Once again we would like to thank you all for playing Highrise City and for providing us with tons of feedback. After leaving Early Access we did not stop working on the game and started throwing around ideas on how to extend the game even further while also fixing reported issues and improving the performance of the game.
Today we would like to introduce a new product for your citizens: Cake. The bakery now becomes a building with a switchable resource. The bakery is now either a bakery or a pastry shop. To produce cake you will also need a new resource: Eggs. Which can be produced with a chicken farm:
We have also updated the building menu slightly, giving it a better structure and making it clearer and easier to understand. As a small tease here: We are currently reworking the icons in general and will introduce a fresh building menu later this year.
Something we’ve also been working on is the overall performance of the game. And yes, we will keep working on it to improve it even further - one of the most important aspects in the end for a city builder is the performance, especially when creating cities with millions and millions of inhabitants.
Besides general performance improvements underneath we’ve also introduced a new video option called “Reduced Assets” which can save several gigabytes of RAM in the lategame as it removes unneeded assets. This will allow also weaker machines to create even bigger cities.
Now also available (this was a function available in the Beta Branch for a few days now): If you are among the players hit by freezes, we’ve implemented a tool to figure out where exactly in the code they happen. If freezes happen, the game will generate a StackTrace file within 60 seconds, even if the game permanently freezes (it can take up to 60 seconds). The file will be stored under "C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\CityNext\Saved\Config". It can tell us where exactly in the code the freeze happened. Thanks to people using the Beta Branch we already identified two errors which could cause a freeze and fixed these.
Full Changelog:
- Building Menu only shows categories of buildings which can be build
- Some Achievement conditions were adjusted (we know that two are still not working properly, that’s next on our list)
- New Video Option “Reduced Assets” can be activated. Especially in bigger cities players can save a few gigabytes of RAM with this option
- General performance improvements
- Fixed two errors which could cause freezes
- Added a StackTrace creation tool to identify issues if the game freezes
- Fixed a display error when many resources were traded
- New building: Chicken Farm (produces Eggs)
- Neu Product Chain: Cake
- Updated Credits of the game
- Slightly adjusted the satisfaction level of consumer goods
- Adjusted milestones so that they can be achieved quicker
- Improved public transport so that the game now should properly save the amount of vehicles and not reset them to 1 anymore
- Fixed smaller issues and bugs
- Increased way costs for workers on “Middle” and “Hard” a bit
What’s Next?
We will keep updating the game. That’s for sure. We have some ideas to add some additional complexity to the game over the coming months. We have also started working on some additional content. We’ll keep you posted on that very soon.