Version 0.3: a new body, a town that lives, and doors that open

0.2.8 shipped two weeks ago. Since then about 1,200 changes went into the game and the mods, and when we started writing the note for "0.2.9" we stopped: the body is new, the skin is new, the hair is new, the town lives differently, the rooms are lit differently, and a place opens in seconds instead of half a minute. That is not a point release. So this one is 0.3.

It is also a turn for us. 0.3 is the last version where we pile new things on. From here on we add less and fix more: everything you report, everything in the "still wrong" list at the end. More on that at the bottom.

It is a long post. If you only read one part, read the first one.

One body for everyone

Until now a man and a woman were two different models, with two different heads, and everything we fitted on one (hair, clothes, a hat) had to be fitted again on the other. That is over. There is now one body: sex, age and shape are sliders on the same base. Hair made for one head sits on every head; a garment fitted once is fitted for everyone.

On the way the skeleton got honest. The skin is bound to the joints the sliders actually move, which removed a drift of up to 3 cm at the shoulders and hips on the smallest bodies. Height is measured on the body for each age instead of being a constant (the creator used to show 164 cm for a ten-year-old).

Faces are sliders now, not presets. Before, picking a face loaded one whole head at 100 % with every slider at zero, and when we measured them, half of the women's heads had a child's proportions. There are now 20 distinct adult heads per sex, each tagged with an origin, and a generated person takes their lead head from their own origin, then everything else by sliders.

Skin. This is the one you will notice first. 49 skin slots out of 49 had a flat normal map: no pores, no fine wrinkles, that waxy look some of you told us about. Every skin now has its own normal, pore, specular and roughness maps, a subsurface profile (light goes through an ear), moist lips and wet eyes. Tattoos, tan lines, body hair and eye colour were redrawn for the new body. Generated men get painted stubble about one time in two, and eyebrows finally take the eyebrow colour.

Point at the body to shape it. The long lists of sliders are gone from the body page. You hover a part of the body, it lights up, you click it, and its sliders appear, with arrows on the skin showing what each one does. You can also pick how your character walks and stands, in the creator and when you edit someone in town.

Hair

The hair is a new pack of 220 styles, made of cards (strands drawn in layers) instead of solid shells. The hair tab is split into Back, Fringe, Sides, Extra and whole Presets, so you can build a style or take one as it was designed. People generated by the town always wear a whole style, never a fringe from one and a back from another. Under a hat the hair is cut along the hat's line, and a beanie covers instead of shaving the scalp. And there is an ombré: a tip colour down the strands, on every style, from a new Tips tab.

The hair is also being made much lighter right now: the same styles with a fraction of the triangles. It is not finished, and this is a part of the game where you will see changes in the next updates.

The wardrobe, again

Last time we told you how we remade 4,800 pieces. A new body means they all had to be fitted again, and we used the occasion to look at what was really wrong with them.

• Men's clothes sat in the skin. Men's trousers had 17 to 26 % of their surface under the skin; across men's pieces it went from 9–49 % to under 2 %.
• Ragged cut edges were straightened (the worst jeans went from 4.8 mm to 2 mm of jag), and cloth that floated off the body was pulled onto it.
• Layers. The body under the cloth is no longer drawn, each worn layer is pushed out over the one under it, tops tuck in or go over depending on what is under them, trousers go into tall boots, heels stand on the floor again (about 120 of them were modelled on a flat foot), and clothes refit when you change the body instead of floating.
• About 330 pieces had faceted shading when the body moved, and about 570 let the clothes underneath poke through (belt loops through a tee): both fixed.
• We went through every piece by hand and removed 1,144 near-duplicates (2.4 GB), plus a few dozen that were simply broken.
• The whole wardrobe now ships compressed: 4.7 GB down to 1.3 GB.

Same pieces, same voices, same prints. The wardrobe is compressed meshes and 1,144 duplicates fewer; the voices now run on any graphics card.

There is also a new costumes pack: animal onesies, ears, and tails that swing.

What is still not right: men have about a fifth of the clothes women have, and the pieces we removed for being broken are not replaced yet.

Rooms you can believe in

The lighting had a problem we had not seen for months: the rooms leaked. Walls let about 40 % of the daylight through, so the lighting could not tell inside from outside and everything came out flat. Now light comes in through the windows and stays in the room, a soft key light follows the camera on people, lamps are a warm white instead of orange, and hardware ray tracing is on by default (the setting now really switches it, and you can turn it off).

The rooms themselves are generated, and we asked them to prove they work: a walk census of all 189 room types found 81 with a door or a piece of furniture nobody could reach. They are fixed.

A person is walked from the door to every door and every usable piece of furniture of each room type.

Venues are sized by what they are (a casino had come out smaller than a grocery), lamps hang over what people use, banquettes come in pairs with a table between them. Venues get several wall and floor finishes each, from brick to marble to wallpaper, and street venues get a real shopfront with a glazed door.

Clubs got lights: mirror balls, laser fans, moving heads and strobes, all on the beat of the song that is playing. Strobes are safe by default: a "Flashing effects" setting gives Reduced (never more than two flashes a second) or Full.

There are new kinds of homes too: blocks of flats with a lobby and up to ten flats, studios, bigger houses for the rich. A marina appears only where the map has water, with a yacht to charter, or to buy. And something we want for the long run: every object can be picked up. Shop stock was split into separate objects (638 pieces of jewellery on ten displays alone), and all 9,049 pickable objects are tagged with what they can be used for. Nothing uses those tags yet. They will.

The town lives

We told the big part of this in Everyone in town has a life now: the player is one person among the others, everyone has ambitions, affairs and grudges, and a town of a thousand lives in the background. 0.3 is the first version you can play with it. Since that post we added:

• Deaths that follow an age curve, births, thefts and burglaries in the background.
• Income tax, and home owners who pay a mortgage and sell before they end up on the street.
• Crimes of greed: wills, poison, old money, landlords, and fourteen schemes, from loan sharks and pyramid schemes to cults and faked deaths.
• Fights are played, not narrated. You strike, you pick up something to hit with, you run. People who are hurt stay down, people who are scared hide.
• Break-ins of closed venues at night: the lock, the alarm, the cameras, the police, sometimes a guard.
• Prison: "Serve my time" passes a week in under two minutes.
• From your reports: a Work pin on the map with your hours, job interviews and viewings that come within a week instead of seven months, blackmail that pays the next day.
• For those who run a local AI: an optional agent that sets what people want once a game day, for the people near you, a number of them, or the whole town. Minors are never in it.

Hands, motion, and the Director

The motion library was rebuilt from the ground up: 688 new everyday clips (smoking, phone, drinks, writing, fighting, working; before, there was no clip at all for smoking or for a fight), 113 mended ones, and 344 new intimate positions, all read and tagged.

For adults, touch got a lot better. In an intimate scene you can now put your hands on the body yourself, stroke, hold, pinch, and the body answers on its own: it flushes, breathes faster, leans into you or away. Clothes move out of the way when they need to, or when you move them. The first time you used it, it used to freeze the game for 17 seconds; with a hand on someone it now runs at 40 frames a second where it ran at 4 to 9.

And there is a new tool in the main menu: the Director. You place people, cameras, lights and sound on a timeline and the game renders an .mp4, up to 4K. You can import your own sounds, give people lines, add a narrator, light faces with a portrait track. We are making our trailer with it.

Your city

You pick the city. From the hub you can now download a city's street map in one click; the first twenty went up this week and many more are coming. Forty-one capitals were added to the list, every building has a postal address, real chains are turned into parody chains, and the map data is credited to OpenStreetMap under the city list.

New stories in the mods

New mods in 0.3 include a will and the people around it, a paternity question, an ageing parent who needs care, leaked photos, a key party club, a night in the cells, fostering, selling information, and the schemes above. A few lines from them:

The house is quiet in the way a house is quiet after somebody has been in it for eighty years and then has not.

Name, address, date of birth, and then the same three answers to the next eleven questions, and after a while it stops being rude and starts being a system.

A house can hold two truths. It is not comfortable, but it is what most houses do.

The password changes. A message arrives four minutes later: "Little late."

Somebody says the house will be worth a fortune now, and somebody else says it has been worth a fortune for thirty years and nobody sold it then either.

Choice buttons were cut to fit (3,701 labels shortened, the full text in a tooltip), and two quests that did not work were removed.

Menus, settings, saves

• Long text no longer shrinks: it ends with "…" and scrolls when you hover it, in every language.
• New settings: resolution, ray tracing, flashing effects, minimap (off by default), automatic camera (off by default), and the size of the clothes and hair cache (more on that below).
• The map rail has tooltips and keys, stat bubbles say which action moved them, toasts have a close-all button, the people row shows who wants something from you or holds a grudge, and every morning there is a short "yesterday in brief".
• A first-day checklist (a home, a job, someone you know) with hints, for those who start a new life.
• Saves are written safely now (a temporary file, then renamed, with the previous one kept): a crash while saving can no longer eat your save. A save remembers its mods and tells you at load which ones are gone or updated, and the list shows who, which day, which city and how much money.
• A text from the scene UI that stayed stuck on screen after a menu, which forced one of you to quit the game, is fixed.

Doors that open

This is the part that annoyed us the most. You clicked a café and waited 20 to 35 seconds. We measured where those seconds went before touching anything: most of it was every garment and every hairstyle of the people in the room being converted for their body, one by one, on the spot, every time.

Now the game prepares them once and keeps them on disk. The first time you start 0.3, the main menu says "Preparing clothes and hair" with a percentage: it works in the background, slowly enough that you can start playing at once, and keeps going on the city map between places. When it is done (six to nine minutes on our machine the first time, and only what changed after an update), places open like this:

The middle of what we measured over several runs and several cities (café 19–35 s before, 6–8 s now; clothes shop 31–41 s before, 8–15 s now), with the clothes and hair prepared.

The touch mode ran at 4 to 9 frames a second before (6.5 is the middle), after a 17-second freeze the first time.

A place you already visited opens in 2.5 to 3.5 seconds. The cache takes 12 GB by default, and you can set it to 6, 3 or Off in the settings, or empty it. If your disk is nearly full it shrinks on its own: it always leaves at least 20 GB (or a tenth of the disk) free, so it never fills your drive for you. The café's 10 fps came from the body under the clothes being recomputed every time someone bent a knee; the voices went from 2.2 to 1.3 GB and work on any graphics card.

For modders

• Hot reload: reload mod files from the Mods panel without restarting.
• Mods can require a version of another mod (>=) and of the game, and ask the game's API version.
• Every build writes ModErrors.log, and each mod's row shows its error count.
• A mod that takes an id from another one is reported; new Lua functions for fights, recurring payments, and positions placed on a given piece of furniture.

Everything is in the docs.

In the launcher

The launcher now has a 13+ version box: the same game, with no sex scenes and nobody ever naked (underwear always on). Violence, drugs and the rest of the city stay. It is for younger players who want to try it, and it removes the adult mods and data on its own.

What is still wrong

We would rather you hear it from us:

• A crash while dressing people that we see about one launch in three on one of our test paths, and a rare one in the new disk cache. We have not caught either yet.
• After a long time jump (sleeping, a prison stay), the town catches up when you open a door: a few seconds, sometimes much more, and the bar runs badly while it does.
• Men have about a fifth of the clothes women have. The broken pieces we removed are not replaced yet, and a few dozen garments still have blank white parts.
• Full beards cost three to four seconds at a door on their own. They are next in the lightening.
• Clothes shops are still the slowest place to open, because of the mannequins.
• The cost of ray tracing has not been measured properly yet. If your frame rate is low, turn it off in the settings and tell us.

From here: less new, more fixed

This was two weeks of the biggest changes since we started, and that is exactly why we are changing pace. The base is there now: one body, one wardrobe, one hair system, a town that lives, rooms that work, places that open. We could keep stacking features on it for months. We will not.

From 0.3 on, most of our time goes to fixing: the list above first, then everything you send us. Fewer new systems, more of what exists working every time, on every machine. If something breaks, looks wrong, or simply annoys you, tell us on the Discord. That is what the next versions are made of.

Thank you for the reports so far, a good part of this post came from you.

Good night, and have a good game.