GearCity 1.20 Progress Thread!

[Eric.B]

It's been almost a week since the last update on progress. But fret not, I've worked every day since then! Most of the changes however are not very visible to the end user thus why I haven't updated the thread.

So what have we done since the last post? We've received a lot of little bug reports over the last few days with the influx of Winter Sales players. I've cleaned up most as I got them.
Here is what I've marked down:
-Fixed bug in trim naming system that does not carry the name over to advance design.
-Fixed bug in Local Inventory reports which showed wrong inventory levels in certain circumstances.
-Fixed missing data bug in View Details panel for factories.
-Increased Click timeout rate as Crimson AMD drivers are having frame rate issues with shadows.
-Decreased Shadow texture quality. May disable high quality shadows for AMD Crimson drivers. (Getting too many negative reviews from people who won't email me if the game is crashing constantly on their computers :'( )
-Fixed bug with mouse wheel that did not update mouse position over lists. (Thus allowing for incorrect clicking positions)

We've also been working on some features:
-Administration costs and employee levels now increase linearly with the number of active marques you have.
- Restructured Marketing internally. This should improve marketing performance (and save game file size) dramatically by combining budgets for each vehicle into a single row instead of individual rows.

Please note, you may have seen an important thread I linked here about moving marketing to the branch level: http://steamcommunity.com/app/285110/dis...019800454/ I have pushed back this decision until 1.19.2 since it will not be that difficult to implement with this new restructure. (Most likely we'll be doing it, but I'm still leaving it open for debate to see what folks have to say!)


-Marketing information (Such as costs or employees) are now pulled from a past saved record instead of directly from the current funding. (Meaning expense reports will show what you did last turn not what you're doing this turn...)
-Marketing employee calculations have been simplified, employee count has increased.
-Updated all third party libraries to the newest versions. (Still requires stability testing.)
-Recompiled everything with _secure_scl disabled, this should greatly improve turn times, however stability testing is still required and may be re-enabled.

Some vector and sqlite db transaction optimizations have also happened. Until 1.19.2 rolls around I'm just touching these when ever I come across them to reduce the load when I have to do all of them.

Today I started working on the Employee Benefit system. Which you may have heard me refer to it as the Pension system. However using this word typically creates confusion. In most of Europe/Australasia, pensions are viewed as a government only form of retirement payment system collected via taxes. But a pension is actually a term for any type of retirement savings not controlled by the individual. In most places with skilled unionized workers a corporate pension system will exist along side government ran systems and private systems. Such systems have slowly died off in recent years... Anyhoo this is an explanation to a forum post from a few years ago. And I've digressed.

Employee Benefits are much broader than pensions. In GC we'll be implementing two types of Employee Benefits, Defined Contribution (DC)[en.wikipedia.org] and Defined Benefit (DB) [en.wikipedia.org]

DC- is a monthly payment to employees. We'll be using this to cover other monthly employee benefit expenses besides retirement. This system will cover their health insurance, life insurance, payroll taxes, 401k's, etc. For instance in the USA, if you worked a company with a 1:1 match on your 401k, for every dollar you invest in your retirement the company will invest a dollar into your retirement.

Gameplay wise you won't have to worry about the fine detail. You will simply be presented with dialog and/or a slider that will adjust the percentage of your employee salaries you pay out.


DB- Is a little more complex. The Defined Benefit system was the most popular type of retirement savings outside of government programs up until 401k (DC) started to push them out in the 90s. DB can be extremely dangerous if the funds are not properly managed, one can argue that DB liabilities are what lead to the bankruptcy of companies like GM.

So what is it? There are a number of different types, but I'll explain the most simplest in the simplest form. In short, employees are required to pay into a fund. The company manages this fund, invests the money, and tries to grow it. Once the employee retires, he withdraws an agreed upon amount for an an agreed upon amount of time (typically life.)

The easiest payment method to calculate (and the one we'll use in game) is called Money times Service. For instance. You're 20 years old. You pay a fee of $100 a month or so. For every year you work, you'll get $10 a month when you retire. You work 45 years, retiring at 65. 45 year * $10 = $450/month in retirement. If you live for another 10 years, the company will pay you a total of $54,000 while you're retired. In this case, the fund would break even because you paid in $54,000. But what if you lived 15 years? Your payment would be $81,000... The fund would have to make up the other $27,000...

Gameplay wise, you will have to worry about fees (how much employees pay), payouts (how much you pay per year of service), and unfunded liabilities.

Both systems will be manageable by the AI so you don't have to micromanage if you don't want.


The real benefit of this system will be in expanding the Union negotiations.