Thank you for playing Lotwick Hill and sharing your feedback! This post now covers the October 9–10 updates, including the latest update available in both the main game and Playtest.
Performance and optimisation
- Reduced repeated calculations in city updates, including fish-shop lookups and shared pedestrian destination calculations.
- Streamlined traffic-neighbour searches and sorting, intersection checks and road-gap calculations.
- Optimised delivery-vehicle turning-clearance calculations around depots and harbours.
- Simplified delivery-crate positioning calculations.
These changes focus on doing the same work more efficiently. They introduce no balance changes to prices, income, customer rules or AI decisions. The benefit will vary with your city and hardware.
Meet the Six and rival personality
- Added a Meet the Six introduction before the first challenge, with portraits and short introductions to the six rival personalities. You can start, skip the introduction or go back.
- Added situational speech bubbles for AI rivals during auctions, including auctions in multiplayer. Human players are not given automatic dialogue.
- Added short character comments beside Active events for events such as fires, water leaks, robberies and bonus buses.
- Added 444 English dialogue lines across the six personalities, with selection based on the situation in the game.
- Comments are presentation only: they do not change bids, event effects, AI decisions or the simulation. The bubbles do not take mouse input or keyboard focus, and city comments are suppressed while certain other screens, including auctions and reports, are open.
Interface and buttons
- Refreshed button colours and borders to make available actions clearer, with distinct hover and pressed appearances.
- Added icons and right-hand arrows to shop action rows, plus colour accents on shop/building cards.
- Kept the existing button actions and availability rules.
- Improved the new introduction's layout for longer translated text, and refined Back/Escape, focus return and interrupted-start handling.
Languages
- Added 457 localisation entries for the new presentation in Czech, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
- The existing Bonus bus heading is now translated too.
Earlier fixes included in this update
- Display modes: Fixed an issue preventing Windowed mode from being selected, and improved switching between Windowed, Borderless Fullscreen and Fullscreen.
- German tutorial label: Updated the wording to make the tutorial easier to identify.
- Uninterrupted city music: Entering or leaving build mode no longer changes the song. The former building tracks are now part of the regular city playlist.
Thanks for helping me improve Lotwick Hill! If you run into any issues, please let me know.
— Lasse