GearCity 1.16 Progress

[Eric.B]

Game costumisation <3

Will we be treated to a patch this weekend?

If all goes well, today.

[Eric.B]

Sorry for the delay, I have been doing simulation tests on the AI to make them a little more long lasting. Still A lot of work to do in this area, and sadly it takes time to do.

Anyway 1.15.2 has been published. 1.15.3 will mainly focus on tutorials, gui optimizations (mainly in the office), and some more fixes to the AI. So stay tuned!

[Eric.B]

Should have a hotfix coming out in about an hour. I was missing a pair of parentheses in my factory costs.

[Tridon]

Should have a hotfix coming out in about an hour. I was missing a pair of parentheses in my factory costs.

Maybe were you subconsciously trying to give Frankschtaldt a hearth attack.

[Eric.B]

Should have a hotfix coming out in about an hour. I was missing a pair of parentheses in my factory costs.

Maybe were you subconsciously trying to give Frankschtaldt a hearth attack.

Probably, the cheapest factory you could build in 2000 was 22billion, that's like 100m per car.

[Eric.B]

So it's been a few days since I updated. I still continue to work on GearCity full time. The last 4 days have been spent working on the AI. I've made improvements to both pricing and vehicle type selection. Some more tweaks to sliders to improve the quality of AI products, and fixed a bug in the aerodynamics, so now AI cars are faster...

Work on the AI is slow because it requires that I simulate the game, review the data, tweak, and then simulate again. I don't exactly have the fastest computers, so a 30 year simulation with full AI takes quite a bit of time. Not to mention the few 100 year simulations I've done. Anyhoo I have two computers running on this. So progress is being made in this area...

I've also implemented the tutorial framework for the office. Should hopefully have the office finished in 2 days, then I can move to RnD room!

Anyhoo this thread will be pretty slow until I finish the tutorial system. As It'll mainly be me saying "Tutorial implemented here, tutorial implemented there, yadda yadda.)

So sorry in advance. ~,^

[Eric.B]

The base tutorial is roughly 30% complete. (Not including audio dubs for it.)

I've also fixed(or improved, I can only test 1600x1200) the lag issue with the mouse in the office room on high resolution monitors.

Still doing minor tweaks to the AI, they're surviving nicely, but I don't like their expansions...

Next build will come out when base tutorial is 100% finished. No ETA, but it shouldn't be too long.

[Eric.B]

The base tutorial system is about 50% complete. At this pace the 1.15.3 should be ready Tuesday. Once it's out I'll do some minor suggestion and start working on the new racing system!

An open-beta build of the Linux should also be available next week. So if you're a Linux user, testing that would be very helpful to me. Because my distro is probably better than your distro! So I'd like to know if it works on your box.

[Eric.B]

I would say we're about 75% finished with the base tutorial. I stopped last night on "Assigning production" so I just have that, branches, salesbook, and city information (when starting a new game) to do.

The base tutorial covers almost everything in the videos, although more interactively. After I get the base, I'll probably work in one advance tutorial every build, until we've documented the entire game.

[Eric.B]

Base tutorials are around 90% finished. I have to add a little bit to the select HQ state. Fix some of my "English", and fix some of the GUI that is messed up. Once I take care of those tomorrow, I'll clean up a little bit of the AI improvements I've done and release 1.15.3 on Tuesday/Wednesday.

For most of you that have played the game, 1.15.3 won't be much of a change, just improved AI. (At the cost of slower turn times) some performance tweaks to the UI, and most of the stuff in the video tutorials are now built into the game, although it's still a little hinky.

1.15.4 will focus on a few minor suggestions, and I'll start working on the improved racing stuff. Stay tuning!

[Eric.B]

Base tutorial is complete. I just need to clean up a few minor things in the text, do a quick adjustment on the AI, and then bundle it all up for 1.15.3

Should have it ready within the next 36hours.

[Eric.B]

1.15.3 is out, here is the announcement in case you miss it on steam announcement thingies:

1.15.3 Is out.

1.15.3 mainly focused on our new integrated tutorial system. Most of the video tutorials have been translated to this new format. As of now we only cover the basics, however we plan to add additional advance tutorials over the next few minor releases.

If you want to access these tutorials, click the help menu in the upper right hand corner and select "Enable Tutorials." It is best to start the tutorials in the Main Menu and follow the prompts. The tutorials should be automatically enabled if you have not played the game since 1.15.1 or if you have a fresh install.

There may be a few minor issues with the tutorial system. Sorry, still working out all the kinks.


In 1.15.3 we also made some adjustments to the AI, The AI should be more difficult now, more companies will last the duration of the game. However please note this will slow down turn times. So you may wish to play with less starting AI.


Some minor fixes to the UI should improve mouse speeds in the office. I continue to do minor tweaks to this system.



With the bulk of the tutorial system solved. I will move back toward minor bugs and user suggestions for 1.15.4 and start working on the last major feature of 1.16, the new improved racing system.

No ETA on 1.15.4, but it should not be more than 2 weeks. 3 weeks max.

I'll start working on 1.15.4 tomorrow morning Night all!

[Eric.B]

Knocked out a couple of feature requests today, I'm going to try to knock out a few more of these smaller ones until the end of the week. Then I'll start the racing rewrite.

Anyhoo here is what I did:
-Next/Previous Memo Buttons
-Research teams amounts are monthly and comma separated
-Adjusted vehicle weights, luxury and safety ratings have an even greater impact now.

[Eric.B]

This morning I:
-View Parts Active check box defaults as checked
-Adjusted IPO share price
-Load Body style only shows loadable vehicles.
-Components and Vehicles will now be marked as designed on the closest whole year from which it finishes researching.


I'm taking most of the afternoon/evening off. I'll resume working either late tonight or early tomorrow.

[Frankschtaldt]

-Load Body style only shows loadable vehicles.

Hells yeah!!

-Components and Vehicles will now be marked as designed on the closest whole year from which it finishes researching.

Also hells yeah!!
Will this effect aging as well?

[Eric.B]

Also hells yeah!!
Will this effect aging as well?

Yes, although I do plan on adjusting the aging formula for components a little more. Penalty is a little too stiff for the first few years for components.

[Frankschtaldt]

Also hells yeah!!
Will this effect aging as well?

Yes, although I do plan on adjusting the aging formula for components a little more. Penalty is a little too stiff for the first few years for components.

Schweet! I was going to suggest a change to the deterioration of components. I probably still will but I'll hold out to see what you do cuz my idea is barely half formed.

[Eric.B]

Spent the entire morning implementing Vincenty formula to calculate distances... After 5 hours I gave up on getting it to work properly. So I spent the last 2 hours implementing Haversine which was much easier when I actually grabbed a trig book instead of reading wikipedia or trying to port javascript versions of the formula...

What does that mean to you? Shipping Distances have been fixed within 0.5% margin of error! (Vincenty would of gotten us within ~0.0015m of error, but we're not lobing cruse missiles and I've already wasted too much time...)

-Shipping Distances fixed.

[Eric.B]

1.15.4 will have changes to the save games. I will make a note of it in the announcements a few days before release.

-Adjust Auto Wage amounts from 0.9 time average to 1.2 times the average.

[Eric.B]

This morning played around with some reports as requested:
-Fixed more bugs where reports were being cut off from being displayed.
-Added Local Inventories to the Sales and Production Report by City.
-Added a Simple Monthly Summary report which combines "Fiscal-Revenues and Expense Turn Data", "Model- Sales/Production/Inventory", "Sales, Production, and Inventory By City", "Fiscal- Profits per Model", "Fiscal- Estimated Cost of Delivery per Mode"l, and "Research & Construction Status" reports into one simple report. You can access it by creating a user generated report and adding "Simple Monthly Summary" to that report. You also have 4 other slots that you can add reports to. So It should cover a lot of bases for an "End Turn" report.

I'll continue to work on Steam suggestions tonight. Tomorrow I will install Ewwwwbuntu (I don't know why such a crappy distro has huge marketshare on Steam.) to test out the Linux build of the game on a fresh install. IF that goes well, Linux OpenBeta 1.15.35 (30 year demo) should be released around Tuesday or Wednesday. Full time work on the racing starts Tuesday morning.