FOUNDRY News

[p]Hello everyone!

I’m pleased to share that Update 2.2 will be released on Monday, 29th of September at 2pm CEST.[/p][p][/p][p]The update’s theme centers around excavation, and the main features will be:[/p][p][/p][p] New Terraforming Mechanics[/p]

• [p] Drill Shapes (dig multiple blocks at once with your drill/laser)[/p]
• [p] Shaped Charges (precision explosives)[/p]
• [p] Excavation through personal mining drones & construction ships[/p]
• [p] Drill Ships (A new tunnel boring machine) [/p]

[p]Quality of Life and Polish[/p]

• [p] Powerline Quality of Life Improvements[/p]
• [p] New Pipe Drag Mode[/p]
• [p] Ability to regrow grass[/p]
• [p] Improved Conveyor Drag Mode[/p]
• [p] Various other QoL improvements[/p]

[p][/p][p]A more detailed changelog will be released shortly before the release. You can read about many of those features in detail by checking out the dev blogs of the past two months. We see this update as the “Terraforming, Part One” update, as we plan to expand on progression mechanics and unlockable improvements for many of those terraforming features in the upcoming update 3.0 - more details to be shared soon. [/p][p][/p][h3]Drill Ships[/h3][p]As the final piece of the puzzle I’m glad to be able to show off our version of the tunnel boring machine. I have briefly mentioned at the end of the past dev blog that we’re looking at adding a tunnel boring machine which is flexible and capable of players needs. And here it is:

[/p][p][/p][p]Model and Textures are work in progress...[/p][p]The drill ship is a vehicle (don’t expect too much, no action-style vehicle controls!) which is able to move around and excavate tunnels for you. You can walk inside and control it through several levers, valves and buttons. In short, you can set the direction (forward, up, down) and tell it how far it should excavate. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Once started you can walk away and come back when it is done. Drilled blocks will be stored in its internal inventory. Unless used in high quantities it isn’t suited for large scale excavation, but it’s tailor-made for tunnels, no matter the direction. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Trains Preview[/h3][p]Since many of you asked for a progress update on trains I wanted to share some work in progress videos and pictures. I won’t be going into details today, I just wanted to show off some progress. Those videos are showing us testing internal systems, all the debug visualisation is just for the developers. Please keep in mind that trains will not be released with the upcoming update 2.2.
[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p] [/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]We’re excited to see our trains coming together and will share more details as soon as it makes sense. Also we’re still planning on releasing trains on a preview branch before the actual update to gather feedback.

Thank you for reading and I’m looking forward to seeing you play when the update is out!
-mrmcd[/p][p]


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Hello everyone!

Today I am back with more terraforming features for the upcoming Update 2.2. Remember when I asked for feedback about personal mining drones here, and then later covered the received feedback here? We have been working on various different terraforming features since then, some of them I’ve been showing off in the blog post here. Now, for this iteration of FOUNDRY Friday I will continue with more Terraforming features based on your feedback.

[h3]Personal Mining Drones & Mining Areas[/h3]
While the vast majority of you enjoyed the idea of personal mining drones (see first linked blog post above), the key feedback was that ultimately you want to automate the process. Especially when you want to excavate very large areas it can get boring having to idle next to the area and let the drones do the work. Therefore we have continued to work on the feature and simultaneously thought about solutions to additionally add a way to automate it.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Work in progress.

The shared element between both is that you will be able to mark mining areas with a special tool, the mining drone controller. You may mark single blocks, 2-dimensional boxes (1 voxel high and you drag length and width) or fully 3-dimensional boxes.

If you’re in close proximity, your personal mining drones will automatically start excavating. And in case you’re not a fan of that and want to mark your mining areas without the drones immediately starting, you will be able to disable (toggle) the personal mining drones.

Drones will pick the closest available block, go there, excavate it and bring back the mined resources. In case your inventory is full, they will let you know (similar to when a crafted item cannot be inserted into your inventory) and stop mining additional terrain blocks.


We’re planning on providing various upgrades for the system, for example increased number of mining drones or higher mining drone speed. However we might split those off into a separate update as we aim to release Update 2.2 rather soon.

As a side note I wanted to mention that we have also heard the feedback about there being no purpose for dirt, stone and other terrain blocks and how they just fill up the inventory. First, we will drastically increase the stack size of those, but we’re also working on ways to make use of it.

[h3]Construction Ship Excavation[/h3]
Time to look at the automatable version of this feature! Most people suggested a building that is able to launch mining drones similar to the personal mining drones. You would place it next to your mining area and the building and its drones excavate the area while you can go and do something else. But this presented us with a couple inconveniences which ultimately didn’t feel right. Examples are that a limited range might require moving the building frequently, and that you would need power at remote locations where there is none, or even just the fact that placing and soon after removing a building didn’t feel right.

So I was thinking why not implement this in a way where it just works, no matter what. And this is where our existing construction ships come into play. They are already able to move to modular buildings and construct them, so why not give them a few integrated mining drones and let them go to your mining areas and excavate for you? They have no range limitation, so no matter where you place your mining area, they will be able to reach it.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Work in progress.

This required a few changes to the drone ports. Going forward you will be able to toggle if they should automatically assign mining areas and/or construction sites, so you can have a few for each task. We also had to add a storage inventory to the building, since the ships need to unload their mined resources once they are back. You can manually take out the resources, but we have also added a conveyor connection so that you can automatically move the items into a larger storage.


I believe this is the best and most comfortable solution and I’m looking forward to your thoughts!

[h3]What about the tunnel boring machine?[/h3]
Since the tunnel boring machine was also highly requested, I’d like to quickly mention it. We’re looking into it, but I believe we should think a bit more outside the box here. A machine that just allows you to build horizontal tunnels feels somewhat limited to me. I think it at least should allow you to also dig up and down. Additionally I’m not sure if an expanding building (that blocks the path until demolished) is really the best way to handle it. It would be easy to re-use the old underground miners for that, but I think we might be able to do a little better. Stay tuned for future FOUNDRY Fridays!

Thank you for reading and as always see you in two weeks!
-mrmcd



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Hello everyone!

In the previous dev blog I was asking for feedback about removing powerline collisions and I received a surprising amount of suggestions surrounding the high voltage system. Many of them were interesting and not a huge amount of work, so I’ve decided to do a quality of life pass and implement the best and most do-able suggestions.

[h3]Removed Collisions[/h3]
The majority of people wanted the powerline collisions to be removed, but many of you still preferred to be able to tell if it happens so clipping can be avoided if desired. So we removed the collisions and now show yellow warning boxes if something clips.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Those warning boxes (and the message on the screen) can be disabled in the game settings. For me it’s not yet clear if they should be enabled by default. While it can be a bit noisy, it seems worse in the preview video since we’re explicitly trying to highlight it. Any thoughts on that?

[h3]Increased Cable Range[/h3]
In an effort to make working with high voltage powerlines more comfortable I drastically increased the cable & build range when using the powerline tool. Stack size for the poles has been increased as well.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Cable Tension Setting[/h3]
I really liked the suggestion about adding the ability to build perfectly straight powerlines to bury them in underground tunnels, so I added a toggle that lets you swap powerline tension.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Radial Menu Pole Selection[/h3]
Those of you who have been playing the game for a long time will remember the old powerline tool having a radial menu for Connecting/Disconnecting powerlines. This has been removed when we changed it so that you have to use demolition mode to get rid of powerlines. Since that the radial menu isn’t used on the powerline tool and that allowed for adding support for toggling the active power pole by radial menu while placing them. We still had to go for the middle mouse button (can be changed) since right click is already used for resetting the powerline.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]Transformer Group Names[/h3]
This one has been requested for a long time and we never really had the time to work on it because it’s quite complex to solve. But now I was finally able to implement names for transformer groups (grouped by the low voltage grid they are placed on). In your powerline frame you can now add labels to groups of transformers.

What made the feature tricky is that it’s not obvious how to handle when those groups merge or split. But I think I found acceptable solutions for most of those scenarios and I’m looking forward to player reception.


We also have other quality of life improvements in the works for the next update, and I will share those in future dev blogs.

Thank you for reading and keep the suggestions (about all sorts of things!) coming,
-mrmcd



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[h3]Update 2.1 Hotfix #2 Patch Notes[/h3]

• Added missing icon for the superalloy market license
  
• Fixed waypoint marker size
  
• Fixed possible crash on load when a research mod was removed
  
• Fixed throughput issue with integrated belts connecting to T4 belts
  
• Fixed throughput issue on freight elevator
  

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Hello everyone!

It’s summer and things are currently moving a little slower, therefore this will be a shorter blog post. However I still have some progress to show off and some questions to ask.

[h3]Shaped Charges[/h3]
As one of the new terrain modification features we’ll be adding with the upcoming terraforming update we’ll be introducing shaped charges. They act as precision explosives which don’t blow up in a spherical pattern but instead a cuboid shape. On placement you will see a preview of that cuboid excavation shape, ensuring no undesired surprise once you press the detonator. This makes them ideal for quick excavations whenever the spherical explosion pattern isn’t useful. On top of that they are placed like structures and not to be thrown, so you can put them exactly where you need them.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Please note that all visuals are work in progress for testing. Same about balancing regarding to shapes and sizes.

[h3]Experiments with “mining shapes”[/h3]
After your feedback that you wouldn’t like to see the drill/laser replaced, we’ve been looking into ways to improve it instead. We have added unlockable “mining shapes”, that allow you to drill multiple blocks at once, making it a more practical tool overall. So far those shapes automatically project on the face you’re aiming at, which seems to be the most friction-less approach. You can toggle between those shapes with the radial menu.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Please note that all visuals are work in progress for testing. Same about balancing regarding to shapes and sizes.

[h3]What about collisions for powerlines?[/h3]
I’m thinking about removing the collisions for powerlines and would like to hear your thoughts. I’ve seen a fair amount of frustration being expressed whenever a powerline blocks a building, or when you cannot drag the powerline because it intersects with a building. And I think it might just be the right choice to remove the collision check from powerlines completely.

That would mean you could drag them through buildings (or even terrain) and they would never be in the way when placing something. For those of you who care about realism, you can still place them in a way where they don’t intersect with anything. I feel like it doesn’t have to be enforced and it would make building for certain players more fun.

Please let me hear your thoughts about all three topics in the comments below!

That’s it for today, thank you for reading, and see you in two weeks.
-mrmcd



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