City Corner #7 - Morning Dew
Significant traffic pathfinding improvements reduce unrealistic U-turns and late lane changes alongside a major overhaul to shadow rendering and flickering.
Key Changes
- 1Increased pathfinding cost for U-turns to reduce unrealistic traffic behavior
- 2Improved lane selection logic for earlier merging and better highway exit flow
- 3Fixed shadow rendering distance flickering and edge-of-screen clipping
- 4Resolved stuck delivery trucks at specialized industry buildings
- 5Fixed Coal Power Plant trucks despawning before delivering resources
- 6Corrected natural resource depletion rates on easy mode
All Changes
🎨Visuals(4)
- fixShadows: Fixed shadow rendering distance jumping and flickering when tilting the camera toward the horizon.
- fixShadows: Fixed shadow clipping that created a circular shape near screen edges when looking straight down at close zoom levels.
- fixShadows: Redistributed shadow cascades to be more even, preventing quality drops near the camera.
- fixTrees: Improved tree shadow flickering while the simulation is running and the sun is moving.
🚦Gameplay & AI(3)
- changeVehicles: Significantly increased the pathfinding cost of legal U-turns to reduce unrealistic routing behavior.
- changeVehicles: Increased the pathfinding cost of unsafe U-turns to further discourage illegal maneuvers.
- changeVehicles: Adjusted lane selection logic to make vehicles merge into the correct lanes earlier, specifically improving highway exit behavior.
🐛Bug Fixes(4)
- fixNatural Resources: Fixed natural resources depleting at a faster rate than intended when playing on easy mode.
- fixSpecialized Industry: Resolved an issue where delivery trucks were unable to leave specialized industry buildings to export stock.
- fixCoal Power Plant: Fixed a bug where Coal Power Plant trucks would despawn immediately upon returning with purchased resources.
- fixEducation Overlay: Corrected the education overlay to no longer count toddlers as eligible students for elementary schools.
📅Coming Soon(1)
- newJune Update: A major patch is currently planned for release in June.
Summary
Visual Improvements
This update focuses heavily on polishing the visual experience, specifically regarding shadow rendering. The developers have addressed long-standing issues with shadow distance flickering when tilting the camera, as well as 'circular' clipping that occurred when looking straight down at high zoom levels. Shadow cascades have also been redistributed to ensure higher quality closer to the camera, particularly on lower settings.
Traffic & Pathfinding
To address traffic congestion, the pathfinding logic has been adjusted. The 'cost' of U-turns has been significantly increased to prevent vehicles from performing them unrealistically. Additionally, vehicle lane selection has been tuned so that cars merge into correct lanes earlier, which should specifically improve the flow of traffic at highway exits.
Bug Fixes
Several critical simulation bugs have been resolved, including an issue where natural resources depleted too quickly on easy mode and a bug preventing delivery trucks from properly exporting goods from specialized industries and coal power plants.