Plan B: Terraform News

Here is a small update, mostly to fix various issues from v0.8.0. Especially one, very bad, that was happening sometimes after destroying an item in a new world. I'm very sorry for everyone that experienced it.

(Edit) The Steam Workshop has also been activated.

[h3]Plan B - v0.8.1 build 889[/h3]

Improvements:
- Ships: add sounds, smoother movement

Bugs fix:
- Fixed the "destroy item" bug
- Fixed water freeze for in games played more than 80 hours (simulation time)
- Ships: fix destination change and deletion bug ; remove buoy build fx
- Fixed resources of depot destroyed when change of item
- Fixed invisible water on reload
- Fixed water glitch on dam deletion on ground

Minor:
- Fixed +1 pop achievement for mods with different nb of cities
- Fixed refund of cross ways
- Warnings about water stay longer
- Ships try to reroute less often
- Modding: Default mod modifications commented ; change upload confirmation text
- New hint about recycling
- Add link to workshop
- Escape close console
- Fixed "Full" on assembly plants with full inputs.
- Fixed UI issue when planet name too long

v0.8 is a major update for the planet's environment. Enjoy the new world generation with vast oceans and container ships to cross them. Open paths with the new dynamite and terrain tools. Get a better overview of your industry with a new zoom that show the atmospheric currents and cloud simulation, and an enhanced and unified view. Visualize ground humidity and choose between the five available trees, each with their own temperature and humidity requirements.
Five musics have also been added, and the original soundtrack will be available in a few days (for $5).

I suggest to start a new world to enjoy the new generation, but you can continue your old save. However, it will add a lot of water. If you wish to avoid such change, you can activate the "v0.7.5" beta (in the "beta" menu of the steam properties of the game) to keep playing the old version.
Edit: if you have installed a bepinex mod, you might have to remove it, as it could make the loading freeze.

The game will have a 20% discount during the Summer Sale, and then its price will increase from $12 to $14. It was the same with v0.7 and will be the same with v0.9: the idea is that you pay only for what is already done, rather than for promises.


Here is the full changelog:


[h3]Plan B - v0.8.0 build 879[/h3]

Major Improvements:

• New world generation with larger ocean, better mountains shapes, improved city and mineral fields locations and size. And faster to generate.
  
• Container ship! transport 336 containers.
  
• New terrain modification items: Dynamite, Pile of dirt, Level and Smooth.
  
• Dynamic clouds (fully visible in the new max zoom out view) that shows moving clouds, shows dark side of the planet with city and industry lights.
  
• Unified enhanced view (keep Alt or Tab pressed) to show terrain altitude, ground humidity, highligted minerals.
  
• Modding in Steam Workshop. Basic lua modding: add or modify items, recipes, levels. Change 3D models, textures, sounds and musics. Creative mod as mod example.
  
• Palm trees, cactus and tropical trees. New life condition, new infos in description & tooltip
  
• Five new musics.
  

Improvements:

• Water, rain and evaporation simulation improved. Water appears more progressively.
  
• Improved drag (dragging over forests, starting drag while building)
  
• move minerals when using terrain modification tools on them, instead of destroying them
  

Balance:

• if more than 0.5 water (50m), prevent building roads/rails and stop vehicles.
  
• Much more water than before (to fill the large oceans)
  
• Max minerals per hexagon increased from 450 to 800. Less minerals fields but biggest fields far away from cities (much more total minerals than before).
  
• Forests life conditions heavy rebalance.
  
• depot buildable when a bit of water (if not too deep)
  
• MK3 depot moved from level 16 to 15.
  
• landmark tower unlocked at level 3
  

Bugs fix:

• Fixed bug that was changing items of depots
  
• Fixed crash with depot & factories popup
  
• Fixed artefacts in zoomed out view
  
• Fixed some display issue with water in contact with dam walls.
  
• Drones/container position at vehicles loading fixed
  

Minor:

• Lot of tooltips or descriptions improved.
  
• modify status bar infos (water in ground, temperature)
  
• display info on viability when planting trees
  
• big translation update from and to crowdin. Don't hesitate to help improving the translations!
  

HOTFIX on 2024-07-01 :

Plan B - v0.8.0 build 881 HOT FIX

• Fixed loading freeze when a default mod was created, and fix issues when removing a mod
  
• Fixed freeze with some corrupted containers dump items
  
• Fixed some refresh of normal texture
  

Here are some news about the v0.8 update! It's progressing well and should soon be complete.

Here is what is already done:
- new ocean and mountain generation, and improved water simulation.
- new view with visible clouds and city lights, and improved enhanced view (cf. screenshots below).
- dynamite (and other terraform tools) item.
- basic modding support (lua files to change item parameters and balance, 3D models, textures, sounds, etc.)
- additionnal musics

And here is what is yet to be done (if no unexpected issue) :
- container ships
- two new trees types
- improve mineral & cities placement at planet generation.

As with the previous major update, the price of the game will rise a bit. From $12 now it will rise to $14, but only after a 20% discount for a week at v0.8.0 release.
As i had explained before, the idea is that you pay only for what is already done, no promises, and future update are bonus.
The soundtrack will also be made purchasable with this v0.8.



A summary of the roadmap:
- v0.7 was about quality of life updates
- v0.8 is about the planet generation, the environment, the modding
- v0.9 will be about new content (new items, objectives and a simple story)
- v1.0 final release will be about the same as v0.9, once it's enough polished and balanced.

v0.8 is progressing well: new ocean generation, basic modding support and new views (one with visible clouds) are done. Don't hesitate to activate the beta branch to test it! Still a few features to work on before releasing it to everyone.

So, in the meantime, I would like to rewrite here an old post from twitter (2019!) that was explaining the hexagonal generation I've developped for Plan B. Here it is:


How to create a sphere made of hexagons? Hexagons of similar size and orientation?

The most common way to do that is to start from a regular icosahedron (solid of 20 of equilateral triangles), then subdiving each triangle (sphere tessellation). Each triangle vertex becomes an hexagon, as you can see in this pic (credits https://twitter.com/AndyGainey ; I'll come back to him):



Here is a sphere with 5 subdivisions (~10,000 hexagons). It's very nice, that's what I initially planned to use... but it's actually bad for a game. Not because of the 12 hidden pentagons, but because of the non-uniformity of the size, shape and orientation of the hexagons.



Here is what you can see at different positions of the sphere ; north pole being on top. Hexagons are of various shape, size, and orientation ; the result would be awful when you scroll in the game, very disturbant.



There are other ways to do this sphere tessellation, like the very interesting Healpix, which garantees the same size for each area, but have non-uniform shape, and squares instead of triangles/hexagons. https://healpix.sourceforge.io http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/HEALPix/



A very special and incredibly imaginative solution is the one of
@AndyGainey, explained in detail here: http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/procedural-planet-generation
To avoid avoid pentagones and predictable irregularities, he decided to do the total opposite: going full irregularity.



When irregularity (in size, shape and number of edges) is everywhere and random, the surface actually becomes regular - homogeneous in its irregularity. Really brillant, but not what I need for my game, as I really want regular hexagons.



So, what I do is that I divide the sphere in vertical "slices". Inside each slice, the triangles/hexagons are set in perfectly horizontal rows, and are (almost) pefectly equilateral. The non-uniformity is grouped in the links between slice.



One big advantage is that the more hexagons there are, the more regular it becomes. And for my game, I'll have a lot, lot of hexagons. Here is the sphere with a few thousands ones.



And here is a portion of the surface, with a few millions of hexagons. Can you spot the irregular shapes ? Not easy ! They should definitely not be a problem when playing on this field.



The "Icosahedron tessellation" method produces only 12 pentagons. With my method I get much more: 720 for a sphere of 14000 hexagons (5%). But the more hexagons, the better the ratio is. For 10 millions of hexagons, only 0.2% are pentagons or heptagons.
I have calculated the variation in the triangles edge lengths (are hexagons are uniform in shape and size ?): I get a coefficient of variation of 6.5% for the icosahedron tessellation ; but only 1.6% with my method.
The best advantage of my solution is about the orientation of the hexagons (are they "horizontal" ? I check the angles of the triangles edges). I get a coefficient of variation of only 3.8%, compared to the 55% with the icosahedron tessellation!


Here it is. 5 years later, i have no regret using this system, i still can't think of a more suited one. Although, i can say now that i definitely underestimated the technical complexity of using this system in a full game, to properly manage the slices borders.

If I had had more time, i would have loved to research further in this matter. Maybe find a way to avoid the slices. Or something else.
If any of you know of some interesting research about it, i'd be very interested to know about it!

Finally, the major performance increase upgrade is live! You might get x2 or better boost in framerate.
It was a much bigger task than anticipated, but we took the time to explore every optimisation that we could think of. And it was definitely worth it, the result is much better than anticipated.

We also took the opportunity to add the long requested intermediary zoom (between the zoomed levels with all details and the planet-scale view).

We also worked on several v0.8 very nice features, but those are hidden for now... Don't hesitate to activate the beta branch and/or follow the discord to get news of them in the following days!

And so this v0.7.5 was the last of all "quality of life" updates, now we'll work full time on new features, for v0.8 (water, terrain, environment) and then v0.9/v.1.0 (story & new items/objectives).


Plan B - v0.7.5 build 824

Improvements:
- BIG performances optimisation! On hexagons models visibility, trees, containers.
- New intermediary zoom level! With detailed models & containers stacks, but no drones and transports.
- Tutorial proper skip button, and reset option
- Improved looped sound volume & fade
- Shadow optim
- Improved water movement (much less "jumps" when moving camera)

Balance & tuning:
- Roads/Rails building: prioritize existing roads/rails. Shift to avoid straight paths.
- Various existing buildings models retakes

Bugs fix:
- Fixed level 1 blocked when tuto skipped
- Fixed train pathfinding crash on specific hexagon near pole
- Pause auto-save timer when in menu pause
- Fixed error on activating/deactiving fx options
- Fixed refresh error in y=987 coordinate
- Fixed refresh of containers when item is dragged

Minor:
- Enter/Escape as shortcuts for item nb max popup
- Reset UI Scaling option when modifying resolutions/fullscreen option in launch screen (to fix any corrupted ui scaling value)