City Corner #8 - Transforming the Terrain

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Summer is here, Mayors!

Welcome back to another City Corner, where we will be going through the upcoming changes that will arrive with our next patch, Summer Solstice! This patch introduces improvements to gameplay, especially to citizen pathfinding, as well as a major overhaul to terrain texturing.

Without further ado, let’s paint a clearer picture of what’s new in this update!

Gameplay Updates

For this patch, we have made adjustments to the gameplay and citizen behavior, especially when it comes to pathfinding. In our upcoming patch, the citizen pathfinding has been adjusted in a way that they will make more sensible decisions when choosing stores and leisure activities, and going to work or school, which reduces the excessively long trips across the city. Pathfinding limitations are now tailored per trip type, and each type uses a more sensible range rather than a shared, almost unlimited, distance. Citizens who can't find a viable route will now handle it gracefully: move-outs teleport off-map, workers drop their job, and leisure-seekers idle at home before retrying. These changes have so far been made quite carefully, so they might not apply to every long trip that your citizens take, but we will keep working on it even more in the future now that the system is in place.

In addition, due to a bug, citizens chose their shopping locations based entirely on available stock, wherever the shop was located. This caused them to travel unnecessarily long distances in order to buy the item of their choice. This change puts more significance on where you might zone your commercial areas, and with the update, it might cause your city to have more ‘Not enough customers’ warnings when the businesses realize that they are not in a good location. We plan to balance this even further in the future based on your feedback, so feel free to leave any suggestions on the PDX Forums!

Last but not least for our Gameplay updates, we have fixed a bug that caused households to repeatedly look for a new home, but almost always fail to find a better one. In the upcoming patch, citizens will now re-evaluate potential new homes less frequently, which in turn should help improve overall simulation performance, especially in larger cities. Besides fixing the buggy case, for some extra performance boost, we have also adjusted the citizens to generally look for homes less often than before.

Visual Updates

On the more visual side, we wanted to make your cities feel even more colorful, because who doesn’t love textures, right?!

For this patch, we have overhauled the entire terrain rendering system by adding triplanar mapping for cliffs and individual smoothness maps for all terrain textures, as well as improved terrain normal calculation. Triplanar mapping is what makes sure that the texture that is being rendered doesn’t look stretched when terraforming. We have also added additional texture LOD levels and improved the blending between them. We have upgraded our terrain textures and improved the blending between different surface types. You will be able to experience these changes firsthand by loading any of the maps included in the game. All of these maps have been updated with improved grass, dirt, and rock materials, creating a more natural and visually pleasing look. Specific maps, like Archipelago Haven, Twin Mountain, Great Highlands, River Delta, and Mountain Village, have been improved manually as well, and we will continue working on the rest of the maps as we go. When implementing these changes, we have been very careful to not negatively impact the rendering performance of the game and have actually managed to improve the rendering performance.

Look at the blending of the dirt!

But wait, there’s more! This patch introduces the ability to modify ground textures directly in-game! So, if you’ve ever wanted to add a sandy shoreline to your city, you will now be able to do so using our Terrain Painting Tools! These new terrain textures will also be available in the Editor. Whether you are creating a coastal paradise or a rugged landscape, you will have more visual variety to work with.

For map creators, you can update your already published maps with the new textures, or get inspired to create something new to share with the community. To help you even more with the map creation experience, we’ve adjusted gizmos so that they no longer appear on every object, helping to keep the workspace cleaner and make it easier to navigate. We have also adjusted the visibility of map borders against the new terrain textures, making it easier to see and shape the edges of your playable area.

Archipelago Haven, before the patch.

Archipelago Haven, after updated terrain textures!

A close-up of the new mountain textures, in the Mountain Village map.

We have also fixed an issue with terrain normal calculations that was causing the terrain to appear flatter than intended. Previously, the terrain normals were incorrectly pointing too far upward, which flattened the appearance of the landscape and reduced the sense of depth. With this fix, the terrain now better reflects its true shape, revealing more surface detail and giving the world a greater sense of depth and dimension.

Terrain normals before…

…and after!

Future Adventures

As we continue our work on improving the game, we would love to hear more of your feedback and suggestions through the PDX Forums. And of course, let us know what you think about the upcoming patch!

Thank you for reading, and see you soon!