Colony Survival News

The lightmapping made visible

A massive update to the lighting system is available right now! It’s compatible with pre-existing savegames. If Steam doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of the game cache.

In the previous versions of the game, the world was either directly lit or indirectly lit. Direct lighting occurs when the sun hits an area, all the rest is shadow. There was just one value for each. Whether the shadow was behind a little bush in an open field, or deep into a cave, didn’t matter. All indirectly lit areas received the same brightness.

Old

We did add a system that checked the position of the player. It measured how exposed the player was to the skybox. If the player was in an open field, the indirect lighting would be boosted. Deep in a cave, the indirect lighting would be dimmed.

But this too treated all shadows in the same way. If you were standing in a tunnel in the middle of a mountain with a view onto bushes in the middle of a field, the shadows in the tunnel would be just as dark as the shadows caused by the bushes!

Of course, this is not how lighting works in real life. Real light bounces around. When something is not directly in the sun, but sunlight is reflected towards it from the sky, the ground and other nearby surfaces, it still appears bright to us. But when you close your curtains, move into the basement or walk into a cave, the reflected light gets weaker and weaker until it is fully dark.

New

It’s very performance intensive to continuously simulate this on your PC. But as a voxel game where the world is made out of big cubes, there are some useful approximations. In the new update, we calculate lightmaps for all those cubes. The brightest value is for every 1x1x1 area that can directly see the sky above it. Every block that can’t see the sky like that, but that is directly adjacent to the first category, is a bit darker. This chain is calculated 16 blocks deep.

Shaded areas in forests and the interiors of buildings with big windows will be a lot brighter compared to the previous update. But on the opposite side - deep tunnels will be actually dark now! There’s a more realistic contrast in general. The wonky system where all the indirect lighting would become brighter or darker based on the position of the player, has been removed.

Old

Instead of trying to trace complicated paths to the sun, there are some simpler rules you can apply. Crevices and hidden corners will always be darker than openly exposed surfaces. Ambient Occlusion exploits this to add some realism. We had been using a standard AO that applied this effect, but it only looked at smaller details - it had a range of about five centimeters. We added a new one that uses the voxel system to analyze the local environment. Instead of five centimeters, it adds appropriate shading based on a range of about two meters.

Last but not least, while polishing the lighting and its consequences, we took a look at the tone mapping. Tone mapping is a form of image processing that tries to turn the raw outputs of the game engine into something your monitor can render well. The old tone mapping was pretty standard, but it did increase contrast and change colors in ways we weren’t completely happy with. We changed it to more neutral tone mapping.

The new lighting system is more complex than the old one, and that will decrease performance a bit. But at the same time, you should need less torches and other player-made lighting in this new version, and that actually helps performance again. Another thing that should help with performance on very low-end hardware, is a a way to toggle the sun off. With the new light mapping, the game actually looks fairly okay in that state.

New

If you’re playing 0.11.1 and you run into any glitches or bugs, please let us know! If you don’t like the changes in general, if you want things to be darker, brighter, with more contrast, more saturated, less saturated - share that too. The previous version, 0.11.0, will still be available in the beta branches tab. We’ll definitely read feedback on our Discord, in the comments of this blog and on our Steam Forums!

Heel veel plezier met de update :D

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In the previous blog, we talked about an improved lighting system. We’re close to releasing it publicly, but we love to do a test first! We’re curious about the results in different worlds, the performance on different hardware and your opinion about it.

The differences aren’t extremely obvious when just roaming the outside world, but it does really affect interiors, and it’s especially noticeable in underground conditions. Tunnels that are far from sunlight are actually dark.

If you want to try the beta, go to your Steam Library, right-click Colony Survival and go to “properties”. In the “betas” tab, enter the access code sendfeedbackplease. This will unlock the beta-light branch. Enable it and your game will be automatically updated with the new lighting! It should not pose a risk to old savegames. You might encounter some buggy edge cases though.

As the access code suggests: please send feedback! Join our Discord and share your feedback in #general or put your screenshot in #screenshots. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog too.

Veel plezier met de beta!

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The release of 0.11 was a big success! Player counts regularly peaked above 300 simultaneous players, and our recent review rate rose to 98% positive. Thanks to everybody for the support!

We released a couple of small patches, fixing some minor issues and improving some models a bit. We also updated the Steam Storepage. All screenshots were multiple years old, and none featured the new colonist models. We uploaded a bunch of new ones to rectify that situation.

We’re already hard at work on the next big update. The lighting in Colony Survival has been fairly primitive. Sun lighting was harshly divided between “direct” and “ambient”. Of course, in real life, sun shadows have a much more complicated gradient.

Visualizing the new lightmaps

So Zun is working on a system that dynamically renders lightmaps. He has added an Ambient Occlusion system that uses raytracing to make corners and crevices appear darker. And he has built a system that knows which areas have direct sunlight overhead. The floodfill system that was already used for lighting from torches and such, now applies to that as well, to make the sunlight spread around more natural.

All of this helps to make the lighting more beautiful, more realistic and more practical. It’s still a bit wonky in certain edge cases, like when it has to deal with water, so it’s not completely ready for release yet. But it will go public in the next big update!


Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Update 0.11 is now available on Steam! The most visible change is a total replacement of all the colonist models. In the past, we only had one colonist model. It used UV-mapped textures, and they were difficult to change for us. The only thing that varied between colonists was the color of their shirts.

The new vertex coloured model is much easier to adjust for us, and the differences between colonists are much bigger now. A lot of colonists have relevant tools and bags attached to their belts. There is a wide variety of hats and helmets. Shirts, pants, shoes, the belt itself, the wristband - all of these appear in many different colors. Some colonists are more muscular, others less. Some have rolled up sleeves, others don’t. Some wear wrist guards, others wear gaiters.

We are very happy with the results and hope you can appreciate them as well! Let us know about your most and least favorites, and share your ideas to improve the look of current and future models.


To make the colonists even more unique, we’ve decided to add individual names to the colonists. When you recruit a small group of colonists simultaneously, there’s a large chance that they share the same surname.

Names are only visible while you wield the command tool. Click on a colonist with the command tool and a new menu will appear. Here, you can generate a new random name for your colonist, or you can edit it manually. You can also see which job they’re doing, and visualize where they are traveling.



But that’s not all! Construction areas received some improvements. They’ve become much more customizable. Want to build just walls? That’s possible. Want to build cylindrical walls? No problem. Want to dig out a huge round hole? You can do it all in 0.11!

Apart from the shape of the area, there are now 4 different construction assignments you can give to your colonists:

1. Remove All - remove all blocks in an area
   
2. Build All - fill the area with a specific block type
   
3. Remove Specific - remove a specific type from the area
   
4. Replace Specific - replace one type of block with another

We can’t wait to see what you’ll build with these new options!


Some final changes: over time, grass blocks will spread their grass to neighbouring dirt blocks. And previously, saplings placed by the player would always grow into the same tiny, basic tree. In 0.11, these saplings will be able to grow into the tree shapes you saw in “nature”.

Let us know about your experiences with 0.11 in the comments or on our Discord!

Veel plezier met de update :D

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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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