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InfraSpace News

Friday Dev News #107 - Superconducting Coils and Highland Trees

Hello everyone,

we're continuously marching forward to the terraforming update release and so far, we're not too far off our original time plan!

New Factories for Filtering Meshes and Superconducting Coils


Terraforming a planet is no small feat, and your industry needs to be set up to provide the necessary machines and parts.

There are three major ways of terraforming the planet:
  • Filtering toxic and acidic particles from the atmosphere and ground
  • Fertilizing the soil
  • Strengthening the magnetic field of the planet to keep the sun's radiation at bay


All the filtering facilities need to be provided with single-use filtering meshes that removes the undesired particles.
Our concept artist Adriana made a couple of sketches:




The magnetic field generation is a different story: The generator is a massive building similar to the adamantine drill. In order to create a magnetic field that's strong enough to cover the nearby regions, you are going to need superconducting coils. These are a specialized late game resource, which are going to be produced in factories like these:





I'm hoping we'll be able to show you some 3D models next week!


# Trees for the Highland Plateaus and the River

Now that we figured out a nice and efficient shader to display our trees, we have created some more trees for the other biomes.

I'm a big fan of the colors of the new highland trees (here shown in the desert):



The river will not be that dry anymore, so the river trees look a little like mangroves:



Don't worry, you'll still be able to build in the slightly wet river (water patches not shown here) ;)

In the mean time, the coders of team are working on the terraforming algorithm and refactoring (= cleaning up) the code - more about that next week!

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #106 - Terraforming and Wind

Hello everyone,

Terraforming Progress


We have started to properly work on the actual terraforming implementation. Step 1 is exchanging the old models, terrain paint, and grass colors for their terraformed versions in areas where the terraforming progress is advanced enough.

We're probably finished with the grass and terrain paint and are going to take care of changing the models next week. After that, we'll tie the terraforming progress to the respective buildings, like the ammonia extractor or the magnetic field generator.

Ready for a programmer's screenshot? This one shows how to we are changing grass + terrain paint in the circular terraformed area on the left side. Soon, an artist is going to go over it and actually make it look good.






Wind


Lasse has been working on ways to render trees in a way that looks good and is efficient enough even with all the leaves. I think we have found a good solution and it even includes a nice little wind effect:





Performance


We have integrated the VAT method and tried it out in a save of 50k people. It's a nice improvement both on the graphics card and CPU side. More optimizations to be done on the simulation.

Code Quality


In the last couple of weeks I have been refactoring the codebase and cleaning it up while all the other work is going on. I'm thinking this will make future work on the game easier and should be worth it in the long run!

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #105 - Vertex Animation Textures

Hello everyone,

this week we have 2 major news for you.

Vertex Animation Textures


We already introduced VAT last week: It's a technique for animating things more efficiently, especially buildings. Basically, instead of the CPU updating the animation each frame, we bake the animation into a texture so that your graphics card can play the animation without any input from the CPU.

Last week we did most of the work in order to get the animation working and this week we integrated it into the game. The results are really nice!

In this picture we render 10,000 animated copper mines:



The CPU is updating every position and rotation of every part of every copper mine every frame. Quite a lot of work! With VATs, the situation is different:



10k mines without LOD optimizations is still a lot of work for the graphics card, but the CPU is free to work on other things now, so we get more than 6x the frames per second in this example.

There is also another hidden benefit: Our optimization allows us to treat each mine as one single game object (as opposed to being made out of multiple parts) and therefore we also have to send less draw calls to the graphics card. This is the batches number highlighted in red.

The programming part of VATs seems to be done, so our artists will start using VATs starting next week and apply it to the buildings!

Terraformed Trees


Terraforming will be the next big update so we already started preparing some art for it. Specifically we looked into tree shaders and we think we got a nice looking solution:



Lasse, our artist working on it, is going to spend the next weeks creating more assets for the terraformed world while we program the system to make the transition work!

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #104 - Happy New Year!

Hello everyone and happy new year!

InfraSpace in 2023


Our main priority for InfraSpace is finishing the terraforming endgame and improving quality. That means fixing bugs and working on performance.

If you take a look at our ingame roadmap, you'll see that after the terraforming update, we'll have finished all the guaranteed features as well as the extra features "Mod support", "Gondolas" and "Pipes".
For version 1.0 we think it's more important to work on game quality and polishing instead of tacking on more and more features.

Currently I estimate that we'll be able to reach our target quality for version 1.0 after 2 or 3 more updates. Then we'll release version 1.0 and exit Early Access. If and how many features are then added after Early Access depends on how actively people are playing the game after the big release :)

Performance: Vertex Animation Textures


Speaking of working on game quality, we have already started tackling animation performance!

Animation has been a performance bottleneck for a while. A mature save easily features thousands if not tens of thousands of buildings, and for now we've just used the Unity default animation system. The trouble: it's actually putting a bunch of load on the CPU.

Building animations are not complex though: Each building typically only has one or two animations that either run or don't run depending on the state of the building.

We're planning to use a technique called "Vertex Animation Textures", where we design the animation with the Unity animator, but then bake the animation data into a texture and send it to the GPU.

[h3]Pros and Cons[/h3]

The advantage: there is *NO* CPU load for running building animations and the GPU load doesn't actually change that much, since it's just texture sampling.

The disadvantages of this technique: buildings have maximum vertex limit and we can't use it to control particle animations or other, more complex shaders.

Since we don't reach the vertex limit anyways with most buildings and we can still use the CPU to control the more complex parts, the tradeoff seems like a good one to make.

We're finishing the implementation this week and letting our artists play around with it next week and we'll see how it goes!

Happy playing!

Friday Dev News #103 - Happy Holidays!

Hello everyone!

I hope you're ready for the holidays!
First things first:
We're collecting all bug reports that come in during the winter holidays and in the next year we're going to focus on fixes + performance + terraforming on the programming side.

Meanwhile, on the art side, we have a couple of ideas for additional city decorations that can be developed independently of the high prio points above.


Today I'm just gonna share two images:



Since InfraSpace is a traffic simulation game to some degree, we have been missing some parking lots for quite a while. What do you think about this concept for a futuristic parking lot?

Other ideas for additional city buildings include monuments, malls, and colored tiles that you can use to mark different areas of your city.

Finally there could also be some fun stuff like a crashed ufo ;)



Do you have more ideas for decoration buildings you'd like to see? Share!

After Christmas we'll get back to bugfixing and dev, until then I'm keeping an eye out for severe issues and which you all happy holidays!