Release Notes


v0.4.3.22 - December 1, 2011


December's update suffers from a rather disruptive development month and some planning errors. As such, there are no new features. However, progress has been made on our installer and system requirements. Also, we now have a wiki at: http://wiki.synekism.com. It's currently in read-only mode and does not contain much information but this will soon change.


We have a brand new installer. You won't notice much, but let's just say that patches starting with "our installer was confused again..." will be a thing of the past. In addition, we used to have two different executables. One would only work on Windows Vista and above and used DirectX 10.0 while the other could work on either Windows XP, Vista, or 7, and used DirectX 9.0c. We have eliminated this distinction in 0.4.3 and now have a single executable which will try to use DirectX 10.0 and if that's not supported automagically switch to DirectX 9.0c. Finally, we now store all external files like UI textures and cursors inside the executable which means all you will see when Synekism installs is an executable, Synekism.exe, plus the readme and clientspecs files. The above two modifications make it possible to move Synekism.exe to anywhere on your computer and it will still work.


As for the disruption, we lost a member of our team this month, leaving the team size at just two. As this project was somewhat formal we had to deal with the matter in more official terms (legally speaking) which took some time. Nevertheless, the project still lives on. Though, to better focus on the game itself, we will no longer maintain our MSN Messenger account nor our Skype account. We check our email and the forums daily, however, so we can still be reached relatively quickly.


There is not much reason to upgrade this month, other than staying up to date. Next month should be more promising.


WARNING: Our new installer is much more reliable but also more aggressive in its cleanup. The new installer will delete everything in the install directory of the previous Synekism installation and similarly for the current installation upon uninstall. You should not have anything in this directory but if you do please kindly relocate it.



Minimum Requirements:


  • Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7
  • 1 GHz processor
  • 1 GB of system memory
  • Hard drive with at least 50 MB of available space*
  • Support for DirectX 9.0c, Shader Model 2 and 128 MB of graphics memory

* Does not include space requirements of DirectX and Visual C++ Redistributable which may be anywhere from 20kb to 500 MB depending on what has already been installed.


What we install:


  • Synekism v0.4.3.22
  • DirectX Redistributable
  • Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable
  • GPU-Z.0.5.6.exe (to check DirectX support - removed after installation is finished/aborted)


NEW FEATURES:


Core:

  • installer will now delete everything inside Synekism's install directory (usually in Program Files) upon uninstall or upgrade
  • installer will let you continue if minimum requirements are not met
  • the Mods folder has been moved to Synekism's My Documents folder under "My Documents/Synekism/Mods"
  • user terrain texture will load only on demand instead of during game startup which means you can change the texture while the game is running and re-load
  • Synekism.exe no longer needs the Resource folder as it now contains all textures and cursors inside it


KNOWN ISSUES:


  • zoning along more than one, non-aligned, road segments does not work
  • zoning very sharp-angled lots can cause them to overlap the road
  • on some machines, the game will just refuse to work even if they meet the minimum specs (we are working on this one)
  • as we increased slightly our load times (to be fixed soon) Windows might claim that Synekism froze during loading of large cities but please, disregard, and let the game load in peace