This super-sized update brings us a brand new 3D City View, changes to a few lot categories to help encourage their use, a bunch of bug fixes, loading improvements and new objects.

3D City View

• In 3D mode the city will now have a perspective camera similar to the one used on a lot! 3D mode is finally a consistent experience.
• All properties in the city now have "facade" 3d models essentially 3D thumbnails that appear on the map. These are very similar to the ones you might find in TS2.
• You can now use mouse wheel zoom to seamlessly return to city view, or zoom back into your lot (in 3d). Technology is amazing
• The city rendering pipeline has been rewritten from scratch, allowing for a cool water shader and smoother terrain when up close.
• 2D City view also has a face lift! The city smoothly fades out at edges, the water shader is still present, and terrain is smoother zoomed in.
• The tooltip when hovering lots has returned. Now you actually know the price of a property without randomly clicking it!
• Should generally use less memory, and no longer leak memory when returning to SAS.
• Some work in the background for our new neigbourhoods system. The new city view is a lot more modular, so you might see more cool stuff in the future.

NOTE: Lot facades are generated off-server by an authorised machine with a GPU. Right now the applet providing the service is still in development, so 3D Lot Facades may be out of date at times. Additionally, the facade worker is not currently open source.

Welcome Lot Type

• To celebrate our new hints system, we've kickstarted a revised Welcome lot type that should really help new players get started for the foreseeable future. The plans are to make this lot type both welcoming for new players and rewarding for hosts.
• Hints system directs people here, and tells users about skill and money bonuses (and onlinejobs) when joining this property type.
• Property filter in gizmo automatically set to welcome for new players.
• 3x Visitor Bonus
• Group Money Objects are now enabled on this lot type.
• Skills and Money 2x for new accounts (less than a week old)
• Skill and Money force disabled for older visitors. Roomies can still earn money/skills, and visitors can still play group money objects without earning anything.

Romance Lot Type

• Relationship gain/loss is 2x on this property type.
• 2x Visitor Bonus.

Offbeat Lot Type

• 3x Visitor Bonus. More changes pending.

Particle System

• Added a new general purpose particle emitter that objects can attach to themselves. (in 2d and 3d)
• Added a smoke particle for Broken objects. This should help a lot with keeping your objects in good shape.
• Super tip: If you want an object to stay repaired for longer, get someone with high logic and mech to repair it! maybe you can pay them for the help!
• PART chunk format. Volcanic particle editor and particle emit/stop primitives coming soon, for new objects!

New Objects

• Some objects have been rescued from the depths of the game files! The first release features most of the unleashed objects present in the debug catalog.
• These objects have recieved patches to fully port their functionality to TSO without running into weird bugs.
• A few of these objects have been given unique description text by our users on Discord! Check out this link for more info: http://forum.freeso.org/threads/seeking-help-with-catalog-text-for-several-objects.6287/
• If you download the latest remesh pack from the launcher, some of these will already be remeshed and beautiful! Wow!

SPECIAL THANKS TO RAEVEN FOR FIXING THESE OBJECTS!!!

Loading Improvements

• The game window will now pop up a lot quicker when you open it. It will also load faster in general! (async loading ported from Simitone)
• The whole lot load process has been reworked to operate asynchronously. That means we can show a neat progress bar instead of the game freezing.
• Since most of the loading will be done in the game thread, smooth zoom should work a bit better.
• Loading lots in 3D mode will now be considerably faster.

Misc

• Cost for terrain tools has been halved.
• Terrain tools now show errors when the action you're trying to do won't go through.
• The flatten tool will no longer fail when trying to flatten to the same height as a nearby wall.
• Terrain tools can now be used to flatten an area with buildings or objects on it... as long as no tiles on the edges end up uneven because of it.
• Bookmarks now try to order themselves by online status.
• Chat history no longer shows "Test Lot" when joining a real lot, and keeps the player count up to date a bit better.
• Rain is now less frequent. It's summer!
• Fixed some memory leaks with city content and mipmapped TSO textures.
• Sandbox now has a /time command.
• Fixed bug with sprinkler where walk style would not be reset on interaction cancel.
• Crafted bed no longer has an incredibly long wake up animation.
• Speech bubbles now show in Free Camera.
• Some improvements to the patcher application.

3D Mode (in-lot)

• Object Headlines, such as flies, now appear in 3D mode.
• The ground in surrounding lots now blends smoothly into the city.
• The wall camera offset has been reduced slightly, so that remeshed counters would stop z-fighting with them.
• Surrounding properties and trees are now visible. These will only be drawn if their bounding box is on camera.
• That weird transition to 2D map is gone. Seamless 3D map forever baby.