This mostly-technical update brings a major rewrite of the game's backend delivery decision-making system. There were a lot of small and larger issues surrounding item delivery, warehouse use, delivery priorities, inefficient routes, carriers idling, etc. At the end of the day, I couldn't solve many of these without adding substantial complexity and processing time. So I rewrote the system to run in a separate thread and be able to handle more workload and thus more logic and future changes I will need.

Key changes

A major change is to civilians. I did not like how their only job is to deliver goods from markets to houses. It sounded cool in theory, but residence deliveries were disproportionately cumbersome in practice. In fact, many players werent clear on when and why they idle. Instead, I made workers deliver the supplies to houses. However, that brought another problem that now half the population is ferrying residential supplies. So I made workers able to carry multiple sold goods at a time:
Civilians are now basically children:
A few players remarked that warehouses (and granaries) don't work well at all. And that's true -- their purpose was cold storage rather than active use or buffers. But I realize that when a player builds a warehouse somewhere between the producer and the consumer, then their intention is likely to buffer the items through it. So the deliveries will now accept retrieving from and stocking to storage based on distance more than necessity. There are still scenarios where the default logic wont work. So I decided to allow toggling of all the permutations of deliveries for storage buildings:
To illustrate, these work like so:
(And if you see the infinite loop in there, thats the one case that is not allowed; although it also means that you cannot daisy-chain warehouses). I also received comments about tasks and worker jobs being unclear (not helped by civilians adding their own numbers to the fray). So I converted the text-heavy detailed version into a more streamlined one and excluded civilians completely:
I think I will take this approach in designing tooltips going forward replacing text-heavy explanations with a more visual approach. (This also cuts down on any future translation work.) Some other small changes include adding change indicators for item report window:
Storage building now show the item they are storing:
Planks no longer break furniture production due to too many construction projects:
In fact, construction and material deliveries are now done on a queue basis:
Selecting a house will now show sentiment over all houses:
And a bunch of other small things.

Future plans

Theres so much else I want to do and fix, but at some point I have to push an update, even if its mostly just fixing existing issues. The backend rewrite took a long time, so I will try to focus on a content update next. I also recognize that there will likely be new issues that I will iron out over time. My main long-term goals are extending the gameplay length and adding endgame. I already began some work on this, but I postponed it because of the reports and bugs with delivery logic. This is because larger cities suffer from logistics issues and adding content that encourages larger cities will only make the issues worse. But now I really want to get back to this, such as adding stages of city progression.

Full changelog

(including 0.3.1+ stuff) Changes Civilians no longer deliver items to Houses, instead regular Workers do; civilians are now children that don't work and just wander about Workers can now pick up and carry up to 5 items from Market Squares in a temporary Basket (only to the same House, however and one worker at a time) Fewer Civilians will spawn, especially at the start of the game Warehouses and Granaries can now toggle whether items are received from and delivered to other storage buildings (in addition or exclusively) Deliveries--Warehouses and Granaries--are selected to maintain efficiency rather than priority Logistics no longer uses hard priority for items, but a variety of weights -- distance, item state, destination, etc. Construction site deliveries are prioritized in the order of placing them (i.e. build queue) Increase building worker item fetch distance up to 20 tiles Carriers will take slight priority over building workers when fetching items, but workers will fetch their own items when it's clearly faster Items left on ground will be delivered with some priority over others; stored items will be delivered with slightly lesser priority over others Building workers can now fetch internal supply items themselves (i.e. Tools) Item distribution window now allows setting Plank ratio for construction sites Many small logistics adjustments Improve top bar task tooltip overview legibility Warehouses and Granaries now show their stored item in-world Add Water Tower for Water storage for (future) emergencies Selecting any House will show a sentiment icon above all Houses Add unlock confirmation for technology unlocking Cloning buildings will also copy the delivery restriction toggles Profession adjustment window numbers can be adjusted in increments of 10 by holding Shift Item report window shows growth/decline indicators for all items Tooltips, tutorials and other text adjusted for new Civilian-related changes Carriers no longer prioritize output items (e.g. sawmill) over stored items (e.g. in a warehouse) Add zooming (mouse scroll wheel or numpad + and -) Add "X / sec" per item production and usage stats to item report window Bees are now units like animals Beehives no longer automatically produce Honeycombs, but require active Bees that fly to nearby Flowers and bring back nectar, filling up the Beehive Workers at a Beehive can spawn the first Bee; afterwards Bees that deliver nectar to Beehive can spawn up to 2 additional Bees Flowers can be gathered a limited number of times before they need to be replanted and go into short "downtime" after being harvested by Bees Beehives now show the range that Bees will harvest Flowers Increase Florist's max work distance and work area slightly Change Flowers graphic to single flowers; add 3 more variants Florist now has 3 work slots Well is now always unlocked Update Mason sprite, add sprites for active work, add item delivery/retrieval steps, add custom unit animation with sound and particle effect Increase icon and "button" size in item report window Brewing Vat now assumes input item ( Barley or Mead) based on selected production (even if it hasn't started producing yet) Add explanation notes to profession distribution window to bring attention to how the values would impact the game Bees will continue spawning for full Beehives so they don't "run out" if Honeycombs are not taken away Bees that successfully return harvest to Beehives will always spawn a new Bee if the hive is close to "running out" of bees Add version number to pause window Fixes Workers will pick more important building tasks first (such as milking Cows over "spawning" new ones) New Plank construction use ratio prevents Furniture production halt Building site material deliveries will not try to consume all carriers and break other deliveries Update Herbalist steps and HUD to show used items properly Rare error where a Beehive is still used by a Bee returning harvest to it Rare error where a Ranch worker would attempt to spawn an animal for an Animal Pen where a wandering animal decided to stay Fix momentary item "drop" when villagers are picking up items; adjust animation to match item elevation; add idle holding item animation while the villager is thinking Reduce tooltip flicker Units fetching stored items now properly use the building's "entrance offset" Many logistics issues fixed Units that can't find a path within a certain time will gracefully abort and retry path-finding (mitigating being stuck waiting forever in case the path is "lost") Tavern no longer says that it is "producing" drinks Graphics option resolution dropdown showing duplicates Occasional cases of black seems between tiles when moving the camera Ranch showing auxiliary build buttons for locked animals Buildings showing empty production and item sections if potential items are still locked Woolworking now properly requires Herding, without which Ranches can't be built anyway Multiple restarts or loads leading to game being unresponsive and hanging Fix building inspection auxiliary building construction button getting improperly selected Well not unlocked for Woolworking Fix window header text for victory and save upload windows Fix food production tooltip value for top HUD food info Mason not having an operation progress bar in UI Building workers not positioning correctly for Mason and Well Fix worker hammering animation offset Fix building particle effects sometimes not appearing Brewing Vat always showing Barley as input item Fix error when a worker aborts harvesting an animal Rescue animals stuck forever following a worker Fix error when a Bee is left without a Beehive Fix Bees not returning harvest Stop Bees making Cow sounds Animals won't wander on roads Florist not planting Flowers to replace Shrubbery Optimizations Delivery calculations running in a parallel thread, now with minimal overhead in main thread Much more efficient one-time entity flagging for deliveries and tasks Faster and more efficient entity lookup (used all over) Memory optimization for heavy UIs and tooltips

[ 2020-04-08 12:26:34 CET ] [ Original post ]