strikes.
-Bugfix: Fixed another possible DB leak. Please email me your log files after lengthy game play so I can find and fix more!

[Eric.B]

SP4 is coming along nicely. My goal was to get it out on Friday, but I might push it back a couple of days to finish up Base City Map's nation changes. Anyhoo, here is what's been done in the last 10 days:

-Bugfix: Fixed textbox not working on World Map Marketing
-Bugfix: Fixed Horizontal slider bug in 1080 resolution web browser.
-Bugfix: Fixed background image for reports that are wider than one page.
-GUI: Webbrowser on 1080 resolution or larger will now have browser controls on the side instead of the bottom of the scree. This allows for 1050 monitors to support the larger reports system.
-GUI: Possible optimizations to the reports GUI which should speed up rendering.
-Bugfix: Fixed some stock value issues in the Stock Value and Networth charts.
-Bugfix: Fixed broken awards system.
-Bugfix: Fixed wrong unit bid amount displayed in RnD Contracting Bids for naval engines.
-GUI: Implemented a warning pop up message for DirectX 9 users when they Alt-Tab out of the game.
-Engine: Removed Fullscreen option for DirectX9. Fullscreen has been replaced by a fullscreen borderless window. This is to prevent crashing from people alt-tabing out of the game while fullscreen. If you need low resolution full screen, please switch to OpenGL renderer. (Hopefully in the future, we will include an OpenGL3 renderer as well.)
-GUI: Fixed Outsourced Sales Help button not working.
-Gameplay: Cancel Licensing/Outsource for sale button.
-Engine: Engine backs up 5 log files, in case you crash the game but don't immediately email me.
-Gameplay: Winning any sort of contract now resets the AI production system, which means contracted components/vehicles should get priority before consumer models.
-Gameplay: Fixed bug causing only water and electric military contracts.
-Gameplay: Adjusted vehicle length values.
-GUI: Converted lobbying image into text so I could fix spelling and grammar issues.
-Bugfix: Fixed bug in the factory expense report which caused factory costs not to match expenses summary report nor Monthly report.
-GUI: Fixed list overflow issue in modify components lists.
-GUI: Manual entry production no longer adjust automatically. You have to click a button first before manual entry production adjust the sliders.
-Gameplay: Manual entry production now attempts to find a production speed value with the current set production lines before it adjusts production lines.
-Bugfix: Fixed district manual entry production slider adjustments to be more exact.
-Engine: Updated SQLite to 3.22
-Gameplay: Turn time optimizations, approximately 8-10% improvements in turn times.
-GUI: Changed ordering of vehicles in Auto Commands. Vehicles are now ordered by Marque, Model, and then Year.
-GUI: Added missing year to vehicle names for Model Compare in Showroom.
-GUI: Added pages for Auto Command lists.
-Maps: Military War history now up to 1998.
-Maps: Flag changes for all cities.

[Eric.B]

The Base City Map has been updated to include national name changes. I believe I got many of the WW2 major name changes as well. (Except for Japanese Occupied China, couldn't find good dates for city takeovers in that conflict... I will look in the near future.)

As far as Base City Map is concerned, the major elements are implemented. I still have to complete minor war history articles, independence articles, major world event that don't effect vehicle sales news articles, static fuel and vehicle type popularity changes, and finally proof read it all. After which I can start porting the data to other maps and start balancing them.

As for 1.23, this should be the last patch, excluding any hotfixes. I may have some additional artwork and news articles to throw in next week as it comes in.

Demos will be updated sometime next week. I will post when they do. I also plan on releasing a WINE bundled version of the game to OSX users next week as well. This is supplemental to the native port in case you have stability issues with the native build. I am hoping after v1.25 is completed, I will be able to successfully update and port the engine to 64 bit and conform to Apple's latest future standards. (Assuming they don't change it on us again.)


I will link the v1.24 thread here once I have some change log data to post.

-Maps: National name changes for Base City Map.

[Eric.B]

v1.24 progress thread can be found here: http://ventdev.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=3722