Ape Apps

Today I am putting the finishing touches on Death 3d v0.15.0, which comes with some exciting new changes and updates!

First of all, e2m6 - Engineering has been added to the Pegasus campaign.


In this level, you must fight your way through the Galactic Freight Pegasus' main engineering deck.

Next, an exciting new feature has been added to the game - the Map Shop! The built-in level editor has a new menu option Submit to Map Shop, which will allow you to upload your custom map to the Ape Apps server. The map will then be available to download for all users in the new Map Shop browser that is available in the also new and redesigned Play Game screen.


You can make updates to your map and submit them to the Map Shop too, and eventually players' downloaded maps will auto-update. I just forgot to add that part in when I was finalizing the release, but custom map auto-updating will be functional in the next update. I have added the first map to the map shop, Lunar Outpost, which features a Galactic Freight piracy assault on a United Earth lunar base. The map also demonstrates some NPC scripting if you can locate the hidden scientist.

Moving on, the Map Editor now let's you embed custom map tile textures into your maps!


You can add as many custom textures to your map as you like, although they will obviously increase the file size of your map. Custom textures can be used anywhere a regular texture is used, and maps with custom textures are supported in the new Map Shop as well.

The Map Editor has also gained to features for NPC characters. You can now select the weapon that an NPC is holding (or make them completely unarmed). Pairing the custom NPC weapon with the NPC script event to turn the NPC into an enemy, you can now effectively customize the weapon of any enemy (as previously requested by @stupidsilentandas ). I will probably add the custom weapon option directly to enemies at some point, I just haven't gotten to it yet.


NPC's also have a new script action, Explode. This is a ridiculous action that, as the name suggests, causes the NPC to spontaneously explode, gibbing his body and causing damage to nearby players. I am thinking of making an "NPC Funhouse" map for the Map Shop that demonstrates some of the things you can do to the poor NPC characters in the game.

Additionally, you can now add custom text dialog to NPC scripts, allowing you to add an element of story and dialog to your custom maps.

The map editor now lets you set any wall tile to "offset" (or half size). You can find the option by right-clicking on a wall tile on the map.

Finally, there is now spawn/teleport fragging. If you spawn or teleport on top of another player or enemy, they will instantly die in brutal fashion.

Anyway, that is it for today's Death 3d update. I plan on adding a lot more over the coming months, as well as a lot more custom maps to the Map Shop. I will also be further expanding the Map Shop by adding feedback and ratings, so map creators can look at how many people have tried their map and view their feedback. I also want to add multiplayer to the current "single player" game modes, so that you can do a co-op campaign or custom map. I also want to greatly expand NPC scripting, because I have a cool idea for a new game based on the Death 3d engine that takes place again in the My Colony Universe, but plays as a continuous story driven game like Half Life.

And of course, if you haven't played Death 3d yet, you can get it right now on the Ape Market or through the various app stores:
https://market.ape-apps.com/death-3d.html

#death3d

So I'm getting the finishing touches put on My Colony v0.94.0 which should be hitting all devices within the coming days. This is yet another I.T. content update, with a few other goodies and changes thrown in for good measure. Let's take a look!

To begin with, I did not even realize that the Custom Map feature had been broken for some time now. The game could load old custom maps just fine, but newly created maps were not working, resulting in the user seeing a blank black screen when trying to start up a custom map. The issue was with the way Custom Maps were being saved. This has been corrected, but any custom map made between client versions v0.86.0 and v0.93.0 will not function. You can create new custom maps now without issue.

Next, since the previously added Online Black Market Office was a bit overpowered, it has now lost the ability to produce Starships and Ether. All other stats on the building remain the same.

I have switched the in-game 'Online Reference' link (found in the Encyclopedia) over to the updated reference maintained on the Coloniae website. Coloniae is operated and maintained by @Sobeirannovaocc and has really grown into an awesome resource for all My Colony players, so if you haven't checked the page out yet, go ahead and do that! https://coloniae.space/

I have added Plastic import/export functionality to the StarGate and Star Port buildings. I didn't even realize that it had been missing!

In addition to the above, I have made some further (albeit minor) tweaks to both the touch/mobile, and the TV interface for the game.

There have been long standing reports about inaccurate Entertainment building stats and other strangeness. I can't reliably reproduce this issue, but I have made some changes to how Entertainment is managed and calculated, so if you were having issues before, please check again and let me know if the changes help.

Moving on to content, this update adds more I.T. stuff, with a lot more still to come. Firstly, the new tech Mass Data Management has been added for Human civilizations, unlocking much needed buildings with higher Bandwidth output. These buildings are the Large Server Building for U.E., and the Proxy Server Building for L.I.S.. Both Human civs get a new minor building, the Old Electronics Chop Shop, which converts old Toys and Plastic into Microchips.

For Zolarg players, we now have our first Insectoid educational building, the Mound of Scholars! Additionally, there is now finally an upgrade to the Paste Tank, the new Smart Paste Tank, which is essentially a networked Paste Tank with microchips and way higher output.

Finally, Premium users get a new Reptilian entertainment/civics structure, the Live Autopsy Lab. This is just a small gag type building that I saw in the suggestions. Basically, it features a Reptilian cutting up a poor Insectoid and waving his head around for public display.

Oh, those silly Reptilians.

Anyway, that wraps it up for today's update. I am going to try to keep up the weekly update schedule for My Colony, since I think it's been going pretty good here. So keep the suggestions and bug reports coming, and stay tuned for more!

Here is a collection on concepts that I am leaning towards for My Colony 2 as of today (20200624). This is all subject to change and I can be convinced by the community of anything, so keep the suggestions and feedback coming. This is going to be a super long post featuring all of my thoughts on MC2 thus far. Feel free to criticize anything and everything here. My feelings will not be hurt and nothing is set in stone. This is a starting point for community discussion to help make MC2 the best game it can be!

Relationship to My Colony 1
MC2 is an entire new game, not an upgrade to the original, or a version 2.0. It may use completely different concepts. It will not be tied in to the same server. Game files will not transfer over, as MC2 will probably have completely different buildings/tech tree, etc.

This does not mean that MC1 will be going away. I will continue to support the original and the server indefinitely. I realize that a lot of people like the style of game that MC1 is and do not want anything to change, so the original is staying where it is. It may continue to receive new content as well as bug fixes, but I do not plan on any further changes to the gameplay mechanics or core engine going forward.

That said, as long as MC1 remains popular and people keep playing it and paying for it, I will keep the game going.

Business Model/Monetizing
This is the least fun part of development, but a necessary one in order to make creating a game feasible. The business model for MC1 was tacked on as an afterthought, and reflecting back I do not like the concept of certain structures and units being premium.

None of this is set in stone, but here are my initial thoughts on the business model. My Colony 2 will be a straight paid app on all app stores, with everything unlocked at the base price, no in-app purchases. No advertising anywhere. The exception is on Ape Web Apps and the Ape Market, where it will be free, everything unlocked, but with no access to multiplayer or custom content. Maybe only one map type available.

Current My Colony 1 is basically already like this on Desktop, with the mobile client being free with additional IAP, so this change just makes the mobile version match up with what is already on desktop.

Now, I do anticipate the dissatisfaction of Android players not having the free version in the Play Store. However, Android support for Progressive Web Apps is sufficiently advanced now that you can just install the Web version to your homescreen like an app and it's hardly any different. Same with iOS. And MC1 will still be available for free like it always has been.

No free version on the mobile app stores will likely mean less players, and I understand this. But I like the idea of just buying a game and having the whole thing, not worrying about IAP's and not having any advertising.

Client/Server Structure
The biggest change to MC2 is it's design from the ground up as a multiplayer game. This does not mean that you cannot play single player, but it is being designed specifically for multiplayer.

MC1 has limited multiplayer, which basically consists of chat and trading/gifting resources. You can play together on a multiplayer region, but all you are really doing is sharing atmosphere and seeing thumbnails of other players' colonies. Not really very multiplayery (is that a word?). The MC1 multiplayer is also global and centralized, meaning everything has to go through the global My Colony server.

My Colony 2 multiplayer will be decentralized, meaning no global server that everybody plays on. Why am I doing this, because it seems like a downgrade? Look at every game out there with real global multiplayer, not just chat and trading. That takes massive infrastructure, and you pay for it with either a monthly subscription or endless IAP's. That's the only way it's really possible, and I don't think anybody wants that if you really stop and think it through.

The only realistic way to add real multiplayer to the game without investing in a massive infrastructure and charging big money for the game is to decentralize it. And since I am not Blizzard and do not want to spend my whole life maintaining MC2 servers, I am adopting a decentralized approach.

What does this mean? My Colony 2 will actually be designed as two separate applications in one, the client and the server.

The game client will be fairly light weight. It's job is to receive data from the server application and render it to the screen, and pass instructions as to what the player wants to do onto the server. That's pretty much it, and it should be fairly performant. Even though the game is moving to 3d, I still expect it to perform better than MC1, simply because 3d hardware rendering performs better than 2d software rendering.

The game server is much more interesting and is where all of the game mechanics take place, but since the server does not have to worry about handling the UI or making drawing calls, it actually has a bit more overhead to work with than on MC1. The two most expensive operations in MC1 are the rendering and the pathfinding. In MC2, the server is eliminating the rendering, and I also want to greatly reduce the pathfinding, leaving more headroom for actual fun stuff, like game mechanics simulation.

So in MC2, the game relationship is between client(s) and server. Whenever you create a new game in MC2, you are creating a new server, and then connecting to it with a client. The server is saved and retained between plays, where the client only exists while it is in use, and is not saved. So the point I just want to get across is that the client is really not that important, the server is.

The server and client code are both included in the My Colony 2 game. You will have the option of starting a regular game or creating a dedicated server. When you start a regular game, you are spinning up both a client and server and creating a 1-1 connection between the two right on your device. You can also make your game joinable by friends or others on your local network for multiplayer.

You can also create a dedicated server. When you create a MC2 dedicated server, you will be presented with a special server GUI that allows you to be in full control of the game. The server will continue to process game data as long as it is running, even if no players/clients are connected. A dedicated server will be able to establish custom game rules and parameters, and have mods installed that will be transferred to any client who connects. You will be able to make a dedicated server open to the public, or by invite only, or by specifying a list of accounts who are able to join. It's up to the server. A dedicated server will be able to moderate it's players however they want, the server can adjust resource levels, ban players for cheating, or anything. It's all up to the server owner.

The game data is saved only on the server, and the server owner will be responsible for making backups. I expect game files to be a lot bigger than MC1, so I am not going to be implementing Cloud Sync, which is known to cause corruption on larger files anyway. The ability to export and backup data will be built right into the game as usual.

Because of the way it's designed, even if you only want to play single player, it still may be desirable to set up a private dedicated server. For instance, you could run a private MC2 dedicated server on your powerful home PC that is always on/connected to the internet. Then you can connect to your server from your tablet/phone/laptop/another window on your computer, wherever you are, and your game is always there waiting for you, and all of the processing is being done on the more powerful computer.

The Game World/Game Files
In MC1, the game world is divided into cities and regions, and each city is a separate game file. In MC2, there are no cities and regions, there are planets.

This is something I am aping from Minecraft. A planet is like a regular city file in MC1, except is extends out in every direction to infinity, so you do not have to worry about running out of space for your city. A planet can have multiple cities and multiple players building cities at the same time.

Planets will be procedurally generated, and new areas will be generated in real-time as needed. Each planet type will have different biomes like in Minecraft, so that different environments and different resources are available in different parts on the planet.

This system means that you will have to build up trade networks with other cities or make additional settlement outposts across the planet in order to bring more resource types back to your colony. In MC1, practically every resource in the game is available with a square mile of your lander. This doesn't really make sense. In MC2 you will have to go out and find resources, and then build up a network for bringing them back into your city.

Technically, the MC2 world is still a big 2d grid like in MC1, but each tile does have an elevation, a z-index, for varied terrain elevations. Different resources might be found at different elevations and in different biomes. You will also be able to adjust the terrain in-game, like building up dirt to level out construction areas. There will be flat areas good for building, low canyons, and hilly or mountainous areas.

Also like in Minecraft, the terrain is generated on the fly and only transferred to the client in "chunks" as needed. So your client will only contain the data for the area that you are currently looking at, and the immediate surrounding areas. As you scroll around the map, areas you are no longer looking at will be disposed from memory as new areas are loaded from the server.

Construction / Resource Gathering and Rovers
I would really like to get rid of Rovers completely and simulate everything. It's not that I hate rovers, they are so helpful and adorable. The issue is with the pathfinding. Just driving rovers around the map takes up a huge percentage of the MC1 processing time, for what is essentially a visual effect.

Pathfinding is both CPU and memory intensive on anything larger than a medium sized MC1 map, and in MC2 the map sizes are being expanded infinitely larger. It's not just as simple as "only path finding around a certain area from the rover." Before you can even calculate pathfinding operations, you first have to generate a pathfinding map and load it into memory. The maps will be more expensive than in MC1 owing to the introduction of terrain elevation, as there will now be cliffs to work around. Each time a new structure is placed the pathfinding map needs to be recalculated. With the game being multiplayer, this will have to be taking place on a larger scale. It is one of the features holding MC1 back, due to all of the CPU time that must be dedicated to solving rover paths.

The issue of course, is that everybody likes rovers. Even I like rovers. Would the game be less fun without them? I don't know. If you could just turn off Rover Rendering in the engine settings and you didn't even see them, but everything continued to operate as normal, would it make a difference to the game, or would it matter? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't.

Everything a Rover does can be simulated for a fraction of the CPU and memory cost.

This is the largest part of MC2 that I don't have an answer to. I can't just remove rovers because that would be a blow to the fans of MC1. I also cringe thinking of all of the months wasted on optimizing path finding and the 1 star complaints about performance, all relating to a path finding feature in what is essentially a city building game.

There are options.

I could always just keep rovers in the game as they are and just keep working around the processing issues that come with it. In a single player game or a server with only a few active players at once, it probably wouldn't be a very big hit.

I have also considered just simulating rovers, sort of like colonists are just simulated in MC1. For example, you don't even have to build your own rovers. But when you place a new construction order, little rovers drive up onto the construction site and build your building anyway. These rovers do not exist on the server, but you see them building on the client. Same way for moving resources around. On the server it is just simulated, but on the client, you see a rover driving around doing all of the work. This would still require path finding, but each client would be doing their own path finding on the visual rover effect, and the player could turn it off if it became a performance issue.

If the client could just visually simulate things like rovers, colonists, police cars, busses, etc, they would all still be there visually making your city look alive, but the server wouldn't even have to worry about them.

Maybe there are other options too that I am not thinking of? All feedback on Rovers is welcome. I want the game to be performant, but I also don't want to go against the fans, so please let me know what you think either way.

Graphics
MC1 is a software rendered game using the HTML5 canvas element, arranging .png and .svg tile images onto a 2d isometric grid. Most of the graphics processing is done by the main CPU and not the graphics card, so graphics performance is largely defined by how good your processor is. This is why the game runs a lot better on desktop vs mobile, or even on iPhone vs android, and iPhone processors tend to be a bit better.

The problems is that the CPU also has to process the game, so trying to do everything at once gets expensive, especially on mobile devices.

My Colony 2 is moving to WebGL for graphics processing, which is a javascript based implementation of OpenGL that handles rendering on the GPU. This should lead to far better performance on most devices.

My original idea was to use Blender for all of the games building models. The graphics were going to be awesome. But when I dug into Blender and started working with it, I remembered how I am not actually a graphics designer, and it was going to take me forever to make all of the models for this game.

My other idea was to make blocky pixelated type graphics using my own Voxel Paint application (https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/). This means lower quality visuals but much higher output and probably better rendering performance as well. It's also so easy to use that anybody could make their own MC2 models, my wife even offering to help design structures for the game (she is a big Minecraft fan).

At the end of the day, My Colony 1 was never known for high quality graphics, but I thought that with MC2 I could really make it look great. After putzing around with Blender though, I have to acknowledge my own personal limitations. Basically, I can either spend months learning how to make great 3d models in Blender, or I can spend months working on the game code. I know which one I'd rather do. So I am probably going to go with the pixelated look, simply because it is something that I can actually do myself within a realistic timeframe, and it will also go well with the next point I'm about to explain, which is modding.

I know some people will not like a pixelated looking game. This is one of those areas where I have to say "tough," unless somebody is willing so supply me with hundreds of 3d models free of charge, which is what it is going to take in order to do this properly.

Modding
Customization is going to be huge in MC2 compared to the original. Given the global online multiplayer in MC1, custom content could not realistically be allowed in the game. The decentralized nature of MC2 changes everything though, and modding and customization, as well as all of the tools needed to make it happen, are going to be baked right into the client.

In MC2, the basic "unit" of the game is the building. Everything is going to be pretty much based on buildings, and their relationship to each other. This is basically how MC1 works as well, so this is nothing new. What is going to be knew is My Colony 2's build in Building Editor.

I am going to be creating MC2 using the games' bulit-in editor, and so the same editor I use to make the game is going to be available to all players.

Each building in the game is going to be stored as a building file, and the base game will ship with all of its standard building files, which will be loaded at runtime. This differs from MC1 where all building data is stored in a single JSON file that is shipped with the game, which cannot be easily edited.

A building file will contain three parts.

The first is the JSON formatted definition data, with information about the name of the building, what it does, what it generates, etc. All of the properties that a building can have will be stored in that data.

The second part is the model information, which will essentially be an embedded Voxel Paint file.

The third part is a small (maybe like 64x64 pixel) thumbnail or icon representing the building, which will show up on the construction sidebar and various places throughout the UI.

The three above parts are all packaged into a single file which can be added to the game client, posted online for easy sharing, or what have you. A dedicated server can include custom building files that will automatically be distributed to clients when they join the game. Each building file will have a unique UUID and version information, so if a client already has the same version of a building file that a server does, it will not need to re-transfer the data upon connection.

This system is actually a very powerful change over the original My Colony, and unlocks essentially limitless possibilities for the game. This also makes it a lot easier for the community to participate in development of the game. A creator who makes a great building idea can distribute it online where it is tested out and balanced by the community. If it works in practice and everyone likes it, the file can be included in the base game.

If you want to host a crazy dedicated server with a bunch of custom buildings that totally change the game, you can do so.

I have no idea what kind of buildings people will dream up, but including the content creation tools right into the base game will be huge, I hope. And I plan on making the process as easy as I possibly can, so that anybody can create a building. Using Voxel Paint, if you have an idea and the ability to build a house in Minecraft, you should be able to make it a reality. And being able to make something and then instantly import it into your game makes it simple to test out concepts and balance them right there on your own device.

It's possibly that nobody will care about modding or making buildings, but it still doesn't hurt to add the tools right into the game. If nothing else, it will still make it easier for me to create new content for updates, versus having to go through and edit JSON data manually.

However, it's also possible that everybody will be making custom content and the game takes off in crazy directions that we never even imagined!

It could even be possible to allow mod creators to somehow sell their mods in-game and get paid in real money, maybe through PayPal or something. That is a thought for another day though, and not a current actual plan.

Conclusion
These are my current thoughts on MC2 as of this day. Like I said, nothing is set in stone yet and everything is subject to change. I wanted to put everything out there so that the community knows what page I am on and where I am headed, and has time to stop me if I am about to drive over a cliff.

Remember that I am open to all feedback, so if you have ideas, please don't just be quite about it, or don't just complain about them in a Discord chat somewhere, because I probably will not see them. Part of being a game developer is getting hate e-mail on a regular basis on why my games suck, so believe me that your being critical of the above ideas will not hurt my feelings, and will be nothing new to me.

The whole purpose of doing all of this beforehand is to get real feedback from the community so that MC2 can go in a direction that we all like and we will all have fun playing. Once I start getting into the code, it gets harder and harder to make changes, so if there is something you don't like, now is the time to mention it. Think of all of the things I could not effectively implement in MC1 because they would require massive time-consuming changes to the entire engine. So getting ideas in right now is how we avoid that.

Like MC1, I'm trying to make something fun that I myself want to play, not a game that is going to just nickel and dime players with constant ads and IAPs so I can sit on a yacht somewhere. I think the new decentralized play model will allow the game to outlast the original. Basically, if I get in a wreck and die, the MC1 server will be forever down within a few weeks. With MC2, once players can make their own servers and create their own content right from within the game, what happens to me becomes more irrelevant, which is the way it should be.

Anyway, if you got this far, then thanks for reading my small novel. Please give some thoughts to where you want to see the game go, or discuss it with other players and really think about all of the concepts I laid out here. I want to start working on the game soon, maybe as early as mid-next month. I plan to start with the world-generating engine and the in-game building creation tools first, so people can start testing that out and seeing what it is like to make their own content.

So between now and then, if any of the above ideas are way off the mark, I need to know now. So think about it, let me know, and thanks for helping me create the follow-up to My Colony. I think it's going to be fun!

These are some ideas that I have for the regions feature. I have not played the game and experimented with regions, i just now saw the comments for updates 70-72 and I'm excited that this feature was added. I can't wait to get these ideas out so that maybe I could possibly help improve the feature. I'm assuming that all of the resources produced by every map pool together and can be used to improve any map, but I could be wrong and each map has it's own resources and you have to trade between maps to transer resources.

1.) Regional contribution to atmosphere level - This idea is obvious and would probably be implemented without me saying anything. Each region should be able to produce atmosphere that contributes to the atmosphere of the planet as a whole, just like how bast mentioned that each region would contribute to the same research and civics pool. However, if this feature is to be implemented, I recommend a nerf of all terraforming structures... or a raising of the total atmosphere needed for the planet to be earthlike. The point to terraforming is that it is supposed to be a lengthy process, and it would encourage the player to frequently switch between many maps in order to build them all up to contribute to the atmosphere level.

2.)biomes - This may be hard to implement, but wold give the map a varying texture to it, and would give some regions different strengths and weaknesses over other regions. You could base the biomes on each region, but that may look too rigid and blocky for you. Instead, you could use procedural generation to make more natural looking biomes on the global map that look much more appealing to the eyes and would transform in their own ways as the planet is terraformed. The different biomes would cross between regions using this method as well.

An example of multiple biomes would be like having different bodies of water criss-crossing the map, having snowy, dessert, and jungle areas in different parts. Crystalline could come naturally with snowy areas, trees with forest areas, and sugarcane and mutant trees with jungle areas. This also opens up the way for more resources to be added, like sand, glass, glassware, cacti, potted plants (cacti+pottery), snow, and snow globes(snow + glass). For planets with no atmosphere, ice bodies or dry lake-bed could be used to represent where water will form after a certain atmosphere level. The player could build structures on the ice/lake bed, but these buildings would be destroyed if they happen to be there when the atmosphere allows water to form in those areas.

3.) estimated production in non-active maps - this one might help with performance. Instead of having all maps producing and keeping track of all of the colonists and jobs and needs when you are in any map or on the display screen, I would use the following method:

Upon exiting a map, have the game take the most recent production and consumption rates. Then after the player creates cities in multiple maps, have the game add the production and consumption rates of all of the inactive maps together the make a total production and consumption rate for each resource. Add these rates onto the active colonies rates and you will have a grand total for the entire planet. Of course, this rate will change whenever you switch maps, but you are only dealing with one or two formulas per resource in order to keep production going instead of thousands of worker rounds in each map going on at the same time, and you are only dealing with one map producing and changing in real time instead of all of them being in realtime.

This method cuts out all of the updates regarding unemployment, individual colonist actions and stats, population changes, and possibly other functions that happen in an active map. The active map would be the only map keeping track of these stats among it's colonists. Yes, while the production and consumption rates of each inactive map will stay the same as long as they remain inactive, I think that the trade-off is worth it, even if it does represent a small compromise in keeping the game a non-idle game. This would also allow for more resources to be implemented into the game and individual maps could get more developed and densely populated without negatively impacting performance.

In fact, it doesn't have to be a compromise at all if you reduce the production of the inactive maps by a certain percentage. I would also pause the game altogether when viewing the global map, or players could just let it idle at the global map and collect resources without the risk of any of their maps starving to death. On that note, if you run out of food or water, you could have it take 1% off of the overall health of each inactive map's population(which should take off 1% of each individual colonist's health open opening that map) and cause individual health loss in real time in the active colony.

This method would also allow you to increase the size of global map grids exponentially, allowing for more regions/maps to be available to the player to build in. And overall it may even improve the android problem that you are having.

4. individual region naming - this will further help you to keep track of which region is which, even though you can tell which is which by looking at the map. I just think that each region should be able to have it's own name.

5. Being able to transfer rovers/workers from one region to another - you mentioned this one in update 70, so I know that you aim to implement this one. I'm just adding my twist to it. I don't think that rovers should have to smoothly pass from region to region. I think you should be able to select a region and have a listing of what rovers it has and how many of each type. Then, you should be able to specify an amount for each rover type to transfer and specify a destination region. I think it would be too overpowered for rovers/workers to be able to smoothly pass to another region to collect resources and then come back, and I think it would be detrimental to game performance. The player should have to deal with the resources that they have in the map during real time. If they run out of an important resource, such as regolith, they can just start on another region/map, harvest the regolith from there, and then return to the map they were working on, assuming that all of the resources from every map are pooled.

I don't think that colonists should be able to leave the map at will either. i think that at most, if at all, the player should be able to transfer unemployed or homeless colonists to another region to supply workers where needed, but I don't think that colonists should smoothly be able to walk between regions. I think if a colonist wants to leave the map, they could maybe be transerred automatically to the mother colony or to another region, but not by just walking across the border. I think that the player should have to provide adequate housing, entertainment, healthcare, and education in each map for the buildings in that map. I do like the idea of having a map solely for food production that provides all of the food needs for the entire planet, and a water map that does the same, so those resources could be poured into a global resource pool that any region can pull from.

But those are my ideas. let me know if you agree with me or not. Hopefully bast can use these to make a beter system for regions that uses even less performance than it does now. Sorry for the longest post in history.

Do yall think we should have a thread for users to advertise their multiplayer regions and post ideas for the feature? I feel like we should.

Also, I noticed that you can't choose a blank map in multiplayer regions. I understand why this would be disabled, but I feel like we should be able to see what the terrain is for the map that are about to choose so we can strategize on which map to start building on. What if maps in a multiplayer region are procedurally generated so that their terrain fits together naturally just like pieces of a puzzel. Then you can see which maps in the region have the terrain features that you want. Would also be awesome to see the region map come to life with continents, oceans, and rivers. This means that not every map can have a river of it's own, but that's the fun part. There would be inland maps that have no water, ocean maps that have no land, and beach and river maps that have both. This makes it more of a challenge to build, but that's the point.

I think the easiest way to do this is to have it generate each map's terrain upon it's creation. It would take a while but the player would only need to wait once. The terrain is set and unchangeable for each map and will remain tied to a map upon deletion. This way, when a player goes to start a new map, the terrain features are already there, so it makes for less time spent creating new maps, and even if the player's map is deleted, someone else can take advantage of the same terrain features.

Overall, I think that the biggest advantage is that it would make each multiplayer regions map unique, dispite it's planet type. Even if you have only 100 earth-like planet regions to choose from, they would all take different shapes.

If you are going to go this route, I recommend including a picture of each region so that if a region is chosen from the list of advertised regions, the image will pop up along with the content warning, allowing you to look at the region and confirm your choice. Would also be nice if before creating a multiplayer region, we could choose the seed or upload a terrain file that has a custom-designed terrain map(for instance, what if you want your region to look like the map of earth?) We could also use a way to export a region's terrain to a file and share it.

This one may be far off, but I like the highlands and midlands that you made for colony wars. It would be quite the challenge if those were to be added to mc's terrain generation. And coupled with the regional terrain generation idea above, you could have mountain ranges and plateaus that span multiple colonies. This would make some maps super hard to build in, but not impossible.

Also, the option to sell your colony to another member of your region and offer to buy other people's maps would be a nice feature in my opinion

That's all I have for now, let me know what you think.

Today I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony 2 v0.17.0, which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. In some ways, v0.17.0 on the outside is a minor update, but in other ways it begins to completely change everything for the My Colony series, as several new concepts are coming online. So let's take a look at what has changed and what is new with My Colony 2 v0.17.0 - The Phara Update!


The My Colony 2 engine is starting to gain support for AI controlled civilizations, and the first work has been started in this regard with the introduction of the Phara, a new Desert World native species conceptualized by @GeneralWadaling nearly a year ago. Desert World players will start to notice the new faction and their settlements crop up around their maps.

There is still a ton of work to be done with the AI, and some bugs to work out. At present, the AI doesn't do much except for generate new settlements, so don't expect any interactions or diplomacy quite yet. The AI routines are going to be fleshed out over the next several updates, and the initial AI processing is going to be largely based on the AI code from Colony Wars, but more on that later.

I have wanted AI controlled civilizations in My Colony since the first release of MC1, but have never gotten around to it. You may or may not know that My Colony 1 was initially envisioned as a futuristic version of Sid Meiers's Colonization, and was to have native species to deal with and you would also have to fight against the "king" for independence (in My Colony's case, United Earth). The game never turned out like that, and My Colony 2 will not have fighting for independence either, although the engine might in fact support that scenario soon, but we will get to that later too.

I next want to move on to a new concept I have added to the game, which is progression through both Player and Settlement leveling up.


Settlements now have a Level, which you can increase by using Civics. Behind the scenes, Players also have a level which can be increased using Money, but that part is not yet implemented.

Right now there isn't a huge point in leveling up, although eventually some government type structures and policy options will require either a specific player or settlement level to unlock. This adds extra goals and an additional player progression aspect to the game. Various forms of this have been suggested throughout the years for My Colony 1, so keep an eye on these features as they are fleshed out over the coming updates.

Next, I want to touch on what has been by far the #1 requested My Colony feature since the game first came out - Military and Combat, both of which are now making their way into My Colony 2!


This is another concept in it's initial phases and some of it still doesn't work right, but let's go through it. There is a new early-game tech called Colonial Security which is now needed for the Security Station and also unlocks the new Barracks. From the Barracks, you can now construct the first military unit, which is the Infantry unit. The Infantry is able to either attack or defend. It will automatically attack enemy units if in range, and will attack an enemy structure on command. A lot of the initial combat code has been taken from Colony Wars.

So what constitutes an enemy? The engine now accounts for diplomatic relations between each player behind the scenes. Players can either be Neutral (the default status), Enemies, or Allies. To become an enemy, you open the Players tab in the Statistics window, click on a player, and choose to declare war on them. They will instantly be notified of your treachery.


Now, here are the limitations. The 'Propose Alliance' and 'Sue for Peace' options currently are not functional, so if you do decide to declare war, there is no getting out of it. So keep that in mind.

There is a lot more to say on AI's and the new Combat features, but there have also been some other tweaks to the game that I wanted to touch on before getting too deep into the woods.

Firstly, when you go to build a new unit, it will now appear at the Construction Yard that is the closest to where your current camera position is location. In other words, if you are actively looking at a construction yard and you build a new unit, it will pop out of the construction yard you are looking at. This comes in handy as settlements begin to spread out and grow.

Another big change is that new players who join your public game will no longer start out at chunk 0:0. I know that it could be annoying to have all Landers start the game at the exact same spot, so the new Landers will now be randomly placed, somewhat in the area of the currently settled world, but away from all other players.

Now some kind of bad news. You may know that I recently updated Voxel Paint with some cool new features, such as metallic voxels, transparent voxels, etc. Well, I went to implement those features into the My Colony 2 engine, and it completely kills performance. I don't know why yet, but just having one structure with a metallic texture destroys the game, and that is on a high end PC with a good video card. So until I can get the performance situation worked out, the cool new features from Voxel Paint will have to wait. 🙁

Now I want to dive a bit deeper into some of the new features, and how they tie to what I have planned for My Colony 2 going forward.

Some of you may have heard during some of my Podcast episodes or from various release notes here on the forum that I had long wanted to make a game called 'New World' that involved showing up on a new continent in ships like the Spanish did, and trying to get rich on a land inhabited by natives. Well, Amazon recently beat me to the New World game, but the idea still remains in my mind. A lot of this updates recent changes, including AI civs and combat, go directly towards making that game concept a reality.

Additionally, there has recently been discussion with GeneralWadaling about migrating Colony Wars to the Scroll3D engine. I think that my new strategy instead is going to be to have the My Colony 2 engine be sophisticated and customizable enough to be able to be morphed into a Colony Wars type Real Time Strategy game. This would be great for multiple reasons. Firstly, less game engines to maintain is always a good thing for me. Secondly, it will greatly increase the capabilities that modders have to make different types of games for the My Colony 2 engine. A win for everybody!

So with the above two points in mind, here are some things I need to work out before I can make everything a reality, which should give you an idea of some of the features that will be coming soon to My Colony 2.

Firstly, there needs to be more World options then the current infinite maps. You need to be able to create maps of a specific size, and also maps that have a predefined layout, which means some type of map editor. To get started on this work, the next World type I am adding to the game is going to be the My Colony Classic world, which will be roughly equivalent to an MC1 large sized Red Planet map (probably not suitable for multiplayer). It should be a fun challenge for some players, but will also bring important new features to the engine.

Next of course, the AI needs to be expanded and improved. The first order of business is to get the AI's capabilities to be roughly in line with those in Colony Wars, which will allow basic war and RTS support. In addition though, the AI needs to be able to conduct peaceful diplomacy and trades. And for that matter, players need to be able to trade with each other as well.

Modders need to be able to customize various UI aspects. The game UI needs to be able to basically look like the Colony Wars UI, which means options need to be added to show/hide elements and to more the position of different elements. The new/join game screen also needs to be customizable.

And of course, the game content needs to be expanded as well, and that will happen over time for sure.

So there is a ton of work to do, and absolutely all feedback is appreciated. In the meantime though, check out the v0.17.0 update to My Colony 2, and stay tuned for a whole lot more to come!

#mycolony2 #colonywars #voxelpaint

So today I am pushing out My Colony v0.70.0 to all platforms, and it should be arriving soon to a device near you.

This release brings an experimental new feature to premium users called Regions, which are essentially collections of game files places together on a single large map. You can read more details about the feature in this thread, and although the feature is listed as experimental, it actually seems to be functioning pretty good, mostly.

A Region is basically a mega-colony that consists of many small colony files which share Technology, Resources, Power, and Atmosphere. Each colony is still a separate game file like how My Colony currently works, and they each have their own population and industry. However, they are all taxed the same by their home colony, and they all declare independence from their main colony as a single entity.

Regions are going to be the primary focus over the next two or three updates, so any suggestions you have on how to improve the feature would be great.

Some questions I have gotten before which I will answer here for all. People have asked if they can import an existing city into a region. Right now, that answer is no. It might be possible in the future, but probably only for offline games, and the size of the existing city would also have to conform to the grid of the main region map. For instance, if you have annexed land on an existing map, land is annexed in chunks that make its dimensions no longer able to fit on the main region grid.

You can currently build both Small and Medium sized maps on the Region screen. I might add Large on the next update, but probably not Extra Large or Mega. Most of the issues in My Colony stem from the large, extra large, and especially Mega maps, so one of the goals with Regions is to be able to build a giant colony without having to use one of the giant maps.

The Region area is very big. While it is only a 50x50 grid, that technically allows it to hold 2,500 separate city maps, if the small map size is chosen. I don't really expect anybody to ever fill up an entire region map, but you never know with you guys 🤔

So anyway, there will be a lot more about regions over the next several updates. This update lays the foundation for the feature, as quite a few engine changes were required to allow the sharing of utilities and resources between maps. Now that the foundations are laid, work can be done adding new features to Regions, and also fleshing out the Region overview UI, which is pretty basic right now.

Moving on from the Region stuff, I wanted to quickly touch on the ongoing issues with My Colony on Android. I have actually gotten the crash rate reduced from the nearly 10% range to the 5% range. Looking through the crash stats, the majority are coming from users running Android v8.1.0, leading me to believe something is happening specific to that particular release. For instance, the crash rate on that specific version of Android is over 11%, while it is much lower on other versions. Regardless, this update contains several bugs fixes from both the latest Antiquitas release, and other stuff I found while going over the code, so perhaps I can reduce the crash rate even further.

The good news is that the game is at least no longer tanking on Android and seems to have leveled off, albeit at a far lower level than it was before. Still, things are still going good on Windows and iOS, and the Android version of My Colony now accounts for less than 1/3 of the games revenues, so I am not going to cry about it too much.

While I do like Android, I have been sort of disillusioned by the large spike in non-reproducible errors with totally unhelpful reporting in the Google Play Error console. I am also somewhat suspect when Google claims upwards of 10% of all sessions are force-closing, yet there are almost no reports in the Play Store comments about the app force closing. Not to mention the fact that an almost identical binary of the game is on the Amazon App Store, yet these same crashes are almost nonexistent on that platform.

The whole experience though has convinced me that My Colony may have a better future on Steam than the Google Play Store, and over the coming updates I will be taking steps to put Antiquitas and My Colony on Steam. They will be available unlocked at the regular purchase price of the Premium Upgrade. Now, if you have already purchased a premium license, there is really no point in buying it on Steam, you can just use the Native Client or Ape Apps Launcher edition, which will essentially be the same thing.

If you do purchase it on Steam though and sign in using your Ape Apps Account, it will check steam to verify your purchase, and sync that to your account, unlocking Premium on all platforms.

There is really no way (that I am aware) of allowing current Premium users to unlock the Steam purchase. I don't know. Really though, if you already own Premium, there is little point of buying it again on Steam, unless you like the game and wish to support it!

I do think that the My Colony/Antiquitas interface works a lot better as a Desktop game though (vs mobile), and so possibly Steam will be a good match for it. It is also very reasonably priced VS other Steam games, especially considering the vast amount of content/play time available in My Colony.

Speaking of interfaces though, My Colony is actually seeing a great surge in users on the Amazon Fire TV. This is great, although after playing it on my Fire TV for a bit, I realized that the TV interface could use some polish, so that will be coming in the next few updates.

Moving on, starting in v0.70.0, I have completely removed the auto-blacklist banner from the game. As resource checks and trade verification are now done by the server, this feature was no longer necessary, and was resulting in too many false-positives. It is much easier now to just ban bad actors on an account-wide level from the server, rather than trying to make the game monitor and looks for hacking on the individual colony files. A colony can still be banned into permanent offline mode, but there will now be actual human moderation before it is done.

Next, I have started the process of reorganizing the list of build-options in the construction sidebar, grouping like-structures together, instead of just putting all of the newest stuff on bottom. I will continue this over the coming updates.

Another small change, when a new colonist arrives, the "XXX Has Joined The Colony" popup message is now gone. I think the popup was more annoying than anything, especially on phones.

Another minor change, but one which might help ultra large colonies, is a further reduction in game file save sizes. I don't know if it will be noticeable to everyone, but it should help some files out.

Finally, there are two new structures available. Humans get the new Transcendent Triantanium Generator, which is far better than the current Triantanium factory. Additionally, Reptillians get a new Raw Materials Extractor, which is a significant improvement over the current (and horrid) Insectoid Mining Operation.

So that about rounds out today's update. The update frequency will probably increase going forward. I am pretty much giving up on trying to collect error diagnostics on the Google Play version of the game, and as such, I no longer need to keep one stable version number in the store for weeks at a time. Google has already blacklisted the game for "bad behavior", and I have reconfigured with the settings in every possible way I could think of on Android, and nothing made a significant difference. Considering there have never been any wide-scale complaints about crashes on Android, I do not think the users are suffering from the games "bad behavior" any. I am sort of just accepting the fact that Google Play is what it is, and focus on making the game as good as it can be, and not worry about trying to fix the crash stats on GPlay.

As I said before, the next few updates will add things to the new Regions feature, as well as new content to be added to all civilizations, but more especially the Reptilians. Thanks for playing the game, and enjoy the update!

These would be four separate games based on My Colony. Will not be in the actual MC app, as they go against the basis of My Colony

My Colony Survival Edition:
You start out with a Red Planet base and a large lander with 160 people. They are there because they were chosen to be the last survivors of Earth from a huge disaster.
Gamplay: This will not be a very casual play as there will be random events and disasters. You will manage your colonists more (less people = more emotions/detail), and most of the buildings will be temporary, as the lander will quickly disappear. To win the game you have to keep 75% of your colonists for 5 in-game years and research permanent colonies and terraforming by then.
Based off of the CBS show "Salvation."

My Colony Competition Edition:
This will be a Multiplayer/PvP version of My Colony.
Set-up: Once you start-up the game, you will come to a My Colony like screen. You click new map and you have the options of Offline and Online. Offline is you versus a computer generated opponent(s). Online takes you to New Map and Existing. Existing are premade maps by other people. Every option pulls up a menu that says "Name, Civilization, Size, Resources, and Number of Players." Civilization choices are UE, LIS, and Zolarg. You can have up to 7 player spots. The rest are the same as My Colony. The maps for each civilization are the same.
Gameplay: Once your map is generated you are given a base that includes a lander/mound with solar panels, ore and gold rovers/bugs, An ore refinery, a gold refinery, a research station, housing, and a storage facility, all engulfed by a wall/fence. There is also a new exploration probe that builds claiming structures and walls and fences and flags. Your goal is to claim all of the bases of the other players. You use the exploration probes to claim more land and protect your holdings. Please add to this.

My Colony Educational Edition:
This will be an educational/accurate version of My Colony.
Gameplay: The design and setup of the game will be the same, but the gameplay will be different. There will be three playable factions, the International Space Agency, the Space Corporation, and the League of Independent States. The ISA gives you a 50% Research increase and a 25% government decrease. The Space Corp. gives you a 50% economic increase and a 25% government decrease. The LIS gives you a 50% government increase and a 25% production decrease. Each faction has the Mars, Moon, Venus, Europa, and Titan maps. They all start with a lander, miners/builders, a solar panel, a water pump, a greenhouse, base resources, and 5 colonists. The resource consumption and production should be as accurate as possible and so will be the terraforming process (pressure, O2, heat, biomass, N2, CO2). The gameplay will be more dynamic and realistic (natural disasters, riots, immigration, etc). Heavy influence from the game TerraGenesis.

My Colony Lite:
Due to My Colony's large file size, slower devices such as Android and lesser know formats can't handle the game anymore. My Colony Lite would be an offline only version of MC. It would be less dynamic and many structures and maps would be missing. The two civilizations would be a generic human and a generic alien. The maps for the humans would be Red Planet, Lunar, and Forest. The alien maps would be Desert, Ice, and Sugarland. Each map is not random, all of the resources and base structures would be in the same spot each time. Online and human alien structures would be missing. No animations nor lighting. One type of road and no super builders. There would be no premium (ad free already). All of these changes make the game much less fun, but still a good game for people who can't handle the large file size and FPS.

This is all I have for now. Please comment and add to this. Thanks!

bastecklein said:well right now the engine really only supports one terrain type, which is plain dirt. As @jova mentioned, we have discussed adding this over private messaging. It will require significant changes to the engine though, so I will not be implementing it until after Antiquitas is done.

That said, true water tiles and different terrain types are going to be a key feature for my upcoming Colony Wars game, which will use the same engine as My Colony, so support for this is 100% coming to the engine in 2018. Also next year, once different terrain types are available, I plan on adding an in-game map editor to My Colony, which will let you design your own terrains and them play on them (probably in offline-only mode), or export and share your custom terrains with others. This support is also being added thanks to Colony Wars, which will be shipping with a built-in map editor. The only limitation is that custom made maps will not be expandable using the 'annex' feature.

So is Colony wars going to be an RTS like starcraft or age of empires where you and other players are on the same field and have to race to build bases and units? I love those kind of games because they are short and quick and you both start out with nothing each game, which is fair. In most empire games where you build up your empire over time and then go on raids to attack other empires, you have to pay to play or you will have to wait for hours and days for units and buildings to be produced. Although there are some that aren't that way, like endless space, which is a desktop style empire game that was very fun to play back in the day.

Also, will you be making it so that terrain is generated randomly for each planet created in my colony? If so, that would be awesome. Generating random cliffs and mountain formations would be awesome because not only would it force the player to build around said formations, it would look really cool. I suppose that you would have to make behind versions of all your buildings and make the map rotatable before you do that since you wouldn't be able to see anything over certain formations.

As for the map editor, will you be giving the ability to create custom buildings, resources, rovers, and eventually worlds and races? It would be nice if the player could create their own custom race with a set of worlds. It would also be a really good way for players to see if their ideas are feasible and valid before presenting them to you. Of course, it would be premium to the max and you could charge more for premium then since it offers more content.

This topic isn't meant to be a complaint, it's just my ideas of what could be done to improve on the existing planets' designs. I realize that bast isn't working very much on new content and I support that, since what he is doing now is better for the game than making new content. I just figured that I would cover all of the planets for my planet-hub topic. That way people can get my opinion of all the planets.


earthlike Planet specific ideas:

earthlike planet summary: I think that this planet is fine as it is. It's supposed to be a training planet that gives the user the perfect conditions to build a colony, so I think it should be left alone. There are some ideas that I have regarding all planets that also apply to this planet, but I don't have any ideas regarding this specific planet. I do believe that every race should have this planet type so the player can learn to play this race under the best conditions, with the exception of zolarg because they already have a world with the best conditions to grow, their just a harder species to manage overall. reptilians and LIS get the abandoned world, which is earthlike but doesn't have any ore.

Waterworld specific ideas:

Waterworld summary: This planet is really fun to play because you have to be carful how you design your colony layout. I wouldn't chancge anything about this planet and I'm not going to suggest anything because all of the ideas that I have bast is already going to implement soon. There are other ideas that pertain to all planets that apply here, but no specific ideas come to mind when thinking about this planet.

red planet specific ideas:

Red Planet Summary: I really like the simplicity of the map, and I like the laid-back feel that you get when playing it. I also like how quickly it allows you to grow your colony. There is not much more that I would like to see added to this planet aside from the general ideas that I have below that don't apply to any planet. This planet is very well-designed.

red badlands decorations: I think that the red planet map should generate decorations that resemble badlands structures, or weird rock structures that form because wind wears it down into awkward shapes. This should make the map aesthetically pleasing.

generated lake-bed rivers: per the dry lakebed tile idea below, i think that rivers of those tiles should be generated on red planet maps. This allows the red planet to become just like an earthlike planet once terraformed, with rivers that produce infinite amounts of water. It gives the map a more dynamic feel.

Dust storms: These planetwide storms can last for months and would make it more difficult to see your colony. Solar panels would stop working, but you could implement a windmil to take advantage of the storms and it would produce more during these storms than normally. You already have added the ability to block out light by subtracting alpha from an overlaying object to simulate night time. You could create another overlay object for storms and give it a reddish-tan hue. Then just add moving particle affects and wind sounds and your done. These should disappear once the planet is terraformed. There shouldn't be a damage factor to these storms as the dust is too fine to really wear anything down.

Dynamic Terraformation: I think that this planet type specifically could benefit from dynamic terraforming and should be the first to receive such a feature if added since it's one of the most played maps.


Lunar specific ideas:

Lunar Summary: Lunar world is my favorite map because you can jumpstart your colony before you even get your first immigrant. I like the fact that it's terraformable and the regolith challenge is fun as well. There are a few features that could be added to make this world more immersive though.

Jagged rock decos: Since a lunar planet has no atmosphere, it has no wind on it's surface to smooth and erode rocks, so you should see some really jagged rock formations. I think this would add some aesthetics.

craters: I think that large circular patches of darker terrain tiles should exist on the map. These terrain tiles would act the same as lakebed tiles in that they will become water tiles as atmosphere increases. Craters should be random sizes and distances between. I would even have them generate partially off of the map and across region maps to give a very appealing region view. This may might that craters could envelop most or all of some maps, and some maps might get no crater tiles at all, but that's the beauty of it. the player should also have the option to fill in a crater tile or water tile using regolith where they would otherwise use ore on other planets. The player should be able to turn regular tiles into crater tiles as well with the cost of money.

meteor showers: these showers would pummel structures below periodically. Any that land on empty tiles could generate regolith nodes and could have the chance to generate mini-craters that would fill with water upon terraforming, this is why I think we should have the ability to turn crater tiles to regular tiles, and vise versa. The damage from these meteors shouldn't be catastrophic, but it should cause some damage depending on the structure. These meteors should stop once atmosphere is above 1 mil.

Atmosphere leach: Since most planets like the moon aren't big enough to keep an atmosphere forever(there are exceptions), there should be a significant drain on atmosphere that must be compensated for. It could also be a benefit if a colony's atmosphere is too high though. A drain of 5k per minute would be a challenge at first, and you would have to beat that mark in order for condensors to operate.


Forest Planet ideas:

Forest Summary: I don't have much to say about this world, it's pretty straightforward albiet annoying at the start. Not really a big benefit to this world aside from the fact that you don't have to mess with the atmosphere at first until you get bigger. I'd honestly play abandoned before forest any day. Here are some ideas I have in mind though:

Rivers: this should be an addition. Any forest world requires lots of water in order for trees to grow.

mega trees: i think that mega-trees should generate on the map at first and begin to spread. Players could try to preserve these so that they'll have a huge supply later on. Once they they're gone, they're gone.

Asteroid planet ideas:

Asteroid summary:
I like the asteroid world. It's just like lunar, but harder since you don't have alu nodes. I used to play this world back before we had ways to get infinite diamonds. Might take a crack at it again to see how far I get. I have a few ideas regarding this world.

craters: the same concept as the lunar planet.

meteor showers: the same concept as lunar planet

Extreme atmosphere leech: asteroids are definately not large enough to keep an atmosphere for long. Because of this, they are drained by 50k per minute. 100 minutes is all it takes for an earthlike atmosphere level to drop to 0. Major benefit later in the game though when atmosphere is increased rapidly by pollution.

Awkward rotation: An asteroid has a very randomized shape in real life. it can be elongated, flat, and even spherical. Because of this, days and nights on this planet last for random times. Short nights lower colonist energy. Short days reduce happiness. long nights can increase colonist energy and long days can raise happiness. This amount increased or decreased would only apply if the length of a night or day goes past the minimum or maximum limits. if a limit is exceeded, the same amount of energy or hapiness is taken away or given, no matter how far past the limit a day or night is.

Abandoned World Ideas:

Abandoned Summary: I really like the abandoned world map, but my idea for a twilight themed abandoned world would add a mystic and ancient feel to the map. I'd like to see a much darker themed map than the light and cheery theme that it has now.

Rivers: aside form the twilight idea I would love to see rivers on this map.

Ice planet ideas:

Ice summary: I like the ice planet because it's a challenge to get through the crystalline bottleneck. I do have some ideas though:

glacial/ crystal decos: a slew of icy/crystalline decorations would look good for this planet.

unstable melting: When you heat up an ice planet, there's no telling where the oceans and rivers will form and where the actual land will be. Ice melts very unpredictably, so there should be no indication as to whether each tile is a lakebed or regular tile, but they should both still be there and have the same texture. It should be set up to where rivers will form as if randomly and instantly. This would be part of the real-life challenges of terraforming an ice planet, so would make sense here. Sometimes your colony gets destroyed just like in lava world, sometimes you get lucky.

Underwater crystal farm: This new building would need to straddle water and land and would be four-way rotatable so it can be placed in any orientation as long as the front 4 tiles are on water and the back 2 squares are on land. It is a 3x2 structure, and it consumes moderate amounts of water, crystalline, and alcohol to constantly produce large amounts of crystalline. The concept behind it is that some crystals grow faster in a water solution with the nutrients it needs to grow. Water also allows the crystals to grow much larger because gravity is much weaker in water as we all know. The fact that the structure would have to straddle land and water means that the planet will need to terraformed before a player can place on of these and get rid of their green crystals.

desert world:

desert summary: I don't have much to say about this map, haven't played reptilians that much. I do think that it could use some aesthetics though, just one flat plane of land is nothing to get all excited about. But here are some of the ideas that I have:

Yellow badlands decos: weird yellow rock forms, crackly ground, rough patches, and some shrubbery and cacti. These should randomly dot the landscape and would really up the aesthetics on this map.

Tar(oil) pits: instead of water flowing through the map, tar pits would give it a more desert feel, as you find these pits naturally in deserts. just like rivers on the earthlike planet yield infinite water, these pits should yield infinite oil. The major downfall with this benefit is that you need workers to collect the oil, and that can be pretty tedious and may slow down performance.

raise the atmosphere: Since deserts are supposed to be hot, we should raise the atmosphere to above earthlike. This also corrosponds to my thermal idea below. In addition to this, I would recommend adding a fully terraformed stage where atmosphere is reduce to between 5 mil and 15 mil. I'm not saying that deserts don't exist when atmosphere is at perfect levels because the saharrah wouldn't exist if that were true. It's just that since bast still hasn't added any thermal or moisture level factors to terraforming, I thought that lowering the atmosphere was good enough to simulate raising the moisture level and lowering thermal levels to make the planet cooler and wetter.

dry-lakebed tiles: I think that the dry lakebed tile idea would particularly help this planet as once it is terraformed from dessert to earthlike, you'll have rivers flowing through the landscape.
Sandstorms: Not to be confused with dust storms, the storms are much shorter, yet can be devastating to colonists and buildings. These storms should cause colonist sickness, slow down movement, and accelerate the decay of structures by a certain amount for the duration of the storm. Depending on the direction of the storm, walls placed on the map will block the storm from getting into your cities. It's best to surround your cities with walls so that you get as little exposure to the storms as possible, just an extra challenge. These storms should cease once atmosphere is reduced to earthlike and life is brought back to the planet.

Lava planet ideas:

lava summary: I liked this planet at one point, but I think it's rather pointless to play being that it doesn't have an end-goal and you're colony is never safe no matter how far down the atmosphere goes. My list of lava ideas on my planet hub topic should cover all of the ideas that I have for this planet, and they all still stand.

Fissure vents: These gigantic cracks in the planet spew forth ash and toxic gas into the atmosphere. Because of this, atmosphere is increased by 2 thousand atmosphere a minute, even if the atmosphere is reduced to between 5 and 15 mil, atmosphere will still pile up, requiring you to build more buildings that use up atmosphere to balance it out. The only thing that would need to be added is a passive loop that continuously counts down 60 seconds and then adds 2k to the atmosphere number value. Good luck terraforming this planet.

ideas for all existing planets:

Dry Lakebed Tiles: I've suggested this a few times, but basically dry lakebed tiles should replace water tiles in low and high atmosphere planets. These tiles can be built on, but watch out, because when atmosphere goes over 250k or falls under 30 million, these tiles will turn to water and any buildings on them will be destroyed. There should be an apparent difference in color shade or texture between regular tiles and the dry lakebed tiles. remaning Ice deposits should also turn into water deposits at the same atmosphere level.

Dynamic terraforming: I've mentioned this a couple of times too. It's simple, if atmosphere goes too low, the terraformed planet becomes barren, just as if it were a red or lunar planet; if atmosphere goes too high, then the planet becomes hotter, becoming first a dessert and then eventually a lava planet, with all the eruptions and lava spreading we know and love. . I also think that atmosphere requirements for all atmosphere stages for region games should be multiplied by the number of tiles on a region. This gives the player a longer playthrough and also encourages them to develop cities on every tile. I think that downside is worth it and it would be a fun challenge to work towards. I think that aside from the tiles changing texture, trees should generate across the map on empty space once atmosphere either rises past 5 mil or falls past 15 mil. I also think they should disappear while outside of those ranges.

Thermal factor: I feel like there should be some sort of challenge regarding keeping your colonists at a good temperature. Perhaps you could add a meter in statistics that indicates thermal level of the entire colony. Too hot or cold and your colonists will become sick and loose energy and hapiness. An earthlike planet, or any planet that's been terraformed to between 5 mil and 15 mil, will not affect the meter at least, but too much atmosphere and the meter will start to go up and too little atmosphere will start to subtract heat from the meter. You should be able to build coolers or heaters to supplement the loss or gain of temperature. Currently most planets start out at no atmosphere, which means that they will start out cold. Lava is the only planet that would add the the thermal meter at this time but I think that the desert type planet should have high atmosphere so it can add to the meter.

Regions acting as mc campaigns: Now, some people would disagree with me on this, but I think it's totally fair to call region mode and sort of "campaign mode." This is because with regions, you get a longer playthrough and it takes longer for you to develop the space given to you. I also think it's fair that region mode requires premium, as most well-developed apps offer a free trial(single map mode) and full version with campaign mode(region mode). Some of yall might disagree. but here are the main ideas that I have in mind:
- design random mandatory goals to have a chance to pop up for each tile a map occupies that grant the player money, research. civics, happiness, or other resources, kind of like quests. But these would be more like story-line quests. a medium map would contain four of these quests. These should take a decent amount of time to complete and should make the game progress slower.
- design smaller optional side-quests that pop up randomly occasionally and grant smaller bonuses.
- each tech should require a certain number of complete story-line quests before being unlocked, even if you have enough research. There would be only one quest per tile so this would encourage players to develop all the tiles to complete all of the available story quests.
-Make individual map progression depend on the completion of story quests. For instance, you can add a population cap that unlocks after the quest is complete, and for medium maps with four quests, you could increase the cap in increments to allow the player to develop further after each quest, but not indefinitely until all quests are complete.

Overall I think that these ideas for campaign mode should add a very interesting element to regions mode and would make it more worthwhile and entertaining to play and a player might be entertained for a very long time before becoming bored.




But anyway, those are my ideas. I wanted to go over each planet so that everything was covered in my planethub topic. I'll paste this link so yall can access it easily. Let me know what you think and which ideas you like/dislike.

The regular worlds have different starting technologies, and because custom maps are supposed to be custom, so should be the starting technologies of said maps.

Site owners are able to customize how their forum or website looks and behaves when accessed under Forum Fiend. This is an overview on the customization options available to site owners and developers.

Firstly, if absolutely no site owner action is taken at all, Forum Fiend will still attempt to derive your site's name, icon, and theme color from the meta data of your website. These items are taken from your site's title tag, it's favicon, and the theme-color meta tag.

High-Level Configuration

The easiest way to customize a site under Forum Fiend, one which requires no development experience whatsoever, is to upload a forumfiend.json file to the root directory of your site. Any site that is accessed by a fair number of users through Forum Fiend should take the time to include this simple file. The forumfiend.json file allows you to set high level parameters for your site, as well as branding logos and theme customizations. Creating the file should take no more than a couple of minutes, and you can see a complete guide in the following thread:

Complete forumfiend.json Reference

Access Methods

Forum Fiend can display a forum using either the Tapatalk API or through a custom WebView interface. Tapatalk access is based on the outdated open source version of the Tapatalk API and is no longer maintained. If your forum already uses Tapatalk, it may work just fine under Forum Fiend, and you are encouraged to test it out to be sure. Note that the Tapatalk interface has not been updated since 2014 and will not be receiving support or updates in the future, as newer versions of the API are no longer open source.

The Forum Fiend WebView

Forum developers or site owners with JavaScript experience can further customize their site under Forum Fiend using the custom WebView API interface methods. Site owners who have Tapatalk installed on their system but prefer to use the custom WebView under Forum Fiend can do so by setting the disable_api to "1" in their forumfiend.json file.

The Forum Fiend WebView has a user agent string of ForumViewerCore. Developers can check the user agent to determine if their site is being accessed under Forum Fiend. Some implementations may want to alter UI or Stylesheets based on the presence of Forum Fiend.

Forum Fiend will also add a global ForumViewerCoreInterface JavaScript object to your site for accessing WebView API methods. Thus, the presence of Forum Fiend can also be detected in JavaScript by checking for the existence of the window.ForumViewerCoreInterface object.

setProperty Interface

Forum Fiend will add a window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty(key,value) function to your website that will allow you to customize several aspects of the Forum Fiend interface. Below is a reference to things you can do with the setProperty function, as well as some code examples. All keys and values must be text strings.

User Account

To personalize your forum or site for your Forum Fiend users, you can display their logged account username and avatar on the main forum listing screen. Use the following two properties to set the user's details.

key	values
fvc-logged-username	username or "0" for not logged in
fvc-logged-avatar	full URL to avatar image file (png,jpg,gif supported) or "0" for no avatar

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-logged-username","little bobby");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-logged-avatar","https://mysite.com/avatar-bobby.png");

Pagination Bar

Forum Fiend can provide a pagination bar at the bottom of the screen with controls for first/last/next/previous page. The following table lists the pagination related properties, followed by a code example.

key	values
fvc-show-pagination	"true" or "false"
fvc-pagination-pagedisp	ex: "5 of 10"
fvc-pagination-first	url: "https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=1"
fvc-pagination-last	url: "https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=10"
fvc-pagination-next	url: "https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=6"
fvc-pagination-previous	url: "https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=4"

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-show-pagination","true");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-pagination-pagedisp","5 of 10");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-pagination-first","https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=1");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-pagination-last","https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=10");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-pagination-next","https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=6");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-pagination-previous","https://mysite.com/viewpage?p=1&pg=4");

Colors and Theme

There are several properties related to the appearance of the site under Forum Fiend.

key	values
fvc-theme	Title/Status Bar Colors, hex string
fvc-page-foreground	general foreground (text) color, hex string
fvc-page-background	general background color, hex string

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-theme","#2196F3");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-foreground","#212121");

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.setProperty("fvc-background","#CFD8DC");

Slide-Out Menu

The left-hand slide-out menu can be customized using the window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addMenuItem(name,icon,url,color) function. The following lists the parameter values expected for the function.

parameter	description
name	The name of the menu item. If set to "CLEARMENU" will reset all custom menu items.
icon	absolute url to a png icon for the menu item
url	absolute url to navigate to when the menu item is selected
color	optional hex color mask for the icon, or null

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addMenuItem("CLEARMENU",null,null,null);

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addMenuItem("Latest Posts","https://mysite.com/latest-icon.png","https://mysite.com/latest.php",null);

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addMenuItem("Exciting Section","https://mysite.com/exciting-icon.png","https://mysite.com/viewpage.php?p=50",null);

Application Toolbar

The top actionbar/toolbar of the Forum Fiend app can also be customized using the window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addToolbarItem(name,url,icon,secondary) function.

parameter	description
name	The name of the menu item. If set to "CLEARTOOLBAR" will reset all custom menu items.
url	absolute url to navigate to when the menu item is selected
icon	a named icon, reference below, ex "back" or "chat"
secondary	boolean value, if true will force the toolbar item into the drop down menu

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addToolbarItem("CLEARTOOLBAR",null,null,null);

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addToolbarItem("New Post","https://mysite.com/newpost.php","add",false);

window.ForumViewerCoreInterface.addToolbarItem("Sign Out","https://mysite.com/signout.php",null,true);

Named Icons

Here is a list of available named icons you can try out. These can be used for both Toolbar and Menu items, but toolbar items require a named icon (menu icons can be a URL).

selectall,stopwatch,sort,relationship,ruler,pdf,chat,build,search,feedback,merge,envelope,allapps,viewall,filter,threedotshoriz,calendar,system,yescheck,nocheck,font,record,location,nolocation,movie,notes,description,bookmark,notifications,gavel,home,person,unlock,directions,print,undo,rss,showresults,personalize,share,sponsor,fanmail,premium,achievements,scores,import,movetofolder,page,back,add,delete,export,new,save,open,send,clear,emoji2,play,rename,volume,info,contactinfo,important,library,zerobars,help,people,emoji,shop,money,audio,fourbars,sync,switch,like,refresh,list,calculator,map,savelocal,copy,camera,fullscreen,flag,highlight,color,preview,previewlink,settings,rotatecamera,crop,backtowindow,lock,skull,microphone,video

I had created an offline reptilian colony with my custom map “volcano beach” (which you can see and download in the custom maps section of the my colony forum) a few months ago. I hadn’t checked on it for 3 or 4 updates and when I tried to access it in the 0.71 version of the game it told me that the file had been corrupted and didn’t let me enter. I then tried to restore the backup file but I found out that there was no backup file for this colony (and I never deleted it or any other file from this colony).

Android, Samsung galaxy a5 phone

Update: after managing to enter it on the windows 0.70 version of the game (which I have now updated to the 0.71 version) I was able to access the colony on the phone, because I have cloud sync on on all of my colonies, both offline and online except for my red planet regions colony which has now been corrupted on my phone (I only have it on the phone) and since, for some reason, there are no backup files for any of the colonies in the my colony file, I will now have to delete this colony.

I hope this only happens to offline colonies and only on the phone, because I don’t want any of my big online colonies to get corrupted on both devices and not be able to get them back.

Today I am beginning to push out the v0.71.0 update to My Colony, and it should be coming to all available platforms over the next few days. This release further builds out and improves the Regions feature, and finally adds a Capitol building to the Reptilians.

First off, let's discuss the new Region updates. The first change you will notice is that now on the Region overview screen, there will be a faint dotted line showing the borders of your various region cities, allowing you to more easily discern the difference between maps. I had noticed that once you get several cities right next to each other, it was becoming difficult to tell them apart, especially when they are using different map sizes.

This change just makes it a bit easier to see what is going on in your region.

The next change is that road tiles now "link" between maps. Before you get excited, I do not mean that rovers and colonists are walking between maps (yet), but now when you have a map with a road tile built up to the edge of a map, that same road tile will appear on the edge of adjacent maps, if there is an open spot on the map for the tile. This right now is mainly to provide a bit of continuity on the region overview display between maps, as you can see in the example screenshot above. Right now it only works on roads, but I plan on doing something similar with rivers soon.

The next change to Regions, which is a big one, is that resource consumption and production for all region maps will now continue as long as any city in your region is currently active. Region cities continue to produce resources even on the region overview display. It wont take much playtime for you to realize that this is a major game changer for region-based games.

There are other small changes and improvements to the Region system, and you will notice these while you play, but they aren't major enough to describe each in detail. Basically, the entire Region system runs a lot better than it did one version ago, and the improvements will continue over the coming updates.

The next change I made was minor but will be helpful to some. The GBT now shows a little status display at the bottom, outlining your current max trade capacity, as well as the amount of each resource that you currently have available to trade.

This is helpful because often I would find myself making trades, but the GBT window covers up the resource output display, so you don't know how much you need to buy or sell. This should help make the GBT just a bit better. In addition to this, the trade frequency timer has been reduced, so you can now make trades faster than you could before.

Next up is the new Capitol building for the Reptilian race, the Chamber of Laws.

Now that Reptilians can have a capitol to call their own, the next update will be bringing Reptilian embassies into the game. I also need a new structure to produce Oil, for when the map runs dry.

Finally, some older structures have gained the ability to be flipped. All Microchip Factories, the Civic Center, and the reptilian Antanium Impactor.

I expect to maintain weekly updates to the game going forward, and the next few will continue to focus on Reptilians and Regions. There might be a slight lag before the next update, and I am going to be preparing Antiquitas for it's Steam release, but after that, it is back to My Colony updates.

Enjoy the changes, let me know of the issues, and stay tuned for a whole lot more!

Would be nice if we could. Wouldn't take much programming to make that happen I wouldn't think. It's just the same as transcribing the details from you single-map colony onto one of the maps of a region. A large colony should take up 9 squares(3x3) while a mega map should take up 16(4x4) squares. I know that on regions maps you currently only have an option for small and medium maps, but there should be a compromise here to allow player's who have have mega maps to add theirs to a region game. At least that would be the only map in the entire region of that size, and the mega map would possibly be the least used since the player is probably looking to spread out.

In the future, when bast adds terrain features that crisscross through all of the maps of a region, if we ever get the ability to upgrade a single map to a region, the terrain seed in that single map should be applied to the entire region, thus making the terrain features look natural and uniform. I know there may not be a seed for generation of terrain now, but there should be, in order for people to control how terrain generates if they need to.

I have only noticed this on custom maps that I make but at some point the builders stop building anything no matter how many times I cancel and rebuild or destroy and build more builders. More than half of the map worth of resources disappear and whatever is left glitches and allows the rovers and bots to travel through most of them. Not sure if this is related but I haven’t been able to export any of the maps I make to my iPhone to have a custom map for each planet type. Haven’t tried with a regular map yet but don’t want to get into one just to have it turn unplayable.

You can probably guess what the above structures would be used for. A border station would allow you to transfer colonists from 1 map to another. An interplanetary transport station would allow you to send colonists to other member of your commonwealth in the event that they may need more colonists than they can effectively produce themselves.

Border Station:

The idea behind how the border station works is simple. It's a 1x3 structure and you place it on the edges of a region map. Being that it's a 1x3 structure, it'll show up on any maps that are right next to the current map in the direction of the edge that it's on. So basically, if you built it on the right edge of the map, the map directly to the right of the current map would also have the same border station in it. In cases where one medium map meets up with 2 small maps, you would only need to build you stations on 2 different spots on the same edge, one above the center of the map, and one below, so that they can show up on both the small maps as well as the medium map.

So these buildings would have a value in them that you can set. This value determines how many colonists are to be stored in the station. A basic station would only store 30-50, but more complex stations could allow tens of thousands to be stored. The station would pick from the population randomly, regardless of position or wealth, and store them. It can only store the colonists for 5 minutes of game time before releasing them back into the same map, so be sure to close the map and open the destination map right away. Once the destination map is open, the release countdown is reset and you have 5 minutes to change you mind. Otherwise, there sould be a button to release the colonists immediately into the destination map.

This feature would be very useful in that it would allow users to send colonists to areas of a region colony that needed them, potentially preventing a colony from dying out. You would also be able to jumpstart a new map by sending lots of colonists over to a map that's already had it's city built but doesn't have any colonists. It would also get rid of the need for cloning facilities on maps that are supposed to focus on producing specific resources. You could also have a map that speciallizes in human cloning and transfers it's colonists to other maps.

Interplanetary trasport station:

Now for the second structure. This one is fairly simple. Think of it as "gifting" some colonists to another member of your commonwealth. The transactions cost civics, starships, oil, food, water, and money in amounts depending on the amount of colonists being transported. Here is another place where liquid nitrogen could come in handy, because people would need to be put in cryosleep. Once the transaction is completed, the map sending the colonists will experience the drop in population, and then the receiving colony's map(whether a region map or a single mapped colony) would receive the colonists as a gift, in the same way that they receive gifted resources. A colony could play a very important role in boosting the population of it's commonwealth. It could also be a way to reduce your population in case it get's out of hand instead of killing them off.

Here are the current update plans for My Colony.

v0.49.0 has begun on web and will be a bug fix update. So far there are strange rendering issues on MS Edge browser that need worked out, plus other existing bugs. Don't ask me what day it will be done, I don't know yet.

After v0.49.0, most of the remainder of the month will be spent finishing Antiquitas, which I hope to have released before US Thanksgiving holiday (11/23).

Once Antiquitas is done, work will begin on My Colony v0.50.0, and I have significant updates planned while I start getting the engine ready to support my next game, Colony Wars.

First up I will be doing quite a bit of work on the interface. I am thinking of replacing the bottom left corner menu that you get when you click on a building (with the build, sell, cancel, etc buttons) with a small row of icons that appears under the buildings when you click on them. Then there will be a new building stats screen with improved data, such as production per minute and some fun graphs and whatnot. Will also give info related to how many of each type of building you have and so forth.

For vehicles, I will be adding the ability to group them together with keyboard shortcuts, and then calling them up with a keypress. For instance, you will be able to highlight a bunch of vehicles, press ctrl+4 to assign them to group #4, then when you press the '4' key, it will call up all of those units.

I am also going to be totally redoing the way GDP is calculated. Having a horde of cash or resources will no longer boost your GDP. It will instead be based on your production output for a specific time period.

There is also going to be a new map editor coming to the game with different terrain features. You will be able to build your own maps and then start a new colony using custom maps (offline mode only), or export your maps and let other people play them.

The engine will be getting support for flying-type units which can move over buildings, walls, and other obstacles. The current construction drones will be made to fly.

Some buildings will become movable, in that they will be able to "pack up" into a vehicle, drive to a different location, and then "unpack".

On top of these changes, I want to have several big Zolarg content updates before Christmas. Once 2018 starts, I am going to begin implementing the 3rd race in the game, Reptilians. Also in 2018, My Colony premium license will increase from $2.99 to $3.99. I think it's still a good deal, especially given the amount of content now in the game, and will go towards maintaining the server. If you are on the fence about upgrading though, there is your heads up.

Another note, sometime in 2018 (first quarter probably) I will be removing all Facebook integration and switching over to the Ape Apps account system (the login you use for this forum). It's not quite ready to go yet, still needs key features like password reset/recovery. Once I make the switch, playing My Colony online will require an Ape Apps account, and your game saves will be tied to your account. I will probably also remove most of the auto-banning and open up applications for server moderators who will have tools to be able to take a more human approach to anti-cheating. Having moderators and tying online play to an account should help cut down cheating quite a bit.

Anyway, that's all I got for right now. As always, tons more to come! I don't know what % done My Colony is now. 20% maybe?

Wubman said:Having each city being self sufficient simply isn't viable. Between the sheer size of the optimum efficiency layouts and the scale of resources they need to sustain them. It's simply not practical to have everything on the one map without making it too big, which defeats the purpose of having several small maps instead of one big map.

Take the Centre for artificial learning for instance, it would require a robots layout (which on its own takes a quarter of a small city map) and an alien microchip layout. The Robot layout also needs more microchips, and also aluminum. Aluminum generation means I now need to bring in the centre for relic studies layout (which my layout doesn't fit on a single small map length ways, although it can be modified), and then in order to even use workers in the relic studies you need to then make room for schools.

All of that space used to make a few layouts of what you originally wanted and then have to make another city doing the same even though you still have excess resources. Not trying to be a negative nancy here I just don't see having each district self sufficient as being a viable option in the late game.

Well from what you said, you are right that regions as they are right now might not work for your play style. I think the concept will be fun for a lot of people. To say though that the entire idea simply isn't viable just because it can't hold your Relic Studies layout which takes up more than an entire small map, I just do not agree with. But like I said, it might not be viable to your particular play style. But I think you would agree that over the vast majority of players, you are one of the exceptions rather than the norm.

I should note that it is not just small maps, there is also the medium sized map, although that might not help you either. And maybe self sufficient wasn't the right word, as it's not required that the maps are 100% self sufficient. But one thing that is not viable is having all maps running in the background at the same time all producing all of their resources. Just think of the sheer memory and processing power required for that.

Now, it is possible that resource growth/consumption for all maps in the region to be simulated at all times, sort of the way Colonists are now simulated once populations reach > 2000. It will not be 100% accurate as if the colony was actually open, but it can be based on the recent resource growth/consumption trends that occurred the last time that particular colony map was open. That way your factories on map A are still "running" even when you are on map B or C. And perhaps I can add something like that to the next update, if you think it would help your situation.

At the end of the day, the feature is still new, and much more can be changed/added as needed. I might not be able to tailor it exactly to your specific needs, but there will be ways to make it better to fit most peoples needs as good as possible.

Anyway, yes I will be improving it and making it better. No, it might not be the best play mode right now for huge farming operations. But I can see ways to where it can be made to fit that purpose also.

So, I have a well established online human colony that's independent.

I start a new online colony.
I click custom charter.
I enter the charter code from my other colony.
I only get humans.
I want Draconians.
How do I get something other than humans when starting a new colony under custom charter?

If the only option I get for a new colony is human it might cause me to delete my games and quit playing altogether.

Before anybody says anything about placing any buildings and joining my other colony, go up and re-read the beginning of this post and pay attention to the "New Colony" part in line 2.

I would really like to see regional map support for custom maps, maybe having each subsection be a copy of the custom map, or have randomly generated resources based on attributes of the map, or placed objects! In my opinion this would be a great feature, and I hope that it gets added in to the game.

@bastecklein do you think this is feasible?

hey you know what would be cool, if the region feature and the custom map feature were compatible. Either by having the custom map repeat for each region, or by checking the level of each resource in the map, and just randomising its position. From my knowledge of how maps generate this shouldnt be difficult at all so hopefully this will be added soon

Today after many months for on-and-off development, I have finally released the v0.7.0 patch for Death 3d to Android and the Web.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ape.games.death3d
https://www.apewebapps.com/death-3d/

This update contains loads of changes, including a complete re-write of the multiplayer code, most of the rendering engine, the lighting engine, and remasterings of every map in the game. Let's take a look at what has changed.

Heightmaps

As I had mentioned six months ago now in this post, support for heightmaps has been added to the game engine. Prior to this release, maps could only be flat, with a fixed room height of 1 tile. This is no longer the case.


The new change introduces support for variable room heights, different floor elevations (including stairways), objects hanging from the ceilings (like vents or computer panels, etc), and movable floor platforms, like elevators. This gives maps a lot more character and dynamic.


Lighting Engine

The texture and lighting engine introduced in v0.6.0 actually looked quite nice, but it was a killer on game performance. Lights were object based, and certain light points could be placed at various locations in the map. For this release, I have moved to a more performant sector-based lighting system (similar to games like classic Doom). Admittedly, this does not look as pretty. That said, the performance is way better, and it does sort of fit in better with the overall "cartoonish" atmosphere of the game. Sectors can have different lighting intensities and colors.


Multiplayer

The multiplayer engine has been completely revamped and improved. The game now supports native online multiplayer in-browser without the need for the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge software. Multiplayer now works cross-platform between Web, Android, and Ape Apps Launcher, and many of the existing multiplayer bugs have been eliminated. It should now be easier than even to setup or join an online multiplayer deathmatch.

Just for good measure, here is a little bit of multiplayer footage from the latest patch, played on the Don't Fall map, which has also been remastered with new lighting and heightmaps, as well as other improvements allowed by the latest engine updates.


Weapons

The Rocket launcher has gotten a big upgrade. Before now, only a direct-hit from a rocket would drop an enemy. Now, the rocket launcher carries blast radius damage, just as it should. You basically only need to hit a rocket near somebody in order to take them down.

In addition to the rocket launcher, the brand new shotgun now joins the weapons lineup.


The shotgun packs a major punch at close range, and can take out most enemies in one shot if you are at or near point-blank.

Campaign

The last update completed the Episode 1 campaign, and this update begins the new Episode 2 campaign - The Pegasus, with three new campaign maps. Following your escape from the Lunar 3 prison in Episode 1, you find yourself stowed away on the Pegasus, a heavy cargo hauler operated by Galactic Freight. Galactic Freight is known for their brutality and lawlessness, and is able to get away with it due to their personal connections to the United Earth General Assembly. Like Episode 1, Episode 2 will also be an 8 part campaign.

Coming Next

What is on the drawing board for the coming updates? Firstly, I want to add "Capture the Flag" mode to multiplayer. I also want to allow multiplayer co-op for both packaged campaign maps, as well as user-created single player maps. I'd like to add full TV and gamepad support, as well as non-combatant NPC characters that you can either talk to or have join your party (sort of like the security guards in Half Life). I also need to finish Episode 2, and I do have an Episode 3 planned as well.

Although a full game in it's own right, Death 3d also serves as a test-bed for the development of my own 3d game engine that I can use in other projects as well, sort of like how the rendering engine for My Land eventually branched out to power games like My Colony, My Starship, Gone Rogue, and even the built-in level editor for Death 3d. Death 3d has actually spawned two new rendering engines for me, a pure raycaster Software engine that was used up until v0.3, and a WebGL based hardware rendering engine. The two are mostly interchangeable up until this update, with the added heightmap support which is only available on the WebGL hardware engine. The software raycaster does work better on older devices though, and may ultimately be utilized in some future projects that do not require different room and floor heights.

But anyway, that is all for this update to Death 3d. Stay tuned for more!

I have just put the finishing touches on the v0.75.0 update to My Colony, and will begin pushing it out to all platforms tomorrow (Thursday) morning, possibly even tonight if I get time. This is a huge update in terms of "under the hood" changes, and so there is a lot to cover here. It also marks the beginning of a series of "online" focused updates which will be taking place between now and the end of the year.

Now that My Colony has arrived on Steam (which you can find here), I have decided to shift focus a bit more away from the mobile side of things, towards the Desktop and online side of things. My Colony has always played better on the Desktop, but since the majority of users were on mobile, a lot of the design of the game had to be made with that reality in mind. As some of you already know, a few months ago, Google Play blacklisted My Colony from their store search results, cratering the mobile downloads of the game by over 90%. As a result, the My Colony user base has transformed from over 90% mobile users, to now almost 50/50 with Desktop users, spread out between my website, the Ape Apps Launcher, Windows 10, Chrome OS, Facebook Games, and now Steam. And even though the crash ratings on Google Play are back down under 2% and the downloads have picked back up slightly, it is still nowhere near where it once was. On top of that, the experience did open my eyes as to how Google Play operates, and demonstrated the risk involved with being tied so heavily to one platform. On Desktop, things are spread fairly evenly between the distribution networks (too early to tell on Steam yet), so there is a little bit of safety that comes with that situation. Plus, as I said, the game is just 10 times better on Desktop anyway.

So, just to be clear, I am not abandoning Android and iOS, and those platforms will continue to receive all of the latest updates. I am just not going to be focused on mobile first, and some features may not work on mobile platforms, as you will soon see below.

But enough of the intro, you are here to see what is new in this version, and there is quite a bit. So let's take a look!

First I want to go through some of the bugs that were addressed in this release, as one of them has a pretty large impact on later-stage Human colonies. So during this update, I discovered a mistake in the code that was majorly"nerfing" building consumption and production when the building had a very low "tick" phase. The two prime examples where the Ancient Alien Condenser and the Atmosphere Scrubber, but it would also impact buildings with tons of employees, like the Investment Bank.

Essentially, if the production/consumption tick phase was lower than that of the overall simulation's building tick phase, a bunch of update cycles for that building would get skipped, causing it to produce or consume resources at a far slower rate than it was supposed to. As far as I can tell, this issue has been baked into the game for ages, and when adding new content, I have just set the stats in a way to compensate for it, not even realizing it was there. As soon as I fixed the glitch though, the impact on Atmosphere was immediately apparent.

Ancient Alien Condensers and the Atmosphere Scrubber immediately went into "beast mode", chewing through millions of atmosphere in a matter of minutes. This brought my Atmosphere down to zero, causing all of the condensers in the colony to shut down, since they were out of "fuel". This led to an immediate water shortage which was difficult to get on top of, since I could not generate new atmosphere fast enough to keep up with the consumption of the condensers. I eventually just had to import a ton of water from the Star Gate.

Anyway, to address this, I slightly nerfed the stats on the Condenser, and introduced a new upgraded Large Atmosphere Generator to assist in rebuilding Atmosphere. I kept the Scrubbers running in beast mode though, I figured at their new consumption level, one Atmosphere Scrubber can take care of a pretty good sized colony.

So be aware of this new change, and modify your colony accordingly. I already know the bug reports section will be full of "I updated and now all of my Water is gone" reports, so just be aware of what is happening. It is not exactly a bug, but the result of the fix of a bug.

The next fix is related to Creative Mode in Region games. Basically, it didn't work before, and now it should.

Speaking of Regions, there was a glitch where Resource decay would be greatly amplified on Region maps. This has been corrected. I have also implemented several changes which I hope address the issue people have on Regions where tech/resources are lost. I cannot reproduce this issue on my own, so I hope the fix works. I know you will make me aware if it doesn't though!

Next, a lot of changes were made to the server this update. I am getting ready to add in-game moderators to My Colony, which I had hoped to have ready by now, but the server needed so many changes to accommodate for it, that I just didn't get to it. Just know that it is coming soon though.

The first big change comes with authenticated API calls. Aside from the public API's, you basically need to be logged in to your Ape Apps account to do anything on the server now. This requirement seems like a no brainer, but you have to realize that the My Colony server predates the Ape Apps Account server, and there were originally no account requirements at all.

Due to this change, the tie between your Ape Apps Account, your online colony, and the website is now pretty solid. If you happen to get banned from Ape Apps for some unrelated reason, your colony is pretty much inaccessible too, and you will need to send me an email convincing me why you should be able to get back in.

All colony resources are now stored on the server as well. They have actually been stored on the server for some time, but the server would never override the resources saved to your game file. Now it will. The server now keeps a timestamp and checksum synchronized to your online game saves, so that it can detect if you have decided to go back and restore a backup game file. This is to help detect different forms of cheating that are out there, and while restoring a backup does not flag you as a cheater, it is logged and will be available for review by the soon-to-be-announced in-game moderators.

Next up, in-game private messaging has been moved from the my-colony.com servers to the main ape-apps.com servers. As a result, you can now view and reply to your in-game private messages from right here on ape-apps.com. They will also soon be available on my-colony.com. Currently, they don't render very well on the website, but I will be making it all look pretty shortly. In-game it doesn't look much different from before, but in theory the message size limit is gone, although the game still doesn't let you write more characters. The website does though. In the coming updates though, the entire in-game messaging interface will be rewritten to take advantage of the new features available by using ape-apps.com messaging.

The next big change in the game, which I have mentioned already in another thread and some may not be pleased with, is the complete rewrite of how colonial GDP is calculated. In short, it is now an actual GDP calculation, instead of just the sum of all of your resources. So now instead of measuring just how rich you are, which anybody can attain by simply getting a big gift from another colony or from the Galactic Emperor, it is now a measure of the current productive output of all of your buildings, tax collections, and resource collections. In this way, your GDP only grows if your industrial output is growing. If you are maxed out with full storage, then your GDP will be stagnant. I might adjust it next update to have GBT profits figured into the calculation as well, since it is technically a sale of goods. I haven't decided yet.

The game tracks your GDP over time, and will give you both quarterly and annual prints. It takes about two hours of game time to collect enough data to get a full GDP reading, so be aware of that. In your stats, the large GDP number is your current quarterly rate, and the smaller number is the annual rate. One game "year" is roughly equivalent to one real life hour. The quarterly and annual growth percentages also factor GBT price inflation into their calculations, so that large fluctuations in GBT prices do not throw the GDP growth values way off. In addition, the game ai now has "economic analysts" who will try to guess what your GDP growth rate should be every quarter, based on the trends of the last year, and will let you know each quarter if you were on target or below estimates. It's sort of like watching CNBC.

I might start adding other fun little news items to the GBT price ticker on the bottom of the screen too.

Next, there is a new feature that I hope people are able to have some fun with. I have added the ability in-game to stream a live feed of your game play onto your colony website at my-colony.com. On supported platforms, there will now be a "Streaming" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. When you click on it, it will start up your live feed and turn Red, letting you know that it is on.

It also uses your microphone (if available and you give it permission) so that people watching your stream can hear your amazing voice-over commentary. Also when you turn on streaming, the in-game chat channel and the chat channel on your my-colony.com colony site are synchronized, so that you can text-chat directly with those viewing your feed. You will also get a notification in-game when somebody starts watching your live feed.

The in-game streaming works if you are playing on Chrome, Android, Native Client/Steam. It does not currently work on iOS or Windows 10 (Store) edition of the game. I am not sure about Facebook Game Center, as I did not test it.

Moving on, I have decided to merge the in-game popup Commonwealth and Diplomacy windows into the main Statistics window, so that everything is in one place. In-game private messaging will also be moving to this window soon, and eventually, a revamped in-game encyclopedia will be in there as well. I just think it's better to have all of the options in one tidy place.

You may have also noticed a new "Federation" option at the bottom. Federations are headed in-game to My Colony. I have been promising them for a year and a half now, and since I decided to focus on online play for the next couple of months, Federations went ahead and made the cut.

Creating or joining a Federation requires "government level 7", which is game-engine speak for "you need to build the Hall of Congress." This is pretty much the most expensive building in the game, and before now it hasn't really done anything for you. Now it unlocks Federations. Because of this requirement, only United Earth and LIS can make or join Federations, but Reptilians and Zolarg will be getting their own equivalent buildings in 0.76.0.

The only thing you can do with Federations right now is either make one, or join one. Making one is expensive, and joining one is free. However, when you choose to join a Federation, current federation members receive a ballot in their Federation screen and must vote to approve your membership.

Balloting works like this. When a new measure is put up, it will expire in three days. At the end of three days, the yays and nays are counted, and the winner is determined. However, if a measure receives yays (or nays) from over 50% of current Federation members before the three days are up, the vote is also ended.

The balloting system only works for admitting members right now, but it is going to be greatly expanded. Unlike Commonwealths, Federations are an "alliance of equals", with each independent member state getting 1 vote. One colony will be the president, voted on by the other members. The President will be able to put new initiatives up to a vote, and only the president can put a new initiative up, unless that initiative is a vote of no-confidence in the President, which could be needed if the current president goes inactive.

Federations are going to be able to do things that regular colonies cannot do and, for those who wish to enable it, there is going to be an optional PVP element coming for Federations making use of Star Ships. I am not talking about attacking peoples bases or anything, but you might be able to send your fleet to blockade a planet, disrupt communications, etc. I am welcome to ideas on it, but this element will be 100% optional, and you can only do the PVP mode with Federation members who have enabled it. I want people to still be able to play a 100% peaceful mode if they wish.

The Federations are in the early stages, but there will be new Federation stuff with each update, so feel free to start one up and start accepting members, so you are ready for when the fun stuff goes live.

So those are the primary new things in this update, I am sure there are others, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Now I just want to give a quick update on what is coming next.

As I mentioned, Federations are going to be fleshed out over the next few updates. In addition, both Federations and non-federation planets will be able to establish Trade Routes using their Star Ships, and the Colonial Map from the my-colony.com website is going to be accessible in-game soon to aid in this. There are also new interactions coming for Embassies, some of which will only be available to PVP Federations. To support this, both Zolarg and Reptilians are getting new giant 'Hall of Congress' type building soon, as well as Star Ship production.

There are also going to be further changes made to the My Colony website to accommodate all of the new stuff. Federations will each have their own page, and unlike Commonwealths, there will be a few customization options for a Federation page. If you haven't looked at the My Colony website recently, check it out, I've been adding things here and there over the last few weeks: https://www.my-colony.com/

Finally, in-game moderators are on the way. I have several applications, and will be contacting people with offers as soon as the server is ready for them. There is still a bit of server work I need to do to accommodate what I want to do with moderation, but I think when it's all implemented, it will make the online experience a lot better for everybody.

So that is all for this update. This one took me longer than normal to put together, and I have to spend the next few days catching up on other projects, but I should start v0.76.0 mid next-week. Until then, enjoy the update, and it should be hitting all platforms within the coming days!

The time has come for yet another My Colony update, the v0.99.0 patch, aka the Reptilian Content patch! This is a very special release, as it is the very last beta version of My Colony! It's going to be sad to see beta go, but there is a lot in store for you guys with this update. Because of some of the core changes, this update is going to take several days to push out to all platforms, with Web coming today. I actually can't even push it out to the Ape Apps Launcher yet, as the Launcher will require an update itself before this patch should go live, so please stick with me as the v0.99.0 roll-out will be a bit slower than most releases. So what's new in this patch? Let's go over it right now!

This is at it's core a Reptilian update, but there is a ton of other stuff thrown in as well. First off, and the reason for the delayed rollout, is I have taken the game-streaming option out of the core My Colony code, and transferred it to the "Web App Core" wrapper, which is the in-house wrapper I created to be able to port my games to all platforms easily. This changes the behavior by streaming your gameplay straight to your profile on the Ape Apps website, instead of to my-colony.com. I will be updating my-colony.com shortly though that will embed the stream in the same place it used to be, so for the most part it should still look the same.


I made this change for long-term planning, so that I can add streaming capabilities to my other games. The stream viewer on ape-apps.com is improved from what was available on the My Colony website. It now shows how many people are watching and lets you record the stream. It has other capabilities as well that aren't worth mentioning here, but will be implemented in other games in the future. To access your livestream page, go to your profile here on Ape Apps and click on the little video camera button on the left sidebar.

To go along with this change, the in-game streaming interface has been updated, with a new livestream control bar now appearing when you have streaming turned on.


This bar shows you how many people are watching the stream, and lets you turn either microphone or webcam on or off (previously, webcam wasn't even supported). Streaming is currently supported on Chrome, the new version of Edge, on the Desktop version, the Ape Apps Launcher, and on Android. I can't get it working right yet on iOS or Windows Store.

Moving on. Last update was the big Zolarg release, but I had accidentally forgot to make the dazzling hot-pink Etherbug buildable. This is now fixed, and you can now create the Etherbug on your Zolarg maps. Sorry about that!

A lot of people had complained about the massive gold cost on the Zolarg Unholy Pit and Unholy Tower of Stuff. I have reduced theses costs in this update to make them more reasonable. In addition, these two structures have gained storage capabilities for Charcoal, Oil, and Software.

In addition, the Zolarg Customs Processing building can now import and export Diamonds and Software.

I have made a small change to the in-game encyclopedia. Before, under each category (buildings, vehicles, etc) it said Everything you need to know... Now, it shows the number of items that are in each category (number of buildings, vehicles, etc).

I have loosened the building requirements for the Reptilian Brewmasters Den, as it was too difficult to build at the beginning, and is an essential building. I removed Helium-3 and Crystalline from the build requirements. In addition, the building now uses Ant Paste during production, instead of Helium 3.

The Powered Materials Silo has gained Software Storage, and also now acts as a drop-off point for Diamond harvesting.

I don't know if anybody had noticed, but I had inadvertently allowed Ether importing from the Reptilian Medium Range Star Gate. This has been removed. In exchange, this structure can now export Fish and Salt Water.

Speaking of Fish and Salt Water, they have both been added to the Galactic Board of Trade, and will eventually be used in other non-Water World processes. They are the two map-specific resources for the Water World.

While we are on the subject of resources, a brand new one was added to the game this update, Cobalt. Cobalt is a super-rare, because 1) it's only available on the dreaded Lava World, and 2) it only appears after a volcanic eruption.


Why Cobalt? Well, originally Obsidian was going to be the map-exclusive resource for Lava World, but I forgot and ended up adding it to everything, so that wasn't going to work. So now we have Cobalt. It's all good. Anyway, right now only the Reptilians can harvest it, but other civs will be able to after v1.0. It will be coming to the GBT on the next update as well, and will be used for new super-high-end structures on all civs. Being tied to the Lava World, I suspect it will command a pretty good price on the GBT once trading opens up.

Moving on. Since probably v0.1.0 of My Colony way back in 2016, people have been requesting to be able to move buildings once built. I haven't counted, but it's probably the top request in the game, or a close second to Mass Transit. I understand why it's been wanted. Most My Colony players are on Android, and most mobile builder games allow you to move structures. Of course, most mobile builder games are also IAP filled "diamond" (or gems or special coins) festivals that nickel and dime players by making buildings take 5 days to build unless you pay real money. My Colony isn't like that, and I never thought a move building option was realistic enough for the game, but nonetheless people still request it all the time, so for this update, I have now added an option to move buildings, with caveats.


You can now move any structure in the game, unless it is a harvest drop-off location or has it's own move function, like the Lander, Queen/Mound, or the deployed Construction Mech.

I do want to give people the option to configure and organize their base as they see fit, and I understand that as a colony grows from a small settlement to a major city, you might want to rethink the way you placed buildings at the beginning, so that is why I am allowing the move option. The reason I do not allow it on harvest drop-off spots though, should be obvious. I'm not going to let players just, for example, keep moving their Ore Refinery right next to the Ore every time a deposit is dried up. That would be lame.

Next, I have made an interface change to the mobile version of the game. Now when you are building a structure on mobile, you get the same (well, a minified) "new construction" bar that desktop players have.


This makes it easy to see what you are building will cost, and to flip structures before placing them.

So now let's talk about the meat of the update, the new Reptilian content. There are two new vehicles, the Diamond Extractor and the Cobalt Extractor (I think you can figure out what each does), and 19 new buildings, which I will list below and then talk about some of them in detail afterwards.

• Galactic Star Gate
• Radiated Crystal Farm
• Advanced Materials Silo
• Subterranean Slum
• Raw Fish Diner
• Deep Sea Drilling Platform
• Coral Radiator
• Offshore Slum
• Dracarus Mint
• Turbo Microreactor
• Diamond Cobalt Microreactor
• Basic Crystal Furnace
• Suppertime Arena
• Primitive Robotics Lab
• Advanced Chip Transporter
• Automated Software Node
• Antanium Radiator
• Ultra High Frequency Node
• Near-Infinite Materials Silo

My core of thinking with this update was to make the Reptilians more playable, or rather enjoyable to play, and reduce the sheer idling time required to play a Reptilian colony. Starting with Reptilians was so slow before, that a new colony would have to idle for hours just to get anywhere, which isn't really feasible on mobile. So a lot of this content is geared towards early to early-mid game, but there are a few later-stage items as well. Structures like the Basic Crystal Furnace, the Coral Radiator, and the Dracarus Mint should help speed along early-game a bit.

Reptilians also get a couple of new housing units, both slums (of course). The Subterranean Slum is a high-density building for all maps, and the Offshore Slum is a way to gain more space on the traditionally space-limited Water World islands.


I added a couple of new Tourism related structures for Reptilians, in the form of the new Raw Fish Diner and the Audrey II inspired Suppertime Arena, where Reptilians and tourists alike can watch an evil plant eat Insectoids.


There are new much-needed upgrades to Reptilian Storage, Power generation, increased import/export capacity, Microchip production, Software production, and Bandwidth generation. Reptilians also gain the ability to build robots with the new Primitive Robotics Lab, and the ability to build Triantanium with the Antanium Radiator.

All in all, this is a fairly large update that adds some nice QOL improvements to the game, and adds much needed content and improvements to the Reptilian race (a bit for Zolarg too).

Now, to talk a bit about the future. If you missed it, I published a new episode of the My Colony Podcast last night about the coming end of beta for My Colony. v0.99.0 is in fact the 99th feature release of My Colony (which was originally published on May 16, 2016), which will make the next update the 100th feature update of My Colony, in which it will finally be bumped up to v1.0.0.

Now to me it's just a number, but since 100 of anything is generally seen as special, I think something special should happen for the next update to the game. To help kick off the v1.0.0 release, I would like to do another classic episode of the My Colony Podcast with a community group voice chat, the way the old episodes were done a couple of years ago. I would like to host the episode on one of the federation Discord channels, possibly the NOZ channel if they will allow it, and have anybody and everybody from the community be able to participate if they want to. We will just be talking about the growth and changes of the game over the last few years and bumping suggestions and ideas off of each other for the coming updates. You can also ask me anything you want about My Colony or otherwise. I think it will be a fun episode for everybody, and I hope a lot of people participate. I just need to nail down a location, time, date, and re-figure out how to record the thing. So be looking out for more information about that.

As for the update itself, I plan on adding something of an online leader-board to the game, featuring multiple in-game challenges and awards that people can participate in if they choose to. It will be optional, so you can still play as normal without doing the leader-boards, but the purpose is to have something to do in the game after you have a million people in your colony and all buildings unlocked, but it's also going to be set up in a tiered way so that new players can also participate. I still have some things to work out with it, and so you have some time to make suggestions in the forum if you want your ideas implemented!

As for a timeframe, the next release is going to take longer than normal. I go over the reasons in the latest podcast, but basically we have Thanksgiving in the U.S. coming up soon with holiday travels, and I also need to take some time away from My Colony to get work done on my other projects before the holiday season, since December is the biggest month of the year for the app business, and with my schedule I am going to be pressed for time to get much work done later in this month. So I would shoot for early-mid December for the v1.0.0 release, although there might be a couple of platform-specific bug patches between now and then, should the need arise.

Further out, v1.1.0 and v1.2.0 will probably be performance tweak related updates, since I am getting a lot of requests for those, particularly on the Android side of things, so I will have to try to see if I can squeeze more juice out of the engine. So they will still have new content, but not like 10-20+ new items like the last few updates have had. After that, I want to add crime and law enforcement to the game, and even further out, I want to add the ability to have a map with an AI controlled faction, as I want to add a new map type that is inhabited with primitive ewok-type creatures that you have to either coexist with or... something else. So stay tuned for that...

Anyway, that's all for v0.99.0. I hope you guys enjoyed it, let me know if you did (or didn't)! Like I said at the beginning, the roll-out will take several days here, but it's live and final on the Web now. Launcher will probably be next, then Steam, then Android, then Windows, and lastly iOS. I expect to have it published to all stores by Wednesday, so stay tuned!

Since first coming up with the idea and implementing the engine for Death 3d, I have learned a lot more about javascript graphics rendering, and as such I have decided to undertake the work to completely rewrite the Death 3d rendering engine from the current software canvas model, porting it over to WebGL. This change allows for better performance, higher resolutions, floor/ceiling textures, and dynamic lights, among other things. The work started earlier this week, and a lot of progress has already been made. For example, see below for the same scene, first rendered with the current Death 3d engine, and then below using the new WebGL engine.

Most of the work remaining is related to reworking some maps to be compatible with the new engine. For example, most of the current maps were not designed with lighting in mind, and so in many areas, the placement of ceiling lights either doesn't make sense or just does not exist, leaving rooms either too dark or looking strange. Also, since the old floor casting work was only experimental, most levels do not yet include floor and ceiling map layouts, and those will have to be added to each. There is also a whole new wave of visual improvements that I can add to the existing maps by taking advantage of new features that I have added to the new rendering engine.

While not many people play Death 3d (yet!), the performance gains made by porting to WebGL will allow me to bring the game to other platforms where it previously was not possible, such as iOS and Amazon Fire tablet and TV devices. And if nothing else, the work done on rewriting the engine has gone a long way towards increasing my knowledge of WebGL programming, and will be helpful to use on other projects in the future.

This is but the first of several changes I have in store for Death 3d. When the new engine is complete, I want to finish off the single player campaign, which is currently incomplete. Some of the existing maps will be reworked, as the new lighting effects allows for adding an element of suspense/fear to the game which was currently not possible. I also plan big updates to the multiplayer game, adding different game types, teams, capture the flag games, and more. I also plan on implementing an always on WebSocket based multiplayer server hosted by Ape Apps, so that even people on the web version of the game can play online multiplayer. There will also be a new game lobby making multiplayer matchmaking easier.

Even though Death 3d is not one of my more popular titles, it is still one of my favorite projects. I used to love making maps for Doom when I was a kid, and that was the main reason I had with making Death 3d (which is why the game has the map editor built-in). I plan to keep improving the engine and adding features until I think it matches or surpasses the old school Doom engine, at which point I may start porting the engine work over to different game genres that I have in mind.

#death3d

While tinkering with custom maps and mods, I wanted to make a colony. When I did, i got a black screen that i was unable to click. So if you could fix that, that would be nice.

Welcome everyone! Today I am releasing My Colony v0.52.0, the Christmas 2017 update! What makes it a Christmas update? Why, all of the goodies inside of it (of course). Here are the changes:

My Colony v0.52.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Structure: Crystal Vaporizer
• New Maps: Earthlike (human), Lava World (Zolarg
• New Units: Extremeobug, Obsidiobug, Rover Transport, Queen and Airborne Lander (sort of new)
• New Resource: Obsidian
• New Modding Option: Map Editor

Changes

• Water (and the new Lava) tiles now have a slight 'shore' texture around them instead of hard-ending at the edge of a tile. The shore pieces connect when multiple waters are placed next to each other.
• The U.E. Lander can now launch and turn into the Airborne Lander, which can be moved to a new location.
• Likewise, the Zolarg Mound can now transform into the Queen and move to a new location.
• Slight gameplay change, Zolarg Mounds can no longer be built, you must build the new Queen unit first and then turn the Queen into a Mound.
• Removed Power and resource consumption requirements from Creative Mode
• Increased storage of the Charcoal Pile

Notes
The biggest change here is the addition of the new Lava World, which has a few new features not seen before in the game, including moving terrain elements and natural disasters. I won't go too much into it, you can read more about the Lava World in the Lava World thread I made the other day: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=11358

The other big change is the addition of an engine feature allowing buildings to "pack-up" into units (and vice versa) so that they can be moved to a new location. I will probably expand this for other structures in the future.

The other big change for Premium users is the new Map Editor, found in the Mod Tools section. This lets you start with a blank map and add in any terrain feature found in the game. If the feature proves popular, I will expand on it, adding more terrain elements and features. Once Accounts are integrated into the game, I am also going to add the ability to upload both custom maps and texture mods to the My Colony server right from within the game, and add a section where users can download mods without having to leave the game.

Now then, this will be the last My Colony update for a few weeks. Besides for holiday travels I have coming up, there are a lot of other things I want to get caught up on over the next few weeks, including getting my servers ready for finally ditching Facebook and adding Ape Apps accounts into the game. There are also big improvements and changes to the Forum, the Chat, and the general Ape Apps Account experience coming very soon. Also, the My Colony website is going to get basically a complete overhaul.

I will return to My Colony development in mid-January with the long awaited introduction of the evil Reptilians. Just for a background, the Reptilians are the alien race that had previously enslaved the Insectoids. The Insectoids were under brutal Reptilian rule until one brave insectoid named Zolarg overthrew the Reptilians and founded the Zolarg Empire. Many Insectoid worlds are now under the protection of the Zolarg Empire, but there are also many insectoid worlds that are still enslaved by the Reptilians. This will come into play with the new Reptilian worlds, which (on the galactic map) are going to be pretty close to the Zolarg worlds. You will see when the Reptilians come out that they employ poor insectoids as slave labor throughout their colonies. Reptilians are also playing a hand in United Earth/LIS politics, but this will not be a factor in My Colony (only in the upcoming Colony Wars). The Reptilians are also more technologically advanced than both the Insectoid and the Humans, and the are going to have cool new features not found in the other colonies. So stay tuned, much more to come!

I think that being able to play custom maps made by others is a awesome idea because it allows a lot more creativity in the game. I think that this would also convince more people to buy premium. A all round good idea :)

I can not figure out how to delete the custom maps or the layout templates. I play the android version of the game. Could anyone please tell me how to do this?

We already have custom maps for single cities so i don't why we shouldn't implement them for region cities

Actually, I have an idea that might be worthwhile regarding map-editing for Colony wars.

You said that this is a different engine altogether. But would it be easy to implement a map-editer, kind of like the map editor that Starcraft 1 and 2 have. Here are some things that I think it should provide the creator with:

- The ability to add different textures, paths, and terrains(highlands, lowlands, water, ramps, and cliffs) would be an obvious requirement, along with a good variety of deco objects that give aesthetics to the battlefield.
-the map-editor should have multiple planetary themes that a creator can choose from. These themes would have a different set of terrains and decorations. (some examples of themes are icy, earth-like, dessert, volcanic, tropical/water-world, lunar, red planet, asteroid, twilight, indoor map/facility/substructure, space platform, etc.).
- The creator would also need to be able to choose where they want to add resource nodes.
- The ability to choose team starting points and how many teams can play the map.
- The ability to place individual vehicles, airships, and units and choose each unit's team and current status(health and energy levels).
- The ability to create unique sitations with the use of triggers. This would take a lot of time and effort to create. But it would allow players to create different scenarios and even minigames that other players could try, which also leads me to the next bullet.
- You would also need a section on the menu of colony wars that would allow a player to pick a custom map to play on, which is probably already implemented for maps that you've already created, but there should be a separate list for maps uploaded by the players.

I think that all of these features would be good for the game because it enables the players to do a lot of your work for you in regards to creating content that would keep players entertained. In fact, you would be able to use this editor as well instead of hard-coding each map, and this is especially useful if you want to add a campaign for all four of the current factions. Or you could also rely on players to create those maps as well with this feature.

Let me know what you think.

These are just a few ideas that may be obvious things that bast has already decided he will implement, but hopefully some of these ideas may help. And Before you start blasting me about how bast won't ever put a pvp element into my colony, you should check the updates and announcements page under update 75, since bast includes the possibility of a pvp element with federations.

The ideas below represent an entire concept when applied together. This is how I would implement pvp between federations in my colony, but like all of my other concept ideas, it's mainly here to present new thoughts to the developer on how certain concepts could come together, and I don't expect him to just take this entire concept and put it in the game.

First off, I think that any pvp feature should be optional, just as bast said. But I do think that there should be some risk involved with enabling pvp and joining in federation wars/rivalries. I don't think that the risk should be catastrophic, but being attacked by someone else should come with some major disadvantages.

I think that in order for a rivalry/war between two federations to continue, a certain percentage of the federation should be regularly and actively involved. This way, people have to be actively participating in the rivalry in order for it to continue, so time and effort would need to be put in. While a rivalry is going on, all colonies in those federations are given buffs that increase income and production speeds of certain resources, so a rivalry would be good for business, as it also is in real life.

However, those that chose not to participate in a rivalry will not benefit at all from any benefits that come about by attacking enemy colonies, only active colonies do. This way there will be no freeloaders. I also think that there should be a cooldown timer that forces players to remain pvp active for a while after they've attacked another colony. This way colonies can't attack other colonies and then quickly disable pvp mode to avoid retaliation. However, if you accidentally enable pvp and haven't attacked anyone, you can immediately disable pvp. I also think that each colony should only be able to have one debuff affecting them at a time, but they could have multiple buffs in effect. Any further attempts to double-debuff an enemy would result in the attacker wasting a debuff chance and using resources that they could have used on another target.

Now, here comes a system of buffs and debuffs that I think would fit the pvp feature nicely. With these status effects, each colony could specialize in a certain kind of attack, or take on a certain support role in a rivalry, thus adding a bit of an rpg element to this system, but shouldn't need to get too in depth or complex with it. Below is a system of classes, point systems, and buffs and debuffs that a player can cast on other friendly or enemy colonies. Bear in mind that in order to receive a buff or debuff, you need to be in pvp mode. All buffs and debuffs require certain buildings in order to be unlocked and improved, and the best status effects require more complex buildings.

There would also be four different scores attributed to each colony that tell what kind of contribution that colony makes to the war effort and what their specialty/class is. Each class would be specified by a certain building, and only one of six of these buildings can be constructed at once in a colony. Whichever building is built determines the war class of the colony and what it specializes in. The buildings can be upgraded in tiers, giving more and more unique advantages for each tier, but also becoming more expensive. The classes are as follows:

A vanguard heads straight in and attacks the enemy headlong, splitting their focus between offense and defense. They can be capable attackers and defenders, but would more often than not pose as a distraction to the enemy, spreading their attacks and defenses onto multiple colonies at once with the splitter cast, and protecting themselves with the feedback loop cast. They focus on collecting offense and defense points.

Unique advantages: the vanguard's unique advantages focus on reducing the durations of all debuffs that they are targeted with, reducing buff/debuff cooldowns, increasing the amount of targets that a vanguarde can hit with the splitter cast, and on the highest tier, enabling the vanguard to attack an enemy and "taunt" them, thus forcing them to target the vanguard for their next attack. The taunt can also be used in combination with splitter to affect multiple enemies, forcing them all to wait on each other to take turns attacking the same vanguard before they can target another colony.

An empowerer is good at preparing their allies for an initial attack on an unsuspecting enemy. The buff their allies to strengthen them for the battle to come, and they join the ranks of vanguards in attacking and distracting the enemy. The Empowerer can counter some debuffs with buffs, but it proves to be a very inefficient counterer and can easily be picked out by an assassin if it causes too much bother in the heat of battle. It's best for this class to do all of it's buffs before battle and save the debuffs until the heat of battle. An empowerer will rack up offense and utility points, with relatively few defense points.

Unique advantages: The empowerer's unique abilities focus on buff potency, the amount of targets that splitter can reach, duration reduction to any debuffs that it experiences. And on the highest tier buildings, Empowerers gain a 1 in 5 chance to apply a buff to themselves automatically if they cast that same buff onto an ally without negating a debuff or being negated by a debuff. This allows the Empowerer to easily empower themselves while they are empowering other colonies in preparation for a battle, but doesn't help the empowerer during the heat of battle.

An assassin makes calculated strikes. Their attacks are very potent and can be made even more potent thanks to the charge cast. They are often supported by vanguards that strike before the assassins to get the initial attention from the enemies. They need not worry about protecting themselves in battle because of this. Even if they are attacked, they can retaliate quickly by using the dimensional reflection buff, thus giving their enemy a taste of their own medicine. An assassin can be good at countering buffs with debuffs, but not as effectively as they can attack an unprotected enemy. This class will have mostly offense points, with a little bit of silencer points as well.

Unique advantages: the Assassin's unique advantages focus on debuff potency and cooldown, dimensional mirror cooldown and cost reduction, increased potency and decreased cooldown on a buff affected by the charge cast, and on the highest tier, giving the assassin the ability to attack an enemy with an "evasive" attack, thus forcing the enemy to not be able to retaliate against the assassin for a certain amount of time. The enemy can target other colonies during that time though, just not that particular assassin.

The counterer focuses on offense and defense. They use their casts to negate a buff or debuff. They use the splitter and feedback loop buffs to cast negating buffs and debuffs onto themselves and other allies. The assassin might target a counterer with a potent attack at just the right time, during the counterer's cooldown time, if the counterer becomes a bother to it's enemies. So learning when to take action to help your allies and when let up for a while to lose attention from enemy colonies is a must for this class. The counterer gains equal amounts of defense and silencer points.

Unique advantages:The counterer's unique advantages focus on cooldown and resource cost reduction to all buffs and debuffs, increasing the amount of extra targets that splitter can give you, and on the highest tier, a counterer can "silence" an enemy, preventing them from attacking or defending any target for a duration, if they successfully negate that enemy's debuff or buff. The silence effect has a 1 in 5 chance of happening for each successful counter.

The healer is solely a supporter and defender, defending colonists by negating debuffs with their buffs and using buffs on allies just as utilities to boost their performance. The healer gives potent buffs and defenses to other players and is the pillar that holds up the federation in the war. They can use the charge cast to further increase the potency of a buff, which they would use to further strengthen allies. Assassins will target these the most to slow them down so the enemy will be without support, and counterers can also silence Healers by negating their buffs with debuffs. But healers are really good at empowering all of the other classes, which in turn will retaliate if one of their healers is attacked. The healer focuses on collecting defense and utility points.

Unique advantages: The healer's advantages focus on buff potency and cooldown, increased potency and decreased cooldown effects of the charge buff on all buffs, and on the highest tier, if they successfully counter a debuff with a buff, that buff's cooldown is reduced by 75%, allowing them to deal large amounts of counters in rapid succession as long as their buffs aren't re-countered/negated by an enemy.

The Commando is like an empowerer in that it buffs allies in preparation for battle, but instead of joining in the frontline assault like empowerers, commandos hide under cover of distraction and take out enemy defenses with tactical casts. They are extremely efficient with countering buffs with debuffs, yet they can't defend allies against debuffs. The commando is the hardest class to play as their position on the battlefield is an awkward one. And while they are really good at ripping enemy defenses away and preparing allies for battle, they themselves can't directly attack or defend anyone. Only choose this class if you're experienced with the pvp feature and your federation needs people of this class, otherwise you'll find yourself having a really bad experience with the pvp element.

Unique advantages: The commando looses the ability to buff people that are already affected with a debuff and the ability to debuff an enemy that's not protected by a buff, and debuff potency and duration is set to 0 so that if a commando successfully negates a buff, the debuff doesn't affect the enemy as an attack like it regularly would. This forces the commando into it's role turns debuffs solely into a means of breaking defenses instead of attacking directly. The commando also gets cooldown reduction to all debuffs, buff potency, increased splitter targets, and on the highest tier structure, the commando has a 1 in 5 chance of completely removing a buff or debuff's cooldown after casting it successfully. This means that the commando can hit many more targets than any other class in a period of time, allowing it to somewhat carpet-bomb enemy defenses or empower massive amounts of allies before the battle.

Major Benefits in participating in PVP: As factions war against each other, the colonies contributing to the war effect will share in the spoils of war. In order for Federations to start a war, both Federations must fromt a certain amount of money, and then each week after that start of the war, that same amount of money must be paid by each federation. Each week, a tally would be taken of how many successful attacks and counters were dealt by each federation. Both numbers are added together to get the Federation's battle score, and the federation with the highest score wins all of the money from all participating federations for that week. This can be used in a free-for-all war that includes multple federations as well as just a regular rivalry between two federations, and the war can continue as long as the federations want it to continue, provided they have enough money to put forward. The winning federation is required to split the winnings among it's participating colonies, but how much a percentage of the win that it keeps to itself is optional. Just bear in mind that nobody will participate if there is not a big enough reward.

Debuffs:

Benefits of debuffing enemies: When you debuff an enemy that doesn't currently have any status effects without being negated, you permanently gain a small amount of potency towards the debuff you casted and you get offense points that go to your offense score, which can be seen by other members of your federation. If you successfully negate a buffed enemy with a debuff, you gain silencer points towards your silencer score that other members can see and you permanenty gain a very small percentage chance of not being negated each time you cast a debuff or buff, even if your buff or debuff was countered correctly by a defending enemy(this also applies to buffs/debuffs casted with feedback loop). Finally, if you successfully negated a buff or debuff that negated your original buff/debuff on the same enemy, you will gain 2x silencer points and you get 2x more percentage added to your negation-block chance.

Brownout: Forcefully syphon energy from your enemy to temporarily add to your power capacity. Is negated by the Syphon buff but can negate the repair nanites buff. Casting this debuff successfully without having it negated will permanently add a 2% increase to the caster's power capacity that scales with their power capacity.
Category: Techno-warfare

EMP Blast: Blast your enemy with EMP waves that temporarily damage power producing buildings, causing a complete power blackout. the effects of the emp blast are shorter in duration than the brownout, but cannot be countered by simply increasing power production like brownout could. Negates the Syphon Buff but is negated by the repair nanites buff. Successfully casting this debuff without negation would award the caster with a permanent 2% faster build speed on all power producing buildings.

Plague: Inflict an enemy with a nasty plague that lowers the health of it's colonists over time. By treating the population of that colony like guinea pigs, you gain a boost towards research production. A plague will never kill a colonist directly, the lowest that a plague would bring a colonist would be 5%. This is avoid any colony from dying out because of warfare. Negated by the healing nanites buff but negates the probiotic bursts buff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speed of hospitals and scientific structures.

Famine: Target your enemy's food supply and reduce the amount of food they produce for a time. Negated by the probiotic bursts buff but negates the healing nanites buff since people can't heal without eating food. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a permanent 2% increase in food storage.

World eater: You release a rare silicon-based life form that eats stone and metal into your enemy's colony. The creature quickly reproduces and infests all of the enemy's ore mines, viciously attacking the miners.. The enemy suffers a substantial reduction in production rates from any structure that relies on holes in the ground, including excavation sites, core mines, regolith extraction co.s, fracking plants, etc. The world eaters are trained to build storehouses for the ore they collect and share it with their masters. Successfully casting this debuff without having it negated will permanent multiply the attacker's total storage capacity for raw resources by 1.02, thus adding an extra 2% capacity in relation to the capacity they already have. This scales with resource capacity and applies to all resources that come from the ground, including alien arts, ore, gold, ura, alu, rego,
Category: Geo-warfare

Tectonic disruption: Pummel your enemy with earthquakes that make working in tall buildings extremely hard. The target suffers reduced work productivity depending on how potent your attack is and can't build or destroy any buildings during the duration of the debuff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster 2% faster construction of any structure that classifies as a tall building.
Category: Geo-warfare

Splitter: A very costly and high tech buff that allows you to direct your buffs and debuffs toward two targets at once. In order to successfully target two allies/enemies with a particular status effect, you need to cast splitter on both targets in rapid succession(casts are no more than 5 minutes apart), otherwise the splitter buff/debuff would be wasted on only one target and the caster would have to wait the long cooldown in order to cast it again.
Category: Offensive Warfare

Malicious Sanctioning campaign: you target an enemy with a campaign to invite it's population to immigrate to your colony, thus leaching population away from them. Requires tons of civics to cast and a colony would have to be well established in order to have access to this attack and would need to have tons of space for new colonists. Negated by the repopulate buff but negates the Friendly sanctioning buff. Once a caster's housing space is filled up, the campaign will be ended, thus avoiding any homeless people. Successfully casting this debuff without running out of housing space or being negated will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds on all housing structures.
Category: Political Warfare

Purge: Purge your colony of any overly complacent colonists, forcing them to immigrate to your enemy. These colonists will immigrate to the enemy regardless of whether they have housing room or not. If the enemy doesn't have housing room, the immigrants because homeless and detract from their happiness score. This buff requires a lot of civics and would have a huge cooldown. Successfully casting this debuff would grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds for all tourism structures.
Category: Political warfare

Blockade: Block and enemy's trade via gbt and all import/export/immigration buildings other than the Stargate. is negated by the subspace detour buff but negates the hyperspace transport buff. Requires starships to cast. During the blockade, the prices of all of the import/export stuctures besides your highest tier import/export building(stargate for humans) are reduced by 20% and the rewards gain from the exports are increased by 20%
Category: Economic Warfare

Subspace disruption: Disruption your enemy's Stargate connection, rendering their most advanced immigration and trade building useless. Negates the subspace detour buff but is negated by the hyperspace transport buff. During a disruption, your highest tier import/export building gains a 20% import price reduction and a 20% export reward increase.
Category: Economic Warfare

Buffs:

Benefits of buffing allies: There are good benefits to turning your colony unto a support colony that buffs it's allies. When you successfully negate a debuff, you permanently gain a small amount of resistance to the debuff that you negated, and you get defense points that go to your overall defense score that other members can see. When you cast a buff onto an ally while they aren't affected by any status affects, then you gain points towards your utility score, which other members can see as well, and you gain a potency increase to that buff.

Syphon: You temporarily sacrifice a portion of your power to add to an ally colony's power levels. Designed to negate the brownout debuff as long as the caster has enough extra power to successfully supplement that colony's needs as well as the extra demand for power that the brownout debuff adds. Unfortunately, the emp burst debuff negates this buff.
Category: Techno-warfare

Repair nanites: sends a swarm of nanites to repair any damage in an ally's technology caused by an EMP blast, immidiately negating the debuff. The brownout debuff destroys these nanites as the high electric demand causes electronics to overheat, vaporizing the nanites as they try to fix the damage. One side effect of getting hit with this buff is that they repair damage caused by other means, thereby repairing building infrastructure by a significant percentage.
Category: techno-warfare

Healing nanites: you send a swarm of healing nanites to an ally colony to heal it's occupants. Completely negates the plague debuff, but is negated by the dyson sphere debuff. Hospitals also heal sick colonists faster depending on buff potency.
Category: Bio-warfare

Probiotic bursts: gives an ally colony rapid food production for some time. This buff requires a large amount of food and water to charge, but when casted onto an ally colony, it releases massive clouds of genetically modified probiotics in the atmosphere, which help crops grow fast. negates the dyson sphere debuff, but is negated by the plague debuff.
Category: Bio-warfare

Ultrasonic resonance: Blast your ally with ultrasonic waves that purify the earth of any world eaters. Obviously this counters the world eater debuff. The resonance shakes ores and minerals loose from the rocks for easier collection. This adds a significant boost to production in all buildings that rely on holes in the ground. However, this buff does nothing against the tectonic disruption debuff.
Category: Geo-warfare

Cryonic infusion: calm an ally's planet down with the freezing power of cryo-science. Negates tectonic disruption, but world eaters are impervious to the extreme cold. The severe cold causes blue crystalline to grow on the surface of the planet, no matter what planet it is, and there is a percentage chance for each lava tile on a lava map to instantly turn into obsidian. Both of these benefits depend on buff potency.
Category: Geo-warfare

Repopulate: you sacrifice a portion of your population to save an ally from dying off by repopulating their colony. No resource or tech requirements. Not designed to negate any debuff, but designed to prevent any colony from dying off. This is a very low tier buff, and would be the first buff to be unlocked, so it really shouldn't be possible to kill off an enemy colony to where they can't recover, since they could always get reinforcements from allies. In fact, I could see some colonies specializing in this buff by increasing their population size way beyond their population requirements. Negates the sanctioning campaign debuff but people won't want to move to that colony if it been afflicted by a purge from another colony.
Category: Political Warfare

Friendly Sanctioning campaign: Help your ally by welcoming all of their homeless into your colony. The buff only stops when either the caster runs out of housing or the target runs out of homeless. negates the Purge debuff but is negated by the Malicious sanctioning debuff.
Category: Political Warfare

Subspace detour: Allow your ally to connect to your gbt via their stargate, thus allowing them to make trades. This negates a blockade debuff, but is negated by the subspace disruption debuff. Side effects from this buff include a reduced cost in civics for each gbt transaction and the reduction of cost and increase of reward from importing/exporting from the stargate or highest tier import/export building, depending on buff potency.

Wormhole: You create a wormhole above your planet that links to a wormhole above your allie's planet. Because of this, allies can travel more effectively without the need of a stargate. Negates subspace disruption but is negated by blockade. Has the same effect on gbt as subspace detour, but applies the cost and benefit modifiers to every tier other than the top tier import/export building.

SOS: This buff can only be applied to the colony casting it. It's basically a cry for help. Other allies can see a list of SOS reports for their federation and see the colony being attacked and identify the attacker. Afterward they can proceed to buff their ally in danger, or retaliate against the attacker with a debilitating debuff. There is no requirement or cost to cast this buff, you just have to have a communications device, consulate, or capital.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Feedback loop: Can only be applied to the caster, casting requires large amounts of power and the tech required with be pretty high to unlock this buff. Once this buff is casted, the caster can target themselves once with any buff, essentially being able to defend themselves instead of having to rely on another colony for counters. The feedback loop would come with a large cooldown, so the caster would have to choose wisely on.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Dimensional reflection: Reflect a buff or debuff back onto an enemy or ally, thus negating any effect on the caster completely and immediately. A high tech and a lot of resources required to cast this buff and comes with a long cooldown. This buff doesn't prevent an attack, you have to cast this buff during when you are experiencing a buff or debuff.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Charge: cast this buff before casting another buff or debuff to multiply the potency by 5. This also increases the cooldown of the buff being affected by 5. The most expensive buff in the game and comes with the highest cooldown.

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Now with all of that out of the way, I want to remind everyone that I'm not expecting this whole beast of a concept to be plopped into the game. I hope that bast at least takes a consideration of the concept and uses pieces and parts from it, but I mainly just want to see the game grow to become more popular and hopefully some of my ideas play a part in making that happen. I will be making changes to this post to constantly refine it based on what I learn about what is feasible to do and what bast's plans are, so stay tuned.

Edit: v0.81.0: I'm not going to make a new post for this, but I am now pushing out patch v0.81.0 that fixes an issue where the build options menu for vehicles would not appear. Sorry for the issues!

Today I am pushing out the v0.80.0 release of My Colony, and it should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. As I mentioned in the last update, I have been getting a lot of requests to slow down on content updates until some of the bugs and issues in the game are ironed out, and so that is what I plan to do over the next few updates, before I dive into the big Federations expansion which will probably leave the game broken again 😳 Just kidding (hopefully)! Anyway, let's see what is new with this release of My Colony.

Firstly, I have nerfed the Research Converter a bit, as it was slightly overpowered. It might still be overpowered, but it's a little better now. It now consumes more money and research, costs more to build, and produces at a little slower rate.

Next up, the little popup window on the construction options sidebar will now display how much housing a building provides, which was a request I was in the suggestions forum:

Moving on, many people have asked me to change the file names for region subcities, which were previously named with a timestamp, making it hard to tell what they were. So going forward, new regional subcities will be named like this: [region-name]-[subcity-name].mcz, making it a bit easier to tell what they are. This does not impact current cities though.

I have made it easier to share a saved file that is tied to an Ape Apps Account. You might recall that in the last update, I added the option to make an offline copy of a colony so you can share it with others. This has now been expanded a bit, to where if somebody gives you a colony file that is NOT a copy but is tied to their account, the game will automatically make it an offline-only non-account copy when another user tries to import the file into their game.

Next, the often requested 'Leave Federation' option has been implemented. It is fairly straightforward, you will see the new Leave Federation button on the Federations screen.

On all platforms, the Achievements window has been updated. It now shows achievement point values and total progress. Newly unlocked achievements are now also synced to your Ape Apps Account when you are logged in, keeping your achievement progress up to date across platforms. I might add more achievements to the game in the coming updates, so let me know what types of achievements you are interested in!

Next up, I have added a new policy to the Policies menu that allows you to block new tourists from coming to the colony, just like you can currently block immigration. The new option requires government level 3 or higher.

There were also a ton of bug fixes and improvements in this update, and I will just discuss a few of the larger ones. First, I think I have finally solved the issue where incinerators (and similar buildings) would shut down forever if you ever ran out of trash. You can let me know if you are still having the problem, but I think it's fixed.

Next, there was a huge issue involving how virtual colonists were organized and processed that, in large colonies, could potentially cause freezes and hangups of several minutes on regular intervals. The issue has been corrected in that it will not happen anymore on new colonies, but on existing colonies, the engine will slowly sort itself out. Slowly is the key word though, as a colony with over a million population would require more than a day of idle time to get sorted out. The slowness was required to let the colonists sort themselves out without completely killing the economy of the colony. If you want it to go faster, you will have to just kill off all of your colonists and let your population regrow. Most colonies are impacted by the issue, but the real problems are not apparent until populations are in the millions, so most people should be fine just letting the fix sort itself out behind the scenes.

Several optimizations have been made in regards to tourism. Tourism had the potential to really kill the performance of a colony, especially on large map sizes. The game was designed to place new tourists into 'simulated' mode so that they find entertainment without using the pathfinder, after you had so many tourists. However, this function was written when tourists only showed up a few at a time, so it was able to keep up. With the introduction of the Space Ports, tourists were able to show up way faster than the game could keep up with, and you would run into a situation where the pathfinder could not keep up and would cause memory consumption to keep growing and growing.

The engine is now much more aggressive at simulating tourists than it was before. Also, if a tourist does not find a tourist destination within a 60 tile radius of their arrival spot, they will now just leave instead of making the engine keep searching for a destination in a larger and larger radius. There are further optimizations planned for tourism in the coming updates, but if you have a large map with 10k or more tourists, consider using the new policy to block tourists from coming to the colony, which will let them slowly dwindle down as they run out of money. I do not think these tourism issues have much of an impact on small and medium sized maps, but on maps where people have done the Annex policy several times, it can really kill the game.

I have set up a small My Colony online merchandise store with a few things that I will probably expand on over the coming months, whenever an idea pops in my head. There are a few Lander items and a United Earth 'Make Earth Great Again' mug. I am drinking coffee out of the lander mug as we speak, and it really improves the taste of the coffee. 😜 Feel free to check it out and leave suggestions on items you would like to see:
https://teespring.com/stores/my-colony-store

Next, after literally years, I have posted a new episode of the My Colony Podcast. Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you would like to see me bring the My Colony Podcast back from the dead. If I limit it to shorter 10 minute(ish) episodes, it wont be too much or a burden to do.
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=2655

Finally, I just want to let everybody know that after years of talking about it, I have finally begun full scale work on Colony Wars, the multiplayer RTS game taking place in the My Colony universe! I plan (hope) for a release to all platforms this spring (steam included), with the first public beta coming to the Ape Apps Launcher later this month, so stay tuned, and check out the new Colony Wars forum for info:
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=28669

That's all for today's update. Should be hitting all platforms over the weekend, so keep a lookout. Let me know what issues you find, as I will be going hard after bugs and performance over the next few updates. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

Here i am again , smoking a cigarette and thinking about the meaning of life whilst developing my little colony ; and i thought to myself, why in god's name do i have 4 dedicated maps (region) for bandwidth alone? why do i have 5 dedicated to starports? isn't there a better way?

Regional gameplay was developed to allow massive development for players, and it works like a charm

BUT

In the meantime the ''bot stacking'' concept was introduced, which allowed us all to build massive robot armies to do our bidding super fast, and best of all, now we can move them between our maps :)

So, i thought to myself, why not have the same option for buildings?

I don't know the coding it takes, but would it be possible to introduce building leveling? Like for example instead of having 1000 microchip factories on 500 maps, have ONE single one factory on a map that i could level up?
Think about how much computational resources that would save just like the bot stacking did? And instead of having 200 maps/cities on a region we could have but a few ?

I for one think that a building leveling system would improve game performance on all platforms, and especially mobile. When i discovered my colony it was through the google play store and i switched to pc after a few hours because the shear size of what i was developing was hard to sustain on a simple phone.

I know my colony V2.0/3D is being debated right now, but realistically speaking, that will take a lot of time.

In the meantime i personally feel that building leveling would be one of the greatest improvements to the game that you can bring to the table right now. It would cut down massively on computational resources, reduce the hustle of having to build tens of cities dedicated to the same resource, and would make the game a bit more mobile/tablet friendly because it would make it possible to reach end-game on a single large city/map.

These are my thoughts for the day. As you might have noticed, every now and then i like to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.


Few side notes before i sign off:

1) The leveling system should come with a penalty - something like 2% production reduction . So a lvl 2 building will make 2% less than two lvl1 buildings

2) If such a system were to be implemented, everyone should start from scratch. Start a new season of the game if you will and see who reaches the to 10 fastest and manages to stay there . I know many players have worked on the colonies for years , but a fresh start isn't going to kill anyone and could be fun

3) Maybe put a level cap on buildings (like lvl 100 or something) , to encourage further development of cities and not have all production in a 50x50 square :)