The Arch Temple by Saphrax


This week, Zun continued revamping the code behind the UI, and his efforts are starting to bear fruit! Some of the “standard UI elements” that are reused in multiple places look a lot better now - in our opinion, of course. We’ll continue like this for a couple of weeks - the results until now seem well worth the effort, and there are plenty of other rough spots in the UI that need some tender loving care.

Currently, the Colony Tab is a list of ugly buttons. At first, we wanted to make it a list of beautiful buttons. But we just realized that we could bring forward some of the most important elements that are now hidden behind a button, like the recruitment menu and the difficulty settings. They should be instantly visible and usable when you go to the Colony Tab.


Old UI on the left, updated UI on the right


Last week, we announced some pretty radical plans to overhaul a lot of the systems in CS. We received a lot of enthusiastic and helpful feedback so that’s good news! The overhaul is becoming very likely.
Our current roadmap looks roughy like this now:

• 0.7.4: An overhaul to make existing UI elements more beautiful and intuitive.
  
• 0.7.5 / 0.7.6 / 0.7.7: New UI elements like a better job management menu, clearer messages and alarms, a decent tutorial, and perhaps even blueprint builders!
  
• 0.8.0: A massive overhaul to the way unlocks and content are structured, with new systems like the Repeating Scientist (To Be Renamed) who processes Data - all planned in such a way that it can smoothly transition to an Industrial Revolution
  
• 0.8.1 (0.9.0?): Industrial content with new features such as multi-block jobblocks, pipes and electricity

Let us know how you feel about these plans and the screenshot with the updated UI!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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A lot of our menus, like the science menu and the stockpile, are “handcrafted” in Unity. Other menus, like the colony menu and a lot of the pop-up menus there, are generated from code. This code can also be used by modders for their own custom menus.

The old code didn’t offer a lot of options, and it resulted in pretty bare-bones menus. Zun is currently working to upgrade this code, giving us more formatting options, allowing us to present them in a more beautiful and intuitive manner. Currently, this doesn’t have any impressive visual results yet, but when it’s done it should pretty much instantly transform a decent part of the UI.

Something else this week did have very concrete results. We’ve had some intense discussions about the current content. Two weeks ago, we also talked about 0.8.0, but we were mostly talking about content to be added pretty much after the end of the current tech tree. But this week, we were talking about radically restructuring the tech tree that’s already in-game. I made a small “map” that explains how the current tech tree feels to me:


Fullscreen
From left to right: 1# The banner range upgrades; #2 The stove and related happiness items; #3 The upgrades regarding metals and weapons, culminating in multiple colonies; #4 The health upgrades

The banner range upgrades have a nice, consistent feel to them. It’s clear that recruiting more colonists results in a bigger safe zone. But it’s separated from the rest of the tech tree.

There’s a bunch of “bad” science surrounding the stove. A lot of the unlocks have weird prerequisites related to their predecessors; requiring honey to unlock fish, requiring fish to unlock olives, that kind of thing. And these unlocks are often not useful in isolation: a fisherman is useless without a stove to turn raw fish into edible fish. Thirdly, once you’ve unlocked all stove-related science, you’ve got pretty much all of the happiness items you need to get to the endgame.

Then there’s the health sciences. They’re pretty much disconnected from the rest of the tech tree. They’re a fun diversion for the curious, but not much more than that.

There’s one main line forward, and it starts with the science related to new ores and metals and how to convert them into weapons, added in 0.4.0. When that’s finished, there’s a massive threshold added mostly into 0.7.0, with advanced science bags, gliders, colony starter kits and traders. They’re hard to unlock, and when that’s done, they don’t offer any practical benefit until you’ve actually travelled a long distance and set up a second, distant colony. And then the only purpose is new happiness items - which aren’t really needed when you’ve got an efficient small colony.

The current tech tree isn’t the result of one coherent strategy. Over the time of multiple years we prioritized different problems and tried to fix them with different solutions. The tech tree reflects that: it’s a patchwork that’s pretty disjointed in a lot of places. Some parts rely heavily on science bags, others ignore it pretty much completely. Some parts have very light requirements, while others become a lot more costly pretty randomly.

We want to fix that. The tech tree should be a more unified whole, consistently rewarding the same type of activities. Steps should be short and simple in the beginning, but should smoothly grow harder but more rewarding over time. Each unlock in the tech tree should be useful by itself, and shouldn’t rely on three following unlocks before they have tangible results.

The tech tree shouldn’t be over when you’ve got 150 colonists. One way to do this is by extending the tech tree with meaningful, rewarding content, and we definitely want to do that. But we also want to make it more “labor intensive” to reach the end of the game. Even the current content should require more colonists.

The game should still be challenging when your colony grows, so currently, there’s a lot of costs that scale as you recruit more colonists. Every new colonist requires food, happiness items and it will attract more monsters (requiring you to produce ammo and recruit guards).

But balancing this is pretty hard. Some (more experienced) players will run very efficient colonies, where all colonists spend their time on important tasks. Other colonies won’t be like that, with long walking distances, idling colonists and colonists crafting items that aren’t very relevant. These could just be inexperienced players, or players focused on building a beautiful colony instead of a hyper efficient one. If the game is balanced properly for this second category, the first category will quickly build up huge surpluses and won’t encounter much challenge as their colony grows bigger. They’ll also reach the end of the tech tree much quicker.

So we’re thinking of introducing more “fixed costs”. Instead of pushing for efficiency by making colonists themselves very expensive, we want to make “progress” itself more expensive: an example would be the Repeating Scientists who use data (talked about it in this blog) , but also by making science and “permanent items” like job blocks and weapons more expensive (more labor intensive, especially). This should negate the negative effects mentioned above. To balance out these increased costs, we might make the "daily cost" of having a colonist a bit lower, with for example a bit less happiness items being required, especially at the start.

Implementing this requires us to overhaul the entire tech tree and the full production chain. We’re reconsidering the costs of all science and all items. If we’re going to do this, it’ll be a massive overhaul, and we hope it’ll be worth it. But your opinion is important. What do you think of this analysis? Do you recognize it in your own playthroughs and do you think it’s important to fix these? Or are we completely missing the mark and/or overstating the negative consequences? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week’s blog received a lot of comments! There were many enthusiastic replies, which is awesome to see. Others were a bit more critical - which is also useful!

A common request was adding “daily production/consumption stats” to the statistics menu. This is something we'd also love to see. One of the future updates should add a "Daily Report" with a lot of detailed info on what has happened in the past 24 (in-game) hours: how many monsters spawned, how were they killed, what was produced and consumed? This data will also be presented in the statistics menu.

Some other concerns were also mentioned in the comments. Some people want us to polish up the basics a bit more. Working on it :) Others worry that the transition from current tech to industrial tech might be too abrupt. We’re trying to make it a smooth, natural progression!


Second half is a mock-up, it's not in-game!

This week, work on 0.7.4 has started. We’re working to make the UI simultaneously more beautiful and more intuitive. The image above shows the current 0.7.3 UI in the first half and a mock-up for what it could look like in the second half. The menu won’t look exactly like that in 0.7.4, but it’s roughly the improvement we’re striving for. We’ve got quite a lot of UI elements that are looking pretty shabby and/or aren’t intuitive for newer players. That shouldn’t be true anymore when we release 0.7.4.

We live in the northernmost part of the Netherlands, in a province called “Groningen”. Sadly enough, Covid-19 did arrive here, but the south of the Netherlands was hit way more severely. After the lockdown started, the amount of infections has dropped rapidly, and it seems the entire province of Groningen hasn’t seen a single new confirmed case of Covid-19 in a week! [Scratch that we had one new case][Double-scratch seems to be two] New rules that were implemented during the lockdown are starting to be lifted again. We hope it’ll be possible to simultaneously get closer to pre-corona life and keep the virus under control. How are you holding up? Have the virus and the measures to prevent it disrupted life in the region where you live? Are things getting back to normal or is it getting worse?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This Monday, we released 0.7.3! Things seem to have gone quite well. There were some minor problems but they were fixed in a small patch on Wednesday. Check #small-patch-changelog on Discord or the in-game changelog for full details.

In the past weeks, both Zun and I have done extensive playthroughs without using any cheats, and our last time doing that was around the release of 0.7.0. Back then, we felt like the amount of content was pretty good, but a lot of the interface around it was rather rushed together. That’s why we’ve been working on UI updates like statistics, and we’ll continue improving the UI for multiple months.

But these recent playthroughs gave us quite some new insights. Here are some of our observations, and let us know whether you agree or disagree with them:

• The UI still has some very rough spots. Some features, like the amount of calories in the diet of your colonists, are in sore need of better explanation. Improving these rough spots is very worthwhile.
  
• One of the most fun parts of the game is reorganizing the landscape to suit your needs. Building useful structures and efficient infrastructure between them, building defenses, digging tunnels. Making it so that workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters easily getting to them. New jobs, new science, new challenges are fun not because these features are so awesome by themselves, but because they encourage the gameplay described above.
  
• At the start, science and happiness accomplish these goals very well. They require you to mine, grow and craft new resources, which requires you to grow your colony larger and build more structures.
  
• Not all paths of the tech tree are equally fun and rewarding, some are convoluted and/or feel like dead ends
  
• It’s quite easily possible to unlock matchlock guns with only 100-150 colonists and without any shortage of happiness items. After this, the rest of the tech tree is dedicated to exploration and finding new happiness items, which is nice “optional fun”, but not necessary if you’re not facing a shortage of happiness items. Further expansion could be done for fun, but isn’t really “required” or rewarded by the game mechanics - unlike the growth at the beginning that’s fundamentally necessary to make progress in the tech tree.

Every problem mentioned above is something we’re striving to improve. The gameplay should keep being rewarding after you’ve unlocked matchlock guns. We’ve talked about industrial content before and we’re still convinced that that could be a lot of fun. But we don’t want industrial content to just be retextured old jobs with some new “copy-pasted” items, like an “industrial meal” that offers even more happiness and calories. It also shouldn’t feel like you’re constantly forced to switch to a new random collection of messy items. Currently, the cook is a bit like that, with a huge list of required items (honey, cabbages, chicken meat, olive oil, etc, etc). So we need to make things concise and a bit “predictable” without the game becoming repetitive. That’s why we think the Industrial Update should rest on two main pillars.

That’s the first pillar. Currently, the tech tree contains both “fundamental unlocks” like the wheat farmer, and “repeating progress” like the health upgrades, the banner range, and the increasing size of the digger zone. We think it’s wise to split these up. The scientist with his science bags and specific ingredients will focus completely on the fundamental unlocks.

But there should be a new job, for now called the “Repeating Scientist”. He should have a list of “researches” that can be improved incrementally. This could include the things mentioned above divided up in more steps, but also new ones like “+1 Permanent Happiness”, or “-1 Monster per Night”, “-1% Reload Time / +1 % Damage for Guard Type X/Y/Z”, “+1% Productivity for Miners/Farmers/Crafters”.

Instead of requiring new resources every new level, the Repeating Scientist should use something more consistent. For now, we’ll call it “Data”. Every level requires data, but the quantity should grow exponentially. So the first +1 Permanent Happiness could cost 100 Data, but the second one 200, the third one 400, then 800, then 1600, then 3200, and so on.

So players will have to grow their colony and scale up their Data Production to keep up with the demands of the Repeating Scientist. Luckily, this is also something we have done and are doing IRL. From clay tablets, to wax tablets, to handwritten books, to the printing press, to punch cards, to vacuum tubes, to modern computers: our capacity to store and transmit data has grown enormously. Allowing people to repeat this process in-game and to continuously choose their own rewards for it sounds like a good idea.

Data production could require lots of colonists. Just look at the images of “human computers”. And even the “data centers” of the 1960s are still crewed by a lot of workers - and then we aren’t even talking about all the invisible infrastructure in manufacturing these machines and providing them with electricity.

Manufacturing and using these modern machines shouldn’t be a reskin of older jobs. It should introduce new challenges - and we’d prefer challenges in building to challenges in “navigating the UI to balance lots of items”. We’re thinking about pipes that can transmit fluids from storage tanks to machines and vice versa (sorry, no awesome “freeform” fluid dynamics planned, this’ll be more like the pipes in Factorio), and these could be fluids like water (hopefully with a modifiable temperature), oil and perhaps even things like acids for special processes.

Imagine a large, multi-block machine that requires you to connect pipes with oil and water to generate electricity, and then building a cable from that machine to your data center to operate lots of primitive, clunky computers that are being operated to produce data for your Repeating Scientist. We think that could be a very interesting challenge that is both fun for the player ánd provides a good reason to recruit many hundreds of extra colonists (which is a challenge itself that can be made a bit easier with the Repeating Scientist).


Pipes and trains in mods by Pandaros

Now of course, the Industrial Update shouldn’t solely be this. We want to integrate it nicely with the rest of the game - there should also be guards with “industrial weapons” and you should be able to produce and distribute “industrial happiness items”. Eventually, there should also be “industrial monsters” and “industrial transport”. And the transition from the current content to industrial content should be smooth instead of sudden.

Assuming we succeed in doing that - do you think this would be a good course for future development? Do you agree with our observations at the start of the blog? Or has working on this game for 7 years made us blind to the experience and demands of regular players? Let us know, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The new update is available for everybody right now! It’s 100% compatible with older savegames. The biggest change is the addition of the statistics menu. It displays a wide variety of data:

• Stockpile. It shows how many of each item have been present in your stockpile. It’s a useful tool to figure out how much you’re structurally under- or overproducing.
  
• Happiness. A history of all happiness effects. The effects of individual items are tracked, just like the effects of crowdedness, rationing and “misc causes”.
  
• Food Intake. Data on the diet of the average colonist. How much calories does he consume, and which food items contribute to that?
  
• Total Calories. Displays the total amount of calories you've had stored in the stockpile over time. There's a line for the true total, and individual trackers for each food item.
  
• Idle Job Time. When your workers lack ingredients, or when they’ve reached the specified limits, they stop working and start idling. The graph shows how much time has been spent idling in every job category. This way, you can easily figure out which jobs have been the most unproductive.
  
• Colony. Shows the history of the data in the top-left corner: total amount of colonists, beds and unemployed colonists.
  
• Inbound & Outbound Trade. This should give a much clearer view of how your trade between colonies is going.

A category like stockpile contains a long, long list of items. To help you find exactly what you want, we’ve added a search bar to the statistics menu. But instead of merely using it to find items with a name that matches your search term, we wanted to give players some extra tools to find exactly what they want. That’s why it’s now possible to enter commands into the search bar.

You can use “>#” and “<#” to only select items with an item count above or below a certain threshold. For example, just typing >10 into the search bar will filter all items that number 9 or less out of the list.

The command “cat:” can be used to display items from a certain category. Typing cat:food will result in a list of all items related to food production. All of these commands can be combined. So cat:food >10 <100 is a valid command that will result in a list of all food-related items with an item count between 10 and 100. For the categories “food” and “luxury” there is an alternative command, “is:”. While cat:food returns all food-related items, is:food returns only edible items.

Here’s a list of all categories: seed - decorative - leaves - essential - grass - planks - job - bees - bricks - carpet - cobblestone - iron - lantern - stairs - colonykits - flower - ingredient - edible - luxury - weapon - combat - ammo - bronze - fuel - tropics - raw - copper - cotton - new world - transport - gold - linen - far east - sciencebag - silver - steel



These commands can be used in both search bars: the one in the stockpile, and the one in the statistics menu. To notify new users about their existence, we’ve added a couple of buttons to the stockpile where important categories can be selected by clicking a button. Clicking the “food” button will automatically enter “cat:food” into the search bar.

We’ve also thought about mods. Mod items function identically to vanilla items, so they should automatically appear in the statistics menu. It’s also possible for modders to add completely new categories of statistics!

Last and probably least, there’s a list of minor changes to the game. A visible one is a change to the “job squares” of guards; the job squares of night guards are slightly darker now. For a complete overview of all changes, check the in-game changelog!

The statistics menu is a large, complex feature and we’d love to know how it’s working for you. Is it intuitive? Are there bugs? Are you missing certain functionalities? Let us know! We’re on standby, and we’ll be reading all comments; here on Steam, on Discord, on Reddit and Twitter. If something needs fixing, we’ll try to accomplish it as soon as possible.

Veel plezier in 0.7.3! :D

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This was a week of testing and finishing touches. Names were changed for cosmetic reasons and clarity. Performance was increased and network usage reduced. Mod support was expanded: modders now have the ability to collect and display custom statistics! Zun is still working on adding a new category of data: total stored calories, including a true total and totals per food type. It shouldn’t take long, so the Monday release date is pretty definitive!

I must admit, it had been a while since my last playthrough of Colony Survival, without cheats. To test the new statistics, I mostly loaded up pre-existing worlds. This time, I planted my banner in a self-made hole in the side of a cliff. It’s a challenging location which results in all kinds of weird paths to make sure workers and guards can get where they need to be without monsters getting to the banner. I had a lot of fun!

In the months since my last legitimate, serious playthrough, I’ve played quite some other games and done a lot of thinking about UI design. Playing CS with this fresh perspective resulted in a large amount of new insights. There are a lot of things that can be changed or tweaked to make the game more intuitive and streamlined.



Next week, we’ll be listening to your experiences with and comments on 0.7.3, and hotfixes will be deployed when necessary. Afterwards, we’ll start working on new changes to the UI, and implementing those new insights.

0.7.4 is will be mainly cosmetic. A lot of the new 0.7.0 UI features are pretty barebones, like the colony tab and the trading menu. They really need a “coat of paint”. Lots of places could use a tooltip to become a bit clearer. We need to make the UI look more professional while simultaneously being more intuitive to use.

When the current UI looks decent, we want to add some new menus. They will be split among multiple updates (0.7.5, 0.7.6, 0.7.7). For example, there should be a Job Management Menu which indicates how many job slots of each type are empty. It should also be possible to prioritize certain jobs, to make sure they get manned when there’s a shortage of workers.

Another new menu that I’m really looking forward to is a decent Message System. Currently, important messages and warnings are sent straight to the chatbox, where they appear as a simple, single line of text. We’re thinking of something that’s a bit of a cross between the pop-ups in the traditional Total War games and Gmail. Different icons should appear in the corner of the screen to indicate different messages: lack of workers to fill a job, science completed, colonists killed by monsters. You should be able to click on them or find them in a list of messages to get more info. New players can use this info to learn the game quicker; expert players can use it to pinpoint problems more precisely.

When the Message System is in-game, we can also add new kinds of messages that are currently impossible. The one I’m really excited for is the “Daily Report”. Imagine, every day at sunrise, a streamlined report that clearly conveys information like this:

• Congratulations, your colony survived day #!
  
• In the past night, your guard type A/B/C killed # monster of type X/Y/Z
  
• In the past 24 hours, you gained/lost # colonists and added/removed # jobs
  
• # amount of happiness item A/B/C were distributed to your colony, resulting in # happiness

All these improvements to the UI should make the content that's currently in-game a lot more accessible. We feel like 0.7.0 was a bit of an unstable house of cards, and 0.7.6 should be a stable platform before we can once again start adding new jobs, features and items!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Wil's colony

We decided on a release date for the next update! It’s Monday May 10. This gives us one big week to perfect the last couple of details.

This week, we added the last big new category to the statistics menu: info on idling colonists. When you’ve got a lack of workers with a certain job, your production chain will break down because of shortages. But the reverse can also happen: too many workers in one job, resulting in a lack of items to craft, or a lack of ingredients to craft those items.

Unlike in real life, idling workers don’t have any benefits in Colony Survival. It doesn’t cause them to relax and become happier; it doesn’t make them ponder about their work methods resulting in boosted efficiency. It’s a costly waste: these colonists don’t produce anything but they keep consuming food and happiness items, and their mere presence attracts extra monsters every night.

But determining which workers are truly superfluous is pretty hard. Periods of idling come and go. Many colonies start the day furiously compensating for ammo lost during the day, but these tasks are often finished long before the day is over. Other shortages in the supply chain can cause idling to appear and disappear randomly throughout the day.

Accurately assessing this while physically strolling through your colony is pretty difficult, and the statistics menu makes it a lot easier. It counts the total amount of milliseconds spend idling per second, per job category. When lots of workers in a job category start idling, they generate a massive peak that is easy to identify. When you compare these peaks to the trend in earlier days, it becomes very easy to notice structural issues in your job allocation.



We’ve made more progress this week. A couple of weeks ago, we added a new system allowing players to use commands in the search bar. These commands can be used to search for specific categories, or to filter out items based on other parameters. To make players familiar with this new system, we’ve added buttons to the stockpile. In the previously empty space next to the search bar, there are a couple of buttons that put helpful “default commands” into the search bar. In the screenshot below, you can see how this works with the “combat” button.



We also spend this week doing seemingly unimportant optimizations that are required to get the update up to release quality. One example is localization, another can be seen in the screenshot below. As you can see, some texts are rendered sharper than others. That has been fixed, but they’re the kind of unpredictable small problems that make the difference between “functional” and “ready for release”.



There are still a couple of similar problems waiting to be addressed. Right now, Zun is testing performance on worlds with lots of colonies with lots of colonists - like servers with many players. We’ve also still got to look at the way this update impacts mods. And today, we’re starting a closed beta test that might result in unforeseen problems. But we’re pretty convinced that we’ll be able to release update 0.7.3 in 9 days, on Monday May 10!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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All screenshots in today's Friday Blog are made in Wil's colony!

[All changes concern the internal dev build which will hopefully be released to the public in 1-2 weeks]

Lots of new features got added to the statistics screen this week. Happiness data is now separated into individual happiness items. This makes it a lot easier to figure out problems with unhappy colonists by analysing historical trends. The same has happened to the calories data: you can track the individual components of the diet your average colonist eats. Two other categories track inbound and outbound trade. It’s a lot easier to keep track of trade relationships between colonies now.

Last week, Comrade Matt left a comment with a good suggestion: Honestly features like statistics, if they work without particularly bad bugs should just be released as they develop. On first sight, I agreed - why are we waiting so long to release this feature? So, I asked Zun. The answer is twofold. Firstly, as always, updates often generate a lot of work for mod developers and server hosts. But lots of people don’t use these features, so they don’t really care about that. For these people, a relevant part two: the statistics menu is pretty sensitive. After only a minor change, it needs to reload all data. Pretty much every Friday for the past weeks, I start the day by idling a colony for an hour to get new data in the most recent build.

To get data for the full 24 days, the max time range you can see on the graph, you’ve got to play for five hours! We’re pretty sure that people will be disappointed when we release the stats screen and we erase all their hard-earned data one or two weeks after the update. So we’re making sure that all the important data is in there, and that bugs and problems are fixed as good as we possibly can before releasing.



There’s one big category left that we want to include: % job idling. When a certain type of job has reached the limit of every item they produce, or if they lack the ingredients to produce a single in-demand item, all colonists with that job will be idling. Sometimes, this happens pretty randomly because you’re messing with supply chains. But in a lot of situations, there are clear patterns to recognize: for example, colonists start by crafting lots of ammo and reach the recipe limit around 2PM - resulting in these colonists idling for most of the afternoon. We think the statistics graph can help immensely to make this clearer.



When job idling has been added to the graph, the update needs a couple of finishing touches. We need to check the impact of big colonies on performance - bigger & more colonies = more data. Currently, all the data is gathered in one frame, and it might be useful to smooth that out over a couple of frames. We must allow proper localization of the new menu, and we’ve got to see how it works with mods. 0.7.1 added a lot more advanced mod support. 0.7.2 changed the lighting, but barely had an impact on mods. This could be the first time we’re going to break mods with the new mod support system, so we might have to add some UI for outdated mods. Last but not least, we want to add some buttons in the empty space next to the search bar of the stockpile to explain the new system with options like searching for categories by adding “cat:”. We hope all of this can be done in 1-2 weeks, but there’s always a risk of unforeseen problems.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Colony Survival is always split in two. There’s the client: the part of the game that runs on your PC, which renders the game and the UI. Then there is the server. When you join a multiplayer game hosted by a friend, your friend runs the server. But even in singleplayer, there’s always a CS-server running - just in the background on your own PC.

This means development for singleplayer and multiplayer is pretty much identical, which is very useful. But it also means that developing new features is quite a bit harder than it would be for a purely singleplayer game. It’s a bit comparable to driving a car with two persons - one using the gas pedal and the brakes, the other one using the steering wheel. It’s possible, but it’ll require quite a lot of communication and it’ll always be less efficient than just one driver.

Like the two drivers, the client doesn’t automatically have all the information the server has. One of the limitations of the client was having knowledge of only one colony. The server only sent the information for the currently active colony. We wanted the statistics menu to display info for other owned colonies as well, so that had to be fixed. It took a couple of days, but it’s done! In the internal dev build, it’s now possible to switch to the statistics of your other colonies.

Now that the client has data from other colonies, it’s possible to improve other small problems as well. Previously, the safe zone of other owned colonies wasn’t shown (because the client didn’t know about them). That’s already fixed in the dev build. Another quick improvement would be to the trading menu. You can remotely start trading from distant colonies to your active one, but where the UI should display the remote colony's stockpile, it displays the active colony's stockpile. The problem was already on our bug tracker and should be easily solvable now.

Zun also added support for negative values in the statistics graph this week. Stockpile items cannot possibly be negative, so it wasn’t useful there. But of course, happiness can drop into negative numbers. It resulted in some strange results with the logarithmic scale, but that was fixed as well.

We still want to add some extra data sets to the graph, like the percentage of the time that jobs are idling, and the happiness stats per happiness item. Then the menu still requires a bit of polish, but the update should be ready in 2-3 weeks!



Last week, I wrote about the arrival of my Valve Index VR headset. We asked whether you were interested in Colony Survival VR, and we got a lot of enthusiastic replies! I hadn’t expected VR to be so widespread already. This week, I did some small tests trying to get VR to work in Colony Survival. To my surprise, it was relatively easy to get head tracking and “hand representation” in there!

GIF 1 / GIF 2

Gif 1 shows one of the first VR experiments, with broken shaders. Gif 2 shows proper textures for blocks, but broken textures for non-block objects. It’s promising, but don’t expect VR anytime soon. Converting all the controls and UI to have decent, consumer-friendly VR-support is a lot more work than just glitching some VR-headtracking into the game. We’ll first overhaul the regular old non-VR UI, and we’ll probably do some content-updates afterwards. VR might come afterwards, depending on surveys.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Bog's submission for the Artificial Extinction contest, one of the winners

This week, Zun has added statistics for happiness and food consumption. That cost about 1.5 or 2 days of work. I spent a roughly equal amount of time making mock-ups for the new UI. The rest of the week wasn’t very productive - at least not directly for the next update. We’ve been working pretty much non-stop since Zun’s trip to Japan in September, and it seems this week was mostly some kind of non-planned holiday. We worried a lot about the coronavirus and the lockdown does impact our lives. We’ve calmed down quite a bit now, but of course, coronavirus is still a dangerous and deadly problem.



But for the past 48 hours, I was distracted by something totally else. The VR headset I ordered, a Valve Index, finally arrived! :D VR has been amazing until now so I’ll spend the rest of the blog talking about that. If you’re only interested in the next update, please stop reading now. If you’re interested in the future of gaming and our company - enjoy! ;)

I was expecting pretty complicated hardware that took a decent time and lots of fiddling to set up - and that was not true! The package (headset, controllers, base stations) is very easy to set up. I think it took less than fifteen minutes from opening the package to my first VR experience.

Steam has an entirely new “mode” especially for VR, predictably named “SteamVR”. Every time you launch SteamVR, you appear in your SteamVR Home. It’s a fancy apartment with a big backyard in the middle of mountains. You can get used to VR there: walk around, spawn some items, grab them and throw them around. There’s an airbrush you can use to draw 3D-images in the air. And there are some big screens on the walls. One screen has a list of VR-compatible games you own, another has info on popular and top selling VR games.

My expectation for VR was for it to be pretty clunky. There’s this weird teleportation-style of movement, and strange controllers. But the teleporting feels very natural in no time at all, and the controllers are super accurate. Navigating UIs with a regular controller can be a pain, but you can use the Valve Index controllers to point at in-game objects and menus, similar to a laser pointer. It’s very quick and intuitive.

Apart from using them as laser pointers, the controllers know when individual fingers grab them. This means that you can do normal grabbing motions with your arms, hands and fingers IRL and they will be translated very accurately into in-game motions.


Your hands in Half-Life Alyx

This allows you to experience completely new things in VR that are just impossible to reproduce in normal keyboard+mouse games. Do you remember Surgeon Simulator? Lots of people loved it for all the wacky stuff that happened when your clumsy hands interacted with all the objects in the world. To some degree, every VR game is Surgeon Simulator, but except for the controls being clunky and messy, the controls are pretty much perfect.

My first half hour of Half-Life Alyx was purely messing about. You spawn on a balcony with all kinds of objects. I’ve grabbed every single one of them, rotated them around to inspect them, followed by throwing them away and hopefully breaking them. Every bottle, every flower pot, every brick. It’s incredibly satisfying, and I’ve never done something like it before VR.

Eventually, you get into combat. And it’s super intense and exhilarating. To reload, you don’t just press R, you’ve actually got to remove your empty magazine, grab a new one, insert it and cock your gun. Throwing a grenade isn’t just pressing G, you actually need to grab it and make a throwing motion. Crouching isn’t “C”, to crouch in-game you’ve got to crouch IRL!

VR takes regular gaming and adds way more detailed input and output. It adds the motion of your head and the details of your hands to the input, and instead of the output being a monitor that only takes up only a small of your IRL field of view, the output is a VR headset that immerses you into the game completely. This opens up a new near infinite range of possibilities in gaming.


VTOL VR

In the past, there have been a couple of trends that claimed to be the future but ultimately seemed to peter out again. Motions controls like the Wii and Kinect are one example, 3D movies another. Pokémon GO was very innovative in 2016 but similar games haven’t achieved popularity since then. But we are starting to become fairly certain that VR or something highly like it will stay and keep growing for a long time. In 2030, it might even be roughly the same size or bigger than regular old WASD+mouse gaming. There are a couple of barriers to VR but I think most of them can be overcome or will shrink in the future:

• Cost. VR headsets (and requirements like controllers and base stations) are still pretty expensive. But the costs of similar tech like desktop PCs and smartphones has dropped rapidly in the past, so I expect the same to happen here. Currently, you also need pretty high-end hardware in your PC to run VR: VR requires consistent 90+FPS to feel smooth, and it needs to be rendered twice (once for each eye) in a pretty high resolution. But as hardware gets better, VR-ready PCs should become more affordable.
  
• Quality. The first VR headsets were pretty primitive - like the first mobile phones. There was too much delay between head motion and the movement of the image and the resolution was low. But like mobile phones, VR headsets get better every year. More resolution, quicker response times, more accurate tracking, more comfortable headsets. The Valve Index is very usable and a lot of fun, but in this new paradigm of gaming, it’s clear where progress can be made. Even more resolution, less effects like glare, less bulkier headsets. If current trends continue, VR headsets in 2030 will be very detailed and comfortable.
  
• Practical problems. You’re pretty much blind to the world when gaming in VR, and you need at least enough space to stand, to crouch and to swing your arms around you in all directions. There are probably quite a lot of people gaming in cramped bedrooms and home offices without space to do the things mentioned above. You can play Colony Survival on a laptop in an airplane and that will be impossible with VR games that require significant arm motion - private jets excluded ;) But people have made space in their homes for big flatscreen TVs, so I expect more and more people to leave space for a VR corner as well.

Currently, VR is getting more and more popular every year - see the graph of player counts in VR-games below. With VR headsets getting better and more affordable in the future, and with more and more great quality VR games becoming available, we expect this trend to keep going and accelerating for a pretty long time.


The huge peak at the end is the release of Half-Life Alyx

I’ve already tried to get my Valve Index to work with Unity, the engine we’re using for Colony Survival. This was really easy to accomplish. If it’s possible to add decent VR support to CS within 2-3 months of development time, we think it’s worth it and will do it in the future. There’s a fair chance our next project will be a VR compatible game!

Now, please don’t interpret this as “they’re going to focus on a niche market that’s not relevant to me”. CS is currently 7 years old, and we don’t think we’ll shift our focus to a new project before at a minimum 2023. That means that our next project might have a release date of 2028-2030. That’s probably a very different time from now. If a large majority of our playerbase owns a VR headset by then, and VR+hand tracking offers so many advantages and new possibilities, it seems very sensible to develop for VR. At the very least, it’s an exciting technology that deserves consideration and experimentation!

What’s your opinion of VR? Do you already own a VR headset, and if you don’t, do you think you’ll buy one eventually? What would you think of CS VR or our next project being in VR? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D
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