Friday Blog 148 - The Client-Server Split
Colony Survival is always split in two. There’s the client: the part of the game that runs on your PC, which renders the game and the UI. Then there is the server. When you join a multiplayer game hosted by a friend, your friend runs the server. But even in singleplayer, there’s always a CS-server running - just in the background on your own PC.
This means development for singleplayer and multiplayer is pretty much identical, which is very useful. But it also means that developing new features is quite a bit harder than it would be for a purely singleplayer game. It’s a bit comparable to driving a car with two persons - one using the gas pedal and the brakes, the other one using the steering wheel. It’s possible, but it’ll require quite a lot of communication and it’ll always be less efficient than just one driver.
Like the two drivers, the client doesn’t automatically have all the information the server has. One of the limitations of the client was having knowledge of only one colony. The server only sent the information for the currently active colony. We wanted the statistics menu to display info for other owned colonies as well, so that had to be fixed. It took a couple of days, but it’s done! In the internal dev build, it’s now possible to switch to the statistics of your other colonies.
Now that the client has data from other colonies, it’s possible to improve other small problems as well. Previously, the safe zone of other owned colonies wasn’t shown (because the client didn’t know about them). That’s already fixed in the dev build. Another quick improvement would be to the trading menu. You can remotely start trading from distant colonies to your active one, but where the UI should display the remote colony's stockpile, it displays the active colony's stockpile. The problem was already on our bug tracker and should be easily solvable now.
Zun also added support for negative values in the statistics graph this week. Stockpile items cannot possibly be negative, so it wasn’t useful there. But of course, happiness can drop into negative numbers. It resulted in some strange results with the logarithmic scale, but that was fixed as well.
We still want to add some extra data sets to the graph, like the percentage of the time that jobs are idling, and the happiness stats per happiness item. Then the menu still requires a bit of polish, but the update should be ready in 2-3 weeks!
Last week, I wrote about the arrival of my Valve Index VR headset. We asked whether you were interested in Colony Survival VR, and we got a lot of enthusiastic replies! I hadn’t expected VR to be so widespread already. This week, I did some small tests trying to get VR to work in Colony Survival. To my surprise, it was relatively easy to get head tracking and “hand representation” in there!
GIF 1 / GIF 2
Gif 1 shows one of the first VR experiments, with broken shaders. Gif 2 shows proper textures for blocks, but broken textures for non-block objects. It’s promising, but don’t expect VR anytime soon. Converting all the controls and UI to have decent, consumer-friendly VR-support is a lot more work than just glitching some VR-headtracking into the game. We’ll first overhaul the regular old non-VR UI, and we’ll probably do some content-updates afterwards. VR might come afterwards, depending on surveys.
Bedankt voor het lezen :D
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