Release 8

Full Changelog: r7a...r8

Game Fixes

• Four unused songs have been added back into the music rotation. Now you have even more of Sue Kasper's fantastic soundtrack to listen to!
• The game display now updates every in-game day instead of only on the 24th of the month. Now you can really watch your cities grow in real-time! This has the accidentally helpful side effect of slowing down the African Swallow speed to "mostly useless" instead of "entirely useless".
• The game will now show the full in-game date in the title bar instead of just the month and year. Yes, there are only 25 days per month in the SimCity calendar.
• The game will no longer freeze when loading music (see the second line in New Features).
• Additional typos in certain building name strings have been fixed.

New Features

• The floating status bar from the DOS and Mac versions of the game have been reimplemented. It works as in those versions, with the weather icons and the "go to disaster" button integrated the same way. (Thanks @af-az for the goto button implementation!)
• The music engine has been rewritten with multi-threading for improved performance. This should eliminate freezes when the game loads a new music track, as well as potentially allowing for alternate soundtrack formats (eg. MP3/OGG/FLAC) in the future.
• An update notifier has been added. The game's main menu will now show a small notice when there is a new update for sc2kfix available.
• A new detailed query dialog that shows internal simulation data of tiles has been added. Simply hold the Alt key before clicking on a tile with the Query Tool and you'll get every bit of information the tile has to offer that you didn't really care about.
• The order that music is played in can be set to shuffle after each run through the playlist in the settings.
• Settings have been updated with tooltips detailing what they do. Just hover over a setting to see its tooltip.

Internal Changes/Reverse Engineering

• The 1995 CD Collection version of the game has been deprecated due to the sheer difficulty of maintaining the reverse engineering effort as applied to two different builds of the game and the relative rarity of the CD Collection compared to the 1996 Special Edition.
• More types, enums, addresses, and helper functions for working with the simulation state in real-time have been added.
• Three pull requests have been merged as part of this release's development cycle!
• A lot of work went into reverse engineering the simulation engine based on things needed for this release, future gameplay mod plans, as well as suggestions and questions posed by members of the Simtropolis community. There's still an incredible amount of work to be done, but every time a function or two gets figured out or a part of the simulation state gets a definitive name and purpose assigned to it, we get closer to understanding how this 30-year-old game really works on the inside.