Release Notes


v0.4.0.30 - September 1, 2011


It's been one year since our launch in 2010. The game has made respectable progress in this time and today we top it off with a fun little screenshot feature.


During my last term at school I worked as a final project on a raytracer which, oversimplifying, is a program that generates 3D images by sending rays from the eye into the world and seeing what they hit. It was a busy term and little work was done on the game so I thought I'd combine my school work with Synekism to partially make up for it. The raytracer still needs a lot of work before it becomes usable for normal cities. However, for extremely small cities, it can create interesting results.


The school term just finished so I only had time to integrate the raytracer into Synekism (which means multiplayer has to wait yet another release - sorry!). For the next release I will optimize the raytracer for larger cities and expose some of its settings. With the raytracer also came a Lua interpreter which means you can expect to see more of Synekism's settings being exposed and possibly some limited functional modding capabilities.


On a broader view of the next 4 months, we are really going to focus on the performance and stability of the features we introduced during the last year. This means multiplayer will get done, the toolset will be fixed and improved, the simulator will be updated, and buildings will start to look like buildings.


NOTE: Please make sure to read the warnings and info below before trying out the raytracer.



Minimum Requirements:


  • Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
  • 1 GHz processor
  • 1 GB of system memory
  • Hard drive with at least 50 MB of available space*
  • Support for DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 2 and 128 MB of graphics memory

* Does not include space requirements of DirectX and Visual C++ Redistributable which may be anywhere from 20kb to 500 MB depending on what has already been installed.


What we install:


  • Synekism v0.4.0.30
  • DirectX Redistributable
  • Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable
  • GPU-Z.0.5.4.exe (to check DirectX support - removed after installation is finished/aborted)

NEW FEATURES:


Raytracer:

  • initialized via Ctrl-R
  • will render the current view of the city at the same resolution as the game window
  • you can get the current game resolution by going to the options menu and checking "Show Extra Display Details"
  • image will be save under My Documents/Synekism/Screens/Raytraced
  • WARNING: the raytracer is currently unoptimized and will therefore take astronomically long for any cities larger than about 1000 people but you are welcome to give it a try
  • WARNING: the raytracer will use up 100% of your CPU so only run it while you do not need to use your computer for anything else

KNOWN ISSUES:


  • zoning along more than one, non-aligned, road segment does not work
  • zoning very sharp-angled lots can cause them to overlap the road
  • if the angle lock option is on you cannot create regional roads
  • any DirectX problems will cause the game to give a fatal error and quit (mostly during loading)