Colony Survival News

https://youtu.be/QgYrI0gWX3g
For a quick and clear overview of all new features, read Blog 261

Ladies and gentlemen - welcome to a new era.

After more than a decade of development, this first-person strategy game finally acquired an (optional!) new perspective, the traditional view for strategy games: top-down.

This changes everything.

Think about real life. What jobs match strategy games the best? Architects and generals. But their main design work doesn’t happen on the frontline or in the middle of a construction site. It happens at a headquarters or office, standing next to a big table filled with maps, or a desk full of blueprints. This helps them to get an overview and see the whole picture, to make adjustments in a dozen different spots without physically travelling to a dozen different spots.


Colony Survival faced a bottleneck. We couldn’t make the game much more complex without making it too annoying and frustrating to deal with for a lot of players. But with the top-down view, we’re giving maps to generals and clear blueprints to architects. Things become easier to comprehend and to manage - which gives us new room for added complexity.


To start using the top-down view, complete the brand-new option in the tech tree: the Overseer’s Desk. It’s a desk full of maps and blueprints that can be used to activate the top-down view.

The buttons on the right allow you to adjust the view. The house icon activates X-Ray Vision, which filters out all blocks above a certain height. When it’s on, the blue arrows can be used to adjust that height. The lightbulb toggles the lamp on your cursor on and off. The icon with the monster allows you to see the area where monsters spawn.


The buttons at the bottom give you access to the command tool, the banner tool, and the tools related to blueprints. The one on the left is the “Scanner Tool” - it allows you to select a building in your world and turn it into a blueprint that can be used again and again.

On the right is the “Placer Tool”. It opens your list of blueprints, and allows you to select them and put them into your world. The “Import Blueprint” button is greyed out by default, but lights up when you’ve copied a string of characters that works as a blueprint.


To generate these blueprint-codes yourself, just press the “share” button. We’ve already got a channel on our Discord called Blueprints Collection, which is full of codes generated by beta testers. Feel free to share your best blueprints there, with some screenshots! Or grab the ones that others have produced. If you'd really like to avoid Discord, there's also a Steam Forum with the same purpose.

Blueprints work just like other construction areas. Place job spots around the area, and construction workers will come to build the blueprint block by block.


We'll highlight two specific blueprints. The first one is Darkwind Gatehouse by Acapla. It can be seen in the image above. It's part of a set of blueprints related to walls, and they all fit together. The blueprint-code is:

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In contrast to the traditional and rustic Darkwind Gatehouse is the Piedmeutian Style Low-Income Housing Unit. Do you need a convenient rectangle to house your colonists or shelter your jobblocks? Build one of these - or a dozen! Credits go to the designer, Fenn.

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

Apart from the top-down view and blueprints, 0.15 has also replaced the old meshes for the merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe with new ones. The new ones are a lot more detailed, and larger too.

Wherever you’ve placed them already in your world, the old ones will remain. But as soon as you remove them and add them to your inventory, they will be converted to the new mesh!

Some other items, like wheat and berry bushes, have also received a fresh coat of paint.

Talking about painting - the paint system has been expanded! Fences, pillars and architraves are now paintable. Painted planks have also received an upgrade.

Last but certainly not least - plaster is back in the game!

Enjoy 0.15, and let us know how you feel about these changes :D We'll read all the comments here and we're monitoring Discord actively. Thank you beta testers!

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Update 0.15 is available for a public test right now! The core new feature is the top-down perspective. Unlock the Overseer’s Desk in the tech tree, place it in your colony, and click on it to switch to this perspective.

From the top-down view, you get access to the new Blueprints feature. There is a “Scanner” which allows you to select and save parts of your world. Right next to it is a “Placer” that opens a list of all saved blueprints that you can place back into your colony. A placed blueprint will start a construction project, and you need to assign construction workers to build the project.

Blueprints can also be exported to codes, or imported from them. This allows you to easily share buildings between worlds, with friends or with strangers.

To help navigate indoor and underground spaces from this new perspective, we’ve also added X-Ray vision as a toggleable option. When activated, it will make everything above the height of the Overseer’s Desk invisible. But it also comes with buttons that allow you to increase or decrease the height of this “slice”.


Like the mill we added last year, the Overseer’s Desk is a lot larger than one voxel. We like the consequences of that size, both visually and in terms of gameplay. So we’ve redesigned a bunch of meshes with this new philosophy. The merchant hub, grocery store, tool shop and sacred failsafe were all tiny and bland. They are now much larger and more lively and unique. This will not affect these blocks when they are pre-existing in your world, but each one placed while playing 0.15 will have the new shape.

That’s not the only visual change! The paint system has been expanded. Pillars, architraves, fences and planks are now all paintable. The berry bush switched from a textured voxel to a 3D mesh. Wheat and barley have new meshes. And last but not least: plaster has made it back into the game!


All these features should be working. The main things that are lacking are translations and controller support. But of course, we can’t test the blueprints and the X-Ray vision in all circumstances. And that’s why we need you! Have fun trying out all the new features of 0.15, and if you notice anything weird, let us know. We’ll be monitoring all channels, but Discord and the comments under this blog get checked most frequently. And apart from bug reports, general feedback about the update is also appreciated!

To get access to the beta:
- Right-click Colony Survival in your Steam Library, choose “Properties”
- Go the “Betas” tab, enter the code pleaseshareyourfeedback
- Select the 0.15.0 branch

The game will show the version number in the bottom-right corner in the main menu.

Have fun, and pleaseshareyourfeedback :D

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All the progress talked about in this blog concerns the unreleased development branch and is not publicly available yet

In the last blog we announced “world slicing”, the ability to “cut the roof off” and see inside of buildings at the level of the “top-down trigger”. It’s a fun experiment, but because it’s just on one level, it’s not very practical. Many buildings have floors on wildly different levels, and it also makes it hard to see into underground spaces.

Zun has added a major improvement to this feature: you can now determine the height at which the world is “sliced open”! It’s a radical new way of looking at your colony. Previously invisible things become very visible. I’m certain this will affect how players build their worlds and I’m looking forward to seeing that impact. Screenshots in this blog should give you an idea of how it currently looks in-game.


And as you can see in these screenshots, the UI is a bit mediocre and work-in-progress. We still have to work on this before we can release the top-down feature.

The UI in general is a bit of a struggle for us. To make multiplayer functional, there has to be coordination between the “client” running on your local desktop and a server that can be anywhere in the world. Our singleplayer and multiplayer modes work nearly identically, so when you’re playing offline, there is still a server-client split. Both run separately on your local machine. This makes development of certain features, like UI, more difficult than developing for a purely local, undivided, singleplayer game.


We also have extensive mod support built into the game. This means that a mod can tell the game to render special buttons and menus for that mod. Taking all of this together means that developing our UI is more complicated than it seems at first glance.

This is one of the reasons why our UI is fairly barebones and primitive in general. We didn’t like engaging with the UI system, and often chose to add new UI elements in a janky manner. Which just made it even harder to engage with in the future.

The new top-down view both requires UI elements, and gives us a lot of opportunities for new ways of engaging with the world. But our “technical debt” is catching up with us.


So we’re planning to release the top-down view with slightly less features than hoped for, and our next big project is refactoring our UI system. Making it work more elegantly behind the scenes, and improving the in-game appearance as well. The goal is that it should be easier to add new, functional, good-looking UI systems when the refactor is done.

Another technical obstacle that Zun worked on this month: rotating and mirroring blueprints. They’re pretty essential features, and fairly easy to get to work for most blocks, but of course, there are extremely tedious edge cases. In recent years we’ve added pretty complex “adaptive” blocks like the dynamic quarterblocks and crown moulding. Making sure that all their variants are rotated and mirrored correctly was quite the struggle! But Zun did manage to make it work.


While Zun has been fighting these complex technical problems, I was working on replacing more old meshes. The primitive, small mesh for the sacred failsafe has been replaced by the massive statue of a divine protector. And berry bushes, previously a square block with textures, has now gotten its own 3D vertex-painted mesh, like many jobblocks and other objects in the game.

The new mesh of the berry bushes randomly rotates to make fields of them look more organic. Personally, I was surprised by how well it looked! We’re thinking of designing more plants in this style, and making them part of the world generation.


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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These new features are still in development and not yet released. The world in the screenshots was built by Lagoon.


In the past month, we continued our work on the top-down view feature. We added a “worldslicing” feature, where everything above the height of the “topdown trigger” turns invisible. It's practical to be able see inside houses, but it's essential if you want to use the topdown view in underground situations!

Last month’s blog and video caused some confusion, because buildings were copy-pasted instantly. Of course, that was not the intention. Since then, that has been fixed as well: blueprinted buildings are built gradually by colonists, like all other construction projects they can work on.

Blueprint saving was quite wonky at the time of the last blog. The blueprint was gone after reloading the world, and stuff like texts on signs or crafting configurations on jobblocks were never saved at all. All of that now works as it should.


Making blueprints work smoothly with the Steam Workshop is not something that we can get to work before we release the feature, but Zun found an alternative way to share your blueprints! As can be seen in the screenshot, each blueprint now generates a unique code that can be shared between players. This means that in the near future, you’ll be able to find great buildings on for example our Discord, the Steam Forums, the wiki or our subreddit and add them to your own colonies!


In last month’s video you could see that the “topdown trigger” looked like a regular crate. It now has a proper mesh! Since we added the mill last year, objects that are larger than a voxel work much better. We’ve used that for the topdown trigger.

What’s a sensible way to indicate an object that turns your perspective to a top-down view? We were inspired by architects and designers studying maps and drafting blueprints. We’ve represented that by building a big desk with a chair. We’re very happy with how it turned out!


Now liberated from one-voxel constraints, we redid some older meshes. The merchant hub, grocery store and tool shop were fairly uninspired and bland. They were significantly enlarged and gained a lot more personality!

They all received a kind of “market stand” look. Wide and deep tables displaying many items, with a rain cover. The items on display are related to the type of shop it is.


These will totally replace their much smaller ancestors. They won't be automatically replaced in existing savegames and the older variants will keep doing their work. But destroy them, and you will receive the new, larger version.

The new mesh does not have large consequences for the market stand. That object is only useful to the player, and most colonies have no more than one or two. But tool shops and grocery stores are useful to colonists, and many players have placed them at every job cluster.


In quite a lot of these situations, the new mesh doesn’t fit physically, or it looks out of place because it’s indoors. It will be less aesthetic and less efficient to put the new larger shops at every corner.

Hopefully, this cuts down on repetitive “shopmaxxing” and leads to slightly more refined designs, with little central places where colonists from multiple job clusters regularly gather to collect new tools and meals!


How do you feel about all these changes? Let us know here in the comments or on Discord!

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We made good progress with the top-down view this month! This short video shows what it currently looks like in the internal development build. Watch it here:
https://youtu.be/OCcjfFNz_ZM It's all work-in-progress, so it will look different when it's publicly released. The interface is very basic. And when you place a blueprint of a building, it's constructed instantly. Of course, that's not the intention.

The video demonstrates the new features, currently called the "scanner" and "placer". The scanner allows you to select a part of the world and save it as a blueprint. The placer allows you to select a blueprint and place it in the world. The core of the feature is currently working, but there's still a lot to do before we can release it. For example, at the moment blueprints disappear when you return to the main menu and then reload the world.


The video mentions the orthographic perspective, but it's hard to explain without images. So here are two screenshots from Blender to illustrate the difference! First, a regular perspective, as used by your own eyes and current first-person Colony Survival:


Secondly, the orthographic perspective:


All the cubes are the same size. In a regular perspective, distant cubes appear smaller. In the orthographic perpsective, all cubes appear the exact same size.

Lots of top-down strategy games use this perspective, and we tried to make it work for Colony Survival as well. Our game engine, Unity, has a special option for it, but it changes so much in the way things are rendered that we ended up with a lot of visual glitches. Instead of trying to patch them all, we chose a very similar solution: use the equivalent of a telescope. A really powerful telescope has a visual result that is very close to an orthographic perspective!

The top-down perspective looks and feels visually distinct from regular gameplay, and I love how it’s turning out. We’ll keep working on it and hope to release it publicly later this year!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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