GearCity 1.20 Progress Thread!

[Frankschtaldt]

1.2 is going to be good!
Sounds like it'll ad a lot of depth.

[Eric.B]

I've implemented a few new features for 1.19.1, the first of which is the Employee Furlough system. When you reduce production lines or finish designing components instead of immediately firing employees these employees are throwing into a "Furlough Pool." These are employees that are still technically employed by your company but are not working and are not paid. When you hire more employees, new employees are pulled from the furlough pool first before new employees are added.

Every month the ratio of employees furloughed to working will effect your employee Moral. There are limitations to the effects. Likewise every month roughly 10% of these furloughed employees will be laid off or quit. This pulls down moral a little more, but your ratio of furloughed to working will be less the next month.

Another minor cost feature was added to factory production. The more distinct components you produce in a factory will increase the factory monthly costs by an additional 2%. This means if your factory is producing two vehicles using the same chassis/engine/gearboxes then there is no penalty. However if you're producing 10 cars all with different chassis/engines/gearboxes, expect 60% increase in monthly factory costs. (These numbers may be adjusted before 1.19.1 comes out.)

I've added a Low Definition texture toggle to the settings. This should make the game playable on very old video cards such as the Intel i915 as well make mobile/embedded GPU (such as PowerVR) support more likely. (ARM and MIPS support anyone?)

Here are a few things I've Implemented and fixed since the last post that will be included in 1.19.1:

-Employee Furlough System
-Fixed Wealthy car index (Limos, Landu, Supercars) insane margins bug.
-Disabled Dynamic Popularity for wealth index car types above 6 (Luxury Sedans, Limos, Landus, Supercars)
-Monthly Factory Costs increase based on how many different components are being produced at the factory.
-Fixed bug in assisted chassis designer, does engine fit tool.
-Low Definition Texture toggle.
-Improved decal system selectability. (Modern Headlights/Tailights and up coming stuff such as door jams.)
-Fixed compositor and shader crash in OSX
-Fixed possible crashes in OSX
-Fixed upgrading factory bug which charges 2 additional months of construction costs.
-Minor boost to buying populations in normal and hard mode.

[Frankschtaldt]

-Monthly Factory Costs increase based on how many different components are being produced at the factory.

When using regions to manage multiple factories at once will the game try to minimise this extra cost or will it continue to spread production evenly around the factories in the region?

Also, how will this extra cost be allocated in the fiscal reports? It's going to be hard to determine if a model is in fact profitable if these kinds of add on costs are simply averaged across all models. Like how the racing costs being averaged across branches can make profitable branches look like they are loosing money at the moment.

[Eric.B]

When using regions to manage multiple factories at once will the game try to minimise this extra cost or will it continue to spread production evenly around the factories in the region?

It will continue to spread it out as transportation costs are generally more expensive than this added cost. I should note I have reduced both factory build costs as well as factory monthly costs to offset this added expense. So the costs increases are not as bad as they seem. I'm also considering dropping the expense from 2% to 1.5%

Also, how will this extra cost be allocated in the fiscal reports? It's going to be hard to determine if a model is in fact profitable if these kinds of add on costs are simply averaged across all models. Like how the racing costs being averaged across branches can make profitable branches look like they are loosing money at the moment.

The costs are embedded into the factory monthly costs. Just as line usage is. So if your factory is building 5 cars with no shared components. And the factory supports 20 lines. And each car is using 2 Lines then the monthly costs for the factory is simply:MonthlyCosts = BaseMonthlyCosts * ((10+2lines used)/(20+2total lines)) + (BaseMonthlyCosts * 0.02 * 15 number of different components)

Then individual car, like in manufacturing costs on the side panel would simply factor in: BaseMonthlyCosts * ((2+2lines used for specific car)/(20+2total lines)) + (BaseMonthlyCosts * 0.02 * (15 number of different components / 5 number of cars) )

So it's integrated into the factory monthly costs and distributed the same as line use is. (Calculated at individual factory level.) So technically the cost is spread out among the cars being built at that factory. But this costs isn't really individual car costs, but a factory cost which should be shared by all at the factory IMO.

As for detailed reports on this. I have not implemented them. The entire report system is getting a major overhaul in 1.21, a complete from nothing rewrite. So I haven't bothered doing much more than the above to the existing systems.

[Eric.B]

The last 7 days I've focused purely on optimizing turn times. As of right now there is between 25%-45% reduction in turn times over v1.19.1.***

There is probably another 10-25% I can squeeze out not including possible gains from AI and Stock Market improvements. But I'm going to wait until I improve the AI first before switching back to optimizations.

Since turn times are moving faster, I can now take that saved time and use it to improve the AI. On top of this I plan on making the AI more efficient as well. Hopefully net-net we'll have both a faster AI system and a better AI system.


***Currently simulating the game from 1900 to 1930 with full AI on easy using my AMD Phenom 9550. No player interaction. 24.5% gains before optimizing the consumer AI, 45.3% after optimizing consumer AI. Changes to consumer AI flow has caused some AI to go bankrupt faster, so speed gains may not be as high after I have improved the AI.



Also if you crashing issues with shadows or alt tabbing in the past, please try out 1.19.1 and let me know if you still have these issues. Thanks!

[Eric.B]

Just to give a little update.

I continue to work on improving the AI. Vehicle design, production, factory building, and a few other things have been tweaked.

As of right now a full (300) AI, on a 30 year simulation, is producing a 30mb save game file. Where as 1.19.1 produces a 10mb save game file.

While this is a flawed measurement. It is pretty safe to assume that the AI is producing roughly 3 times the output. Looking at the raw data, more companies are staying in business, and more cars are being built. Awesome!

But with all good things there is some bad. I spent the first few weeks of 1.19.2 optimizing the game because I anticipated improved AI will result in slower turn times. And I was correct.

With a 10mb save game, the current code is roughly 30% faster than 1.19.1. However with the AI producing more data, full AI turn times are now 2.8x slower! I should be able to optimize this even more. But it's looking like I won't be able to drastically improve the AI without a nearly linear increase in turn times.

There is a silver lining however. With improved AI, Random 50-100 AI should provide the same amount of challenge as 1.19.1's AI while at the same time having faster turn times than 1.19.1 full AI.

Also in v1.22 I will be implementing new maps which will have fewer cities. Less cities means less data to process while forcing players/AI to step on each other's feet more.

So net net, we're moving in a good direction. I would say 1.19.2 is a little over halfway finished.

[Eric.B]

Work is just about complete with improving the AI. In fact, it's working so well that very few companies fail! Some more minor adjustments will be made to knock out a few more companies, as well create more mergers. I'm aiming for a 50% fail/merge rate. Currently that rate is around 10%.

I believe I can wrap up most of what I have planned by the end of the month. Add another week for a couple of minor new features and a few days play testing and we'll be good to go for 1.19.2!

-Fixed assists evaluation on stock prices which caused for rapped stock crashes of profitable companies.
-Fixed AI lobbying bug that caused buffer overflow errors when building factories.

[Eric.B]

Some more optimizations have netted us some more speed. We've reduced the number of string comparisons in sqlite, replaced our string converter system, and hash_mapped a few more of our rb tree maps! Currently working out any possible bugs these optimizations could have caused. (Switching out old well tested stable code for newer faster untested code is always scary!) I haven't done enough profiling to pinpoint the exact gains (and errors could skew my current results) but if it holds up, we're looking at roughly 20% performance gain with 110% AI output over 1.19.1!

AI starting funds have been greatly reduced. Its now much closer to the player's starting funds. This causes the rate of failure closer to what I want it to be at. On the flip side, AI starting factories are much larger than player's.

There are still a few more things I want to do with the AI. But they'll have to wait until I redesign the Finance/Stock system and move marketing to the branch system.

What else?

I've added in a few "Advance Game Settings" that will allow you to adjust consumer population rates, consumer spending power, starting AI bonus money, and how often AI will adjust its production. (Default is set to every turn. However on slower machines you may want to change it to once every 2 or 3 turns.) With these new settings you can adjust your difficulty beyond the 3 radio buttons.

I've also began purging old data from the save games. Namely old user generated reports after 3 years and News older than 10 years. This should reduce the size of save games somewhat. These changes may be superseded when I redo Office GUI in v1.21.

We've also added new component images. These new images have alpha channel around the edges thus allowing you to see what you select. Buttons with blue prints in them have been shrunk. And these images have been tailored to fit better so there is no blurry images from scaling. There shouldn't be any place holders with component images now.


There are a couple more tickets left, some will be pushed back to 1.19.4 or 1.20, some more play testing needs to be done, but it's looking like we'll be set to release 1.19.2 on the 11th!

[Eric.B]

I released 1.19.2 this morning,

Tonight I fixed a bug in the factory redesign system and released it in an "unannounced" hotfix.

Enjoy.

[Eric.B]

Long time no update,

The last few days I have either been without internet or without development computers. And sometimes without both! Sadly the internet situation won't be solved anytime soon due to circumstances beyond my control. However I should be back into a normal programming routine starting Monday.

In any event, I have been working on a hotfix for 1.19.2 that should resolve a number of issues and bugs. Sadly without internet, it's kinda hard to upload them to Steam. But soon.

This is an incomplete list, I haven't been keeping too much of a record of what I have fixed.
-Displaying incorrect monthly expense in sales book when updating factories.
-Fixed crash when creating custom districts with no cities.
-Fixed inactive model listing in RnD View Parts/Vehicles.
-Fixed possibility to get negative points in racing.
-Fixed bug in marketing which deletes all marketing in a city if you 0 out a single type
-Fixed slider position issue in megamenu
-Fixed bug in AI which caused vehicles to be sold at production costs when opening new branches.
-Improved AI single cylinder designs to prevent 0hp cars.
-Fixed view factory costs in world map view factory details
-Fixed bug calculating factory labor.
-Disabled charts for the first year of the game to prevent crashing (Charts are going to be redesigned in v1.21.)