The past few months has seen quite a significant amount of progress made on the game engine, resulting in better graphics and improved performance. A lot of code from the early/prototyping stage of development was refactored and is now in a state where I feel more comfortable shipping it as a commercial product. In order to release an alpha version mid-2016 a conscious effort has gone into polishing what is already in the game rather than adding new features, and that will continue well into February also.

Chunk Loading & Tessellation

Some major improvements were made this month with the chunk loading system. Previously chunks within an arbitrary radius were loaded- now that is narrowed to only chunks currently in view. Those chunks out of view are ignored for rendering and the processing power required for them is much less- for instance, NPC pathfinding and traffic pathfinding is disabled and instead journey time is estimated, putting the NPC/vehicle into an idle state until the destination is assumed reached.

Tessellation has also been implemented for terrain rendering, and most other assets, resulting in further performance gains. The video below demonstrates how different chunks are drawn at different levels of quality as the camera zooms out. While no strict limit has been set currently for maximum view distance (or for maximum map size while on the subject), giving players the ability to set set these limits based on hardware available, and also more fine-grain controls such the maximum quality to render various world elements at, will go a long way to making something that is also accessible for players with lower spec hardware.

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Improved Graphics

Since the last update, shadows have been added to the engine in addition to HDR rendering and bloom. While there is still a fair amount of polish to do, the graphics are getting close to what is planned for the initial alpha release. A few more things will be implemented beforehand, such as adding fog for better depth perception and basic environmental effects such as rain, clouds etc, while other improvements such as more advanced lighting will most likely be delayed until a later release while gameplay and economy improvements take priority. While these features do result in a better looking world, they do add to the overhead of the program, but all can be disabled in the settings menu which would result in something more similar to the graphics in the pre-alpha trailer.

NPC Animation

Up until recently all NPCs were being rendered as motionless minecraft-like characters that had not been touched since early development. A walking animation and idle pose was added this month, along with a character more resembling the low-poly style of the game. A few more animations for different tasks will be added over the coming months. In addition, it would be good to eventually individualize skin tone and clothing color in a later update rather than being rendered as grey characters, but that is not a priority for now.

Improved Road Geometry

Roads were another area that hadn’t seen a whole lot of refactoring since prototyping and weren’t implemented all that well initially, having to be drawn a fair distance above the terrain to avoid intersection. Now road geometry will be calculated based on the tessellation level of the terrain below, resulting in a much more visually appealing result- no terrain intersects and no noticeable change in elevation can be seen between the ground and road. Road markings have also been added but are still in a pretty basic state- marking intersections and multi-lane roads properly still needs to be implemented.

State Of The Economy

With the graphics side of the game engine in a much better shape as the result of the last few months of work, improving the economics side of things will be a greater focus going forward. In the current state of the game, the economy mainly consists of food production (fishing, farming) and collecting other natural resources (wood, stone), with NPCs trading with each other to fulfill needs that they do not directly produce themselves. Prices react to market conditions and deciding what to produce is influenced by market prices. Government departments also employ NPCs (both for administrative and physical labor) which is how money is initially circulated into the early game economy.

A few main areas of focus initially will be making consumer demand more individualized, increasing the number resources and implementing a supply chain (i.e. crafting system) for processing raw and intermediate goods into consumer goods. Moving NPCs away from resembling the representative agent and adjusting behavior based on a range of factors (economic status, family status, age, health etc) should go a long way to making the economy more dynamic and gameplay more emergent.

Expanding the role of the government in the game and polishing what has already been implemented will also be a focus over the next few months. Currently players are able to create taxes (limited to either income or transaction based) and social services programs (limited to cash payments) based on specific conditions, zone areas of land for development and create and manage infrastructure projects, but more departments are planned in order to increase the scope and range of available government sector injections/leakages into/out of the economy.

2016 Schedule

As already mentioned, polishing the game in it’s current state will continue to be a focus, with the GUI, workflows in regard to placing zones/buildings/roads and controlling departments to be an initial focus, and definitely some low hanging fruit for some rapid progress in February. Having something ready to get into the hands of a group of testers perhaps as early as April would be ideal. Getting initial feedback, bug fixing and expanding gameplay and depth will be done from there on, until a public alpha release is ready a few months after that.

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