InfraSpace News

Hey everyone,

quick update today since both our 3D artists have left for vacation and 2 other devs are working on secret stuff that's not yet ready to be shown. Also, in the next weeks different people are taking their vacation since it's still summer.

Anyways, we have finished the biome generation part for the new terrain, check out the programmer screenshot:



Obviously it's still far from the art concepts since details are missing and colors are off, that's part of the process. Our progress here is creating and optimizing the biome generation for larger maps. Also, you will be able to have multiple volcanoes as well as enough space to build your city. Not sure yet how many terrain generation options will be configurable by players, but many most be moddable for sure.

Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

this week we've got an art update and a tech update for you.

First up is the finished ammonia extractor:





It's a large futuristic building that cleans up the atmosphere and contributes to making the planet livable.

Second, we'd like to update you on the terrain generation process:
Most of the time in the last weeks was spent on optimizing the highland shape generation process. The reason this was necessary is that we are aiming to quadruple the map size and we don't want terrain generation to take forever.

So now, we have basic shapes for the dried river, the highlands next to it, and also the volcano. We still need to add the crater and then we will fill out these biomes with the assets from the art concepts. We hope we can share some progress pics that don't look completely like programmer art next week ;)

Finally, it's the end of August and our team members are beginning to take vacation. Expect progress to slow down a bit for the next couple of weeks after which we'll speed up again to finish and release the update planned for September.

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

Today we don't show any new graphics or art concepts, instead we go on a little deep dive on game performance on big maps.

Bigger maps are one of the most common community requests and since we're doing the terraforming update anyways, it's a good point in time to check if they are possible.
There are actually 2 different types of problems to solve:

The first one is just simple simulation performance of production buildings, cars, trains, etc. When we quadruple the map size, we just have to speed up the simulation performance by 400%. Sounds like a lot, but doable.

The other problem is pathfinding performance. This is a lot more difficult since the the time to find a path for a car to take does not grow linearly with performance - it grows a lot faster.

We did our experiments on a city with 100k citizens. This is waaaay more than needed to reach the current endgame, but it's close to the max of what players can fit onto a current InfraSpace map. I have only seen 2 players reach that kind of city size so far.

A 100k city looks like this:





This save game features around 7,000 roads (14,000 road directions to do pathfinding on, since most roads are 2-way), 16.000 buildings and 15,400 active cars - and we want to quadruple that.

Before we look into general game performance, we need to check if we can deal with the pathfinding problem appropriately - otherwise bigger maps won't be possible, period.

In order to simulate bigger cities, we use a simple random road network generator. It's not a perfect recreation of player city networks, but it's a good enough approximation. We can generate road networks of different sizes easily for performance testing:





The green lines are highways.

In order to make pathfinding feasible, we use a 2-step algorithm that preprocesses the road network first to enable lightning fast pathfinding queries later, called contraction hierachies (paper).

With a 100k city, the preprocessing step only takes 11 seconds, that means it takes 11 seconds for cars to take your new road after you placed it - that's good enough for such a huge city.

With a 400k city, the network becomes much more complex to preprocess, taking 225 seconds or almost 4 minutes. That's too long.

While other team members were working on the terrain generation, I focused on some deep optimizing and found a 2-part solution: First we cut down the size of the graph by replacing some stretches of road with simple shortcuts. Then we run a much more optimized version of the contraction hierarchy preprocessing time.

The results for the 100k city look like this:



The 400k city takes a lot longer, but is still in an ok range because this is only for players that push InfraSpace to it's max even when we quadruple the size:



So it seems like we may be able to increase the map size when it comes to pathfinding. There are a lot of other optimizations that need to be done and I'm not sure we'll actually change the size for the terraforming update, but it's good news nonetheless.

I hope you enjoyed the technical deep dive post for a change, and as always, happy playing!

Hello everyone,

today we're introducing the largest building you need to construct in order to terraform your environment after the terraforming update: The Magnetic Field Generator.

On earth, our magnetic field protects us from solar radiation, but on this planet, there is no natural magnetic field across the whole planet, just small localized fields. In order to make the environment more suitable for life as well as safer for humans, you will be able to construct a large building that consumes tons of electricity and converts it into a large field to keep your city safe.

We only have some art concepts for now, but since you enjoyed voting on the drone, I thought it'd be a good idea to show it to you early and let your feedback influence the design process. Let us know what you think!





On another note, the drones you saw in the last posts have made their way into the game - behold your new autonomous fertilizer distribution system!







Disclaimer: the movement is not programmed yet, but I thought I'd share the art screenshots anyways ;)

Happy playing!

Hello everyone and welcome to another round of progress news on the terraforming update!

First of all, I'd like to show you some progress on the buildings that have already been introduced in a previous post and are now getting integrated into the game.



The ground acidity regulator is a large building that slowly extracts acid from the soil by digging down deep to the subterranean water.



On the left side you can see the drone hub for the fertilizer drones and on the right side you can see the new dust particle filter.

Speaking of drones, thanks for all the feedback to our last post! There have been a lot of different opinions so we decided to combine a bunch of well liked ideas from the previous concepts:



As far as the buildings go, I'd like to introduce you to one more terraforming building: The air purifier extracts ammonia from the atmosphere and releases nitrogen in an effort to make the air on this planet breathable.

The air purifier reaches up high into the atmosphere and covers a big radius.



Also, a small update on the world generation: Our programmer is back on his feet and has been working on the river & highlands shapes, let me show you a visualization:



So, obviously this is just a programming concept with all the art missing, so let me explain what you're seeing: The dried river shape is already pretty nice and cutting into the terrain properly and we can dynamically add more or less curvature to it. The blue outlines show a pattern of voronoi cells which is going to be used to generate interesting looking highland shapes. Basically we select a couple of nearby cells to form a plateau and the resulting shape is more natural looking than other methods.

Finally, I wanted to provide a first guess at when this update is going to be released. The terraforming update is a big one and in my head I'm thinking it could be another month or so of work. *But* multiple team members have planned vacation in August and it's good to have some buffer time, so to be on the safe side, let's expect September. I hope you can stomach the wait and keep letting us know your opinions in the comments!

Happy playing!