For the past few weeks, I have worked on mostly backend things and quality of life features, as well as tons of fixes and optimization.
Key changes
A major issue was being able to tell what items buildings have and what is happening with them. So the building inspection window now shows selected building's items. Firstly, this provides a straight-forward "explanation" about how the building processes these items. And secondly, it shows items that are going to be delivered (lighter yellow) and stored items that are pending for pick-up (cyan):
All other places where items appear and are delivered, like houses, construction, or storage, also show the same indicators:
And furthermore, the tooltip for each item "stack" provides additional information about the exact state of items being delivered or scheduled for pickup, including the distance the villager has yet to travel to fulfill the delivery:
Another annoying issue was trying to build "on trees", which is now solved by the builders clearing the area of any trees, shrubbery or flowers first:
Buildings can also be built on top of items, and the builder will move them away before construction. Furthermore, if these items are compatible construction materials, then they will just be directly used for construction instead.
Another nicety is task status icons for the top HUD overview bar that show the active trade, delivery and construction tasks:
A red icon would mean that the tasks are missing villagers and aren't being done.
I also moved the task information tooltip content to this section's tooltip and expanded it to show additional details.
I also added a much easier way to upload a save for bug/issue reports rather than having to manually navigate to the save folder and send the saves:
And a whole lot of other small things and fixes, including several optimization passes, especially for larger worlds.
Future plans
I may have again underestimated the time it takes to fix and adjust things. And I have a long list of tweaks, fixes and QOL features that I need to do. But for the next update I am primarily going to focus on some content addition. As the main goal, I really want to add proper animals to the game.
Full changelog
Changes
• Tradesmen can now also deliver their own building's outputs to nearby buildings as input or storage
• Building inspection to show its input and output items
• Building inspection input, output, stored, material, and house reserve and road inspection material item indicators to visually show pending and reserved amounts and have tooltips list these pending deliveries and pickups for tasks, including delivery distance
• Add in-game "soft" pause button and shortcut P
• Tooltips only update every second by default
• Add gameplay option for tooltip update frequency - periodic (new default) or continuous (old)
• Adjust Herb sprite
• Buildings can be placed on tiles with items
• Builder will move items out of a tile before constructing buildings
• Roads can be placed on tiles with items and built "under" them
• Buildings and roads placed on tiles with items that are compatible building materials will use them
• Buildings and roads can be placed on tiles with obstructing props (trees) and previously-discarded props (shrubbery, flowers) will stay
• Builder will remove props from a tile before constructing buildings and roads
• Add shortcut X for building and road deconstruction
• Population overview tooltip to separate number of idle vs carrier workers and also show these numbers for civilians
• Remove Tool label from top overview
• Add task status icons and label to top overview
• Move task info from population tooltip to task tooltip
• Expand task tooltip info with additional details and numbers
• Top overview labels to update continuously periodically
• Add "bug report" button to save/load menu that allows directly uploading a save
Fixes
• Incorrect road pending construction material counter
• Housing goal requiring more villagers than the houses that it requires can provide
• Lumberjack occasionally not cutting trees when using operation location
• Fix Ham description
• Crowded villagers getting stuck idling in a tile between finishing a task and reporting for the next one if there aren't compatible nearby locations to avoid crowding
• Idle villagers shuffling around will not choose inaccessible tiles (water)
• Villagers previously stuck in inaccessible tiles (water) will be teleported to nearby valid tiles on load
• Typo in tutorial text, in Medicine description
• Fix Water not being unlocked by Bookbinding or Brewing
• Fix building inspection arrow not appearing in correct location when some items are not yet unlocked by technologies (for example, Brewery before Beekeeping)
• Fix villager path-finding skipping certain tile points and in rare cases causing path-finding to fail
• Some villagers taking a very long time to choose the next task after having juggled idle tasks
• Lack of carriers causing items to (not) be delivered based on item type and ignoring delivery priority
• Fix P shortcut for pause not working
• Fix typo in controls info window
• Building and road pending material indicator/tooltip saying that an item is being delivered, when it's only queued
• Rare profile loading failure due to data conflict
• Forester not planting trees on Shrubbery or Flowers
• Task tooltip not grouping workers that are delivering/retrieving items as workers
• Restore the flag on the Town Hall
• Invisible sprites due to off-screen optimization issues
• Top overview villager count won't show the second limit number past 1000 and won't badly wrap when reaching high population
• Brewing Vats not switching production
• Paper Rollers using twice the amount of Paper Pulp
• Rare case of tree being still used after it's removed when workers aren't available to chop it immediately
• Occasional conflict between construction clearing tasks and regular tree chopping tasks using the same trees
Optimizations
• Faster thinking for villagers going to building positions
• Faster villager animation and other moving entity updates
• Much faster carried item updates and rendering
• Faster entity lookups with less lagspikes
• Building task checks with less lagspikes
• Task searches with less lagspikes
• Villager path processing slightly faster and with much less lagspikes
• Saving and future loading larger saves is slightly quicker
• Entities off-screen are not visually updated until visible (panning camera is slightly slower than idling, but still faster than idling previously)
• Less entity logical animation overhead
• Idle input processing more efficient
• Skip redundant entity transformations (rotation, scale)
• Faster entity ranged lookups
• Reduce save size slightly