For most of the autumn the title screen was a river town seen from the air. It was fine. The trouble was everything behind the logo, which was a big patch of empty fields because that's where the map's edge happened to be. Once I'd noticed it I couldn't stop noticing it.
So the title screen is now an island. I've been calling it the Floating Town. It's the same metropolis as before, but cut out of the world like a slab of cake and set down on a turquoise sea.
Everything once
The rule I gave myself was that a single view should show what the game has, without it turning into a car park of the same building. So every kind of service building stands on the island exactly once. There are 83 of them, from the fire station and the clinic to the crematorium and the observatory. The only ones that appear twice are the metro and gondola stations, because a line with one station isn't much of a line.
There's one park. Every era is unlocked, so the 2040s buildings stand next to the market town, and the big landmarks are at their top stage. The fire station, police and hospital are at their top level too, which means their helicopters are parked on the roofs.
Any grass that had nothing on it gets painted as a patchwork of fields and little copses, so there's no bare ground anywhere you look.
The cut edge
The bit I like most is the sides. Where the island is cut out of the ground you can see the layers. There's a lip of turf, then topsoil, clay, sandstone, a band of red earth, limestone, slate and a thin iron seam, then grey rock going down to deep rock. Where the river runs off the edge the cut face is turquoise.
The first version of the sea had a problem. Every tree along the rim threw its shadow across the water, so the open sea looked dappled and grubby, like it needed a wipe. The fix was to light the sea with its own copy of the sun that casts no shadows, kept in step with the real one every frame. Now there's one soft drop shadow under the island and nothing else.
It kept crashing
Here's the honest part. The first evening I had it working, the graphics card hung on launch. Then it did it again. After the third one I put the old river town back as the title and parked the island behind a launch switch.
Measuring it the next day turned up two surprises. The island actually hands the GPU far less than the old title did, about 43,000 instances against nearly 128,000. And the old title hung too, just less often. Going back through the crash logs, about 7% of launches that opened on the title screen hung, both versions, and every hang was in the very first frame the renderer drew. Launches that went straight into a city never hung once in 68 tries.
I can't fix the engine, but I can stop handing it a whole town on its first frame. The title is now built a few frames later, once the renderer has drawn the empty stage, behind the black fade that was there anyway. Since then I've launched the title 60 times, 40 of them with the island, and it hasn't hung once. On the strength of that the island went back in as the default title screen.
There was also a half second freeze about four seconds after the title appeared, which turned out to be 6,500 Voxies being given their routes home all at once. They now move in while the scene loads, which takes 68 milliseconds instead.
What it's for
It's also where the store art comes from. Every still of the island is rendered in the game from that same scene, so what you see on a store page is the title screen you'll get. That was the whole point really. I didn't want the box to promise a town the game can't build.