Update 4

**Update #4** was released on December 15, 2021.

Update #4 is a combination of things we have planned for the update #4 itself as well as the previously planned update #5. Due to the delay in update #4, these updates have been combined into one.
The focus of update #4 remains what is was: performance optimizations, saves games and loading times, random crashes and fixes for achievements.

One of the reasons the update #4 took longer than we anticipated was a major rework and clean-up of large potions of the game not only to improve overall performance, but also to allow us to create and introduce more new content into the game more easily. While that might sound like much, it has been of major importance to us considering the large amount of future content we plan for the game.

## Update Notes

**Performance:**

* Loading times for game start and loading saved games have been vastly improved. The game now loads less data on various stages of the process and handles it differently.

* All vehicles have been optimized and require less resources now, meaning they now eat up less performance than they did before. This becomes very noticeable in later stages of the game when there is a lot more traffic on your gas station. These optimizations affect both the CPU and GPU performance.

* Lighting and Shadows had an optimization pass resulting in improved performance especially inside the gas station building.

* First thorough pass of GPU usage, Render optimizations as well as Scalability settings. On lower settings you should now see more difference in quality and bigger savings in GPU usage, VRAM usage as well as regular RAM. Visual quality of textures, vehicles, characters, and shadows of course will be more affected at lower settings. Specifically draw distance makes a large impact on the visuals of skeletal meshes (cars, customers) based on a distance, so tweak accordingly to find what is best for visual / performance gains for your specific hardware.

* The overall memory footprint of the game has seen some nice improvements while we are it at.

**Improvements:**

* AI Pathing has seen some optimization to make especially vehicle AI be a bit smarter now when attempting to drive. This should lead to less traffic pileups and better navigation to their destination and especially exit points. So more situations related to traffic should be solvable on their own, or with minor help of the broom rather than needing to call the UFO.

* AI priority queue has been changed which should allow for cars to come to Fuel / Garage more consistently.

* While working on loading times we also had a close look into issues with saved games reported by some players and made various improvements to how the game handles the save process and improved it.

**Stability:**

* Various random crashes have been caught and fixed. Especially the random crashes resulting from Employees being stuck in loops related to their cleaning and garage repair tasks should now be a thing of the past.

* We caught various instances responsible for random crashes in later stages of the game and fixed them. We would like to thank all those players who sent us their save game folders along with detailed reports what they were doing and when. It would have not been possible to catch these things without their help.

**Employees:**

* As part of the crash fix, employees when they manage to clean the whole gas station during the cleaning task, should no longer go home and rest. Instead they will wait at last the position of cleaning for more mess to happen. They should only stop cleaning / return to their camper once their energy runs out.

**Other Fixes:**

* Applied a fix to Trash Drop rates, as it turned out customers were really nice and never dropped trash on the floor any more at some point due to a rounding error in our drop chance calculation when we last adjusted it to be lower.

* Fixed an issue where at Popularity Level 10, the amount of cars arriving was wrongly set to Level 1 Popularity.

* Fixed an issue where Rudy was not saving properly. The old saves can't be retroactively fixed by this, but any new saves or even on old saves games should apply the fix. For example if you picked up sand and saved, Rudy would remember that it had Sand, but would on load have lowered the front 'blade', and no sand could be picked up because it was considered full, so you'd need to unload it first before being able to use it. This will still be the case if you load an old save with this situation, however if you drop off the sand, pick up another batch, and save again, that misbehaviour should be fixed in all future saves from that point on.

**Achievements:**
As you are likely aware, we have been struggling with fixing achievements for a few updates now.
While we managed to fix them in the game itself, tons of players still reported issues with achievements. We have spent a lot of time analyzing those reports and working directly with players on discord to track down the issues. As it tuned out, while we missed just a few things in the game previously, the vast majority of issues stemmed from handling the achievements, connection issues or achievement frequencies. Some of these things we could fixed, some were simply beyond our sphere on influence.

We have thus decided to revamp the Achievement System and added it to the game itself rather than being purely reliant on Steam. This means that while you're in-game, you will now see a new Achievement Section in the escape / pause menu where you can also track your achievement progress.

The system now works locally, meaning as you unlock achievements these are saved locally first and then sends them to Steam for verification. You can find the file holding your achievement data in your Saved/SaveGames folder under AchievementProfileX.sav, where X is your user ID from Steam.

When loading an older save game it will try to retroactively grant the achievements based on quest progress and stats (the stats are saved in GSS\_Stats\_X.sav file). So first time you broom, pick up trash, fuel a car, serve a customer, get a tip, buy or steal an indoor decoration, paint a wall, etc. it should read your stats and apply any missing achievements.

In a future patch we will likely expand on the functionality of the Achievement Section with options resetting them locally, resending them to Steam in case of connections errors or unpredicted issues. Achievements should now also pop on screen in-game in addition to the Steam notification, which might be of importance to players who disable the Steam overlay to squeeze more performance out of their games.

As an added side bonus of this whole endeavour, it will also allow us to add more achivements to the game in future updates, related to new content or expanding the existing stat based achievements, even beyond the 100 achievement limit from Steam.
Another added bonus for those who just love to do achievements over and over again, if at any point you feel like it, you can reset your local achievements to experience the rush of earning them again, by deleting the AchievementProfileX.sav file in your Saved/SaveGames/ folder :P

Achievements - Known Issue

During public testing we have discovered an issue where for few players the GSS\_Stats\_X.sav file was corrupted and they were unable to earn any stats and thus the achievements related to the stats.
We will attempt to implement a fix for this on our side in the future patch, but as it requires a lot more work and testing, we didn't want to postpone the update even further.
There is however a workaround. If you see that you're not getting achievements in-game for any stat related achievements as outlined above, you are safe to delete the specific GSS\_Stats\_X.sav file and they should become earnable as we will regenerate the file later.
Just make sure the game isn't running when you delete the file

**Languages Versions:**
While we working on update #4, many community members reached out to us offering to translate the game into their language. We are so grateful for that!
With update #4, the game now supports:

* Croatian
* Hungarian
* Portugese
* Serbian
* Vietnamese

If you notice any issues with these languages, please report it on our Discord in the translation section.

**What's Next?**
With update #4 now deployed, part of the team will continue on more improvements, some more optimizations and further bug fixing. Among the improvements will be many requests from the community for gameplay QoL features and adjustments.
Another part of the team switched back to prepare the Car Wash content update for release, now that the vehicle optimizations planned for update #5 have been included into this update which in turn were required for the Car Wash.

<<< Update 3
Update 5 >>>