I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to playing New Cities. But don’t worry, I’m finding time to fix and improve the game as I play. I’ve been playing the same city from last week, Concord, and I want to get to 1 million people, which I haven’t done yet. I want to make sure the game performs well and works economically at 1 million people. Up to about 500k, I was getting 60fps consistently. Approaching 700k, I get around 45fps, so I’m confident that the game will still be playable at 1M. However, there is also room for improvement.

Just a brief update today. Last week we sent out the first New Cities Council-member Poll. The results are in, and the big winner, as expected, was Mass Transit. When dealing with traffic problems in six-figure cities, the lack of buses and rail is quite noticeable, so let’s say I’m in concord (heh) with the crowd about the need for mass transit. I’ve started to prototype mass transit in a branch, and a basic version should be available in a month.

In second place was pedestrians. I’m worried that adding pedestrians would have a performance impact, since it may well double the number of traffic entities that have to be simulated, but given its popularity, I will implement it along with mass transit. If there are performance issues, we will discuss with the council about what to do, but I recognize the desire to have walkability as a gameplay aspect.

Councilmembers will start playing January 10th, if all goes to plan. Towards the end of January, we will send out an update poll, so we’ll get to see how opinions change after people start playing. Until then, Mass Transit is my #1 priority.

We used approval voting, if you were wondering.

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