Posted January 27, 2022
CAR WASH Update #5
Update 5# Features (Do., 27. Januar 2022 - 19:04 CET)
Car Wash Added
Unlocked after Quest Chain at Lvl. 4 Gas Station ($1000 for Restoration).
If you are beyond the starting point of the quest, it will begin after you finish the current active quest, or immediately if you finished the main campaign.
Five levels of upgrades, leading up to Automated Car Wash that requires minimum maintenance. As an extra feature we've also added the ability to open/close Car Wash separately from the station itself by popular request from the community (We might expand this to other parts of the station in the future).
- Extra regular achievements connected to the Car Wash (Upgrades and Washing the Cars)
- 2 New Hidden Achievements
Locations
- New location added: The Sewers
Connected with the car wash, it houses the Water Pumps that keep the water flowing and few small secrets to discover.
Misc:
- Various minor bugfixes
- Minor language fixes and updates
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a bug where if you ordered more than 1000 units of Products/Car Parts in a single order that only 1000 would arrive.
- Fixed a visual bug in the Wheel Ordering UI showing the wrong sale price.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1149620/announcements/detail/4989427331555021101
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Update #4 is here! (Mi., 15. Dezember 2021 - 18:02 CET)
Update #4 is a combination of things we have planned for the update #4 itself as well as the previously planned update #5. Due to the delay in update #4, these updates have been combined into one.
The focus of update #4 remains what is was: performance optimizations, saves games and loading times, random crashes and fixes for achievements.
One of the reasons the update #4 took longer than we anticipated was a major rework and clean-up of large potions of the game not only to improve overall performance, but also to allow us to create and introduce more new content into the game more easily. While that might sound like much, it has been of major importance to us considering the large amount of future content we plan for the game.
Performance
- Loading times for game start and loading saved games have been vastly improved. The game now loads less data on various stages of the process and handles it differently.
- All vehicles have been optimized and require less resources now, meaning they now eat up less performance than they did before. This becomes very noticeable in later stages of the game when there is a lot more traffic on your gas station. These optimizations affect both the CPU and GPU performance.
- Lighting and Shadows had an optimization pass resulting in improved performance especially inside the gas station building.
- First thorough pass of GPU usage, Render optimizations as well as Scalability settings. On lower settings you should now see more difference in quality and bigger savings in GPU usage, VRAM usage as well as regular RAM. Visual quality of textures, vehicles, characters, and shadows of course will be more affected at lower settings. Specifically draw distance makes a large impact on the visuals of skeletal meshes (cars, customers) based on a distance, so tweak accordingly to find what is best for visual / performance gains for your specific hardware.
- The overall memory footprint of the game has seen some nice improvements while we are it at.
Improvements
- AI Pathing has seen some optimization to make especially vehicle AI be a bit smarter now when attempting to drive. This should lead to less traffic pileups and better navigation to their destination and especially exit points. So more situations related to traffic should be solvable on their own, or with minor help of the broom rather than needing to call the UFO.
- AI priority queue has been changed which should allow for cars to come to Fuel / Garage more consistently.
- While working on loading times we also had a close look into issues with saved games reported by some players and made various improvements to how the game handles the save process and improved it.
Stability
- Various random crashes have been caught and fixed. Especially the random crashes resulting from Employees being stuck in loops related to their cleaning and garage repair tasks should now be a thing of the past.
- We caught various instances responsible for random crashes in later stages of the game and fixed them. We would like to thank all those players who sent us their save game folders along with detailed reports what they were doing and when. It would have not been possible to catch these things without their help.
Employees
- As part of the crash fix, employees when they manage to clean the whole gas station during the cleaning task, should no longer go home and rest. Instead they will wait at last the position of cleaning for more mess to happen. They should only stop cleaning / return to their camper once their energy runs out.
Other Fixes
- Applied a fix to Trash Drop rates, as it turned out customers were really nice and never dropped trash on the floor any more at some point due to a rounding error in our drop chance calculation when we last adjusted it to be lower.
- Fixed an issue where at Popularity Level 10, the amount of cars arriving was wrongly set to Level 1 Popularity.
- Fixed an issue where Rudy was not saving properly. The old saves can't be retroactively fixed by this, but any new saves or even on old saves games should apply the fix. For example if you picked up sand and saved, Rudy would remember that it had Sand, but would on load have lowered the front 'blade', and no sand could be picked up because it was considered full, so you'd need to unload it first before being able to use it. This will still be the case if you load an old save with this situation, however if you drop off the sand, pick up another batch, and save again, that misbehaviour should be fixed in all future saves from that point on.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1149620/announcements/detail/3102415185625185463
Update 5# Features (Do., 27. Januar 2022 - 19:04 CET)
Car Wash Added
Unlocked after Quest Chain at Lvl. 4 Gas Station ($1000 for Restoration).
If you are beyond the starting point of the quest, it will begin after you finish the current active quest, or immediately if you finished the main campaign.
Five levels of upgrades, leading up to Automated Car Wash that requires minimum maintenance. As an extra feature we've also added the ability to open/close Car Wash separately from the station itself by popular request from the community (We might expand this to other parts of the station in the future).
- Extra regular achievements connected to the Car Wash (Upgrades and Washing the Cars)
- 2 New Hidden Achievements
Locations
- New location added: The Sewers
Connected with the car wash, it houses the Water Pumps that keep the water flowing and few small secrets to discover.
Misc:
- Various minor bugfixes
- Minor language fixes and updates
Bugfixes:
- Fixed a bug where if you ordered more than 1000 units of Products/Car Parts in a single order that only 1000 would arrive.
- Fixed a visual bug in the Wheel Ordering UI showing the wrong sale price.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1149620/announcements/detail/4989427331555021101
----------
Update #4 is here! (Mi., 15. Dezember 2021 - 18:02 CET)
Update #4 is a combination of things we have planned for the update #4 itself as well as the previously planned update #5. Due to the delay in update #4, these updates have been combined into one.
The focus of update #4 remains what is was: performance optimizations, saves games and loading times, random crashes and fixes for achievements.
One of the reasons the update #4 took longer than we anticipated was a major rework and clean-up of large potions of the game not only to improve overall performance, but also to allow us to create and introduce more new content into the game more easily. While that might sound like much, it has been of major importance to us considering the large amount of future content we plan for the game.
Performance
- Loading times for game start and loading saved games have been vastly improved. The game now loads less data on various stages of the process and handles it differently.
- All vehicles have been optimized and require less resources now, meaning they now eat up less performance than they did before. This becomes very noticeable in later stages of the game when there is a lot more traffic on your gas station. These optimizations affect both the CPU and GPU performance.
- Lighting and Shadows had an optimization pass resulting in improved performance especially inside the gas station building.
- First thorough pass of GPU usage, Render optimizations as well as Scalability settings. On lower settings you should now see more difference in quality and bigger savings in GPU usage, VRAM usage as well as regular RAM. Visual quality of textures, vehicles, characters, and shadows of course will be more affected at lower settings. Specifically draw distance makes a large impact on the visuals of skeletal meshes (cars, customers) based on a distance, so tweak accordingly to find what is best for visual / performance gains for your specific hardware.
- The overall memory footprint of the game has seen some nice improvements while we are it at.
Improvements
- AI Pathing has seen some optimization to make especially vehicle AI be a bit smarter now when attempting to drive. This should lead to less traffic pileups and better navigation to their destination and especially exit points. So more situations related to traffic should be solvable on their own, or with minor help of the broom rather than needing to call the UFO.
- AI priority queue has been changed which should allow for cars to come to Fuel / Garage more consistently.
- While working on loading times we also had a close look into issues with saved games reported by some players and made various improvements to how the game handles the save process and improved it.
Stability
- Various random crashes have been caught and fixed. Especially the random crashes resulting from Employees being stuck in loops related to their cleaning and garage repair tasks should now be a thing of the past.
- We caught various instances responsible for random crashes in later stages of the game and fixed them. We would like to thank all those players who sent us their save game folders along with detailed reports what they were doing and when. It would have not been possible to catch these things without their help.
Employees
- As part of the crash fix, employees when they manage to clean the whole gas station during the cleaning task, should no longer go home and rest. Instead they will wait at last the position of cleaning for more mess to happen. They should only stop cleaning / return to their camper once their energy runs out.
Other Fixes
- Applied a fix to Trash Drop rates, as it turned out customers were really nice and never dropped trash on the floor any more at some point due to a rounding error in our drop chance calculation when we last adjusted it to be lower.
- Fixed an issue where at Popularity Level 10, the amount of cars arriving was wrongly set to Level 1 Popularity.
- Fixed an issue where Rudy was not saving properly. The old saves can't be retroactively fixed by this, but any new saves or even on old saves games should apply the fix. For example if you picked up sand and saved, Rudy would remember that it had Sand, but would on load have lowered the front 'blade', and no sand could be picked up because it was considered full, so you'd need to unload it first before being able to use it. This will still be the case if you load an old save with this situation, however if you drop off the sand, pick up another batch, and save again, that misbehaviour should be fixed in all future saves from that point on.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1149620/announcements/detail/3102415185625185463
Post edited January 27, 2022 by Ulf2016
