A phone in your pocket, a ring on every venue

The map's menus had grown one page at a time: an agenda here, notifications there, a "phone" list, a people list, and venues whose actions came in one long column where a cafe offered self improvement next to the coffee. Even we could not find things any more. Version 0.2.7 puts it back in order.

A phone with apps

Everything you do from anywhere now lives on a phone. Eight apps on one screen: Messages, Contacts, Calendar, Jobs, Bank, Dating, Social and Store. Some have tabs (Bank has Money, Bills & loans and Property). A search bar at the top finds any action on the phone by its name or its app's. And the actions that are not part of an app, but that you can do from where you are, are listed under the apps.

Apps are mod data, like everything else. A mod adds an app, a tab, or actions to an existing one with a few lines in a .ulapps file.

Click outside the phone and it closes. The clock, signal and battery at the top are duplicates of the HUD, yes, but a phone without them did not look like a phone.

A ring on every venue

Clicking a building on the map now opens a ring of categories around it: Food & drinks, Work & money, Fun, Social, Romance, Body & care, Learn & create, Shopping. Enter and Go here sit at the top. Pick a category and the venue's card beside the ring lists what you can do there.

To build it we went through every action's category and where it can be done, and moved many of them: playing a video game or making a mod happens at home, lying low too, and a cafe no longer offers a course in self improvement. "Take a few minutes to breathe" is gone.

Once you walk in, the venue's actions are already open. There is no more looking for the button at every door.

The ring around people works the same way, with their own categories: Talk, Give, Together, Romance, Desire, Money, Hostile.

Photos for your contacts

Contacts used to be a column of the same grey icon. Each one now gets a real portrait, taken the same way for everyone. Same light, same framing, same background, whatever the hour and wherever they happen to be. Photos are taken in the background, in a small studio the camera never shows you. They are kept between sessions and retaken only when someone's look changes. The person sheet shows the same photo.

Your own portrait in the corner had the opposite problem. It filmed your body where it stood, so its background turned into the street, the bar or the night sky. It is now filmed in that same studio, live, so it keeps breathing and blinking on a background that never changes.

Also in this build

• Contacts are people you know. The list showed every resident the city had generated around you. It now holds only the people you have a tie with: family, numbers exchanged, a partner, a boss, a colleague, a neighbour.
• Life settings moved to the pause menu, under My life: difficulty, a quiet week, your life in numbers, the journal and milestones. They are about your life, not about what you do with a phone.
• No more 15-second freeze when quitting. Two loading threads were waiting on each other while the game shut down.