CD#28: Logistics optimizations, queuing fixes, and quality of life changes!
Hi everyone, Captain Zuff here again with another Captain’s Diary for update v0.4.9! This update brings many great features and fixes, including dragging and dropping inventory items, an in-game calculator, and massive improvements to the logistics system.
Maddprof has mastered the “Art of Terracing”
Note: Full patch notes are at the end of this update.
Today we are launching the v0.4.9 patch to the experimental branch. For details on how to join this branch, please check out our previous Captain’s Diary #27.
One of our biggest updates yet, v0.4.9 brings a lot to the table in terms of Quality of Life and Logistical Optimization. We’ve received some amazing feedback from the community and we’ve made some highly requested changes to our logistics systems. Check out the big features below!
[h2]Upgrade of Unity rendering engine[/h2]
As you might know, we use Unity as the rendering engine for COI and until now we were running on version 2019 LTS (long-term support). To get access to all the latest and greatest features and fixes, we have updated Unity to the latest version 2021 LTS. Yes, the “2021” version is the latest, published a few months ago. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We hope that this will also resolve many problems including some rare crashes and compatibility issues that players were reporting.
[h2]Drag and drop of pinned product stats[/h2]
A highly requested feature, you can now drag and drop pinned product stats on the right side of the screen to your liking!
[h2]In-game calculator[/h2]
Do all your maths without taking your eyes off the screen! Use the search bar for computing simple algebraic expressions. This is useful for not having to pull up the calculator on your phone or alt-tabbing to see how many more assemblers you need to build. You can also use the in-game console for this by typing equals sign, e.g. “= 1+1”.
[h2]Disable exclusive import toggle[/h2]
We have introduced a new toggle in storage UI that allows you to disable exclusive imports when import routes are present. This means that you can have a storage accepting deliveries from all trucks even when the storage is a target of an import route. This is extremely helpful for example when you want to assign a mine tower to a storage but keep the storage accessible to all other trucks when needed (like when you unassign a full truck from a mine tower).
[h2]Vehicle queuing be GONE![/h2]
No more truck blobs and staggering of vehicles when trying to access a single building. While the buildings will still only serve one vehicle at a time, the others won’t be trying (and failing) to form a queue and pausing while navigating. Instead, all vehicles will go toward their destination building and wait by it for their turn. This speeds up jobs throughput across the board.
[h2]Batch Building[/h2]
Trucks can now complete several construction jobs in a single trip! This is extremely useful for small belt segments that previously required lots of journeys involving small quantities. What would take 20 trucks can now take 2!
[h2]Inputs/outputs shown when selecting a building[/h2]
See what could possibly be missing when selecting a building now that input and output nodes are shown.
[h2]More detailed tooltips in the research tree[/h2]
See more details when hovering over buildings and machines icons in the research tree.
[h2]Fixed sorters throughput[/h2]
Sorter throughput will now match the speeds of the belts attached to them. Before, using a sorter could create a choke point in your transport line, but no more! If they are attached to a T3 belt they will have the same throughput as a T3 belt!
[h2]Fuel consumption details in the vehicle depot[/h2]
Now you can see the difference in fuel consumption rates for vehicles at the depot. Finally, you can know why you’re running out of fuel so quickly after building 12 large haulers. You can also use this information to get a rough estimate of how much diesel you’ll need to produce to keep up with demand.
[h2]Trees rendering optimizations[/h2]
We have been having issues with the performance of tree rendering for some time now. This has become only worse after we upgraded to Unity 2021 where tree rendering became even slower by 20%.
After extensive investigation, we have revealed that tree animations were the culprit of the poor performance. By removing the animations, we saw up to 30% higher FPS on maps with lots of trees. Trees slightly moving in the wind look nice, so we decided that the performance penalty was not worth it and opted for the increased rendering performance for now.
Screenshot from profiler that shows the speedup obtained by removing the tree animations. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is FPS (frames per second), lower is better. The New Haven map went from 60 to 80 FPS!
We see a lot of great factories and screenshots every day and here are a few we’d love to showcase:
Yandersen is on a terraforming rampage! They are completely terraforming the whole island!
Vaquinha has created an extremely clean Main Bus, but what else they’ve done is quite impressive:
They’re storing all of their mined minerals above ground for…future mining.
In the previous Captain’s Diary we have started a fan art contest and while we have received some nice entries, we decided to extend the deadline for another two weeks to allow more people to join. Share your fan art (drawing, meme, etc.) with COI theme to #fan-art channel on our Discord server to enter the contest. COI Supporter edition + t-shirt prices are still on the table! Here are entries from players “Alaska” and “Wikus”:
Maddprof has mastered the “Art of Terracing”Update v0.4.9 features showcase
Note: Full patch notes are at the end of this update.
Today we are launching the v0.4.9 patch to the experimental branch. For details on how to join this branch, please check out our previous Captain’s Diary #27.
One of our biggest updates yet, v0.4.9 brings a lot to the table in terms of Quality of Life and Logistical Optimization. We’ve received some amazing feedback from the community and we’ve made some highly requested changes to our logistics systems. Check out the big features below!
[h2]Upgrade of Unity rendering engine[/h2]
As you might know, we use Unity as the rendering engine for COI and until now we were running on version 2019 LTS (long-term support). To get access to all the latest and greatest features and fixes, we have updated Unity to the latest version 2021 LTS. Yes, the “2021” version is the latest, published a few months ago. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We hope that this will also resolve many problems including some rare crashes and compatibility issues that players were reporting.
[h2]Drag and drop of pinned product stats[/h2]
A highly requested feature, you can now drag and drop pinned product stats on the right side of the screen to your liking!
[h2]In-game calculator[/h2]
Do all your maths without taking your eyes off the screen! Use the search bar for computing simple algebraic expressions. This is useful for not having to pull up the calculator on your phone or alt-tabbing to see how many more assemblers you need to build. You can also use the in-game console for this by typing equals sign, e.g. “= 1+1”.
[h2]Disable exclusive import toggle[/h2]
We have introduced a new toggle in storage UI that allows you to disable exclusive imports when import routes are present. This means that you can have a storage accepting deliveries from all trucks even when the storage is a target of an import route. This is extremely helpful for example when you want to assign a mine tower to a storage but keep the storage accessible to all other trucks when needed (like when you unassign a full truck from a mine tower).
[h2]Vehicle queuing be GONE![/h2]
No more truck blobs and staggering of vehicles when trying to access a single building. While the buildings will still only serve one vehicle at a time, the others won’t be trying (and failing) to form a queue and pausing while navigating. Instead, all vehicles will go toward their destination building and wait by it for their turn. This speeds up jobs throughput across the board.
[h2]Batch Building[/h2]
Trucks can now complete several construction jobs in a single trip! This is extremely useful for small belt segments that previously required lots of journeys involving small quantities. What would take 20 trucks can now take 2!
[h2]Inputs/outputs shown when selecting a building[/h2]
See what could possibly be missing when selecting a building now that input and output nodes are shown.
[h2]More detailed tooltips in the research tree[/h2]
See more details when hovering over buildings and machines icons in the research tree.
[h2]Fixed sorters throughput[/h2]
Sorter throughput will now match the speeds of the belts attached to them. Before, using a sorter could create a choke point in your transport line, but no more! If they are attached to a T3 belt they will have the same throughput as a T3 belt!
[h2]Fuel consumption details in the vehicle depot[/h2]
Now you can see the difference in fuel consumption rates for vehicles at the depot. Finally, you can know why you’re running out of fuel so quickly after building 12 large haulers. You can also use this information to get a rough estimate of how much diesel you’ll need to produce to keep up with demand.
[h2]Trees rendering optimizations[/h2]
We have been having issues with the performance of tree rendering for some time now. This has become only worse after we upgraded to Unity 2021 where tree rendering became even slower by 20%.
After extensive investigation, we have revealed that tree animations were the culprit of the poor performance. By removing the animations, we saw up to 30% higher FPS on maps with lots of trees. Trees slightly moving in the wind look nice, so we decided that the performance penalty was not worth it and opted for the increased rendering performance for now.
Screenshot from profiler that shows the speedup obtained by removing the tree animations. The horizontal axis is time, and the vertical axis is FPS (frames per second), lower is better. The New Haven map went from 60 to 80 FPS!Community creations
We see a lot of great factories and screenshots every day and here are a few we’d love to showcase:
Yandersen is on a terraforming rampage! They are completely terraforming the whole island!
Vaquinha has created an extremely clean Main Bus, but what else they’ve done is quite impressive:
They’re storing all of their mined minerals above ground for…future mining.Art contest update
In the previous Captain’s Diary we have started a fan art contest and while we have received some nice entries, we decided to extend the deadline for another two weeks to allow more people to join. Share your fan art (drawing, meme, etc.) with COI theme to #fan-art channel on our Discord server to enter the contest. COI Supporter edition + t-shirt prices are still on the table! Here are entries from players “Alaska” and “Wikus”:
Patch notes for v0.4.9
* Pinned product stats display can be now reordered by drag & drop.
* Added in-game calculator to the search field and game console.
* Logistics improvements:
- Construction/deconstruction jobs are now grouped into batches which drastically reduces trips that trucks have to make.
- Changed logistics rules to allow exporting from storages even if they have an import slider active and the inventory is above the slider amount. Similar behavior applies for the export slider.
- Trucks assigned to storages now have a job priority over non-assigned trucks.
- Added an option to disable import routes exclusivity so that storages with active import routes can also accept products from non-assigned sources.
- Logistics job priority for an entity now reflects the number of pending jobs. This means that vehicles will be more nicely distributed between multiple entities. It also prevents cases where balancing large high-priority storages choked the entire island's logistics.
- Assigning of vehicles (for example to storage or mine tower) now prefers non-paused ones.
- Improved refueling priorities (storage export priority is no longer used to find a fuel source).
- Improved vehicle queueing for storages and gas stations that was causing low throughput. Vehicles can still be served one at a time but they no longer waste time by forming a queue.
- Logistics overview window now shows assigned vehicles to tree harvesting and buildings.
* Cargo ship improvements:
- Cargo ships now depart only when empty and when they can get full load (if possible based on max capacity of the world resource).
- It is now possible to force-depart a cargo ship for emergency delivery.
- Cargo ship UI now shows available quantities to pick up in the world.
- Cargo ship depot modules now show their throughput in the UI.
* Updated Unity to version 2021 LTS. This may help fixing some crashes and issues with compatibility.
* Removed tree animations, resulting in up to 30% increase in FPS (based on the amount of trees on the screen).
* Clicking a machine (to open an inspector) will show its I/O icons and ports like in build mode.
* Added popup window for hovered buildings and machines in the research tree.
* Fixed sorters to be able to match throughput of T3 transports.
* Fixed excavator mining job that could get stuck doing nothing in rare cases.
* Fixed recipes priority for recipes that have the same outputs.
* Allowed dumping of fertilizers (with pollution effect).
* Fixed colors of liquids so that they are more close to their icons colors.
* Fix issue in adopt population button.
* Fix text width in harvest statistics.
* Increase refueling distance when refueling multiple excavators with leftover fuel. This especially affects tier 3 vehicles.
* Chickens cannot be added to a paused animal farm.
* Show products stored in connectors.
* Show fuel consumption for vehicles in Vehicle depot.
* Research lab no longer accepts products when not fully built.
* Increase text contrast in error popups.
* Fixed jerky camera when following a vehicle.
* Updated translations, thanks to everyone who is contributing!
You can join the experimental branch by choosing “experimental” under “betas” in the game settings.
Now you can remove any item (besides waste products) from your shipyard instantly with a click.
Side by side comparison of the old and new dumping logic. 
Notice the new truck job description and unreachable designations marked by the orange lines.
This can be used on Tree Harvesters as well!
Quickly build up that queue!
Aaaaand it's gone, just like that!
Less repetitive and looks more like a landfill!
Excavator during sunset in watercolor by Kejia Cao