Summer Islands News

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• Added Faster Seeded random number generator
  
• Added double Speed Mode
  
• Added a different Way only for bicycles
  
• Added terraforming for dark water in editor
  

[h2]USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

• ReAdded Movement of Cars/Bicycles/Moped
  
• Use of ParticleContainer for resource enhancement
  
• Show Buildings during movement
  
• Stop moveables (planes, bicycles,...) during movement
  
• ESC key first closes all menus before opening the save menu
  
• Conditions of the missions were reduced
  
• FIX Player list disappears after 5 players in the lobby
  

attached the new features:



Have fun with the new update. https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• Added jump to self selected marker
  
• Added change mouse icon to system icon
  
• Added individual mouse scroll speed
  
• Added your own keyboard keys for the shortcuts
  
• Added Editor Eventmenu
  
• Added Mouse click on red banner jumps to disaster
  

[h2]USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

• FIX Resolution with PIXI JS
  

finally the time has come. It took a lot of work to switch from CreateJS to PIXIJS. So the change of the frontend engine. Because there were a lot of similarities in the methods I could save time. But some functions are just different and had to be tested extensively. Or some workarounds had to be integrated. Also I extended the engine with a few methods to simplify the transition.
I think the result is well playable. For example the system mouse is used now. So if the computer is busy with other things, the mouse is still fluid. This gives the gameplay a much more positive side.
In summary, you can say that the FPS are much more stable and run with a higher number. The engine is being developed further and there are still a few advanced features that I could not integrate yet. I am positive to improve this in the future.
I hope the result will excuse the long waiting time. I tried to post my progress daily to give you an estimation. Every file and every line had to be looked at.



Unfortunately I am a bit surprised myself how long this took. My goal was originally to extend the editor. I had to postpone this to the next update.
But I was able to fix some bugs from you. Thanks a lot for your mails and entries.
Of course I have also on request the "Send money to other players" again integrated! Great function in multiplayer. But also funny to interact with the bots.

I will now look into more features again in the future. We have also received more requests for new buildings and I can already say: someone sits right next to me and diligently creates new buildings :D

There was also the wish to reduce the disasters. I have reduced the number to 50% for now. I would expand the whole thing in the future a little bit. The plan would be to have only disasters in randomly selected years. This means that you have e.g. 5 years no disasters and then comes a year with disasters. In addition a consultant could be created who could tell you the years and in which map area (north/south/west/east) these occur. Just as an idea.

As you have already noticed it is summer!!! (at least in the northern hemisphere) What I want to say is that Summer Islands is already available on Steam since 21/06/2019. I'm very happy to have been developing this game and working with you guys for 3 years now. You guys have really brought some great ideas to the game. It was never my plan to work on the game for so long. But I am very happy to have done it. I think the development is getting closer and closer to the end. Unfortunately some of the last updates were not very effective with the performance, so new features suffered a bit. I'm trying to get the focus back here in the future and some things that are already integrated still need some fine tuning. But the whole thing already feels relatively good.

Have fun with the new update. https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• Complete migration to PIXI JS
  
• ReAdded: send Money to other Player
  

[h2]USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

• Number of disasters halved per 10 years
  
• Performance improvements
  
• FIX save/loading issue
  
• FIX catastrophes on/off
  
• FIX building disappear short after builded
  
• FIX smaller Bugs
  

this time I was able to integrate some performance improvements in some places. The performance is still not in my wishes. Some places I will work on in the next updates. But these are places to open the menus faster or other small things. The two bigger problems with the map and mouse movement are more complex and require an intervention in the engine.



As already announced the mapeditor is added again. Here I had to adapt the code and the texture. It's also worth mentioning that it's much more time consuming to work into existing code instead of creating something new. That's why I should try harder to finish a feature to 99% instead of creating a first version.
I had planned some features for the map editor (event manager). But unfortunately I realized too late that it makes more sense to create a HTML element directly from it instead of a complex and not so performant ingame menu. So I tried to create something with Bootstrap and JQuery. But unfortunately I ran out of time. So this is coming for the next update. Also coming in the next update is the ability to change dark water in the map editor.



I must admit that I follow the YT channel Itchy Boots (https://www.youtube.com/c/ItchyBoots). So I decided to add a next language: Spanish.
Since I'm not a Spanish expert, I hope the texts are translated well. Of course I'm always open for feedback!



Since the last update I noticed that the plants were a bit offset. So I corrected that and added some random positions. I think this makes the overall picture not so linear anymore. I also added a change to the alpha value for each wave movement. So the waves have a shading. I must admit I was surprised about the result with such a small change.

Have fun with the new update.

https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• ReAdded Mapeditor
  
• Added Language: Spanish
  
• Added bugs to find
  

[h2]USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

• Performance improvements
  
• Waves improvement
  
• Plantpositions more random
  
• FIX Map movement to the edge
  
• FIX smaller Bugs
  

yes, with this update many things went wrong in the run-up. I have to admit that I often went in the wrong direction this time.
During the optimization and restructuring of the game architecture I got into dead ends this time which set me back several weeks.
My goal is still to achieve a frame rate of at least 30-40 frames/second.
That's why I started to completely rebuild the architecture core of Summer Islands. After the new version was ready for testing, I was shocked to see that the frame rate was constantly at 20 frames/second. So I had to rebuild some things and was left without any features just before the weekend. So I decided to integrate smaller things (new hotel) and also the errors that were listed here in the forum (autosave, loading). I am still working on the optimization and hope to make progress in small steps this time.

The schedule, at the beginning of the year, in June to plan a release, has thus rather failed.
I think that's a pity, because the calendar summer start was already used when Summer Islands came into Early Access. That would have been a nice round thing.
My new plan is to release the game in September.
I.e. until then all big features should be integrated. After the release, I still plan on bug fixes and minor improvements.
Please don't get me wrong, I love to develop Summer Islands with you. Your support has brought Summer Islands a huge step forward. I'm just reaching the limits of the engine (also because it's no longer being developed). I am very interested in how efficient e.g. Unity or Unreal Engine would be and if this would not have been the better choice. But before I try such things, I want to have all features integrated for you in Summer Islands. Because nothing is worse than not finished projects ;)



Have fun with the new update.
https://trello.com/b/FbC1a19w/devboard-summer-islands

[h2]FEATURES[/h2]

• Added Added Ocean Bungalows (Hotel)
  

[h2]USABILITY IMPROVEMENTS[/h2]

• Performance Boost
  
• Saving/Loading asynchron Functions