InfraSpace News

Hey everyone,

It's time for our weekly update on InfraSpace progress. We've got a bunch of news to share, so let's dive in:



Andreas has been working hard to finish the art for our terraforming buildings. These include the buildings that help you terraform the planet as well as some factories that provide parts for it. Here's a sneak peek:








Lasse has been working on making the terraformed planet look more natural. He has created a moss shader for the terraformed rocks, and he's also added some new bushes to the landscape. Check it out:








Sepehr has been busy implementing a feature that allows for different trees to spawn in different biomes when the areas are terraformed. This required a bunch of work since not every piece of data necessary was saved in the current save files. Plus, Sepehr has also made it so that these trees disappear when you place a building on them, making it easier to build your city.




Besides these, Sepehr and I investigated some small memory leaks which should help out with performance.



Adriana has been busy creating concepts for some new futuristic roads that fit the sci-fi setting of InfraSpace. These roads should fit better with the sci fi vibe of InfraSpace.




That's it for this week's update. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you again soon with more news on InfraSpace!

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!