Colony Survival News

The current colonist model was already in the game over eight years ago, in early 2016. The workflow for producing it was horrible. The model has a bunch of surfaces that connect and disconnect in many different spots. To texture them, the model has to be “unwrapped” into a flat image that displays all these surfaces next to each other. But getting a feel for how the textures look on a 3D model from a flat image is very difficult.

When it looked semi-decent, I didn’t want to touch it anymore. The only difference between the colonists is currently the color of their shirt, which we can very easily adjust by putting a simple color code in a .JSON file.

When we added new monsters in 0.9.0, we used a different method to craft the models. Instead of texturing the model in a more traditional way, we made slightly more detailed 3D models and used vertex painting to color them. We had used the same method to generate for example the beds and torches at the very beginning of Colony Survival development, and later on we used it for jobblocks as well. We’re very happy with the results there.

Farmer / tinkerer / beekeeper

I had used it to make a new vertex-painted colonist model before the release of 0.9.0, but Zun never got around to implementing it. It was also a bit “flat”, undetailed and boring. In recent weeks, Zun did put it in an internal development build, and I gave it a bit more life and detail. We like the results a lot and are near-certain of adding this to the main branch.

Instead of merely having a different-coloured shirt for every job, it has now become possible to make much more custom designs for different jobs. I can quickly adjust how muscular colonists are, the color of not only their shirts but also of pants, shoes, bracelets and belts, I can roll shirt sleeves up or down, I can add tools to their belts or hats to their heads. I’ve been making a bunch of new models for different jobs and we believe it’s a big improvement!

[h3]Names and miscellaneous[/h3]

That’s not all we’ve been working on. To make colonists feel even more personal, we’ve decided to generate names for them. We made a long list of first names and surnames and each colonist gets a random combination of them. Colonists recruited in quick succession of each other have a high chance of sharing the same surname. In our internal development build, they are only visible while wielding the command tool. Making sure they’re not blocked by headgear or crafting icons, and that they’re not floating in the middle of nowhere either, is a bit of a problem that we’re still working on.

Named colonists

Another change concerns the saplings. Saplings placed by players would always grow into the same very small tree. In the next big update, saplings will be able to grow into larger, more diverse and more natural shapes, like the trees that are in the world when you first launch the game.

Also, builders will be able to use a couple of extra items like roofs and rails, and crafting limits will become a bit more flexible. In the current live build, the number of the limit has to be a multiple of the amount of items produced in one recipe. So if a recipe results in 3 arrows, it has to be 3/6/9/etc. That will no longer be the case with the next release.

We hope you’ll enjoy these changes as much as we do! Let us know how you feel about the new colonists and names, and feel free to share your ideas for specific jobs in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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After six years, Colony Survival finally has a new main trailer! Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbDsOB_3zQ

Making it was quite the challenge. We really wanted to showcase the potential of the game. We needed beautiful worlds that integrated all the new content from 0.10.0, stuff like the enhanced rail system and all the new decorative items. We asked for help from the community with the Builder’s Contest - here are the winners!

Although their worlds are impressive and beautiful, they didn’t showcase all the things that we thought a main trailer should contain. So we spent weeks building a custom world exactly suited to filming the trailer.

Then we filmed it. For the first time, the entire pipeline is 4K. 4K rendering of the game, 4K recording, 4K editing. The difference with older videos is very noticeable!

Last but not least, we needed a proper trailer song. One that will really “grab” newcomers who visit our storepage for the first time and know nothing about Colony Survival. Eventually, we found The Mad King by Rok Nardin, a young Slovenian composer. We got in touch with him and licensed the song for our trailer. We are very excited about the end result. Thanks again to everybody who helped make it possible!


We set another major step since the last Friday Blog. We now have full controller support and Steam Deck compatibility!

This is actually a thing that is checked by the team behind Steam. You have to put in a request for them to look at your game, and then they’ll actually play it and test a bunch of different features.

We didn’t get fully approved on the first try. We received some feedback about things that we needed to improve. We did, and this week we did get the full approval!

This is a feature that has been popularly demanded since the release. If you’ve been waiting to try and play Colony Survival with a controller or on your Steam Deck, then this is the moment!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The game is currently on sale! It’s 30% discounted. If you don’t own it yet - this is a great time to purchase it! And if you do - thanks, and consider telling your friends or outright gifting them the game :)

Today, we released 0.10.3. The main changes concern controller support. In the past, we did some work to make it a bit possible to use the controller, but it was still very primitive. Lots of basic functions were very inconvenient.

Now, Zun has put in a lot of effort to make using the controller (or playing on Steam Deck) a lot more comfortable. He has actually been playing the game a lot on his couch, with a controller, this week! He has implemented a long list of small tweaks to improve that playstyle.

There are some non-controller related improvements too. One of the most noticeable changes concerns the fisherman. With the new water transparency, we changed the model of the fishing rod: the line now continues under water. The functionality has also changed a bit - your fishermen can now use water that is 1 or 2 blocks lower than they themselves are.

Raftsburg

Last and least, for the first time in years, we’ve updated the storepage. We changed some promotional texts to better reflect the current state of the game, nearly completely rewrote the answers to the Early-Access-questions, and updated some banner-images.

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Lagoon's world used in these screenshots and the video

Lighting has changed quite dramatically! Here is a before/after video:

https://youtu.be/d_i8hXLc-EU

Last month, we published a pretty long video featuring the winners of the Builder’s Contest. There are many different shots of those worlds in the video, but they’re pretty much all filmed during the middle of the day or in the night. I deliberately avoided sunrises and sunsets. They look pretty impressive with the landscape, but I felt that they didn’t work well with the towns and buildings - they made everything look very dark/red/yellow.

Another problem I noticed was the excessive strength of the torches and lamps placed by players. In the middle of the day, they were still casting bright yellow/orange light on the buildings around them.
It felt quite wrong that I had to avoid large parts of the day cycle to make the game look great. So we decided to update the lighting! It looks quite different now. Sunsets and sunrises are brighter in general, and the yellow-red effect associated with them lasts much shorter. In the old version, the effect lasted for many in-game hours, which doesn’t make any sense.


To simulate morning dew, there is a new fog effect in the valleys, which helps to bring some of the ‘drama’ back. And we’ve dimmed torches and other player-built lighting during the day, to make towns appear less “orange”.

[h3]Cloud Sync [/h3]

More technical explanation of the lighting changes below, but other major news first: Colony Survival now supports Steam Cloud Sync! It will be automatically toggled on for worlds made in 0.10.2 or later, but it has to be manually enabled for pre-existing worlds. These worlds will be uploaded to the Steam Cloud, and automatically downloaded wherever they are missing from your Colony Survival install. Convenient if you switch from PC to laptop or Steam Deck, a lifesaver if your harddrive or entire PC suddenly fails.


[h3]In-depth with Lighting[/h3]

When we had to figure out lighting during the full day-night cycle for the first time, it was probably 2014. We had little experience and hadn’t put much thought into it. I remember thinking that sunsets had deep, dark long shadows, and that dark shadows are pretty much the same things as night, right? So when the sun sets, shadows get longer until they cover everything in darkness, which we then call night. Sunrise is the reverse process.

It took embarrassingly long for me to properly witness a full sunrise in real life and fully comprehend what’s actually happening. It’s actually bright outside for a pretty long time before the sun becomes directly visible. Indirect sunlight is bounced through the atmosphere and makes things pretty bright before that happens.


When you can see the sun directly for the first time, the sunlight has to travel through the atmosphere for a very long time before it hits your eyeball. Which means that a large percentage of it has already scattered away and bounced around. As a consequence, when the sun is close to the horizon, you actually don’t witness deep shadows. The direct sunlight is weak and the scattered light that is indirectly bouncing around is relatively strong.

Around noon, when the sun is in its highest position, sunlight is way less disrupted by the atmosphere. This makes the direct sunlight much stronger than the indirect light that’s bouncing around, leading to deep, dark shadows.

Our old lighting didn’t follow these rules, and went straight from deep sunset shadows to night. These deep shadows were also very yellowish, leading to a pretty weird, unnatural and unappealing look for many structures. The new settings should improve this.

The best solution would be full raytracing, but that’s a very computationally intensive solution that is still not 100% practical, so we’ve got to approximate it as best we can.


Another problem is that our eyes absolutely do not register light objectively. They constantly adapt to the world around us. Two things that have the same brightness might look completely different to us, depending on the circumstances.

”Lux” is the unit of measurement for brightness. Bright sunlight is measured at 111,000 lux. A sunrise or sunset on a clear day only measures 400 lux. A candle generates roughly 10 lux, and a full moon 0.25 lux.

Our eyes will adapt to both bright sunlight and a full moon. When adapted to 111,000 lux sunlight, a 10 lux candle barely even registers. But when adapted to 0.25 lux moonlight, a 10 lux candle can visibly illuminate an entire room!

Such extreme differences and the adaptation between them aren’t present in Colony Survival. Which meant that torches that look realistic in the night, also turn cities orange in the middle of the day. The more I looked at it, the more it annoyed me.

So Zun added a system that reduces the lighting of torches and other player-placed lamps during the day, and increases it again during the night. That’s not how it works in real life, but this too seems to be a better approximation than the old system.

Feel free to share your opinions about the changed lighting with us! We might need to tweak it a little more. The previous blog has instructions on how to change the lighting settings yourself at the end.

Veel plezier met de update!

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The live build of Colony Survival was just updated from 0.10.0.13 to 0.10.1.0! The main change in this update concerns water. The visuals are much improved. Instead of it being solid light-blue “shaving foam”, it’s transparent with a new “wave-effect”. Moving around in water has also been enhanced.

https://youtu.be/IRUsFNhlkpk

There have been some minor changes made to the lighting too. There are now low and medium settings for Torch Quality. These render the torch lighting at a reduced resolution. This should be very noticeable for the performance of the game on minimum-spec computers.


The lighting during the day cycle has been tweaked a bit. We also found a bug affecting the ambient lighting during the sunset and sunrise, which has been fixed.

If you want to mess around with the lighting yourself, visit Colony Survival\gamedata\textures\materials and edit lighting.png. Lighting.txt provides detailed information on how it works. Changing the look of the water is possible too, and can be done with the settings at the end of serverperclient.json, which is found in Colony Survival\gamedata\settings. If you get interesting results, please share them with us in the comments or on Discord, we’re very curious about it.


Veel plezier met de update!

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