InfraSpace News

Hello everyone!

First of all: The Decoration & Polishing Update releases in 2 weeks, on May 12th!
We are trying to get InfraSpace ready for its 1.0 release in a couple months.



We have posted about pathfinding performance before (see Friday Dev News #29 and #84 for example), but this week I think we've implemented a solution that is gonna handle any city you can throw at it!

Instead of our C# implementation of an optimization algorithm called contraction hierarchies, we are now running a highly optimized C++ library called RoutingKit, which is a research project from the Karlsruher Institute of Technology. Well, and this version is much faster.

For example, a city with 8,500 bidrectional roads is represented as a graph structure with. 17,000 edges (two edges per road). Our old version used to take 15.6 seconds to calculate the acceleration structure in the background, while the new optimized version is way faster at 0.051 seconds. Finding the actual path is also significantly faster.

We were looking into pathfinding performance, because it turned out that it has become one of the major performance bottlenecks in bigger saves. I'm looking forward to seeing your experiences once the update is out!




While Sepehr worked on the pathfinding performance, Lasse added some new buildings to the game, the first being a new park with a nice little animation:



Second, we now have small fences you can use to visually separate parks of your city:



Update releases May 12th, we hope you'll like it!
Happy playing!

Hello everyone!



Polishing continues and this time our programmer Sepehr fixed something that has been a long standing issue when you build long roads, especially in already large cities: Road building performance!

It used to be that every time you place down a road via mouse click, the game would hang for a short while, leading to quite the stuttering experience. We looked at all the different areas that need to be done when placing a road:

• Calculating the shape of the road
  
• Splitting the road into multiple segments
  
• Connecting it to the nearby intersections
  
• Removing any grass that might be below the road
  
• Calculating the small decals beneath the road for better looks
  
• Updating the nearby terrain to fit to the road if necessary
  
• and much more
  

We optimized most of the slow parts and got from 400 milliseconds down to 60 milliseconds (6.7 times faster!) when building a road in our test case:



This is a relatively long road performing quite well in a city of 50k inhabitants.



Thanks to our artist Lasse, we got some nice looking parking lots!





Unfortunately they are only decorative, since we're spending our programming time on improvement and it's not entirely clear how trucks would use the parking lot in InfraSpace. After all, the most efficient thing is to go directly from source to target building for production purposes.

Still, it looks really cool and if you have some creative ideas for applications, let us know :)



Currently it seems like we might be able to release our current progress as update in 3 weeks, on May 12th. That way, you can already play with a lot of the improvements. Wish us luck, we'll keep you posted!

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!



This week I just wanted to take some time and update you all on the progress of InfraSpace and when we're gonna hit 1.0 and release Early Access.

InfraSpace has been in Early Access for almost 2 years now and we have long finished all of the promised roadmap items as well as a bunch of extra features and stuff that wasn't on the roadmap. During development we prioritized dev speed over stability and performance, but it's time to change that and improve the game we already have. Let's make it an experience fit for a mature 1.0 release, probably leaving Early Access in 3 months or so.

That means less focus on new shiny features and more focus on fixing bugs and performance issues as well as tutorials. And I want to be clear that we will not make huge changes like adding "Area 02" for making another city in the same save or multiplayer or anything like that. That is in the realm of "InfraSpace 2" or whatever may happen in the future ;)

I have heard some people complain about "how can you work on a ferris wheel when bug X is still there?". The reason is that artists will not fix programming issues. The ferris wheel does not require programming, so this is something our artists can do to improve the game, while our programmers work on other issues in the background.

The terrain is an open question. Of course we have heard your feedback especially regarding the love for the old terrain. The thing is, working on terrain takes a large amount of time and currently I feel it's better spend on fixing multiple smaller things instead. We'll see!

As for how much content comes after updates, I've said in the past multiple times it depends on how many players will play it at that point. For now we focus on improvement and getting it ready for 1.0.




In that bugfixing spirit:

It's long been a gripe of players that placed roads do not always have the shape their draft shows before they're placed, especially on hills.

Well, our programmer Sepehr just fixed it:





InfraSpace's production ratios have alwyays been a little whacky and unpredictable. Andreas is working on finding a new balance for the production chains so you can much easier calculate how many mines you need to supply a factory.

Also, we're planning to do away with huge fields of nanotube factories or electronics factoriers. To that end, we might introduce 1-2 new resource chains. More info on that to come later!



On Discord we have a small group of playtesters playing our in development version trying to find bugs. This week, they've already had a go at the new pixel buildings (screenshots are from AaronJerda):





If you also wanna help us find bugs, join the Discord here.

That's it for this week. I hope you understand that we'll not focus on huge new features for the forseeable future, but if you got bugs, performance, or broken gameplay issues, let us know!

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

Easter time is here, so we had a little shorter week this time and we hope all of you are enjoying the holidays if you have some. This week we already released a small bugfix update on Monday to make sure the magnetic field generator is working properly for absolutely everybody.

So now, I wanna reveal a fun little thing we've been making, called pixel buildings:



It's always been great to see players use the signs in their cities for all kinds of purposes. Sometimes they declare districts names, remind players of future plans, or are just plain little funny messages.

Another cool thing we saw is that some "road building artists" on our discord server made some absolutely amazing things. Check out the adamantine icon made out of roads in this city by AronJerda on Discord:




So we thought with relatively little effort it might be possible to give you way better tools besides pre-made decoration.



"Pixel Buildings" are just some buildings that are exactly 1x1 unit wide and come in some different shapes like rectangles, slops, and circles.



You can use them for all manner of purposes. You could make pixel art or just fill up some space. We're just gonna give them to you and see what happens :D

All the colors can be set with the new color picker, implemented by our programmer Sepehr:



Unfortunately, because of some tricky issues, implementing the color picker took longer than expected. We haven't forgot that we want to focus on polishing, fixes, and performance as well this update and will get back to it soon.

On a positive note though, the color picker automatically also works with trains and any future thing that might be editable:



Check out next week's post to hear some more news about balancing!

Until then, happy playing!

Hello everyone!

A couple players still complained about their magnetic field generators turning into the adamantine drill. With this small update we change the save game loading so that old, broken magnetic field generators from the time before our terraforming update hotfix are get fixed as well.

If anyone still has issues with these, let us know.

Happ playing!