InfraSpace News

Hello everyone,

we hope you're having a great day and are excited for the latest news on our development. Our current focus is getting the terraforming update into a playable state.



Each biome has their own vegetation. Unfortunately, Biome data is not explicitly saved in the current version of the game, so our programmer Sepehr had to recreate it from the seed, which took some time.

But now, the terraformed planet features different vegetation in each of the biomes:




(Note: terrain paint is turned off temporarily in these screenshots, just programmer testing shots)



Since the soil on the volcano is mixed with ash, the vegetation is a lot different. The terraformed version of the volcano will feature large mushroom plants, made by Lasse:





The billboards idea has been well received so Adriana made a couple of futuristic ads for our InfraSpace companies. Which ones do you like the best?








This is how they could look like in game (sign model not done yet, this was prototyped with text building feature ;) )



That's all for now, but stay tuned for more updates on InfraSpace. We hope we can get the terraforming update to you soon, and we're grateful for your support.

Take care,
The InfraSpace team

Hello everyone,

and welcome to another Friday Dev News!



In order to feel natural, the terraformed planet needs a lot more objects of two types: Trees and grass.
Our programmer Sepehr and Artist Lasse worked together this week to spawn trees on the terraformed parts of the map. Check out the result and let us know which color scheme you like best!

(Note: grass is still missing and will change the look a little. More on that next week!)

Color scheme 1:



Color scheme 2:



Color scheme 3:





We're planning to add some simple decorative buildings so you can change the look and feel of your city to your liking.

This week we're presenting the idea of ad billboards, featuring the companies you already see on the buildings. Check out Adriana's concepts:



Some billboards may even display a small video, like these:



What do you think about the idea of you being able to add your own pictures in-game?



I've been working on general code improvement in the background and merged a big reorganization of about 40% of the code into the internal development branch. The intention of this cleanup is making future development easier.

During this work, I noticed some inefficiencies regarding save loading that were introduced in the new update. I managed to reduced save load times by 58%. There is more we can do for save loading performance, but general game performance nees a look at also :)

Happy playing!

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!



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!

Hello everyone,



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.








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:







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.



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!

Hello everyone,

this week we have 2 major news for you.



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!



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!