Sep 18, 2023

Eco - SLG-Dennis

Greetings Citizens!

Coming soon to Eco 10: ports! With the introduction of Boats, coastal infrastructure will be crucial to opening up trade and travel between continents. We’ve added lots of new block types you can place directly on water like docks, and other decorative elements to give you that nautical appeal.

Port towns will be very important to the overall economy, and become hubs of trade as resources pass through them between land and sea, connecting far-flung towns with the resources they need from the other side of the world.

Overview of past and coming up blogs:
- Boats and Trade
- Coastal construction (This blog)
- New avatars
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries, and Federations
- Culture

Coastal Construction in Eco 10

Docks

Original concept art for hewn log docks

We've created a set of dock-specific forms in the Hewn Log blocksets. These specialized blocks were designed for building and expanding your coastal creations, but we aren't going to judge you if you find other creative uses for them.

We’ve also made blocks have much more detail in their close LODs, and we’re going to retrofit all our old blocks to do this as well. This will give us the ability to create more interesting building pieces for you to create with.

As we add more forms to blocksets, we will be looking at ways to improve the UI and UX of form selection. Please feel free to leave feedback related to this, we plan to be giving a lot more time to blocks in future updates.

Buoys

Moorage Posts can be added to your docks so they are locked in and can’t drift away. These can be crafted from both wood and steel.

Wood Mooring Post

Steel Mooring Post

We’ve introduced two floating buoys that can be placed in the water and used for navigation, additionally these can be used like the moorage posts to stop your boats drifting away.

Steel Buoy

Plastic Buoy

Nautical Decorations

We have also added a series of decorative, nautically themed objects to dress up your coastal areas.

Life Preserver

Ships Wheel

Hanging Buoys

Glass Buoys

Fish Rack

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to explore upcoming features for Update 10. If you have thoughts, questions, or stories to share, connect with us through our Discord channel. We're eager to see the coastal constructions you'll create in the Eco 10 update.

Aug 1, 2023

Boats and Trade in Eco 10

Eco - SLG-Dennis

Hello Eco Citizens, big news: the long-awaited Eco 10 update is finally in playtests!

We've added a ton of features (over a full year's worth of work), and we're introducing a lot of brand new systems as well as lots of polish.  Release date is currently 'when it's ready', but goal is well-before the end of the year.  With all the new additions, we want to adequately test it with large groups to make sure they're balanced.

So over the coming weeks we're going to be doing blog posts on all the new things to expect. Here's the agenda:

- Boats and Trade (This blog)
- Coastal construction
- New avatars
- Face tracking avatars
- Photography/painting
- New graphical improvements
- Expanded tech tree
- Twitch plugin
- Towns, Countries, and Federations
- Culture

We’ll kick it off with the first blog on Boats!

Boats and Trade in Eco 10

One of our most anticipated additions, and for good reason! Boats will not only introduce a whole new way of getting around the world, but will introduce the need for new trade gameplay, as its combined with our resource-spawning upgrades also shipping in 10.

Isolated Resources

With Eco 10 we’ve totally changed how plants and resources spawn. Previously, they were pretty spread out all over the map: if a plant could grow somewhere, it would. No longer, now things will spawn in clusters around the map, which may be just a few spaces, or even one.

As visualized on the screenshot above, clusters are representative of an area where plants are allowed to populate on the initial world generation, these contain the individual groups of plants and as the red indicates, this is the distance limitations between each group inside the cluster.

We now have the ability (as do you players since these are all set inside the individual plant) to add more dynamic restrictions and scarcity of each plant species on a whole new level then what was technically possible in previous iterations.

This means that there may be resources that are native to a specific island or on the other side of the world, and to get access you’ll need to build trade ships and sail to distant locales. And these islands will certainly lack resources from the mainland, so you’ll have much to offer in trade.

Combined with the new Towns and Countries system, very interesting things can happen. A town might gain exclusive access to a resource, like oil or gold, or a rare plant that’s needed for research. That resource is then beholden to the laws of the town, and the town can wield a lot of trading power in the wider world. You see this in real life in places like oil-rich countries, the scarcity of a resource can greatly impact the cultural fabric of the societies built atop them. Really looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

And connecting them all are a progressive series of boats, here’s the line up of what you’ll be able to sail the seven seas of Eco with:

Small canoes are the carts of the oceans, allowing you to transport a medium amount of goods while you discover the oceans of Eco. They are the first type of boats available to you.

The large canoe is an upgrade to the small canoe, holding more storage and allowing two players to go on a journey together.

Wooden transport ships have the storage capacity of a truck with decent speed and are very suitable for transportation purposes.

The Wooden Barge can hold up to two trucks and is very useful to transport your goods from one island to the other.

With the introduction of the Medium Fishing Trawler you will be able to fish comfortably and directly on the oceans.

The Industrial Barge is an upgrade to the Wooden Barge and our currently biggest ship, it can carry up to four trucks at once.

To make boats more useful, we’ve introduced limits to swimming as well. You can now ‘drown’ and wake up exhausted on the shore if you run out of calories while swimming, and swimming itself will expend calories.

This means no more swimming across continents (and you can’t eat while swimming, you would get a stomach ache as everyone knows). This will make boats and coastal port towns very important to global advancement, as they may be the only route to circulate an important resource to the rest of the world. Note that this can be disabled, like all new systems we will add, so players can configure the world their community wants to play in.

Stay tuned for more updates as we build up towards launch, and feel free to drop us a line in the discord!

- John K, CEO Strange Loop

May 18, 2023

Update 9.7.13 released!

Eco - SLG-Dennis

Hey Citizens,
we've just released Update 9.7.13 to address the following issues:

Civics:

Added: A limit of 5000 characters for election speeches was added to prevent errors in the server log for too long text.
Fixed: Triggering a law that records a custom stat with a name length of less than three characters would disconnect the client from the server.
Fixed: As a landlord, changing the bank account a rent goes to had no effect until the renter left residency and rented it again.
Fixed: An issue with specific laws that caused the boot time of the server to become extremely long.

Art & Effects:

Fixed: Texture and highlight for urchin plants were not displayed correctly.
Fixed: Sound effects were not playing when moving through plants.
Fixed: Harvest animations were not playing for plants.
Fixed: Trees did not have wind animations.

Gameplay:

Fixed: Debris and plants were not slowing down players and vehicles as intended.

Interaction:

Fixed: Several issues with tree trunk physics that could have a multitude of potential negative effects, from them falling underground to catapulting players to space.
Fixed: An issue that in specific circumstances could lead to the creation of untargetable ghost rubbles.
Fixed: The interaction area for papaya plants was too small.

UI:

Fixed: In specific circumstances food items in storages would not show or show a wrong shelf life bar until they were moved around.

Server:

Fixed: A cause for vehicles teleporting across the world was identified and fixed.
Updated: ModKit.eco.template was updated.

Miscellaneous:

Fixed: Players that had specific special characters in their name would get a unity crash when joining a world.
Fixed: Crafting and repairing items did not work when a player with a single-letter name existed in the world.
Fixed: Debris and some plants could get rendered at a position they don't exist, leading to invisible debris and plants at the place they actually exist and untargetable debris and plants at the place they pretended to exist.

Apr 6, 2023

Performance Update 9.7.10 released!

Eco - SLG-Dennis

Dear Eco Citizens,
we're happy to announce that Update 9.7.10, the last part of our 9.7 Performance Update series, is now available.

In the coming days after the easter holidays we plan to make an early development version of Update 10 available for public testing on the playtest branch. Please note that the official playtest on official server White Tiger will start independently from that a bit later and that this branch may be updated very frequently, up to several times a day. The branch will not guarantee migration yet, neither from prior versions nor between playtest versions. All further information about the playtest will be available on our official discord: https://discord.gg/eco.

We're sorry for the slight delay. Good luck on your egg hunts and please find the changelog below:

Optimization - Client

Improved: Optimized plant rendering, making plants faster to appear and more lightweight for the engine.
Improved: Heavily optimized the minimap, also addressing several issues with and caused by it.
Improved: Several optimizations for chunk, network and view updates - removing duplicate and unnecessary updates, reducing and optimizing sent data.
Fixed: An issue that caused micro-freezes on harvesting plants.

Optimization - Server

Improved: The amount of notifications sent was vastly decreased by accumulating notifications where possible, removing unnecessary notifications and displaying notifications only to affected players where they are not relevant for anyone else.
Improved: Mod file uploads have been limited to one at the same time per user to prevent overwhelming the network. Additionally a configurable limit for how many players can be served with mod downloads at the same time has been added.
Improved: Property updates are now sent via broadcasting to all relevant clients in the same network packet instead of having a separate one for every relevant client.
Improved: Small optimizations for the login queue.

Icons

The way to display icons without background has changed, it is no longer possible to use lowercase identifiers to achieve this. Instead, the code for icons now has a parameter type="nobg" that can be added to make the icon have no background. Additionally, icons without background do no longer show a border.

For example, <icon name=SawmillItem" type="nobg"> on a sign will create this:

Avatar

Fixed: The land claim stake was displaying as a untextured white object on the avatar.
Fixed: The avatar would hold an arrow in its hand when the player went to sleep while having a bow selected.
Fixed: Removing a tool from the hotbar that exists a second time in the hotbar as currently selected tool led to the avatar showing its hands as empty, despite the selected tool still existing.

Civics

Improved: Civic name length limit was increased.
Fixed: Revised civics would not correctly remove the addition of "Revision" after passing when the law name was too long.
Fixed: Old civics that were revised would get multiple "Old" added to their names instead of just a single one and a number.
Fixed: Some contract clauses would become invalid in repeatable contracts after it was accepted the first time, preventing players from accepting it several times as intended.
Fixed: Contracts could show up with missing description and all entries invalid on contract boards.
Fixed: Performing specific actions when creating a contract with nested clauses could lead to a client crash.
Fixed: Repeatable contracts could disappear until a server restart after it was completed for the first time.
Fixed: Not repeatable contracts would sometimes still be displayed on the contract board despite they were already accepted.

Economy

Fixed: Trading with a store which had set a bank account that was deleted in the meanwhile led to a client crash.
Fixed: When claiming new land for a deed, the bank account of any stores on the deed was reverted to the one of the owner of the deed.
Fixed: Stores owned by an elected title reverted to barter mode and turned off after changes were made to the owning elected title.
Fixed: Deeds for sale on a real estate desk were not removed when the deed was deleted.
Fixed: Deeds listed on a real estate desk were removed when the deed was owned by a title and there were changes to the holders of the title.

Improved: Trees on the edge of the minimap now disappear smoothly.
Fixed: After opening the chat while the map is in full screen mode, the map could no longer be closed with the "ESC" button.
Fixed: Text in store tooltips could overlap for long item names.
Fixed: Hovering over the amount of people with a specific level of a profession in the skill UI would not show a tooltip.
Fixed: Several tools were not showing their descriptions.
Fixed: Players were receiving a hint to switch their residency to a deed with allegedly more housing value than their current residence, despite that not being true.
Fixed: The soil sampler could show wrong info on growth times when growth rates were changed in the configs.
Fixed: Food items would sometimes not accurately show the spoilage level until moved.
Fixed: Property layer on minimap was not activated by default as intended.
Fixed: Shadow placement preview could show objects with wrong colorization.
Fixed: The popup that appeared when being kicked from the server due to inactivity showed buttons to report a bug.
Fixed: Under rare circumstances it was possible that the map on the Web UI was no longer displayed permanently after a server restart.

ModKit

Added: A way to define food items as not spoiling. (Thanks to nid)
Added: An option to toggle a vehicle's world object state while driving.
Improved: Expanded availability of marked up usernames. (Thanks to nid)

Balance

Changed: Harvest yield of kelp was increased by 1.
Fixed: Harvesting kelp was not affected by the gathering skill.

Miscellaneous

Improved: The camera for cart driving was adjusted to remedy a possible motion sickness cause.
Improved: Carts do no longer collide with animals.
Fixed: The "Clear Vegetation" tutorial could sometimes not be completed.
Fixed: Some animal species, like alligators, tended to die out quickly after server setup.
Fixed: Food items would sometimes not turn into rotten food despite the remaining shelf life being 0%.
Fixed: Under specific circumstances it was possible to interact with world objects through walls and windows.
Fixed: Players were unable to leave their vehicle when it fell over and turned upside down.
Fixed: When using specific mods it was possible that food items picked up did not start with a shelf life of 100%.
Fixed: Plants would sometimes not show fruits, despite being fully mature.
Fixed: Some dolphin can be mounted again, also fixing an issue that could lead to players being unable to join an very old migrated worlds.

Server & Configs

Added: Command /network setpassword to set or remove a server password during runtime.
Fixed: Normally unobtainable settlement objects in a savegame would crash the server.
Fixed: Players trading with shop carts caused unnecessary warnings in the server log.
Fixed: The command /land remove removed all blocks but the specified blocks instead of the other way round as intended.
Fixed: Players sometimes could get stuck at downloading mods.

ModKit.eco

Added: "MaxNumberOfDownloadRequests" config variable, defining the number of players that can be served mods at the same time - defaults to 10.

Jan 23, 2023

Road Map to Update 10

Eco - SLG-Dennis

Hello Eco Citizens,
with 9.7 performance updates almost complete (one more big update for this version to come), the majority of the team is working on the long awaited ECO 10! We’re going to be doing little quality of life updates along the way, but have a deadline set of April 3rd for the start of public playtest for Update 10.

We’re going to be demoing the features as we build up to this launch with live streams, here’s the schedule, with each livestream from various Eco devs typically happening on Fridays at 21:00 CET / noon Pacific Time. You can watch the demos on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook or directly here on our Steam store page. We’ve put together a calendar you can sync with if you’d like to keep track of these, click here.

Schedule:

Twitch Election Plugin – February 3rd

We’re building a custom plugin for twitch that will let users cast votes in a streamer’s elections and view and interact in other ways with the game. Streamers are a huge part of the Eco community and we want to make some really interesting ways for them to interact with their audience and blend the barrier between creator and audience.

Avatars with Facial Animation via Webcam – February 17th

We’ve got brand new upgraded avatars coming into the game, with much more expressive and customizable faces, hair, and clothes. On top of that we’ve got lip-syncing based on your microphone and facial animation based on your webcam (both optional of course). This means that as your avatar is giving a speech or interacting with others you’ll see the actual facial expression the real human player is making applied on your avatar. With the depth of role-playing we’re seeing in Eco and the potential for live events like town halls, campaign speeches, etc, we’re expecting this feature to add a ton of depth to your characters identity and how you connect with others.

Boats Demo – March 3rd

The long awaited boats feature will be at last shipped in 10! We’ll be demoing all the new boats in the game, from row boats to industrial barges, and how they work. We’ll also show the other systems that support boats like new dock blocks, new placement systems, new swimming systems, etc.

User Pictures Demo – March 10th

We’re adding the ability to take pictures of what you see in game, and then use that on the sign, as icons for your avatar, and much more. This will further connect our new avatar feature, allowing you to take a picture of your avatar and use that for your presentation to users in chat as well. It’ll also be a part of the new culture system we’re building, you’ll be able to make a museum of pictures from other players around the globe to create culture points for the new settlement system.

Render to Horizon Lodding Demo – March 17th

With our performance upgrades for 9.7, the stage is introduce lods to render the landscape all the way out to the horizon, at 60fps on recommended hardware. You’ll be able to see the curvature of the world clearly, see distant cities and mountains, and really get a feeling for the scope of the world that’s being shared with everyone in it.

Settlements Demo – March 24th

The new Settlements system will allow the creation of towns, countries, and federations. Towns contain multiple citizens, Countries contain multiple towns, and Federations (think United Nations) contain multiple countries. Each has their own overlapping governments, complete with laws, taxes, treasuries, etc. Each casts ‘influence’ based on their culture (another new system) where their laws apply. The property system will be completely transformed too, based on population rather than skill upgrades. This is going to be a giant change to the feel of the game and looking forward to community tests and feedback! We’re also keeping support for the old style without settlements, which players can disable in the server if they like.

These are the major feature demos, but on the other Fridays we’ll have livestreams showing other features, and a chance for feedback from players.

We’re all super excited to get this version of Eco out to you all, its going to be like a new game. We got a ton of work to do still, so back to it! See you soon.

- John K, CEO Strange Loop