InfraSpace News

Hello everyone!

Today I'm going to be answering some frequently asked questions.
Currently, 3 out of 6 people are on vacation and the rest is working on a secret project, so the progress on InfraSpace wasn't that exciting in the last few days. The good news is that we're planning to announce the secret project next week and its completion will free up another programmer for InfraSpace! :smiley:



I think we already got somewhere between 50 and 100 requests to add Mac support for InfraSpace. It is coming, just not during Early Access! The reason is that we still want to focus on the main game, its features, performance, and bugs instead of spending that time playtesting and supporting different platforms.

This will change when we hit 1.0. At that point, we won't change the core of the game that much anymore (like adding a full new map and terraforming). And with fewer changes it becomes easier to support more platforms.

However, some people have got it working with Mac already using virutal machines and I have reason to suspect that after the environment update it will already be a lot more compatible.



A lot of people ask us if we can improve the traffic AI. This is a double edged sword: Sure, lane changing could be improved.

But if cars start avoiding traffic jams on their route, we run into a different issue:
If a player has designed a terrible intersection and it starts jamming up, cars would take different routes putting much more load on intersections that typically would be fine. Suddenly, more and more intersections clog up, the city becomes gridlocked and the player doesn't know where the problem actually started.

We may test a pathfinding variant like this to be configurable in the options, but currently I believe the time is better invested in traffic tutorials and letting player turn down the traffic difficulty if they don't want to deal with it.



Players have been asking for some kind of tool that gives you more control over the routes cars take and have been wondering if that's something we want to add. I just wanted to confirm, yes we're very interested in that even though it's not on the roadmap. Distribution centers are probably going to be part of the solution, we just need to figure out a design that's interesting, understandable, and not immediately overpowered. Players already have some control with the districts tool, but it takes some learning to be able to use it effectively.



With traffic lights, trains, and terraforming as the big endgame goal we're quickly reaching all the promised roadmap items and with pipes, mod support, and gondolas we're going to have a bunch of the optional roadmap items done as well.
Naturally, some players are wondering what will happen with InfraSpace once we have fulfilled all the Early Access promises and how long development will continue. This is the answer to our best knowledge at the moment:

• Of course finish all promised EA roadmap goals
  
• Also finish most of the optional roadmap goals (or replace them with other features players like instead, like maybe add distribution centers instead of natural disasters)
  
• Of course do a lot of polishing, bugfixing etc. for version 1.0
  
• Besides from that it depends a little bit on how well InfraSpace continues to sell and how much it's played, but I'm pretty sure we have the resources for 3-4 major feature updates before 1.0
  
• Probably we'll have at least 1 major update after 1.0 and then we'll see how it goes.
  

I hope this satisfies your curiosity to some degree. If you have thoughts on future features or what InfraSpace needs the most besides the environment update and polishing, let us know!

Happy playing!

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!