Yesbox Studios

This is what abandoned buildings will look like in my game.

Hardware costs are increasing 😰. Is Metropolis 1998 future proof?

I placed the largest building until 1 GB of RAM.
✴️Empty map: 450 MB (RAM)
✴️96 Huge Buildings: 550 MB (RAM)
✴️Save file size: 10 MB
✴️Base game size: 40 MB

Bluesky is changing the volume of my videos :(. @bsky.app Can you stop this? The volume is now VERY loud

It's 3:00 AM. Businesses can now be open 24 hours.
Was a teensy bit of work implementing workers shifts!

First look at municipal utilities: Electricity Substation

A small sample of new assets added to my game :)

Units will now use the public spaces of apartment buildings/all buildings. Before, they only stayed in their apartments or went outside.

Added tool to recolor items in-game.

🏚️🏠🏡 As land value goes up, so does the building quality. I've got these changes working in game now :) This video shows the transition from lowest to highest.

Thank you for all this feedback! Universally no one likes level 5 😅. I'll make this feature optional (both globally and on an individual building level).

Early sketch. Starting to work on building levels. 🏘️
Building levels will be mostly determined by biz/service availability (proxy for land value)
Thoughts? Ideas?

You can customize the optional tilt-shift blur how you like. That wraps up this fun side-project :'-(

I've added a new tool to help design cities faster. Building Copy & Place
Today is #screenshotsaturday too!

Added street lights that mostly work in "3D" space, despite being a 2D game.

The angle can be changed. Gonna let the user choose there own in the end

I want my tilt-shift camera blur to be right.

Since my game is 2D, it's not so easy. But I figured it out a way. Red is closest to camera, then blue, then even more blue. Will post final results soon

I had a fun Saturday and added a tilt shift camera effect.

⚡️More municipal electricity progress⚡️
Substations (the steel building, temp art) will be needed to transform electricity the buildings can use. If there are not enough, the buildings furthest away will lose power.

I've got the power ⚡️(early WIP) :)

High rise + construction

Working on municipal simulation !

Terrain manipulation is now in game! 🗻

Rendering 100K units requires a lot of CPU cycles, so the second half of the video shows the setup running at (a bit unstable) > 60 FPS!

So I spent a few days tinkering with the containers the indoor pathing code relied on and boosted the numbers to 400-600 per frame (normal case: 2K to 3K), then distributed the load throughout multiple frames if needed.

Typically 2%-6% of the population (when awake) will change their activity per in game minute. Thus every ~2,000 population ate up a frame. In a real city, this number is probably closer to ~10,000 (i.e. 500 processed units per frame).

For this building (which is quite large), it came out to ~75 units per frame (@ 60FPS). <"worst case">

This became an issue when I began batch-processing units to update their activity each in game minute. Hard to say the max number of units it could handle since it depends on building size and the units schedule (e.g. at work they move around less)

Stress testing: Rendering (max) 100K units and simulating all of them.

There was a bottleneck with the A* setup I was using for indoor pathing that limited the number of units processed without causing FPS stuttering. 🧵

Hey everyone, launching is on the horizon. No official date yet.

I've updated the road map reflect what Metropolis 1998 will offer for early access: yesboxstudios.com/roadmap/

I've been working through a backlog of assets. Happy to see the pond ones in the game now!