Hi everyone! I have a rather large amount of information for you with this update as this took a few weeks to accomplish! (also I was in bed sick for one week, boooo!)
Civilians now have homes and jobs!
Civilians are assigned locations as a "home" and "work" location. They will alternate going back and forth between home and work and will spend time in these locations. They will be assigned a single room to be their "home" and their "office" and will go to these locations.
To be able to do this I have put together a new upgrade of the pathfinding systems in buildings so that units can figure out how to reach different rooms without causing a hit on performance.
At the moment I have chosen to assign 50% of the civilians a job/home based on the default settings because when 4000 civilians have a job in an 8x8 city area there is a small problem with traffic and congestion:
I've been doing a lot of experiments with trying to reach a good balance and avoiding congestion issues and reached this conclusion for now, though I would like to allow the user to specify how many people work or come up with a congestion calculation system to try and deal with this issue, which you can hopefully expect in future updates!
The current downsides are, people in vehicles do not have jobs. Work/Home locations are randomly assigned and may seem strange based on what a building looks like. I'd like to make it so certain blocks can be designated work and home blocks so that people can do more reasonable commuting but that's for a future update.
Hopefully I would like to eventually have a system where people who live together might be considered a family and this information would influence AI decisions about what to do in the zombie apocalypse, things like "I must get home to make sure my family is safe" etc to create the level of depth I want this game to eventually have.
Thanks for playing and I hope you look forward to future updates coming soon!
Changed files in this update