Glory of Rome

1 พฤษภาคม

2024 Glory Edition Update

9 ถูกใจ

1

A Glorious Update

I've been busy working on a heap of changes to the game and today It's finally ready.

With this new update I'm calling the Glory Edition, I've gone through the game from top to bottom and improved almost every UI, interaction and system in the game. These quality of life improvements I feel have added another level of polish to the game and overall improve the gameplay experience.

Tweaked all UI elements to improve their design, animation, sound, interactivity and usefulness
Added new data-rich UI's to give you more insight into your settlement (resource generation, population breakdown, financial information)
Revised gameplay mechanics, giving you more control over how your dwellings collect resources and upgrade
Improved settings, giving you more control over how the game performs
Updated sound design, with more intuitive feedback when using the UI / interacting with the game
A heap of bug fixes, including some visual ones, performance ones, sound ones and a few sneaky rare ones that used to cause crashes

Dwelling Upgrade Mechanic changes

Previously when a dwelling had all of it's resource it would automatically upgrade. While this worked fine, it also meant you had no control over when that upgrade happened. With this patch you'll now have to press the update button manually, letting you control when your building upgrades.

This is a major change to the flow of the game, but one that brings the game more in-line with other survival games such as Anno.

New Building Interactions

I've added a few new ways in which you can interact with your buildings, including a Multi-Building Action UI and a new Right Click Context Menu

New Multi-Building Actions UI

This new UI sits at the bottom of the screen. This lets you enable Move Mode, Delete Mode or Upgrade Mode

Move Mode

Enables selecting an existing building and moving it elsewhere, left click to select the building you want to move and left click again on an open spot to confirm (or escape / right click to cancel)

If you try and drop your building on an existing space you'll get a message letting you know it's gonna work and to choose somewhere else.

Delete Mode

Enables bulk delete mode, click on buildings one after the other to delete them. This is perfect for mass removing roads (or dwellings if you're feeling vindictive)

Upgrade Mode

Upgrade Mode, click on multiple dwellings back to back to upgrade them to the next level. You can click on any dwelling, but only if it has the resources required will it upgrade.

These new actions should help you easily upgrade dwellings, delete a section of road or move buildings around. All of these actions generally can be done by selecting a building (or right clicking it) and choosing the same actions.

After playing other games like Anno, I really appreciate having a move and delete tool, so I'm hoping my take on it improves your enjoyment.

Right Click Context Menu

New context menu shown when you right click on a building. This menu gives you quick access to select the building, upgrade it, delete it or move it. A simple UI to speed up your gameplay

Right click on a building and when you're done either right click again, press the close button or select something else to dismiss it

New Building Icon System

Added a new Icon System to show information above each building and how its operating. This info should tell you at a glance what's happening and highlight any issues your buildings are running into.

Status Icon

Shown when a building is having issues (e.g. no access to civic services, no workers, limited resource collection and so on). Generally you'll see this when there's something wrong

Production icon

Shown when your Industrial Buildings and Civic Service Buildings create their resource, a little icon of that resource is quickly shown and hidden.

Dwelling upgrade icon

Shown on dwellings that are ready to be upgraded. This should help highlight which of your dwellings is ready to be improved.

These icons can be enables/disabled under gameplay options if you prefer

New UI - Residential Breakdown

This helpful UI will let you see your population at a glace. Press the new button in the top right of the game to open this system up

The summary page gives you a quick breakdown of the number of residences in your settlement, along with their income and other important data.

Clicking on one of these summaries will open the details tab for that respective type, letting you see all dwellings. You can then click on each dwelling to get important information about it, including if it's ready for an upgrade, the amount of resources it currently has and what citizens it holds.

While you can get this info by hovering over your dwellings or selecting them, having this single UI should help you more easily track down issues and highlight when buildings are ready for an upgrade, I'm hoping you guys find this one useful.

New UI - Resource Breakdown

This new UI will give you information about your resource generation and consumption across your settlement. When toggled you'll see a layout like below, showing the resources your settlement can create on the left and a summary on the right

Selecting a resource will give you a breakdown of all industrial buildings that generate and consume that resource, for example you can see how many units of livestock are needed to supply the demand for your meat industries.

This UI should help you see at a glace the balance of your industry buildings.

Building Tooltip Adjustments

The tooltip that's show when you mouse-over a building has been improved, I've given it a once over and improved its functionality to make it even more useful.

Productivity Info / Resource Generation Progress

Shows industrial building productivity percentage, so you can see at a glace how well your building is working (low productivity generally means it's not getting it's resources in a timely manner)

Also I adjusted how the resources production bars are displayed in the UI.

When watching an Industrial Building / Civic Service building, a small progress bar shows how long until that resource is created. Previously this was updated every second, with this change it now updates every frame so the progress animation appears smoother

Improved Help Section

When hovering over a building, an adjusted help section will be shown at the bottom of the screen, showing you what actions you can perform, for example when hovering over a dwelling you can see that pressing shift will highlight that dwellings occupants

Shift button - Show Related Elements

Added a new feature when hovering over buildings. When you press SHIFT, the game will now show information about related buildings and people. In the example below, pressing shift shows you where they are sending and receiving their resources

When used on a dwelling, shift will show all people belonging to that residence
When used on a civic service building, shift will show all dwellings in range who will be getting that service
When used on an industrial building, shift will show a range of information such as all its workers, related industries that it collects from and delivers to, along with the path it's agents will take
This new system should help further outline exactly what a building is doing, along with where it's agents are and what's happening.

Building System Improvements

I've gone through the building system and re-worked a heap of elements. Overall the building placement system should feel smoother, be more responsive and have less glitches overall.

Smooth rotation / movement

Placeholder buildings should now smoothly rotate and move towards your mouse cursor, compared to them directly snapping in previous versions.

Existing building error handling

placing a new building on an occupied spot now shows an error animation, sound and a temporary warning message.

More consistent building

when building small buildings around bigger buildings, sometimes the game would trigger an error because of overlap detection (thinking you're trying to select the bigger building), this has been fixed and the underlying build system improved to be more reliable.

Multiple buildings preserve rotation

when placing multiple dwellings one after the other, the new dwelling will copy the rotation of the previous one instantly (prevents dwellings from being created and visually snapping to a road, it spawns with that correct angle in mind)

Other noteworthy changes

Removed colliders from trees and other scenery (which would sometimes block your mouse cursor as it thought you were selecting a tree instead of a building)
Removed the building replacement system. Previously you could build a new building on-top of an existing building, when doing that you'd get a popup asking for confirmation. With the new move and delete system this isn't needed
Fixed an issue with placing large buildings (e.g. 2x2 tiles or 3x3 tiles) near the edges of the map. When places on the right most edge or top most edge, sometimes you could push the building out of bounds.
Fixed an issue with African civic service buildings, a few of them were listed in the wrong category (listed as religion instead of culture etc), this has been fixed

New Game Settings

I've had a look at the games setting system and added in some new features and quality of life alterations

UI Scaling Support

Now you can choose to scale the whole game UI up and down. Give it a go and see what percent works for you

V-Sync Support

Added in V-Sync option which is enabled by default. Previously v-sync was always enabled, but having the options here just makes sense

Building Icons

New building icons have been added to the game. These display on-top of each building and give you a visual indicator when there's an issue with your building, or when it produces goods or when it's ready to be upgrades.

These can be individually enables/disabled to match your playstyle

Setting Saved Notification

When changing settings, a little settings updated notice will appear on the right hand side of the menu, to confirm the setting has been changed

Updated Campaign Menu

I've re-design the main campaign menu to make it more intuitive. Instead of having all the scenarios in one long horizontal scroller, you now select the scenario on the left and it's info appears on the right

All Resources UI

The all resources UI (that you toggle) has been adjusted so these resources are broken down into 'types', so when you're playing a scenario with multiple types e.g. both Roman + African resources, these resources will be separated instead of being combined in a single large list.

Date Changes

Date display has been changed in-game, previously it showed the date of the scenario e.g. 01/01/0045 , this wasn't helpful so it's been adjusted to show the number of days since the scenario started + the number of weeks remaining.

In other parts of the game, generally I've swapped from a "you've spent X days" to a "You have X days remaining" approach. This feels more in-line with expectations (you have X days to complete the scenario for the Senate)

Financial Breakdown UI Changes

This UI has been improved to help streamline the information shown. Previously when viewing the income or expenditure tabs, you'd see a long list of buildings separated by categories and sub categories, now these elements are collapsed and need to be toggled to see as below.

This should help improve readability greatly. For example instead of seeing 50 dwelling line items when the UI opens, you'll only see it when you toggle the 'Residential' section, leaving the UI less cluttered.

In addition, buildings that are not currently contributing 'income' or 'expense' are shown in these breakdowns, previously if a building was not contributing it just wasn't shown, while that worked it also meant you couldn't see dwellings that were currently not contributing because their occupants didn't have jobs. With this change you'll see all buildings that CAN contribute and if they don't currently they list their value as 0.

Help Dialog Adjustments

The help dialog which shows once you dismiss the advisor (on selected scenarios) has been adjusted. I've added small videos here instead of images to further highlight elements you should focus on. These videos feel better compared to static images.

Dwelling Browser UI Tweaks

The single building browser (which is opened by clicking on the '?' button when viewing a dwellings building card) has been adjusted.

Previously this used a full vertical scroll UI to show all 4 levels of the dwelling. This has been adjusted to use a new tabbed layout, making reading this information much easier

Camera Adjustments

The camera has been adjusted to smoothly zoom in and out now, compared to instantly jumping as you zoom. Use the mouse-wheel as normal or even the '-' or '+' keys on your keyboard to zoom in and out

In addition, when using the middle mouse button to pan across the map (holding middle mouse + move), the speed should now be consistent regardless of how fast you drag your mouse.

UI Elements / Updates

Almost all UI elements have been adjusted in some way, with most of the changes involving streamlining their appearance, animation and interactions.

Most UI popups with lots of information have been adjusted to use 'tabs' and 'containers'. This new tabbed design also animates, showing and hiding its related content section when you interact with it
Cursor icon now changes based on content, showing movement, deletion, info or similar things when you play the game
When viewing the Scenario in game. The time elapsed UI has been replaced with a time remaining UI. Instead of saying how much time you've used of the scenario, it now counts down to list the time you have left
Added a fancy 'Full Screen Blur Effect' that's triggered on most UI elements. When you open a menu, the gameplay behind will now blur out of focus.
Several UI cards now respond when hovering over them, for example swapping out their background color to show they're being interacted with
Buttons (such as the main circular ones) now have a pulsating interaction animation when selected, along with an animation swapping out their background color on hover. This should help visually indicate when a button is focused / selected.
All UIs should animate in and out in a similar manner now
UI's updated so that their main 'Heading' is now the same size
All UI's now have a 'Close Button' in the top right of the UI, in the same position and size
Advisor UI now has a close button, players can press that or the standard dismiss button to jump into the gameplay
Help Dialog UI (shown on some scenarios) can be dismissed either with the dismiss button or a new close button, to keep the UI consistent.
Temporary notifications now are handled better, they can be triggered in quick succession without their animation looking broken
Several industrial and civic service buildings have had their icons adjusted to make them more consistent
Fixed single dwelling UI to fix a white transparency issue (an incorrectly displayed image)
Current senate missions UI now animate when focused on, these missions have been slightly re-styled also

Sound Adjustments

I've gone through almost every UI element and part of the game to improve the sound system. Overall buttons and UI elements should make sounds when hovered over / interacted with and gameplay elements such as selecting people or buildings should also play corresponding sounds.

Almost all buildings and people now will have selection and hover sounds, the idea being when you're interacting with anything it should make a subtle sound
All buttons and icons that are interactable should now make a sound when they're hovered over
All items in the settings menu (e.g. the dropdowns / buttons / checkboxes) should make sounds when hovered over / interacted with
Notification messages now play a sound when they're triggered (and the sound is based on if it's a good, negative or neutral message, distinguishing sounds when you run into issues)
Many sound effects (like building, pressing buttons or toggles etc) will have a variable pitch (so it's not always the same sound effect over and over)
Fixed long standing 'button click issues' where when you started a scenario, several 'click' sounds could be heard, these phantom clicks finally have been removed and my sanity restored

General Gameplay changes

Press space to pause/resume gameplay (can still use 1/2/3/4 shortcuts to change game speed where possible)
Dwellings previously started spawning in people even when they had no road connection. In this update until a dwelling is connected to a road no people will be spawned in (and a warning message is displayed)
Fixed a bug where when a dwelling was deleted (and its people destroyed), it never updated any business they were assigned to. This meant industrial buildings had workers listed but these workers no longer existed (so these buildings would fail). This has been corrected so when dwellings get destroyed all buildings are corrected!
When there are no menus, build mode or other UI's open, you can now press the Escape key to open the main menu

What's Next?

I'm planning a few other things I want to work on, but this update covers a whole heap of areas I always wanted to polish up, I'll keep you guys updated with what I cook up next

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