InfraSpace News

Hello everyone!

it's time to finally announce the release date for the environment update!

We want to release on Friday in 2 weeks, Dec 9th, 2pm CET

Our plan is to finish all the features by next Friday and then spend a week with playtests and bugfixes. If anything goes wrong, we may move the release by one single week, but definitely not longer.

It's going to be good seeing you play with the new, larger map :D



Our new map is 4x the size of the old map, includes lots of grass and small details and features a much more detailed background. For most of development, the performance of all that, was... questionable. This week, we've done a large performance pass over all the environment graphics and some building graphics and managed to reduce the amount of draw calls from 3.000 to around 500 with still more ideas to optimize further. We'll see how much better we can make it perform.



(note: this concerns only graphics performance. simulation performance for large cities (10k and more citizens) will be addressed down the road)



Now that we have a lot of grass, we need to remove it when you build on it. Already made a lot of progress last week, but now it's dynamic when create and replace buildings and roads or when you move them.





The new gondolas enable you to gain access to the volcano caldera and the dried river bed. But in order to make it work, we needed to create an algorithm that distributes the gondola lines over the rocks in a way that makes it look natural and make sense. Check it out:





And finally one of our artists has been keeping up his quest to make the city look good with new variations for habitats level 6:



We all hope you're going to enjoy the update we worked so long on - see you next week for more details!

Hello everyone,

this week, we have 3 progress updates to share with you:



Our new terrain is going to feature lots of grass and small stones for variety. This also means we need to remove them if you place down buildings and roads.






The new cargo gondolas enable you to reach stuff through difficult terrain. Their build system is a little different than all the other buildings, because you always have 2 stations that are connected with each other and can only be placed at certain angles to each other.



(screenshot is still using the old terrain here)



While the programmers are busy completing the update, Lasse has taken to improving the building variety and has finished all the habitat 5 buildings. Check out the new look:



Since the environment update has already been delayed quite a bit, I don't want to commit to a specific release date. (for sure before Christmas though!). But we are working on it and you can count on our posts each Friday to let you know how it's going.

Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

work on finishing the environment update is progressing. This week, I have 3 major pieces of news:

First, Ben finished implementing the save / load system for the new map in a way that is also compatible with the new laser that you can use to remove those objects. Next week we'll merge a bunch of this code together so it's all in the main code branch.

Sepehr has done the first steps for the cargo gondolas. If you don't know: Since we have volcanoes, highlands, and the dried river with sometimes inaccessible height differences, we need a way to get cargo from A to B. This is going to be accomplished by the new cargo gondola system where you place a 2 stations which then ship good over uneven terrain. We have finished part of the building logic. The remaining tasks for the gondolas are spawning the poles and wires between the stations (pics next week) and hooking it up to the traffic system.

Finally, there are some nice little art updates. Lasse has been using this time to create a burning effect for the plants that are destroyed by the laser, replacing explosions. And further he's created some more habitat variations to improve the look of the city. Pics below:





Happy playing and thanks for your patience for the update! I'm keeping up the news posts to keep you informed on the progress :)

Hello everyone,

I hope you had some happy holidays around halloween. This week it's going to be another quick update because most team members had 2 holidays and also one of our programmers got sick unfortunately.

What we did manage to do in the remaining time:

• Andreas did a bunch of playtesting with the new terrain and found some bugs that are now on our list
  
• After Ben has finished making the new maps playable, he's now working on making save/load work
  
• We redesigned the save implementation for rocks and environment object to integrate the new terrain generation with the new laser feature
  
• We have gone over the laser code and found some improvements we'd like to do before we release it in the update. Shouldn't take long.
  
• While the programmers are working on the update itself, our artist Lasse has taken to improving the game look in general. He has started with more building variations for the habitats, so residential districts don't look as repetitive. Work in progress screenshot below
  

I'm hoping we can do more substantial progress for the update in the next week without holidays, but stuff like the save/load system just takes time even and there are no cool screenshots to show, that's just how it is :)

Happy playing!

Hello everyone,

last week we asked you if we should split the environment update so we can get new bigger map with biomes out the door and released early. The overwhelming majority was for splitting the update, so we're focusing on finishing the new map features.



The most important piece of work was making the game actually playble in the new map. For now, we have been doing a lot of world generation work, but to make the game playable, we needed to look at lot of integration work: The new terrain shader needed to work with the decals and the visualizations, we needed to adapt the road + car rendering system, the game scene load order had to change a little, the space scene needed to be fixed, and so on. Basically many of the small features that use the map in some way needed to be made to work.

Our programmer Sepehr on the other hand was caught up in handling visa documents, but saving/loading is probably almost done for the laser feature.



Finally we ran into some grass rendering issues: It was difficult to achieve the density we wanted without making the grass huge in comparison to the buildings.

We tried a couple of differnet approaches, like making grass with horizontal planes:



This approach yielded very dense grass and was good for performance, but didn't look as good. Since players can control grass performance anyway, we opted for a different technique, seen here:





(The difference to grass screenshots in previous posts: The previous ones were art tests, here we make sure they also work with many of the technical requirements.)

Happy playing