The City at Night
The W1 works yard comes alive at night, the C-Level and Assembly wait below the plaza, water, weather, light and holograms are new – and every effect can be switched.
This update collects everything since version 0.23.1.
New Features
- The W1 works yard comes alive at night: open workshop halls with a warm window band, store, workshop, transformer house and silos, light masts and floodlights, light cones from the gates and a lit works sign.
- Life in the yard: pallets, crates, forklifts and freight wagons on the track, trucks and a gantry crane at the last build stage, workers at their posts, embers and steam at the chimney and sparks in the hall.
- Two lower levels lie below the plaza: the C-Level as a control room with a magnet core hologram and four new C terminals that stabilise the core, and the Assembly level as a machine room with a clock generator. The lift runs through a shaft tube with rings of light. In the demo and playtest it is out of service.
- The ferry docks at CodeCity's new city harbour, and you walk off board yourself.
- New game and loading run through a loading console, and the airlock asks whether you want to skip it.
- Concept pictures in the terminal show joining text, if, else, functions and return, and an object card explains objects and properties in 36 puzzles.
- Holograms build up with scanlines, learning boards cast a projection cone, the W4 curator is a hologram made of light, and an LED ticker runs at the W4 gate.
- A goal ring and a guide trail show the way in the world, a burst of light celebrates every solution, compass and goal card are larger, and a minimap sits below the location map.
- New water: ocean and coast, wakes and swim rings, caustics on the seabed, a view under water, schools of fish and gulls over the harbours.
- Light and weather: looks per area and time of day, rain, storms with flying leaves, seasons, haze, sun shafts, the island's turning beacon and heat haze above fires.
- Palms and trees sway in the wind, reeds and kelp move blade by blade, flower beds bloom, fireflies dance above the reeds, and districts age with their build stage.
- Characters breathe, hair and cloth shimmer, you are wet after swimming, and the AR helmet's visor reflects lightly.
- Footsteps sound right on every surface.
- New comfort options: “Seeing and picture”, dimming the world while you work at a terminal, a calm screen edge in lifts, on the ferry and while swimming, colour vision correction for status displays too, and a large goal marker.
- The graphics menu switches every effect on its own, with a preview per switch, a benchmark tour, a choice of graphics card and baked light as an option.
- Code Rescue has its own application icon.
Improvements
- Fewer stutters: grass builds up in small portions, and DLSS loads in the background.
- Early tasks that asked too much too soon are easier, and correct answers no longer fail.
- The compass no longer sends you to the wind turbines and solar fields first.
- Signs and wayfinders sit firmly on their boards, and paths lie on the ground at every build stage.
- Voices end without an audible breath, and stone no longer sounds metallic.
Bug Fixes
- You can no longer dive below the islands; the islands end in a seabed.
- Dry rooms under water no longer look like the sea.
- Arabic keeps its reading direction on follow-up lines in the terminal.
- Vulkan shows a picture again, without grain.
- Floating parts are gone.