Fleshing out the World of Dawn Apart
It’s been a month since we launched our steam page and shared our announcement trailer and we want to thank you for the ongoing love the community has shown to Dawn Apart - seeing people wishlisting the game, championing it on social media, and joining our Discord server to follow and actively shape the development means the world to us!
In our second announcement post, we want to let you know what we have been working on in the meantime - from adding small, but important details to establishing and refining the basics.
Flashy conveyors
Arguably the most important asset in any automation sim are conveyor belts. So we want to make sure that moving resources from point A to point B looks and feels right. That’s why we are actively working on refining the animations as well as updating the shaders for all conveyor belts to add some animation to their emissive voxels. Since Dawn Apart features a dynamic day/night cycle this essentially means cool, glow-in-the-dark conveyors for optimized production chains all throughout the night!
Branching out
As we have pointed out in our last post, we want Aurora, the distant planet where you establish your colony, to be the real star of our game. Instead of just presenting a lifeless boring, grayish, brownish or greenish sandbox we want our players to engage with a lush fauna and flora that poses unique challenges for extracting resources and terraforming. While our Announcement Trailer featured only a few placeholder trees, we have been busy creating a whole new array of plants for each of our biomes, including this tree inspired by the Dracaena Cinnabari (also known under the badass name of Dragon Blood Tree). Look forward to more colorful alien plants (and other lifeforms) soon!
Saving the world (and loading it)
Adding a save and load function to a game may seem like a mundane task, but creating one for Dawn Apart proved to be quite the challenge. Precisely because our world is so rich in detail and made out of individual voxels, in order to successfully save a map full of moving machines, factories and colonists - and then seamlessly bring it back - our coders came up with a solution.
We first create a new save world and copy over all entities and their data. Once there we can safely format their component data into the format needed for serialization without affecting the world the player actually plays in. To avoid a hot 3GB file size every time the player saves the game we only save the necessary data which is needed to recreate the game state on load. We also run through all voxel objects and check if there are changes in each 8x8x8 voxel grid cell. If there are, we save only that run of voxels and then reapply it on deserialization. Our initial tests on an empty world saving absolutely everything resulted in around a 1.3 GB file, and at the end of our sprint we’re looking at just a couple hundred KB for an active world which was a great success. In other words: Data go in file, data come out. Because it was a rather complex process we’re very proud to share our work in progress Game screen including the options to load save states!
We’re in full scrum mode and can’t wait to share more results of our sprints in upcoming posts (spoiler alert: the next post is going to be explosive, because, well, we are currently refining our destruction engine). In the meantime please make sure to join our Discord server - in the past few weeks the community settled on some important lore questions (for example that giant space ship featured in the trailer is now called The Eventide!) but we need more input!
In our second announcement post, we want to let you know what we have been working on in the meantime - from adding small, but important details to establishing and refining the basics.
Flashy conveyors
Arguably the most important asset in any automation sim are conveyor belts. So we want to make sure that moving resources from point A to point B looks and feels right. That’s why we are actively working on refining the animations as well as updating the shaders for all conveyor belts to add some animation to their emissive voxels. Since Dawn Apart features a dynamic day/night cycle this essentially means cool, glow-in-the-dark conveyors for optimized production chains all throughout the night!
Branching out
As we have pointed out in our last post, we want Aurora, the distant planet where you establish your colony, to be the real star of our game. Instead of just presenting a lifeless boring, grayish, brownish or greenish sandbox we want our players to engage with a lush fauna and flora that poses unique challenges for extracting resources and terraforming. While our Announcement Trailer featured only a few placeholder trees, we have been busy creating a whole new array of plants for each of our biomes, including this tree inspired by the Dracaena Cinnabari (also known under the badass name of Dragon Blood Tree). Look forward to more colorful alien plants (and other lifeforms) soon!
Saving the world (and loading it)
Adding a save and load function to a game may seem like a mundane task, but creating one for Dawn Apart proved to be quite the challenge. Precisely because our world is so rich in detail and made out of individual voxels, in order to successfully save a map full of moving machines, factories and colonists - and then seamlessly bring it back - our coders came up with a solution.
We first create a new save world and copy over all entities and their data. Once there we can safely format their component data into the format needed for serialization without affecting the world the player actually plays in. To avoid a hot 3GB file size every time the player saves the game we only save the necessary data which is needed to recreate the game state on load. We also run through all voxel objects and check if there are changes in each 8x8x8 voxel grid cell. If there are, we save only that run of voxels and then reapply it on deserialization. Our initial tests on an empty world saving absolutely everything resulted in around a 1.3 GB file, and at the end of our sprint we’re looking at just a couple hundred KB for an active world which was a great success. In other words: Data go in file, data come out. Because it was a rather complex process we’re very proud to share our work in progress Game screen including the options to load save states!
We’re in full scrum mode and can’t wait to share more results of our sprints in upcoming posts (spoiler alert: the next post is going to be explosive, because, well, we are currently refining our destruction engine). In the meantime please make sure to join our Discord server - in the past few weeks the community settled on some important lore questions (for example that giant space ship featured in the trailer is now called The Eventide!) but we need more input!