Colony Survival News

'Weltenbäume' by JoeMan

The Colony Survival Steam Workshop has been available for one full week now! It has already proven highly useful. The most popular mod is Pandaros’ Settlers Mod, which has received over two thousand subscribers. In total, there are now more than two dozen different mods available.

Apart from the mods, it’s also possible to share worlds via the Workshop. Only 7 have been uploaded yet, but they’re very impressive. This blog uses screenshots from JoeMan’s Weltenbäume savegame, which contains three huge custom trees that contain all the requirements for starting a colony, like ores and water. But the Workshop also contains Pathros by PatateNouille, the castle visible in the background of the main menu. Last but not least, there is an insane world uploaded by Bog, which contains a colony with 50,000 colonists. Zun has regularly used that world to test performance optimizations :)



Technically, the release of 0.7.1 was the release of 0.7.1.7. We’re now at 0.7.1.10. In the weekend, we were on standby and continuously monitoring reactions to see if there were any significant problems that required a hotfix. There were, so Zun released 0.7.1.8 on Sunday.

To compensate for the busy weekend, we mostly took Monday off. Wednesday we released a bigger patch with a bunch of small changes. Co-op worlds started from a workshop were marked wrong, and that’s fixed now. Translations were updated, a problem that caused freezing was solved, just like another problem that caused some glitching terrain.

Yesterday, 0.7.1.10 was released, which should fix a problem with mods on Ubuntu, and which refactors torch lighting a bit. It shouldn’t make a visible difference, but if it does, please notify us!

0.7.1 did exactly what the plan published a couple of months ago promised. We've discussed our future plans some more, but our 'mental roadmap' hasn't changed significantly, so the linked blog is still accurate and relevant. The plans can still change though, so if you really like/dislike a certain feature in the list, let us know your opinion! And if you want your world to be featured in a future Friday Blog, upload it to the Steam Workshop :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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New items in mods made by Boneidle

The update should be available for everybody right now! The biggest new change is Steam Workshop support. This should make it a lot easier to find, install and update mods and texture packs. It's also possible to upload your savegames to the Workshop!

Straight to the Workshop

Modders have had access to the Workshop for a week now, and they've rapidly filled it with all kinds of new features and items. Some of these mods have literally been worked on for multiple years, like for example the Settlers Mod. There are many mods that add collections of new items. They add things like doors, windows, spiral stairs, new lights, furniture and a long list of other stuff to the game. There's a "Schematic Builder" available, which allows your colonists to build custom blueprints like cathedrals and castles. There are also mods with grief protection and other new multiplayer features. There's plenty of other stuff available, and the list is constantly growing!

Functional monorail and manapipes in the Settlers Mod by Pandaros

For reasons explained in last week's blog, Workshop-savegames work a bit different than regular ones. Instead of appearing in your regular list of savegames, they're available to choose from when you start a new world. This feature was added literally today, so there's not much choice on the Steam Workshop yet. We hope you'll help us change that! We'll regularly check the worlds on the Workshop, and feature them in Friday Blogs and trailers.

More from the Settlers Mod

But Workshop support is not the only change - it's part of a larger overhaul of our mod support. In the past, mods affected the entire game. You had to make sure you did not have conflicting mods, and if you wanted to switch to another mod or vanilla, you had to go to the game files and manually adjust them. It wasn't very user friendly.

In 0.7.1, mods don't affect your worlds until you explicitly tell them to. This means you can switch from a vanilla-world to a world with mods by Boneidle to a world with mods by Pandaros to a world with mods by Kenovis, without ever having to exit the game or fiddle around with folders. That should make it a lot easier to experiment with mods!

In the coming weeks and months, more mods should appear on the Workshop, and we can't wait to see all the worlds you've been working on appear there. We're going to see how the Workshop gets used in the coming period, and finetune things based on that. We're planning to add customizable settings to the mod selection menu, which we want to use for a standard terrain generation settings mod, allowing people to easily change the scale and shape of the world.

When you've tried the Workshop and the new features, please let us know your opinion! What's working well, what isn't? Which mods are your favorite? Nearly all modders have joined Colony Survival's Discord, so that's a way to reach them if you want to praise their mods and give feedback :)

Bedankt voor het lezen en veel plezier!

Straight to the Workshop

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We were planning to release 0.7.1 today, but at the last moment, decided not to. Mod creators have now had ~24 hours to upload their mods to Colony Survival's Steam Workshop, but that didn't give them a lot of time. More mods are expected to be added in the weekend.

Another problem is the fact that the Linux version of the game seems to be broken. Non-Latin fonts cause some issues and are in need of an alternative, and there's a big problem with loading .ogg audio files.

There's also a last feature Zun wants to add before releasing 0.7.1: savegames/scenarios. We'd love to allow people to easily promote and share their most beautiful colonies. We've seen a lot of highly impressive ones. But doing that via the Steam Workshop is slightly problematic.

The Workshop allows creators to update their assets even after they've been downloaded. That makes sense for texture packs, new items and other utilities. But imagine using a world from the Workshop, working on it for dozens of hours, and then losing your progress completely because the creator updated his savegame. That's obviously not ideal.

So we've got to make some kind of system where you can choose "scenarios", custom maps, when you start a new world. If the creator of the savegame decides to update it, it only affects new maps.

We've already seen players make maps that are meant to be played as "scenarios" / challenge maps, with for example a huge tree that contains ores and all the necessities to run a relatively large colony high in the sky. So that's the solution we've chosen, and Zun is working on it now. He expects to have it finished in a couple of days, and that's when we want to release 0.7.1 - combined with a Steam Workshop filled with a lot more content than it currently has!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The flat world, created by a testmod that will probably be available as a default

This week, we created our very own Steam Workshop page! Screenshot available below. It's only available internally, but it's relatively functional. Integration of the Workshop was slightly easier than expected. A lot of the required settings can be adjusted in default Steam Workshop menus, so we don't need to develop our own UI for them. In our private testbuild, it's now possible to upload mods to Steam Workshop from Colony Survival, and we can also download them into the game again. And of course, another important new functionality is the fact that it's now possible to select only specific mods to use in a world, making it a lot easier to regularly play both modded and unmodded worlds, and to experiment with combining multiple mods.

We've received multiple reports of people who missed the flatness of 0.6.3 worlds. As a result, Zun's testmod is an adjustment of the world generation, resulting in a nearly entirely flat world. We might make this option available as a default mod. For 0.7.2, we'd like to make extra settings available to modders, which will allow us to upgrade the flat-world mod into a full terrain generation customizer.

A release date of Friday next week is a definitive possibility. The Monday afterwards is another option (December 1) or the following Friday. This will give modders the possibility to configure their Workshop pages in time for Christmas :)



To make myself more useful for updates that rely mainly on programming/Unity skills instead of new textures and objects, I've continued to 'level' these skills and I really do feel like I'm making progress. I got quite a lot of encouragement as a result of last week's blog so thanks a lot :D

My little project is far from perfect or complete but I'd like to share some GIFs again:

• Lots and lots of projectiles
• Making custom smoke/explosions
• Crazy experiment

I did run into some persistent shadow issues that we haven't been able to figure out this week. They're most obvious in the last GIF. If anybody knows a solution, I'd love to know!

Finally, the Half-Life Alyx trailer released this week! Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2W0N3uKXmo
It looks like a revolutionairy and impressive experience. The way you can use your hands to grab and manipulate objects and to shoot looks very intuitive. There's one problem that makes us hesitant in regards to VR.

In VR, you can do some limited moving around by physically walking through your room. But my room is a bit smaller than for example Los Santos in GTAV, or the pretty much infinite world of Colony Survival. Which would require you to still use buttons/joysticks to move around, but that might be jarring in VR.

Nearly all of the gameplay scenes in the trailer are stationairy, or at least confined to an area of a couple of square meters. There is no walking through long streets, no climbing stairs, no running through corridors. And in most games, such activities are essential. That might be a coincedence, but it might also indicate that movement is still problematic.

So that makes us feel uncertain about the future of VR.
Perhaps the issue is fixed, and VR becomes as essential to gaming as the mouse, or as color is for movies.
Perhaps VR will create entirely new genres of games, causing regular gaming and VR gaming to coexist for a long time, like flight simulator games that require flightsticks.
Or last and least, VR is mostly a gimmick that will decline in the future, like 3D movies or the Kinect. We'll see! We'd love to have your opinion.

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Our internal unreleased testbuild now has a nice in-game menu that allows you to select and deselect specific mods for individual savegames! There is a screenshot below. The same options appear in both the 'new world menu' and the 'load savegame menu'.

While working on the UI, Zun decided to refactor, optimize and improve some underlying systems. The main menu should work smoother in 0.7.1, and fonts should be rendered more clearly. This work should pay off in the next couple of updates, because we're planning quite a big overhaul for all UI systems.

There are a couple of things we still want to do before we release the update. In the mod settings menu, modders should be able to give a couple of options to players. An example of this would be a mod that allows players to customize terrain generation, to for example change the size of the world or the amount of hills. It would require a couple of sliders that players can use to provide custom input. More mods would benefit from such functionality.

Another thing we've still got to deal with is edge cases. What if someone installs a mod, starts a world with it, and then removes the mod? We'd think a warning would be appropriate.

Last but not least, we need a visual UI to connect the game to the Steam Workshop. We hope to be able to finish that in 2-3 weeks. We can't wait to see how the Workshop will be used! Plenty of mods and texture packs have been developed for CS in the last 2+ years, and many of them add useful functionality or impressive new content and features. Nowadays, they are spread between different GitHub pages and Discord servers and relatively hard to install and manage. 0.7.1 should make that a lot better!



For the reasons explained in last week's blog, I've continued to increase my programming/Unity skills last week. Last week I was working on a simulated ecosystem, but this week I've decided to focus on a more game-like project, with opposing teams of cubes fighting each other. On one hand, working on it felt very smooth some days. I'm starting to understand the combination of Unity and C# a lot better. On the other hand, there were plenty of weird behaviors and bugs I had to deal with and the GIFs I made throughout the week reflect that:

• GIF 1: The cubes track and fight each other properly, but the projectiles are off
  
• GIF 2: Trying to fix the projectiles made them even wonkier
  
• GIF 3: Things start to work more as intended, with the player being able to smoothly place opposing cubes on both sides

After some fruitful hours, I even got the projectile enemies to work! But trying to add a fancy explosion effect ruined the entire project. I tried to redo it in standard Unity instead of the High Definition Render Pipeline, but it looked and worked a lot worse.

• GIF 4: The ugly version with broken explosion effects at the end

There's another exciting thing we learned this week, that should hopefully boost our development output in the future. A company called Quixel has created Megascans, a library of detailed textures that can be easily used in both games and renderers. They've also got related software that helps customize, mix and apply these textures. Here's a video with details:

https://youtu.be/BfbNlk-QCfs
In the past, using this library was pretty expensive, and we were afraid that it might not be as useful in our specific case as we hoped. This week, they released the news that they were acquired by Epic Games. The tools for customizing and applying textures will become free for everybody, and the Megascans library will be free for use with the Unreal Engine. I'm planning to experiment with that in the near future, and if the tools are as useful as they look we might be able to use them to improve the textures in Colony Survival!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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