FOUNDRY News

Hello everyone!

We’re writing today's FOUNDRY Friday to provide news regarding the next big release, referred to as Update 2. As you may know, we originally planned for the 2nd update to arrive at the end of this year. After analyzing player feedback and survey results, we have decided to adjust the timeline and move Update 2 into next year.

The main reason for this decision is because we want FOUNDRY to provide a great and unique gaming experience and we believe to make this work we need an even bigger update. Because of the scope of the changes, breaking it into incremental pieces would have been difficult and slowed development. This means that instead of getting a smaller update at the end of this year, we will instead deliver a much larger update next year, addressing many of the suggestions our active community members shared with us during these months.

[h3]What will Update 2 be about?[/h3]
Many of our players have mentioned that a more meaningful purpose for building a factory would make the game more interesting for them — Update 2 solves this by letting players explore commerce and robot production of all kinds. After all, what’s a factory if you aren’t building something? We’ve been talking about this in several past FOUNDRY Fridays and you can read about that here and here. We believe our work on this feature drastically improves the core of the game.
Alongside that, we will also focus on new features, buildings, recipes and space station content — everything to make the game longer, deeper and more engaging — we will gradually share more details as we work towards Update 2.

And finally we will keep working on game performance, optimization and QoL features so that your factories will run smoothly while looking great.

We would like to express our gratitude to everyone who has been talking to us on Steam, Discord and socials, and participated in our surveys — you are shaping this game with us and your input is what is helping us deliver the best possible version of FOUNDRY.

It is a bit too early to have a specific date, but we’ll be transparent about our progress and what we’re working on in future FOUNDRY Fridays, and we will inform everyone as soon as we have a release window for it.
Join us on the upcoming livestream
To talk about Update 2, the new timeline and to answer your questions we will be hosting a livestream on Wednesday, the 4th of December at 18:00 CET / 9 AM PST. Tune in to share your feedback and get in touch with the developers!

See you next time,
-Foundry Team

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Hi there. Today I want to talk a little bit about the work that we're doing to try and improve streaming performance in Foundry.

[h2]Current System[/h2]
Similar to many other Unity games, Foundry is built in Unity and most entities in our game are represented by GameObjects. Some of the performance challenges that come with using game objects include:
- You can only create/destroy GameObjects on the main thread.
- You can only enable/disable GameObjects on the main thread.
- GameObjects and their components are dynamically allocated meaning that their memory is all over the place and not cache friendly.
- GameObjects use a lot of memory.

[h2]Option A: Object Pooling[/h2]
One of the solutions many games use is object pooling. This is when you preallocate pools of gameobjects and just enable/disable them as they come into streaming range. We actually use this already for some portions of the buildings but there are several challenges with using this strategy for all the objects in the game:
- It's difficult to choose how many of each item to have pooled. If we want perfect pooling, we would need to have enough gameobjects in the object pools to handle the player walking in any arbitrary direction and we only have a little bit of time on the main thread available to grow those pools when necessary.
- GameObjects use a lot of memory. If we needed to have a significant amount of objects pooled, the memory costs would grow quite significantly.
- It is still quite expensive to enable/disable objects, especially ones with deeper hierarchies where unity has to iterate the hierarchy and enable/disable all the components.
- Implementing game object pooling is fairly simple to do but converting all the game code to work with object pooling can be quite difficult and lead to very subtle bugs, not just for all the existing code, but for any code that anyone on the team writes in the future. It effectively would add a 'development tax' to all current and future development on the project.

[h2]Option B: Unity ECS[/h2]
Another solution games will use is Unity's ECS system. Though using Unity ECS would solve many of our issues, the main issue with the unity ecs system is that Foundry was in development for many years before the 1.0 release of Unity ECS and switching the entire game would require a significant rewrite of the entire game. It would be possible to use it for only certain systems but this would mean we would have two entity systems which would add significant complexity to the game. So instead of rewriting everything to use Unity ECS, we're working on incorporating some of the ideas behind it into our own code.

[h2]Option C: Streaming Proxies[/h2]
The solution we are currently prototyping is to take parts of our own code and make them more data oriented and have it stream in separately from the unity GameObjects. These objects that stream in separately are called streaming proxies. These proxies are data oriented and stream in exceptionally fast. The idea is that most of the world you see will be drawn using streaming proxies and game objects will stream in close to the player:




[h2]Initial Prototype[/h2]
As a prototype, we've moved over the rendering of everything that uses our compute rendering system over to the streaming proxy system. Here's a video of how fast streaming was before:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And here's an example using streaming proxies:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In the second video you can see that all the streaming proxies stream in exceptionally quick but we're not yet loading collision for any of those objects which means you can't interact with them at all yet. That'll be solved by a mix of streaming in gameobjects near the player and moving more systems over to the streaming proxies such as collision/effects/sounds/etc.

[h2]What's Next[/h2]
This whole system is a a work in progress and the final solution might end up being a mix of gameobjects/pooling/streaming proxies. Next steps are to stream in the gameobjects near the player but also to move some of the collision handling over to the proxy system. That being said, we wanted to give you guys a look into some of the work in progress that's being done to solve the streaming issues in large bases.

Thanks for listening!
-Cheerio

If you haven't read our previous FOUNDRY Fridays and prefer a video format, feel free to check out our Monthly Status Update video on YouTube:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

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Greetings Founders!

We have been pretty heads down working on some major changes, so today's Foundry Friday is a bit of a grab bag of topics. We are going to go over the survey results, show off the orbital uplink tool, show some optimization progress of modular buildings and tease a new mega structure.

[h2]Survey Results[/h2]
Last Foundry Friday we shared a survey with our community to better understand where we should focus our efforts on improving Foundry, and we received TONS of responses and were able to draw some valuable insights.



Although there was a great deal overlap in respondents' opinions, the feedback fell into two broad buckets. Our retained players focus on quality-of-life improvements, like refining resource gathering and adding smoother gameplay tweaks, reflecting how invested they are in the experience. Meanwhile, players who’ve taken a break often cited the need for more content, a clearer endgame, and blueprints to bring them back. This mix of perspectives gives us a solid direction: making iterative improvements to keep regular players engaged while expanding content and adding features to draw back those who’ve stepped away. This survey affirmed our need to add more content and a thematic goal- but also reminds us we also need to expand the existing core pillars of the game.

Of note, the pressure mechanic was not seen as a priority. I believe that’s because it’s something that has conflicts with the general vibe of the game- so it’s interesting to see the community respond with a similar opinion. Also… everyone wants trains.

[h2]Orbital Uplink Tool[/h2]
In Foundry Friday #62 we shared information about the Orbital Laser. This late(ish) Space Station upgrade helps players terraform large chunks of terrain with ease. And now commanding the space station with the new Orbital Uplink Tool design is a breeze. This craftable handheld has a right-click modal menu that lets you switch between different Space Station features (like the Orbital Laser).


[h2]Optimizing Modular Buildings[/h2]
Foundry is receiving a ton of optimizations, but there is still much left to do in order to allow absolutely massive factories smoothly on a wide range of hardware. This week we tackled optimizing Modular Buildings, the mid to late game super structures that are built in modules by construction ships and drones. These buildings presented a unique challenge in that they don’t utilize our existing systems for rendering.
By manually processing the drawing of these buildings (and their related handrails, scaffolding and modules) we were able to improve performance on this “blast furnace” test scene from a poultry 27fps to a much more acceptable 103fps.

Modular buildings can contain thousands of pieces like hand railings and scaffolding.

Modular buildings now have the same batching optimizations as regular buildings

Foundry is the most fun when you try to scale, and because of this it’s important that we have each element run as fast as possible. We have done a ton of other rendering and streaming optimizations that we haven’t talked about yet, and our development builds are running smoother than ever. The next update should be really solid for those who like to build "big".

[h2]Mega Modular Buildings[/h2]
Now that modular buildings have received a large optimization- we might as well tease where this feature is going. Even larger, even more modular mega structures! Next Foundry Friday we will reveal one of the most mega modular buildings yet. In fact, it’s so large you can actually go inside and to get it to work requires numerous new modular buildings. This building is so iconic that it was hard to get a work-in-progress screenshot where you wouldn't immediately guess what it is. So you get this early rendering of one of the components instead:

What could it be?

Well, that's it for this week. We are hard at work on a ton of things behind the scenes and we are eager to share more in the coming posts.

Cheers
-markl

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Hello everyone!

In today's FOUNDRY Friday I continue to talk about potential future features and afterwards conclude with a community survey. The survey can be completed in less than two minutes and all textbox questions are optional. We are actively working on a bunch of exciting features and content, but we believe it’s important for us to ‘gut check’ that we are prioritizing things correctly.

While the survey asks a few different questions, the main focus is a feature list we want you to order by priority. What you care about most goes on the top and what you care about least goes to the bottom. We understand that many of you will want all of those features, and we might very well add all of them, but for this survey it is important for us to understand what you believe is most urgently needed.

The features to order are purposefully vague as this isn’t the time to go into details, however during the following blog post I will be providing content to each of those features to help you make the decision on which rank you’ll be ordering each. Additionally if you want to share I would love to read your thoughts in the comments about how certain features should be implemented.

For better context it’s advised to read through the feature descriptions below first, but if you want to skip ahead you can find the link here.

[h3]Trains[/h3]
Trains offer a very effective, immersive and visually appealing way of moving goods around your factory over large distances. I think they don’t need much explanation, there are quite a few (factory) games with trains and we would implement them in a roughly similar way. We have already experimented with trains and we might show some of those experiments in the near future.

[h3]Blueprints[/h3]
Factory games are about scaling and blueprints help a lot. We want to add blueprints, but we are not yet sure if it should be a relatively simple copy and paste mechanic or something more integrated with unique mechanics like blueprinted objects being built by the construction industry.

[h3]Pressure Mechanic[/h3]
I want to start with the important part right away: Any sort of pressure mechanic would always be optional and could be turned off completely. A pressure mechanic could be implemented in many different ways. I personally believe that moving enemies don’t fit our first-person voxel based gameplay and that pressure should come from other sources. It could be environmental pressure (pollution, weather, …), something related to our space station (attackers?) or maybe something entirely different.

[h3]Exploration Mechanics[/h3]
FOUNDRY offers a procedurally generated world, yet as of now there isn’t much to discover except new resource nodes. I’d be very curious to hear from you if you would like to have some mechanics themed around exploring the world. An example could be the hunt for rare items that provide various bonuses or unlocks, however I believe players shouldn’t be forced to if they want to focus on the factory. If you have suggestions, let us know in the comments!

[h3]More meaningful goal / endgame[/h3]
It’s something I have covered in multiple previous FOUNDRY Fridays, most recently here, therefore I’ll keep this one short: Does the game need a better purpose for producing goods, instead of just to progress through the tech tree?

[h3]More unique features[/h3]
Do you think FOUNDRY needs more unique features that cannot be found in comparable games? An example would be our construction industry and modular buildings.

[h3]Better Performance[/h3]
We are constantly working on improving the performance so that larger factories are possible. The reason this is part of the list is that we see how urgent you believe this topic is.

[h3]Better Usability[/h3]
With usability we mean how comfortable certain features are, that could be the user interface or how easy it is to drag belts and pipes. As with the performance point above, we are working on this no matter what, but we’d like to see where you put it on the priority list.

[h3]More content[/h3]
We intend to make the game much longer compared to what it is now, but we want to offer it as part of the orderable list so that you can specify how important it is as of now.

[h2]That’s all of the features we want you to sort by priority, here’s the link to the survey: LINK[/h2]

Thank you very much for participating, me and the team are looking forward to the results.

See you next time,
-mrmcd


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Hello everyone!

This FOUNDRY Friday is going to be a little shorter than usual because our fully remote team is traveling to meet up in person. For some it is the first time they will meet the team in person!

Amongst many other things we’ve been working on, we’ve also been continuing to work on optimizations. Optimizations are such an important part of a game like ours because the entire fun of the game centers around building giant never ending factories. They also help the game run on lower power systems, and on higher quality settings. Most factories in Foundry are CPU bound which means that the GPU is idle and available to help.

One of the optimizations we’ve just finished up is to recreate the unity particle systems on the GPU. This frees up the CPU to handle more of the factory simulation. In this video you can see the CPU version of one of the Foundry smoke effects on the left, and on the right you can see the GPU version. The GPU version costs no CPU to simulate and it also now supports occlusion culling so if it’s completely obscured by terrain or a wall, it costs no CPU or GPU at all:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This plus some other physics/effect/batching optimizations that we’ve been working on makes it so that on average, in dense areas of your factory, you will see on average somewhere between a 50% to 150% increase in your FPS. Here’s a before and after video of a factory designed by Zytukin where the framerate in one of the problematic areas is almost double what it used to be.

Before:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

After:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This was just a brief overview into one of the optimizations we’re doing. There’s still a lot more to come which we will cover in a future Foundry Friday.

Until next time,
Thanks for listening!


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