It’s been two weeks since the prior Metro Monday (these are for announcing changes, and are not strictly weekly). Here’s what’s happened in that time:

On the asset side, there are two new buildings. First, “Anderson Antimicrobial” is a 3x3 tile chemicals facility. The archetype for this building is “level 3” of “consumer goods,” found in dense industrial areas. Second, “Monarch’s Concourse” is a 2x2 tile corporate office highrise. The archetype for this building is “level 3” of “office work,” found in dense commercial areas.

On the code side, while there are plenty of things to keep improving (don’t worry, we have a huge list of stuff to get to — eventually), focus has been primarily on simulation performance. So, the simulation engine now includes a profiling framework, and after setting up plenty of labeled “measurements” within the sim engine code, we can meaningfully identify expensive operations with precision. These measurements are disabled by default since they incur a performance impact.

From profiling the operations involved in savefile loading, the time it takes to load save files has been dramatically improved — for large saves, it is down to as little as a few percent of the previous load time.

Efficiency past startup, during the normal course of the game, is also improved. Due to improvements in a variety of mechanisms, from pathfinding, to economic re-evaluation queueing strategies, to more nuanced path removal when changing the transit prototypes of a tile, the economic engine is able to handle larger, denser cities without slowing down as much. So, you should be able to play in a world for longer before getting bored due to the sim engine spawning buildings too infrequently.

By no means are these optimizations the end of the road, but they already help to make the economy seem noticeably snappier, especially when there is a very complex transit network layout. Further, these are “true” optimizations that do not just throw more CPU threads at a problem, and thereby may be seen to reduce power consumption by the game in some situations — which is something we do care about, on behalf of those who play on laptops. We may improve scaling across CPU cores later on, but our favorite optimizations are the kinds that improve the experience on hardware of any price, i.e. inclusive of lower-spec machines.

Here’s a rundown of what happened between today’s Metro Monday and the last one, which was also the first one.

Firstly, this past Friday we launched the game! The Free Edition, which has been available on itch.io for years as a rolling developer preview of sorts, is now also on Steam serving as a demo. The Gold Edition is now also available on both itch.io and Steam for purchase. We want to thank everyone who has tried either edition of IsoMetro so far, and beyond that we’re especially appreciative of those who have decided to fork over their hard-earned cash for the Gold Edition.

As far as the state of the game itself, we’ve rolled out a few updates since launch.

There’s now a Main Menu, so instead of jumping straight into an empty world with a clunky message box asking you whether to spawn the “starter level,” there are instead buttons on the main menu to start a new city in a few different ways. Since the visuals of the Main Menu only require loading a small subset of assets such as trees, the overall game is able to launch a bit more quickly. The existing Pause Menu has also been visually improved.

A bug with the tutorial wherein the first tutorial stage wouldn’t highlight the UI buttons associated with it is resolved. A bug wherein the volume setting would be ignored initially after resetting the game loop (for example starting a new city) is also resolved.

The assets for the “Frank’s Furniture” industrial building in the Gold Edition have been overhauled to be much more visually interesting. Two new tenement highrise buildings have been added (there are now three tenement highrises in total).

Finally, we are gradually figuring out the ideal ways to use social media to not just broadcast the existence of IsoMetro but also to welcome bug reports, usability concerns, and feature requests. Even if you’re reaching out about the Free Edition, we intend to take your feedback seriously. After all, both editions have plenty of code in common, so bugs in one are probably in the other. Bugs aside, suggestions for improving the IsoMetro experience are valuable to us – even if we’re already aware of a potential improvement, duplicate suggestions still help us prioritize what we should work on next. For a full list of our socials, such as our Community Discord, check the IsoMetro site: https://isometro.live