May 20, 2020

The Universim Toxic Patch V0.1.41 is Now Live!

The Universim - Crytivo

Greetings, Creators!

This month we would like to present you with a set of features that will improve your overall gameplay experience and bring you more joy to the game. For this patch, we put more emphasis on environmental changes as well as some Exile Villages Improvements.

Quick Video Review

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One quick thing before we dig into the juicy details, Creators! If you're enjoying The Universim, please take a few moments to leave us a review on Steam. It's always a huge morale booster, especially since our devs are only allowed to eat when we receive some kind of feedback!

MODERN EXILES CITIES

As your civilization develops, Exile Villages progress as well. Even if it doesn’t look like much, Exile Nuggets are silently watching the progress of your civilization and borrowing some of the techniques used by your Nuggets in order to build their own little empire. It might not look as big as your city, but it definitely looks quite impressive for barbarians. Pretty soon, they will be at the gates! (Or not, if you decide to play nice with them!)

AIRPORT (EXILE NUGGETS TRAVELERS)

For some time, Airports were just empty lonely buildings without a purpose in your civilization. We revisited it and brought a new life to it. Airports will now be an essential bridge between your civilization and the Exiles. Tourism is an essential part of our lives and Nuggets should think the same way. It doesn’t matter if they are Exile or not, they all dream about flying up to the sky and visiting new places. Based on your relationship with Exile villages, modern Nuggets from Exiles may fly over to your city and check them out for themselves. If they like it and they see a lot of happy faces, the chance that they will stay in your city will increase significantly. Make sure to keep your civilization happy and your relationship with Exile Village healthy. This will provide you with an additional boost to your population and some additional happy faces :)

NEW FIRE SYSTEM

The Fire System finally got its final touch with a brand new look. We had the old system to help with PC performance but we found a way to improve the system while keeping within scope. New fires are dangerous and will require quite some work to put them down, but that look of the fire in your city will at least be quite stunning. The spread of the fire will be influenced by wind and we finally have a reasonable burn rate for your buildings. Your Firefighters will have their work cut out for them.

TOXIC CLOUDS AND LAKES

Well who said that dropping Nuggets into the lakes won’t lead to anything bad? Dead bodies rot you know… and dropping them in bodies of water will cause them to release a dangerous toxin that will surely kill a mammoth, so be careful and watch out where you are dropping your Nuggets or your civilization might be doomed. Besides polluting your water, global changes will also influence the appearance of the dangerous toxins in the sky. Make sure to keep your oxygen levels reasonable or otherwise you can meet some acid rain that will poison other lakes. But don’t worry, as a creator you can revert the changes, just make sure that you have enough creator power to fix what you’ve done. Overwhelm the toxic lakes with clean water from your clouds and save your civilization.

RESOURCE GRAPH

As we move forward, we would like to give you more information about the state of your civilization and its resources. This graph will help you clearly see and understand the usage of resources by your civilization and its production. This tool will also be your best friend in your Space Journey. Make sure to make full use of it and consider what resources are being used the most and what you need to produce more of.

Not in the build but being worked on:

Roads
Organic simulation on planets
Alien planets
Rovers
Landing on an alien planet
Rockets
Space Port
Terraforming

Improvements and balance changes:

Reworked Electricity and Water Systems

Electricity and water systems have some changes. Previously, you would have to deal with big numbers and millions of gallons of water, which was very confusing and, most importantly, difficult to play with. We changed Water and Electricity systems to work based on 10 minute intervals instead of each second, which allowed us to reduce the number that will be displayed drastically. Water and electricity also received some additional tooltip information when you move the mouse over them. Now you can see an estimate on how long your current storage will last with the water / electricity that you have in your reservoirs / batteries and the current consumption rate if you lose water / electricity for production buildings.

Clouds Shadows

Previously, shadows from clouds were fairly temporary in the world and they had a big impact on performance. We had to review them in order to improve the overall stability of the game and performance. In the process of reworking them, we made them more defined and permanently looking in the world.

Improved System for underground resources

Since we moved to the new planet, the underground resources were worked on for a while. We tried to fine tune them and make everything work perfectly, but one issue always presented itself. That issue was with the distribution of resources across the planet. A lot of underground resources, such as Stone and Iron, ended up on top of the mountains, which caused a lot of discomfort for everyone and didn’t feel right. Therefore, we decided to add an additional condition in our distribution system that will also take the height of the terrain into consideration. Now, tips of the mountains won’t have metal or stone and you will be able to get every bit of underground resources from the planet without any issues and struggle.

Improved Upgrade System for Residential Buildings

As we implemented a new Residential System, the system that was responsible for upgrading them worked a little bit differently from all of our buildings upgrades and therefore was prone to some additional bugs. Even though all of our tests didn’t produce any issues with the Residential Upgrade system, we decided to go with a safe route and change it to work the same across the board. This way, we are using one unified system that was played with thousands of hours and produced a stable result.

News Alerts

In our previous patches, we touched the News System multiple times and we tried to do our best to clean them up a little bit and make it less noisy. Additionally, we made sure that important information will be more permanent and noticeable. Our initial idea was to keep the important messages on the screen until the “X” button would be pressed, which would ensure that the player will recognize the issue. What we did not anticipate was that no one would try to close them and the multiple reports that messages are not being closed started spamming and this was ultimately irritating. Therefore, we decided to optimize that system even more. Now if the issues appeared and it can be resolved, the message will stay until you either Click X or you resolve the issue. If the issue is resolved, the message will disappear automatically and clicking on that message won’t be necessary anymore. In addition to that, if the issue is not being resolved in 10-15min. The message will be closed automatically. We hope that change will make life easier for every player and ensure the proper display of the messages.

Engineer Hut Improvements

Engineers received an additional love and some improvements. Now engineers will help with building construction only inside the circle area. In addition, if the building is in critical condition, they will take the repair action as a priority instead of finishing the construction of the building, which in some cases caused the building in critical condition to collapse. The repair and construction time are also now separated. Since repairing and construction speed was represented as one value and we tried to balance engineers and make them very efficient with repair work, it led to the issue where the building construction was super fast and it was breaking the overall balance. Now construction will still be faster if the engineers will do it, but it is balanced separately from the repair function and therefore should feel overall better without breaking the balance.

UI Scaling Fixes

Research windows as well as tooltips on the main UI were not scaled properly and for people who have lower resolution monitors, those UIs were extremely big and in many cases led to inability to play the game properly. We reviewed the scaling system for those screens and made it work properly with lower resolutions monitors.

Optimized terrain modification system (Terrain Deformation System upon load)

Dynamic planet generation creates additional loading time when the planet is being created first. In order to improve the loading time, we reviewed how our system calculates the terrain deformation and we found some ways how that aspect can be improved which helped us to reduce the loading time when the new planet is being created. This will help drastically in Space age, since all the planets will be randomly generated.

Glass Factory in Stone Age does not require electricity anymore

A small balance change was added to the Glass Factory. Glass factories that were added in the Pre-Medieval age required electricity which forced players to research faster perks in order to unlock it and forced players to change the pace with which they were previously playing the game. Thus, we decided to remove the electricity requirement from the Glass Factory in order to provide a better experience for everyone.

UI and Art:

New Modern Exile Village
Exile Village Airport
Resource Graph
New Fire System
Toxic Lakes and Rain Clouds
Improved UI for resources

Bug Fixes:

Fixed: Certain biomes didn’t have trees or they had a lot of empty space.
Fixed: Mines were consuming a lot of resources despite displaying lower consumption rate inside the building panel.
Fixed: Small light in the construction site was blinking even though there was no new building unlock.
Fixed: Each time a new nugget was assigned to the building, the nugget panel was moved down slightly. After assigning a lot of nuggets, that panel could have ended up below the screen.
Fixed: Nuggets that died inside the buildings will be spawned outside of it with an infection zone.
Fixed: Believers were not updated correctly
Fixed: Fire scared firefighters
Fixed: Nuggets would not react to the fire at all
Fixed: Twitch Integration would turn off randomly
Fixed: Certain status icons would get stuck above nuggets
Fixed: New soundtrack would not start at certain instances
Fixed: When a thief steals any resources, notification would not appear
Fixed: Arrest Nugget localization fixed
Fixed: Pressing ESC button during Celebration would break UI, causing it to disappear
Fixed: Adahy and Elu names were duplicated if the game was loaded, causing a lot of nuggets to be called with the same name
Fixed: An error that would occur if two nuggets would get the same name
Fixed: During an election, UI would get stuck on a screen
Fixed: During an election if the game is paused, the election process would break
Fixed: Duplicated names
Fixed: Nugget that died on a boat would cause some performance issues
Fixed: In certain cases Nuggets would not get auto assigned by minister

A heartfelt thank you for all your support. Your passion has made the development of The Universim a pleasure. If you have some time and you're having fun, please leave us a review on Steam and be sure to join our Crytivo Discord server to have direct access to us. In the near future, we'll have an update for you soon that creates a good path forward for your civilization... something that'll help your Nuggets move around more smoothly. Stay tuned!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/352720/The_Universim/

All the best,
The Crytivo Crew

May 20, 2020

Dev Log #8 - Dev Diary, New Level Dummy Island, Win a Gaming PC & More!

Main Assembly - Josh_Team17

Hey Inventors!

Welcome to our 8th weekly Dev Log.

Developer Diary

First of all here's a video of us giving insights about Bad Yolk and Main Assembly!

New Level - Dummy Island

Some of you may have caught the dev stream where we showed off the Search N Rescue challenges and the new sandbox level, Dummy Island. If you haven't, you should definitely check it out!

(Disclaimer: several dummy inhabitants were definitely harmed in the filming of this video!)

Win a £2000+ gaming PC by building a bot!

PCGamer have a beta open right now that you can join to play Main Assembly, on top of that they are also giving away a high end gaming PC from Novatech. The prize, a Reign SENTRY MKII gaming PC is worth over £2,000. It features an RTX 2070, an i7-9700K and is built for 1440p gaming!

To have a chance at winning you just have to share a bot created in the beta on their forums. You can find out more here: {LINK REMOVED}

For the chance to win a

Bad Yolk Update

We have a short week this week because of a national holiday here in Sweden! Woohoo!

The 11th of June Launch is moving closer, and we're gearing up for the Early Access release of Main Assembly. We're very excited to share our game and have all the levels and parts open for you to try out!

The office is pretty much empty because of the current global situation, but a few of us walking distance to the office still come in. It's not quite the same when you are close to the release, and the entire team isn't gathered together. But we're in high spirits, feeling focused and happy!

We've also had Tomas, our screenshot specialist update the Steam page with new screenshots. Including this dummy filled beauty!

Community Bot Spotlight

This is the Horten Ho 229 - WW2 german fighter by Krautregen which is an impressive look back at an extremely early jet bomber which may be mistaken for a more modern stealth bomber! So, it's both an impressive bot but also a welcome dive into history!

Be sure to comment below or get in touch with any builds you feel we should feature next week! :)

Thanks for reading inventors, we'll see you next week for dev log #9! :D

Plus, if you want to be notified on Steam you can wishlist the game for it's Early Access launch on June 11th here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1078920/Main_Assembly/

You can also keep up with Main Assembly's development on all these channels:
Main Assembly Twitter
Main Assembly Reddit
Main Assembly Facebook
Main Assembly Discord
Team17 Twitter
Team17 Facebook
Team17 Discord