TGIF, Mayors!

We are elated to preview our latest addition to NewCity: Tourism!

Host citizens from neighboring areas! Watch them enjoy the latest amenities! Enjoy the visual updates! And of course, performance improvements. Take your next vacation in NewCity.

These are the patch notes:
[h2]Version 0.0.58.1 ALPHA[/h2]

[h3]Features[/h3]

• Tourism - NewCity now features a Tourism system. Once you build an amenity with Tourist points, tourists will start to visit your city. Every Tourist point gives +500 tourists per year. The city will be given a Tourism rating, based on tourists' experiences. The higher your rating is, the longer tourists will stay -- and the more money they spend!
  
• Tourists will only visit amenities which have at least one effect point in either Tourism or Prestige.
  
• Added new building designs, including hotels, motels and resorts. There are retail and mixed use zoned buildings. They will spawn when there is demand for hotel rooms, regardless of the retail zone demand.
  
• New Amenity: Police Operations Center
  
• New Amenity: Theater
  
• LUA - added timeNow(), which returns the time of day.
  
• When placing roads, there are now icons showing intersection points and upgrade plans.
  
• New Newspaper articles
  
  [h3]Improvements[/h3]
  
• Performance has been improved. You can see data about performance by setting CLogUpdateTime = true.
  
• Many Amenities now give Tourism points. Some other amenity effect points have been updated.
  
• The Public Beach Amenity is now always unlocked. The Ice Rink now only unlocks when the weather is cold enough. (Sorry, desert city players.)
  
• The Convention Center Amenity now contains hotel rooms.
  
• The total number of retail businesses in your city is now driven primarily by the total value of retail transactions per hour. More shopping => more retail.
  
• Hospitals are no longer "Limit one per city"
  
• Buildings now have an effect on the Value heatmap.
  
• Less traffic in small cities.
  
• Cars will now despawn when lost rather than rerouting.
  
• The Police Headquarters Amenity now gives more Order, less Law.
  
• In-game Amenity Info now covers all information about the amenity.
  
  [h3]Visual Updates[/h3]
  
• Shadows are now sharper. Fixed shadow acne and peter-panning.
  
• Light color is now sampled from the palette, in the same way that skybox color is. Light color is the first color patch of the three.
  
• Updated the appearance of water.
  
• Animations are now smoother.
  
• Off map roads are hidden again, except in the road map, traffic view and transit view. Fading roads heading off map are now longer and easier to see.
  
• Land Grain has been removed. It can be brought back by replacing textures/land-grain.png with textures/land-grain-alt.png
  
• Trees on boulevards are removed for now. They will be brought back when we improve road rendering in a future release.
  
• Added statues to university buildings.
  
• Known issue: there are some visual glitches such as UI elements reappearing after being hidden. To fix this, set CCullingAlgo = 0. Performance will be degraded slightly.
  
  [h3]Building Designer Updates[/h3]
  
• Designs can now have up to 2 billion families and businesses of each type.
  
• You can now disable spawning on particular designs, by unchecking the Spawnable box. Use this for in-progress, prototype and scratch designs to prevent them from appearing in game.
  
• Designs now have a default end year of 9999. Designs which previously had an end year of 2100 (the previous default) will now have an end year of 9999.
  
• Known issue: Playing NewCity for 8049 years will result in buildings not spawning, and is not recommended for your health.
  
  [h3]Bugfixes[/h3]
  
• Fixed several bugs related to families and family membership.
  
• Fixed flickering when placing a road.
  
• Fixed a bug when rotating or flipping blueprints.