Colony Survival News

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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Bog's submission for the Artificial Extinction contest, one of the winners

This week, Zun has added statistics for happiness and food consumption. That cost about 1.5 or 2 days of work. I spent a roughly equal amount of time making mock-ups for the new UI. The rest of the week wasn’t very productive - at least not directly for the next update. We’ve been working pretty much non-stop since Zun’s trip to Japan in September, and it seems this week was mostly some kind of non-planned holiday. We worried a lot about the coronavirus and the lockdown does impact our lives. We’ve calmed down quite a bit now, but of course, coronavirus is still a dangerous and deadly problem.



But for the past 48 hours, I was distracted by something totally else. The VR headset I ordered, a Valve Index, finally arrived! :D VR has been amazing until now so I’ll spend the rest of the blog talking about that. If you’re only interested in the next update, please stop reading now. If you’re interested in the future of gaming and our company - enjoy! ;)

I was expecting pretty complicated hardware that took a decent time and lots of fiddling to set up - and that was not true! The package (headset, controllers, base stations) is very easy to set up. I think it took less than fifteen minutes from opening the package to my first VR experience.

Steam has an entirely new “mode” especially for VR, predictably named “SteamVR”. Every time you launch SteamVR, you appear in your SteamVR Home. It’s a fancy apartment with a big backyard in the middle of mountains. You can get used to VR there: walk around, spawn some items, grab them and throw them around. There’s an airbrush you can use to draw 3D-images in the air. And there are some big screens on the walls. One screen has a list of VR-compatible games you own, another has info on popular and top selling VR games.

My expectation for VR was for it to be pretty clunky. There’s this weird teleportation-style of movement, and strange controllers. But the teleporting feels very natural in no time at all, and the controllers are super accurate. Navigating UIs with a regular controller can be a pain, but you can use the Valve Index controllers to point at in-game objects and menus, similar to a laser pointer. It’s very quick and intuitive.

Apart from using them as laser pointers, the controllers know when individual fingers grab them. This means that you can do normal grabbing motions with your arms, hands and fingers IRL and they will be translated very accurately into in-game motions.

Your hands in Half-Life Alyx

This allows you to experience completely new things in VR that are just impossible to reproduce in normal keyboard+mouse games. Do you remember Surgeon Simulator? Lots of people loved it for all the wacky stuff that happened when your clumsy hands interacted with all the objects in the world. To some degree, every VR game is Surgeon Simulator, but except for the controls being clunky and messy, the controls are pretty much perfect.

My first half hour of Half-Life Alyx was purely messing about. You spawn on a balcony with all kinds of objects. I’ve grabbed every single one of them, rotated them around to inspect them, followed by throwing them away and hopefully breaking them. Every bottle, every flower pot, every brick. It’s incredibly satisfying, and I’ve never done something like it before VR.

Eventually, you get into combat. And it’s super intense and exhilarating. To reload, you don’t just press R, you’ve actually got to remove your empty magazine, grab a new one, insert it and cock your gun. Throwing a grenade isn’t just pressing G, you actually need to grab it and make a throwing motion. Crouching isn’t “C”, to crouch in-game you’ve got to crouch IRL!

VR takes regular gaming and adds way more detailed input and output. It adds the motion of your head and the details of your hands to the input, and instead of the output being a monitor that only takes up only a small of your IRL field of view, the output is a VR headset that immerses you into the game completely. This opens up a new near infinite range of possibilities in gaming.

VTOL VR

In the past, there have been a couple of trends that claimed to be the future but ultimately seemed to peter out again. Motions controls like the Wii and Kinect are one example, 3D movies another. Pokémon GO was very innovative in 2016 but similar games haven’t achieved popularity since then. But we are starting to become fairly certain that VR or something highly like it will stay and keep growing for a long time. In 2030, it might even be roughly the same size or bigger than regular old WASD+mouse gaming. There are a couple of barriers to VR but I think most of them can be overcome or will shrink in the future:

• Cost. VR headsets (and requirements like controllers and base stations) are still pretty expensive. But the costs of similar tech like desktop PCs and smartphones has dropped rapidly in the past, so I expect the same to happen here. Currently, you also need pretty high-end hardware in your PC to run VR: VR requires consistent 90+FPS to feel smooth, and it needs to be rendered twice (once for each eye) in a pretty high resolution. But as hardware gets better, VR-ready PCs should become more affordable.
  
• Quality. The first VR headsets were pretty primitive - like the first mobile phones. There was too much delay between head motion and the movement of the image and the resolution was low. But like mobile phones, VR headsets get better every year. More resolution, quicker response times, more accurate tracking, more comfortable headsets. The Valve Index is very usable and a lot of fun, but in this new paradigm of gaming, it’s clear where progress can be made. Even more resolution, less effects like glare, less bulkier headsets. If current trends continue, VR headsets in 2030 will be very detailed and comfortable.
  
• Practical problems. You’re pretty much blind to the world when gaming in VR, and you need at least enough space to stand, to crouch and to swing your arms around you in all directions. There are probably quite a lot of people gaming in cramped bedrooms and home offices without space to do the things mentioned above. You can play Colony Survival on a laptop in an airplane and that will be impossible with VR games that require significant arm motion - private jets excluded ;) But people have made space in their homes for big flatscreen TVs, so I expect more and more people to leave space for a VR corner as well.

Currently, VR is getting more and more popular every year - see the graph of player counts in VR-games below. With VR headsets getting better and more affordable in the future, and with more and more great quality VR games becoming available, we expect this trend to keep going and accelerating for a pretty long time.

The huge peak at the end is the release of Half-Life Alyx

I’ve already tried to get my Valve Index to work with Unity, the engine we’re using for Colony Survival. This was really easy to accomplish. If it’s possible to add decent VR support to CS within 2-3 months of development time, we think it’s worth it and will do it in the future. There’s a fair chance our next project will be a VR compatible game!

Now, please don’t interpret this as “they’re going to focus on a niche market that’s not relevant to me”. CS is currently 7 years old, and we don’t think we’ll shift our focus to a new project before at a minimum 2023. That means that our next project might have a release date of 2028-2030. That’s probably a very different time from now. If a large majority of our playerbase owns a VR headset by then, and VR+hand tracking offers so many advantages and new possibilities, it seems very sensible to develop for VR. At the very least, it’s an exciting technology that deserves consideration and experimentation!

What’s your opinion of VR? Do you already own a VR headset, and if you don’t, do you think you’ll buy one eventually? What would you think of CS VR or our next project being in VR? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D
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Landru’s submission, one of the winners of the contest!

This morning, we reached the deadline of the contest for Artificial Extinction! We’ve picked the 10 winners and sent them all a Steam Key for AE. A lot of the submissions were very creative and impressive, so thanks to all participants! Boneidle, a winner whose submission was already featured in last week’s blog, even put his huge and detailed world on the Steam Workshop, so all of us can explore his spaceship. Other winners might do the same this weekend, so keep an eye on the Workshop! Check an album of all the winners here. You can also still open #submissions-only on the Discord for more info.



We've also made decent progress on the update this week. The search bar from the stockpile has been refactored, improved and added to the statistics menu. And that’s also how we added categories. The search bar is a bit smarter now: it accepts commands like “cat:”, “”. “Cat:” searches for entire categories, so cat:food will return a list of all food items. The angle brackets can be used to search for items that are below or above a certain threshold. For example, “>1000” will return all item stacks that are larger than 1000. As you can see in the screenshot, these commands can also be combined! And these commands work in both search bars, the one in the stockpile and the one in the statistics menu.

There are now three things left on our to-do-list:

• There’s quite a bit of empty space left next to the search bar in the stockpile. We want to put some buttons there that automatically put useful commands in the search bar, like “cat:job”. That should help to explain the new feature a bit.
  
• There should be a tab with “non-stockpile data” in the statistics menu, data like the amount of colonists, % idling of different jobs, and happiness.
  
• We’d like to add a drop-down menu where you can select other colonies and see their statistics

Once these things are done, we will release 0.7.3!

Image above is currently in-game, image below is an imperfect mock-up in Photoshop. The sentence that is ‘lost’ in the second image should be visible in a tooltip.

While Zun is working on the statistics, I’m creating detailed mock-ups for a big revamp of the interface. We were always pretty utilitarian guys. If it works, it works, and it doesn’t matter too much how it looks. But lately, I’ve noticed how my preferences are changing. I’ve been playing more other games, and I’m drawn to games with smooth, intuitive UIs and a bit repulsed by complex, unwieldy ones. Just take a look at this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcF9V-0l2P0
I’m not really into wine or winemaking but just look at how smooth and beautiful the graphics and the UI are! A couple of weeks ago I mainly thought our UI needed some shading, a couple of textures and fancier, consistent buttons and sliders, but Hundred Days proves me wrong completely. They’ve got a very minimalistic UI with flat colors, but it looks very professional and intuitive.

An important difference between our UI and theirs seems to be… categorization? Our brains only have limited processing power, so when we look at a new menu, we can’t instantly read and comprehend all the text and icons. When all the options and info are all just thrown into your face without clear categorization, you have got to do the processing to determine what is what. Which options are important, what should you read and what can be safely ignored for now? It’s not clear, so you’ve got to think.

A better UI removes a lot of the required processing. It visually distinguishes between more and less important options and texts. A different kind of description is a different size/color/etcetera, making it instantly clear that you’re looking at different things.

While that’s certainly an aesthetic upgrade, it isn’t merely aesthetic. It fundamentally improves the ease and joy of playing the game. So we’re taking a long and hard look at the UI and in the update after statistics, it’ll be changed pretty radically!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Impressive Work-In-Progress Spaceship by Boneidle

Last week’s contest for ten Artificial Extinction Steam Keys still lasts another week! Until now, we’ve had five submissions, not counting Boneidle’s unfinished project above. That means that you’ve got a good chance of winning even without a megabuild that costs dozens of hours to build! You can find the details on how to participate here.

We’ve kept making good progress on the statistics menu and it’s getting close to a quality that is ready for release. There are now icons on the right side of the map to indicate which items lines represent. That makes the graph a lot more usable.


Zun also added numbers and lines on the x-axis, and lines to indicate midnight on the y-axis. There’s also a new button to switch between linear and logarithmic scale. The logarithmic scale inflates the lower end of the graph, which is often crowded by plenty of items. This makes it easier to recognize and distinguish trends there while simultaneously keeping track of more plentiful items. To demonstrate this effect and others, we made a short and simple video:

https://youtu.be/m8pyi0G1bCg
The basic features of the graph seem mostly done. It still needs a search bar with the option to filter categories. And we’d like to add a second tab with “non-stockpile” information, like data concerning happiness. When that’s done, the update will be released!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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A couple of months ago, someone from our Discord sent me a PM with some questions about Steam Announcements. He was asking for a friend who was developing a game. That’s how I got into contact with the developer behind Artificial Extinction, a new game that released exactly one week ago. The game quickly scored a “Very Positive” rating according to the Steam Reviews, and it’s well deserved, especially for a game developed single-handedly in 14 months!

We decided to team up and we’re both hosting contests. Here, you can win 1 out of 10 free Steam Keys for Artificial Extinction. At their place, you can win 1 out of 10 Steam Keys for Colony Survival!

Artificial Extinction takes place on a distant, alien planet. If you want to journey there, you’ll first have to make the world of Colony Survival look remote and extraterrestrial. Here are the exact rules:

• The contest lasts nearly two weeks, until Friday April 3, 10AM Amsterdam time.
  
• You participate by uploading one image of your most alien looking Colony Survival world to #submissions on our Discord
  
• Discord allows you to add a text description to images. You’re allowed but not required to make use of this
  
• You’re allowed to use Photoshop to adjust, manipulate and merge screenshots
  
• You’re allowed to use texture packs and mods
  
• You’re certainly allowed to manipulate the terrain generation
  
• Zun, Vobbert and I will be the jury and pick our ten favorites. The winners will be announced in April 3’s Friday Blog!

Work on statistics has continued, and we’ve made good progress. A new algorithm is used to generate the lines, which makes them much more smooth and less pixelated. There’s an option to show only “deltas” - which means you’ll see relative changes to the stockpile instead of only the total number of items in the stockpile.

There’s also a new system where you can highlight specific items by hovering over time. Last but not least, Zun did some massive refactoring to prepare the graph for other kinds of data different than “# in stockpile” - data like happiness.



Bedankt voor het lezen!

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