Colony Survival News

Things got wonky in 4K

All mentioned changes in this blog concern the internal dev build that has not been released yet

This week's work had quite a lot of visible results, and we’re eager to share them with you. First of all, we’ve added a new menu called “interface settings”. It adds the much requested feature to be able to permanently see the blue “block highlight”, that during normal gameplay only appears when you’re removing and placing blocks. Toggling this option “on” means you’ll always see it when hovering over a block.

Apart from that, the menu also allows you to rapidly re-enable the “developer buttons”. These are the functions mapped to the F keys. They were enabled by default in 0.1.0, but too many people accidentally broke their game with them. A while ago, they were disabled and hidden behind a toggle, and that toggle has received a better place in the UI now.



A new option, enabled by default, is the adaptive crosshair. It subtly changes shape and color according to the context. It’s small and simple when the crosshair is aiming at the air or a distant block. When clicking will result in mining a block, the crosshair grows larger. When hovering over the banner, it turns red/yellow; when hovering over a colonist; orange, when hovering over a job block; blue. The results can be seen in the following image, with the size of the crosshair 400% enlarged for clarity purposes:



It’s a minor change, but it should make the game feel slightly more “tactile” and intuitive. Last but not least, there’s a UI scaling option that’s mainly meant to resolve a common issue for people with 4K monitors. Until now, the UI itself didn’t scale with resolution. Compare it to plates on a table: when you shrink the table, the plates stay the same size. That’s pretty useful to keep things legible on a small / low-res monitor, but on a 4K monitor it meant you had some tiny plates in the corners of a massive table.

We thought fixing this issue was relatively complicated, but some minor tweaks worked a lot better than expected, so we’ve now got support for UI scaling. Players can choose what they feel is comfortable, and playing in 4K resolution is a lot more viable now.

Fullscreen

While Zun has been working on issues like this, I’ve kept growing my Unity / C# / VR skills. My projects have been growing steadily more complicated - up to the point that I’m regularly breaking them in a way that can’t be fixed with some CTRL-Z’s. I’ve finally decided to learn to deal with Git. It was easier to set up than I thought, and it works very well. Git is a hugely important tool in many organizations that develop software, and it makes collaboration a lot easier and more reliable. It’s another small step in the long road of being able to contribute to Colony Survival directly, instead of merely providing textures / 3D-models / ideas :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Monday morning, Zun’s PC broke. It seemed that the motherboard was malfunctioning. It was a relatively old one, and buying a decent new one also involved buying a new CPU and RAM. And while he was overhauling the thing anyway, he also decided to purchase upgrades like a new case. All the parts should’ve been delivered on Tuesday, but one part suddenly went out of stock and thus the entire order was delivered Thursday afternoon. One benefit: Zun’s PC is a lot faster now :)

So there’s not much to talk about in regards to in-game changes, but we think there’s still plenty of relevant stuff to say. This week, we were having some pretty extensive internal discussions about “suggestions”. A common question that popped up again in #general is “where is the suggestions channel”. We don’t have one!

A channel for suggestions implies that it’s for suggestions only. But lists of isolated suggestions, especially for broad features like “NPC colonies” and “war”, aren’t very useful. What we need is more detailed information. How exactly would you implement it? Which new UI elements are needed? How much development time is it worth? What percentage of the community likes it, and how much do they like it? Would it make older savegames incompatible?

That’s why we’d generally like people to share their suggestions in #general. It invites discussion with the rest of the community, and that’s very useful to flesh out suggestions.

That doesn’t mean the current system is perfect though. We've got a bunch of goals that are hard to optimize for all at the same time:

• Individuals should be able to share their suggestions with us, the devs
  
• The community should be able to see suggestions made by others from the community
  
• The community should be able to see the plans we the devs are working on, and the things we’re planning to add later on
  
• All these plans and suggestions should have detailed explanations with pros and cons, without turning it into a TL;DR
  
• Players should be able to easily leave feedback; comments would be good, but quick “like/dislike” feedback is useful as well
  
• The list of plans and suggestions should be sortable / auto-sort based on feedback like that

We haven’t found the perfect system to accomplish that yet, but suggestions for suggestions-systems are welcome! ;)



There’s one very frequent suggestion we’d like to discuss in this blog, and it’s NPC colonies. We’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s a very complex topic. I’d like to start with linking back to Friday Blog 74 - Edge Cases. At the end, I quoted Von Clausewitz, and that neatly summarizes the blog in two lines: Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War..

Years ago, NPC colonies seemed very intuitive to me as well. We’ve got AI farmers, AI guards, AI miners and AI crafters. How hard could it be to spawn some buildings randomly in the world, and populate them with these AI colonists? You could even develop multiple stages of each colony, and make new buildings and colonists appear when things go well - and the opposite as well.

But having them merely as scenery that you can’t interact with is pretty boring. It should be connected to the main gameplay: you should be able to overwhelm their defenses with an army of your own, to break through their walls and plunder their stockpiles.

But implementing that is going to be very hard. It makes me fantasize about real life medieval sieges with trebuchets and armies scaling the walls, but it’s not going to look like that. Players have the ability to very quickly build walls and dig tunnels. And without gravity, structural integrity concerns and supply line considerations to limit their effectiveness, efficient assaults are going to look nothing like real life, because the world of Colony Survival is too far removed from real life.

So apart from adding the core features of NPC colonies existing, we’re also going to have to do a lot of work to add new features to make interacting with them fun and engaging. True warfare would be very difficult, but we’ve also thought of having NPC colonies with just some more abstract trading/diplomacy features. But that would turn the actual colony itself primarily into a fancy (and expensive in terms of development time) backdrop for a trading/diplomacy interface.

And if there’s one thing we’ve decided on, due to experiences with 0.7.0, and World of Warcraft, and VR, is that we don’t want to invest heavily into “UI features” anymore. Yes, UI is necessary, and the UI that we have should be streamlined and intuitive and as beautiful as we can manage. We’re working on that right now.

But the best gameplay has you acting in the “real” (in-game) world, creating similarly real consequences. Construct a building with your own hands, go to the “physical” place where you want a worker to be, place a job block, and watch a colonist actually move to that location in your own 3D world. Such actions are the core of what makes Colony Survival fun to play. We want to add features that augment and improve that, not add mostly separate stuff that in practice consists out of 90% clicking through UI menus.

So although we can imagine awesome sieges against NPC colonies (we love Total War games, especially the older ones!), implementing that properly is nearly impossible and very, very difficult. It’ll take years and we’d still have a sizable chance of not succeeding as well as we’d like. Instead of taking that risk for a “non-core feature”, we’d rather improve the current gameplay to its maximum potential, in smaller steps.

We hope that makes sense! We’d love to have your opinion. Is there any other common suggestion that you would like to hear our detailed opinion about?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This week, we've implemented and changed some things that should be visible a lot of the time! Firstly, we changed one of our main fonts. It was kinda runic, and we thought it fit the medieval / Viking aesthetic pretty well. But it only had capital letters, so a lot of things in the UI were WRITTEN LIKE THIS.

We experiment with a couple of different fonts that support both regular and capital letters, and we found one we were pretty fond of. It lacks the runic inspiration, but we really like how it changes the UI. It’s more legible, and calmer - not like someone is screaming at you.

Here’s an example of the main menu with both the old font (on top) and the new font (below):



In the above example, it's just a simple font change. But in the next example, you can see how it combines with the other UI changes. We believe it’s a major step in the right direction, and that it’s both aesthetically and functionally superior. But we still love to hear your feedback!



And while we’re comparing old and new UIs, here’s a final example. Apart from a complete revamp of the style, it also clarifies the old system by dividing it up into infinite and limited trades.



There’s another minor feature that’s visible a majority of the time: the crosshair. We have never given it much thought, but are trying to improve it now. We’re planning to turn it into a dynamic crosshair, one that changes slightly to fit different situations. For example, here are four states that could be reflected in the crosshair:

• You’re aiming at the air/distant blocks that can’t be touched from your current position
  
• You’re aiming at a close block that will be removed if you click
  
• You’re aiming at a job block and right-clicking will open a new menu
  
• You’re aiming at the banner and right-clicking will open the linked menu

It’s a subtle improvement, but it should make the game both more intuitive and “feel more professional” :)

The major changes of 0.7.4 are finished now. We’re “stitching it up” again. Zun’s testing the game on Mac & Linux, and the updated eye adaptation seems to be wonky on Linux right now. He’s also got to check mods, and the way the game handles outdated ones. We’re expecting this to take roughly two weeks, and hopefully the update will be released then!



Since shortly after the release of the game, we’ve hosted a Discord server, and we feel like it has been tremendously helpful. It has led to a lot of insightful discussions about the game and we’ve received hundreds of bug reports there. Some people have stuck around for years, even when they weren’t playing Colony Survival very actively anymore, and we’ve got to know them a bit more personally. That’s why we’ve also got off-topic channels, to discuss topics that aren’t directly related to the game (although anything could potentially lead to new features!).

2020 has been an intense year, with a deadly virus, deadly police brutality and deadly riots. This has led to some heated debates, which have caused more frequent discussions about our moderation policies. How best to deal with this? We’ve discussed multiple solutions.

A.) Ban Politics

It’s a relatively common suggestion. Politics can be quite inflammatory, and apparently, many other Discord servers forbid the discussion of it. But to us, this seems quite impractical. Take for example COVID-19 and climate change. These are subjects that have been politicized. Sharing any facts related to these topics could be construed as being in favor of or opposed to certain policies. This means we’d have to ban any discussion of these topics. And the full list of topics that would have to be banned would be endless, because nearly any topic is tangentially related to politics.

B.) Ban a list of Controversial Subjects

So it seems it’s not practical to ban all political subjects. But not all political subjects are highly controversial! So we could ban only the controversial ones.

But making that list of controversial subjects would be extremely subjective. We’re Dutch, and what’s controversial here isn’t controversial in the USA, and vice versa. Every nation, every group, every individual has a list of subjects they consider to be controversial. Even relatively simple things like facemasks have become controversial!

So “The List of Banned Controversial Subjects” would be very controversial and subjective itself, and will dissatisfy a lot of people.

C.) Ban Partisanship

Over the years, we’ve seen and moderated a lot of discussions. We’ve seen debates about tricky, complicated subjects go very well. We’ve seen debates about very benign topics go completely wrong and turn hostile. Of course, “stay respectful of the people you’re debating with” is the foremost rule that prevents discussions from turning sour. But we’ve noticed something else that strongly correlates with debates going wrong.

If we had to explain that thing in one word it would be “partisanship”. Especially in the US, many topics are tied to political parties, and each party is connected to a long range of judgements.

You’d like to see more affordable healthcare? You must be a Democrat, and thus you’re an evil commie who will lead the country to totalitarianism and collapse.
You’re critical of unlimited immigration? You must be a Republican, and thus you’re a fascist nazi who wants to physically abuse all minorities.

Perhaps the other person actually does support that party, and perhaps giving that party power will indeed lead to bad outcomes. But we’ve now seen both sides vilify the other side plenty of times while skipping over actual, practical topics. That vilification itself, that refusal to talk about the details of complicated topics, seems to be the main problem leading towards bad outcomes.

Words often don’t mean what they mean at face value. We say things not merely to communicate the spoken facts, but to signal allegiance to X or opposition to Y. We say things, not because they are true, but to make friends - and enemies! And that’s how we tend to interpret things as well. When somebody is critical, we’re quick to assume they dislike us.

So this partisanship and tribalism comes to us humans very naturally. But that doesn’t mean we’ve got to give in to these feelings, or avoid triggering them in all circumstances. We think the best approach to moderating our off-topic channels is to encourage some maturity, not to ban specific subjects. When you’re discussing sensitive topics and run in some opposition, don’t talk or read in the way mentioned in the paragraph above. Stick to the facts. When somebody advocates violence or extremely disturbed things, ping us, moderators and admins. But for other topics: don’t read too much into it. Don’t assume what’s not stated. Don’t widen the discussion to how you think “their side” is always wrong and immoral. Debate the specifics of the issue itself.

When the guidelines above are followed by both sides, debates tend to stay relatively objective and respectful, and both active participants and passive readers learn something. But when these principles are ignored, things tend to escalate quickly towards a completely unproductive, unfun, hostile situation.

In the last few weeks, we’ve tried to nip partisanship in the bud, whenever it occurs, from all sides of the political spectrum. This has displeased people both on the left ánd on the right, so we feel like we’re acting pretty reasonably. We hope we can foster a culture of rationally and respectfully debating the “facts on the ground", instead of hosting an ideological WW1-battlefield. This is a very complex topic, and political depolarization isn’t something we as a culture seem to have figured out yet, so all of your feedback is welcome!

Here are three useful articles that we’ve based our policies on:
Reporting the Results of the Reality Die and the Tragedy of the Green Rationalists You need more Buckets Feel free to skip towards “Part 2: Simulacrum”

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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This morning started with a long call between me and Zun. He thought he had perhaps had a migraine attack in the middle of the night, and he had woken up pretty groggy. Then we talked about the progress of the week and what to write in the Friday Blog. At the end of the call, at the start of this afternoon… I suddenly got a migraine attack. Luckily, these rarely last longer than 4-5 hours, so we’re still able to put out a Friday Blog on Friday - even if it’s Friday evening :) But this will be a short one.

[All changes concern the internal dev build and have not been released yet]

Zun has updated the version of Unity that Colony Survival runs on. We were still using Unity 2018, but we’ve now gone to Unity 2019. That’s the awesome thing about Unity - it makes it possible to actually skip 2020. This new version upgrades some post processing effects like Eye Adaptation and Anti-Aliasing. They also required some tweaking, so the game looks slightly different now. Better, IMHO! The screenshot above is made with the 2019 version.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. Unity 2019 doesn't support the Linux 32 bit version of the game, so it’ll be deprecated with the next update. Luckily, this affects only a very small percentage of our playerbase because the vast majority of Linux users are on 64 bit systems. Our stated minimum system requirements already recommended 64-bit Linux for years.

It has also caused issues with the torch shader for certain Mac configurations. Zun has found and implemented a workaround! Last but not least, he has also ported the features that used Rust to now use Unity Burst. It won't have a noticeable impact now, but it's a good starting point for future developments.

That’s it for today, enjoy your weekend, don’t get COVID and certainly don’t spread it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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This week, progress on the interface has continued. We’re currently not working on any revolutionary new stuff that totally changes how the game works, but we’re adding a lot of polish and small little tweaks that fix common demands. One example is the converter that can make singleplayer worlds suitable for multiplayer and vice versa. Another example we’ve been looking at this week is making the UI properly suitable for 4K monitors.

Below is an image that contrasts the old 0.7.3 Colony Menu (first half) with the planned 0.7.4 Colony Menu (unexpectedly, the second half). In our current internal dev build, it does look close to that and the functionality is there! Many other UI elements have been overhauled in a similar way.





In previous blogs, we’ve been discussing our ideas and plans to overhaul some core elements of the current gameplay. Decoupling the size of the monster threat and the amount of required happiness items from the amount of colonists still sounds like a good idea to us, but as many of you have warned us, the change has to be implemented very carefully. It could easily backfire. We’re still fine-tuning our plans!

In last week’s comments, we got multiple replies that suggested an interesting idea. They wanted to build wider. Instead of multiple small colonies, or a very tall one, a bigger colony with more land area. This requires a larger safe zone. There even was some suggestion that this was the case in the past. Although the way monsters spawn has changed a bit, it shouldn’t be forcing players to build a more constrained colony?

Anyway, we like the idea of larger safe zones, allowing players to build larger colonies that still look good (meaning they don’t rely on gigantic farm towers). But this also requires better, more efficient pathfinding, as it quickly gets very expensive when you increase the search radius. Potentially, we could limit colonists to not even search the whole colony for a bed - if a bed isn’t in a decent range of their corner of the (large) colony, they’ll start complaining.

It could also require a different way of fighting monsters, if the distance from the banner to the “unsafe zone” gets too large. Perhaps you’ll need to place “monster-banners” at the edges of your colony, perhaps you’ll have to build a “monster-portal” and a containment facility in the middle of your colony to unlock a much larger safe zone. There are lots of discussions about the future of the game happening these weeks! And we do listen to your input, so please keep sharing it :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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