InfraSpace News

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!

Hello everyone and happy new year!



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 :)



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!

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!

Hello everyone,

thanks a lot for all the feedback so far!
We already released 2 small bugfix updates on Saturday right after the release, and today you're getting another one:

• fixed weird looking intersections (bug was related to new map size actually)
  
• resources are no longer generated outside of the playable area on new maps
  
• if you try to build a road into an intersection that already have enough roads, you will not be allowed (previously you'd build a second intersection at the same position)
  
• fixed an issue regarding moving gondola stations while single gondolas were moving up the lines
  
• fixed translation issues
  

Also, we added some small graphical updates:

• grass now sways in the wind
  
• grass now appears and disappears smoothly at end of view distance
  
• no grass shadows for performance
  
• finished a lot of new building foundations
  

If any more issues come up, let us know and we'll have a look.
After Christmas we are gonna focus on terraforming + performance + bugfixing, but you'll hear more about that in the next posts!

Happy playing!

That's what happens if you release your patch too quickly.

All saves created after the envrionment update should work now.
If anyone still has save loading issues in Alpha 11.5 (check on bottom left of main menu), let me know!

Happy playing!