Imagine Earth News

Dear space colonists, today we present our latest update for Imagine Earth - Planetary Colonization. Many improvements to the global management system allow you to keep track and control your complex and full-grown colonies and optimize the daily colonizing work on new planets. We would be happy if you test the latest features and give us your feedback and that you come to the forums and put your most desired features on the wishlist. Best regards, Jens and Martin.


P.S: We hope that you and your beloved ones are and stay healthy. Take care!


[h2]Great List of Constructs[/h2]


The new building list represents an almost too modest revolution for total control over your global colonies. Here you get an overview of all buildings in your colony. You can sort them by productivity and condition and have them equipped with upgrades, repaired or cleaned. There is also a list of all resources that are located in your area and can be mined directly. In the city list all districts are listed and can be checked for their quality of life.


[h2]Release Date[/h2]

What can I say, the veterans among you may already enjoy this as a running gag, but we have to postpone the final release of Imagine Earth 1.0 once again. We ask for your patience and understanding, as it is our main effort to make Imagine Earth really good and a smooth experience. The port to the Unity Engine went relatively well and was worth the work in every respect, but still took twice as much time as we had hoped for. As is often the case, the devil is in the details and there are a lot of game features that need to be balanced and interlinked.


Long story short: We postpone the release until September 2020. It is of course also in the true nature of this project that a global build-up game with economic strategy and authentic planet and climate simulation is a bit oversized for two developers. But we never lost motivation or faith in the core idea and the idealism that made this project so special for ourselves as well. The new date gives us a very generous amount of time to do fine tuning and add some final features. Of course you will always be able to play all finished progress immediately in early access and we will keep you informed on everything…


[h2]Remediation and Maintenance[/h2]


You wished that we introduce the possibility of automatic cleaning of dirt and automatic building repair earlier in the game. The boss will always bring some construction kits for the cleaning center and the maintenance station at the end of the first missions. So they will also be better introduced by the story.


[h2]New Item: Propaganda Hack[/h2]


With the new Propaganda Hack Item you can get the colonists of another faction to revolt. Using the hack will start an uprising in the selected district. This will cause a classic loss of tax revenue and spread to other parts of the city.


[h2]New Achievements[/h2]


Need new challenges playing Imagine Earth? No problem, we have added three new achievements for you to earn. You can complete the mission on Udion Torix or win three competitions on Workshop Planets. One achievement can only be unlocked by building your own planet in sandbox mode.


[h2]Interact with Status Icons[/h2]


This feature is a really practical thing. In the event of a fire, riot, incident or damaged building, you will now have a corresponding icon displayed above the building and you can click directly on it to perform the necessary action such as extinguish or repair. We've also unified how the icons above the buildings and units are displayed in the game.


[h2]Revised Gaia Graphics and Story[/h2]


We have rewritten a part of the background story of Imagine Earth. Whenever you discover one of the Gaianic terraforming constructs like a temple or the citadel, the story of the Gaians continues to be told - an ancient race who were able to use and change the planetary force fields. As the game progresses, we will learn why they have left behind their advanced terraforming technology on so many newly discovered planets.

Note: In the preview version this is work in progress.


[h2]No More Research Limitations[/h2]

Correctly read, we recently realized that we have long since developed our research system so comprehensively that we only need research budgets as a limiting factor in the campaign missions. From now on you can freely research what you need in freeplay and in competition mode. By building City Centers and Research Districts you can increase the efficiency of your research.


[h2]Prioritized Mining[/h2]


One of those options where you wonder why they have not always been there. When all of your harvesting drones are busy, you can use this simple button to specify that the targeted resource be mined with priority, then a drone is removed from the most worthless resource that is currently being mined.


[h2]Jump to Native Twin Camps[/h2]


As you probably know, the Rounosian Natives always live in twin camps. With this new button you can jump between them.


[h2]Switch Upgrades of Towers[/h2]


Finally, it is also possible to convert the upgrades of towers, frontier buoys and research centers. So depending on the threat situation, energy shields, lasers or pulse cannons can be installed.


[h2]Domination Victory[/h2]

You can now also win a competition when all other companies give up their colonies or are taken over.


[h2]Gameplay Improvements[/h2]

• Allow to use piracy item on all opponent fields (not only warehouse)
  
• Allow to hack stock shares of competitors that are hold by other competitors
  
• Increased rocks, rare resources and deco elements for barren biome type
  
• Send drone to rebuild constructs
  
• Terraforming can make volcanoes erupt
  
• Allow spaceships (e.g. uplink) to land on forests
  
• Territory of other companies taken over by native camps is no longer considered an offensive act
  

[h2]Graphic Improvements[/h2]

• Improved overall rendering performance (~10% FPS increase)
  
• Added sub meshes for big mountains that take multiple fields
  
• Reduced visibility of front clouds
  
• Custom selector visualization for ocean fields
  
• Improved visibility of colony borders at day
  

[h2]UI Improvements[/h2]

• Show animation when new items are bought or received
  
• Increased size of bookmark and factions panels (top right and bottom right UI elements
  
• City bookmarks: Add icon for all your cities that have no bookmark
  
• Tool ring: Show which icon belongs to open sub panels
  
• Scan item: Show icons on top of possible fields
  
• Improved layout of dialogs
  
• Improved visibility of loading indicator
  

[h2]Fixes[/h2]

• Fixed alignment of assimilators taking over cities
  
• Fixed niter-pumpkin graphics (depending on size)
  
• Fixed problems with too many pirates appearing in competition games
  

Finally! There it is, the new version of Imagine Earth using the Unity graphics engine. It took us a while to port all visualizations and UI elements, but the result it totally worth it - especially because we can move much faster now based on a modern graphics engine with a lot of tools and features that make the live a lot easier for us.

[h2]Full savegame compatibility[/h2]
Before we have a look into what is new, we want to point out that your existing savegames will still work. If you experience any problems related to that, please note that we lately moved the savegames to a new directory:

%userprofile%\AppData\Local\ImagineEarth

If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:

Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„
Enter the password „oldgameengine„

[h2]Ocean shader[/h2]
A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader that comes with refraction effects for objects that are under water.


[h2]Physics based materials & new lightning[/h2]
The unity engine made it a lot easier for us to add beautiful visual effects. We use physics based rendering for all buildings and world objects, which for example gives rare resource deposits metallic reflections in the sun.

Also each planet theme now has a much stronger colorization and individual look.



[h2]Post-processing effects[/h2]
The game now makes use of an improved bloom post-processing effect and a depth of field filter, as shown in the image below.

There is also an exposure filter that lights the scene up on the night side of the planet.



[h2]3D Sound[/h2]
Finally we have a working solution for the 3D sounds in the world. This feels especially great with the new landing sounds of the trader space ships.

[h2]Planetary shield[/h2]
This is the new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids. The triangle elements randomly move and make it look very organic.



[h2]Explosions[/h2]
I picture says more than a thousand words...



[h2]Thunderstorms[/h2]
The thunderstorm has a completely new visualization and each lightning strike puts the scene into a bright light.



[h2]Pollution, snow and more particles[/h2]
Snow areas now look more natural and sometimes have a decent snow particle effect.

We have also used particle effects and the new building shader to intensify the pollution visualization. Thus it's now easier to see which fields have a high pollution and need cleaning.

[h2]Forests[/h2]
Trees in forest now move independently from each other in the wind. Also we have added basic shadows that make the forests easier to see on the night side of the planet.

[h2]Other improvements[/h2]

• Improved video quality and playback.
  
• "Building menu" title on the building ring to make it better distinguishable from the tool ring
  
• Consistent usage of fertility icon
  
• Volcano and other big objects: The tool ring is now positioned over the clicked field instead of the center of the object
  

[h2]Greetings space colonists,[/h2]

The time has come and the new version with the Unity engine goes online as a standard version of Imagine Earth. For all those who have not tried it yet, a lot of nice impressions and new visual experiences are waiting. The work of the last months was mainly of technical and graphical nature. We want to inaugurate the official, new version on Sunday and celebrate with Writing Bull in his German live stream on Twitch.

[h2]Twitch.tv/Writing_Bull[/h2]

The live stream will start tomorrow, Sunday at 15:00 (3pm), Central European Time.

During the show we will press the big red button and the new engine will be unlocked as the standard version on steam. The broadcast is in German, because Writing Bull is one of the most popular streamers for buildup and strategy games in the German-speaking world. We are happy that he discovered Imagine Earth at gamescom in the Indie Arena Booth this year and wants to play it now.



[h2]11 Keys Giveaway[/h2]

If you follow our Twitter account until the show is ending around 6pm tomorrow and subscribe to our monthly newsletter or join the chat on Twitch you can win one of 11 Steam-Keys. The winners will be announced in the stream, but will also receive a prize notification by mail or message. Among other things, the reason for this generosity is, that we want to get our new release tested as soon as possible and are looking forward to your comments, impressions and ideas.



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[h2]Retro Times[/h2]

If you want to try out the old version again after tomorrow afternoon on for comparison, you can do so with the following instructions:

Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
Under „Properties…“ click „Betas„
Enter the password „oldgameengine„

Update: The old game engine is no longer supported, since the new engine is running smoothly now.

Hello lovely space colonizers, a new update had to be done. Some bugs and exotic writing problems in the documents folder of Windows didn't want to stop appearing for some players while being not reproducible by us. We suspect hyperactive anti-virus programs behind it and the like, but now we've rewritten the Imagine Earth method to save your profiles and your savegames to end it once and for all!

Thunderstorms first time with light effecting the terrain


Imagine Earth will copy your populated worlds and achievements into a new folder the next time you start the game.

Savegames are now stored here: %userprofile%/AppData/Local/ImagineEarth

As always with our updates, all savegames should still work afterwards, a circumstance that is less self-evident than you might think, or so to say that causes extreme activity at our end ;) Please try if everything still works as usual.

Really intense particle explosions


On that occasion we added steam cloud support for our game. This means savegames and scores will now be synchronized via Steam.

Depending on the amount of savegames you have and your upload speed this may take a while when starting the game the next time.



Of course also the new Unity Engine beta version of our game has also undergone some optimizations as we want to change to the new Universal Pipeline of the Unity Engine with the new year if all goes well. If you want to have a look at it, check in the last dev post how easy you can unlock it on Steam. Everything is already in its place and running. https://www.imagineearth.info/alpha-56-preview/

Greetings Colony Managers, surely you are wondering what happened to the monthly updates that we used to deliver all the way. The simple reason is that big changes are coming. After 5 years of early access we decided to make an engine switch to Unity before finally releasing the game.

We worked restlessly and after two month the new version is ready to be tested. So to make it short if you're already supporting Imagine Earth in early access we wanted to give you the opportunity to join the preview of the new version.



Why all the work you might ask. Well we simply wanted to make it easier for us to provide you with great visuals and to have a better out of the box stability and compatibility than the community driven Monogame engine, we used before. It also gives us easy portability to other platforms and consoles. New opportunities await us in terms of graphics and shaders so the quality, look and the atmosphere of the game can finally meet the aspiration and complexity of its content that we have created over all the years.

Please help us getting the new baby tested!

1. Right-click Imagine Earth in your Steam Library.
   
2. Under "Properties..." click "Betas"
   
3. Enter the password "unitypreview".
   

Important note: You can always leave the beta and return the the existing version of the game. All savegames will be compatible!

The current version comes with automatic crash reporting. This means that we will receive a technical error report that will help us to find and fix the problem.

• A good example for these beautiful opportunities is the new ocean shader.
  
• See the noble metal deposits glitter in the sun.
  
• Experience physics based rendering for all constructs in the world.
  
• Improved lighting system renders the world more colorful and shining.
  
• Finally we have an improved solution for the 3D sounds in the world and it comes with new effects for incoming space ships.
  
• Finally we have a contemporary implementation for hd video for the intro and cut-scenes.
  
• A new style for the planetary shield generated by the great pyramids.
  

Expect more exciting stuff to happen in Imagine Earth - Planetary Colonization soon as the Unity universal render pipeline is still in development we keep the game up to date of course. After all this engineering work we can't wait to get back into game design and put some well thought-out ideas into practice. Please stay tuned for what comes next.