InfraSpace News

Hello again everyone!

This small patch fixes the following issues:

• Power poles should now behave as before the update
  
• Fix sometimes getting stuck in build/move mode
  
• Visualization mode will now kick in when moving a building
  

Again thanks for the reports.

Happy playing!
Sepehr

Hello everyone!

Thanks for the reports so far.

This small patch fixes the following issues:

• Resource starvation bug
  
• Far side roads getting deleted when their connected road gets updated
  

Happy playing!
Sepehr

Hello everyone and welcome to the InfraSpace Improvement Update!

This update has been in the works for 2 months and we're bringing you lots of bugfixes, performance improvements and even some new decoration buildings and small extra features!

Special surprise: We got a small Intro Cinematic!



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In InfraSpace, you start out as a ship stranded in space. If you start a new game, you will now get a small movie to introduce you to the situation. Our 2d artist Adriana has been working on it for a while, so I hope you like it!

• “Pixel buildings” so you can highlight parts of your city
  
• Color wheel for pixel buildings and trains so you can have them in any color you want
  
• Lots of new decoration buildings for your enjoyment, like crashed ufo, ferris wheel, new parks, fences, parking lot, …
  

We added lots of new decoration buildings, this screenshot only shows a couple:



The new pixel buildings can be used to make any kind of shape ingame:





You can use the color wheel to customize pixel buildings, fences, and trains:





Improving the performance of the game has been one of the primary focuses of the Improvement Update. And I think we were quite successful: especially in large saves, your fps could increase by 50% or even 100%, depending on your city layout and city size.

• Pathfinding Performance has been vastly improved, which is especially relevant for large saves
  
• We removed one source of regular stutter (Visualization mode verification ran every 5 seconds)
  
• No hanging when placing long roads, especially in large saves
  
• Improved terraforming buildings performance
  

• When you place roads they are now built in the shape you expect
  
• Fixed terrain decals below roads not being rendered correctly
  
• Fixed green grass not appearing in grasslands and forests after terraforming
  
• Fixed a bug where you could connect different types of pipes
  
• "Road missing" icon no longer appears when a pipe is connected to a building
  
• You can now exit move and delete mode with escape
  
• The targeting station now has an animation
  
• Fixed the price calculation when placing gondolas. Now dependent on distance
  
• Fixed height and length of roads not being shown anymore
  

Even very long and steep roads are now built in the shape you expect them to be:



That's it for this update, let us know how you like it! We hope the Improvement Update improves your InfraSpace experience.
Stay tuned for more news next week!

Until then, happy playing!

Hello everyone!

The Improvement Update releases next Friday, on May 12th!

Here is a small summary of the changes:

[h3]Performance[/h3]

• Pathfinding Performance has been vastly improved, which is especially relevant for large saves
  
• We removed one source of regular stutter (Visualization mode verification ran every 5 seconds)
  
• No hanging when placing long roads in really large saves
  

[h3]Bugs fixed[/h3]

• When you place roads they are now built in the shape you expect
  
• Fixed terrain decals below roads not being rendered correctly
  
• Fixed green grass not appearing in grasslands and forests after terraforming
  

[h3]New features[/h3]

• "Pixel buildings" so you can highlight parts of your city
  
• Color wheel for pixel buildings and trains so you can have them in any color you want
  
• Lots of new decoration buildings for your enjoyment, like crashed ufo, ferris wheel, new parks, ...
  

If you're interested in the details, check out the Friday Dev News posts from the last weeks!





If you're a regular reader of Friday Dev News and are wondering what are the new changes form last week: We were busy getting all the stuff ready for the update! There was a big issue stopping the pathfinding performance integration, but I'm happy to report we just released an update to our playtesters, so it should be all ready for the release next week!



We are preparing InfraSpace for 1.0 launch and in order to do that we thought it might be good to release another polishing update, basically Improvement Update Part 2. Cause there is still a bunch we want to improve!

Happy playing!

Hello everyone!

First of all: The Decoration & Polishing Update releases in 2 weeks, on May 12th!
We are trying to get InfraSpace ready for its 1.0 release in a couple months.



We have posted about pathfinding performance before (see Friday Dev News #29 and #84 for example), but this week I think we've implemented a solution that is gonna handle any city you can throw at it!

Instead of our C# implementation of an optimization algorithm called contraction hierarchies, we are now running a highly optimized C++ library called RoutingKit, which is a research project from the Karlsruher Institute of Technology. Well, and this version is much faster.

For example, a city with 8,500 bidrectional roads is represented as a graph structure with. 17,000 edges (two edges per road). Our old version used to take 15.6 seconds to calculate the acceleration structure in the background, while the new optimized version is way faster at 0.051 seconds. Finding the actual path is also significantly faster.

We were looking into pathfinding performance, because it turned out that it has become one of the major performance bottlenecks in bigger saves. I'm looking forward to seeing your experiences once the update is out!




While Sepehr worked on the pathfinding performance, Lasse added some new buildings to the game, the first being a new park with a nice little animation:



Second, we now have small fences you can use to visually separate parks of your city:



Update releases May 12th, we hope you'll like it!
Happy playing!