The Winter Update and Winter Sale has Arrived!

Dear Retailers,

The holidays are officially upon us with the start of the Steam Winter Sale, and we ARE participating with our lowest discount yet, with up to 25%. In all likelihood, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already a player. But if you have any friends looking for a deep Retail simulation, now would be the best time to put that in their gift stocking!

Enough shilling, as we have a host of new updates, fixes, and content ready for the Sale. We’re doing a lot of under-the-hood work this update, but with changes that should improve the experience for everyone and better realize the fundamental gameplay behind King of Retail 2.

Actually, there’s just one more plug I’d like to make before we move on:

The Winter Retail Challenge is Ongoing

Just a top-of-mind reminder that the Winter Retail Challenge is in full swing on our Community Discord. If you haven’t joined yet, and are interested, make sure to check it out.

With holiday assets already available in the Steam Workshop, your own assets, or any combination of to create your own winter-themed retail masterpiece. Supermarkets, boutiques, tech stores, malls—anything goes, as long as it embraces the season and shows off a festive cheer.

We’re accepting screenshots or short videos (whatever is easiest) to be submitted in Discord.

Entries will be judged on creativity, theme execution, store layout and flow, use of seasonal decorations, and overall festive charm. We’ll choose the Top 3 creations, and we’ll be providing a Steam Gift Card for the top ideas.

We’re running until January 5th, so give it a shot and maybe win a prize for your design.

And with that, let’s move onto 0.3.4.0 Patch updates and what’s in store!

Huge Engine Improvements - Faster Loading, Bigger Stores

A week ago, a player reached out to me due to an issue with AI customers not working. I took a look at his save and, lo and behold, there were over 300 NPC’s in his store during busy hours (it was a very big floor space) and had over 144,000 stocked retail items.

Suffice to say, this had a huge impact on performance. It took me 1½ hour to get through a day in his store on my mid level machine due to constant lagging. So I took a look and managed to improve the performance greatly.

To break things down, we’ve improved King of Retail 2’s engine handling to address 3 major issues:

• Stores can eventually get too big, causing load issues and slowdown as the game both has to render and maintain individually stocked items, as well as customers. =

• The number of allowed AI controllers would cap out at about 300, leading to additional customers having no behaviors. This resulted in customers clogging entrance ways with no behavior or intent to buy anything (realistic, but not quite the realism I was going for) =

• 300 customers evaluating 13.000 different product locations is a lot of calculations, and only worsens with more customers or products

Now when opening or loading a saved game, products now load in progressively instead of trying to do it all in one process, which reduces RAM spikes, and the need of looking up the same thing multiple times. I also changed the way customers evaluate products, so they evaluate a random subset instead. This means you can now add as many products as you like, without it increasing this need for calculations. Then I changed the way