Ape Apps

Here goes a message. First there is neither testing version releases nor testers so every build is matching new "features" (and potentially bugs) along with catching old ones and polishing it overall.
here goes the list for web 0.54.0 (Firefox_64)
I will not brag about why 55 alien powers used to be better than 9 diamond crystal reactors for almost every moon base but instead

[not important][GUI] particles-on works fine while particles-off does not despawn existing ones just stopping new to appear. Looks weird when they keep coming from the sides in lava world and still need to wait some time to see whether offing does any good. Not so important but seems quite easy to work with.

[bug][render] Zooming out goes mad. I do know that more render takes more time but there are always ways to use some cheating and tricks to make it a bit easier in exchange for fast rendering, aren't they? Now we are talking about something strange. Quite a big map, quite a small zoom, not so laggy, yet goes buggy. At some mouse scrolling point it goes to scale vertical but not horizontal size making it more wide-stretched. Would see if i could add screenies for both before and after.

[UI] now we have a _red_ form of crystaline. Third one apart from _green_ synth and blue natural if I remember it correctly. But the resource icon features 4 crystals of the same color which looks a bit of strange now as we have not a single natural source of it.

[UI] playing with new colony creation does not leads to bad colonies generation as I've mentiomed it some time ago but still shows a previous colony with engine started (with non-working side menu etc) prior to selecting the name and actual start.

[Major bug][UI] Yeah you've done it right with the assets. And now we're going to encyclopedia where... Well it still is lacking the search so I need to remember where exactly do I scroll for this and that and because it lacks logic it goes mad but... The Assets new. And an Encyclopedia old. I want someone to make a shiny looking meme pic for it. They don't seem to like each other. They are no longer friends!
Erm.. excuse me. Mismatching pics or absent pics is what you might get if you pretend you ever want to see them. But the resources don't think so. They are too noble to show up for such a nooby engineer. No matter what you have loaded before it will load all the assets as soon as you open the list for the second-third time. (you'll get a strgate with a hive icons and such at the first look).
I do want to make a stop here. When I played the game first time, There were no other races and it wasn't even half as complicated as it is now. Even that time ago the only source I used for info was the game and i even managed to stuck being out of atmosphere (there was no forest or moon and surely no guide messages back then if i recall it correctly) so that time I looked it through and it was enough for me to make every building possible afterwards. I've done it at list three times now from nothingness as the game evolved and I do appreciate most of the changes. However, even at present, accidentally closed guide window will not reappear and can neither be seen in questbook or anything alike. Moreover, now we have a numerous races with overlapping techs and buildings not so important to show up in ants colony etc etc. I mean it went wild it became messy. Another complaint is that encyclopedia takes roughly about one third of the screen where it could take almost 90% in the same manner because I can't make a good use of the space to the left of it for sure. It still wont be much of a help due to saving only a couple of lines per entity and only in case that entry has multy-line description.

The solution or better to say a kind of a temporary workaround I see here is to make a tree of techs with a start or with a world load or even a few seconds after. Starting with a root tech of a current base tech as an example. It would allow for a techs like those available to different bases to appear in both trees and will not pollute the files with lists for every base to load. Though the latter approach might be more suitable for mobiles, just to consider both sides of the coin. The tree will allow to map all descendants to load and show up as icons and also to use workaround in pedia: make submenu, two entries: the one leading to a current list and other to a list based on that tree with techs already loaded with pics and ready to go. Double kill.
The way I see it is to add a couple of lines to the place it counts current buildings premium items in game etc which should be quite fine and yet not so difficult to implement.

[UI] You might also think of a random pic showing in the sub menus titles to be chosen from loaded ones or even to be static but that is not so important as previous. Probably a part of a previous bug.

[UI] Old ones to end up the list: making some not square-icon-building will stretch it to be square-like causing funny pictures of "a Consulate with a pressure of the responsibility on its shoulders" or "a helium extractor that feels like a factory" (but of cause nobody would need such a factory ever soon).

[UI] Another old one not sure if fixed already. Coal or regolith? Which of the icons is it here or there? And the icon of it without a framing with the-very-same-color background for a resource header is definitely the most interesting part of this quiz game. It has many unSeen endings. Ba-toooom! tss.

*edit* Speaking of vertical-distortions, there is quite a probability to catch it when zooming with mouse wheel does not change zoom only making stretchy effect to appear while saving the zoom. It always behaves in stretchy but is a bit hard to catch it not changing zoom in the process. I overlayed two captures and cut one of them for you to see the difference.
Spoiler:



*edit*
also a pic showing zones that are there in tech encyclopedia now:
red are neither used nor clickable until closing the popup window. Green zones cut up already lacking space for scrolling (should a big dismiss button be replaced with a red X icon or something?). Blue is ads. They look black not because I'm a racist who killed them. The turbo mode or something alike has taken them to a bar or somewhere near idk. They promised to be back before the sunset. Here goes the pic by the way, you wanted it you got it.
Spoiler:



Another good week to start making more of colonists happy, isn't it? Good luck. Keep it going and make it even better.

Dear @bastecklein,

I am playing MyColony via Steam on a Win 10 Computer.
I am not completely sure but I think after 0.90 came out, the game is not closing correctly/completely.
When I close the game the "MyColony" task is still in the TaskManager and using arrond 200 MB of ram.
If I decide to open it up and start playing again, I get an notification from Steam saying:
While updating MyColony an error occured ( Application is running) : 9916

That means I can only start MyColony correctly once after starting my Pc. Whenever I want to open it up again I have to go into the Task Manager first and end the Task manually. After that I can start MC again.

I was wondering if this is a mistake on my side, or if it is a bug in the program.


Regards

Pavlxiiv

Today I am releasing the v1.28.0 patch for the original My Colony, and it represents a significant under-the-hood transition of the game, moving away from the Web App Core framework and on to it's own server and domain.


So a few weeks ago, My Colony 2 was transitioned over to it's own domain, and today the original My Colony gets the same treatment. Players of the Web App version of My Colony 1 will need to update their bookmarks or uninstall/reinstall their PWA's to point to the new home of MC1 online:

https://mycolony.online/

On top of the URL change, the actual backend game server was also migrated over to new hardware. This change actually took place about a week ago, and since I have not seen any complaints or issues in relation to it yet, I assume that it has gone smoothly.

The original My Colony had a ton of hooks and references in the code to the old Web App Core library, and so there may be some bugs in there that I have not yet found or things I missed in making the migration. Please use this thread to post about any issues you find. If all goes well, I will use the code base of this release to migrate Antiquitas over to it's own server next.

Beyond the migration, the only major change in this release is that players on the Steam version of MC1 are now able to make Ape Coin purchases through their Steam account. Prior to this release, Ape Coin IAP's were disabled on Steam, but it should now be working without issue.

The Future of My Colony 1

I want to take a moment just to dispel any notions that people may have about new future techs or structures coming to the original My Colony. Simply put, there is no new content planned for My Colony 1, and no new game features are planned either. The only things that will be added to the game going forward are limited run premium structures. All future content development for My Colony is focused on My Colony 2.

This does not mean that the game has reached "end of life." It will stay live and available to play indefinitely, and the servers will remain online, operational and updated until I get hit by a bus and die. However, all of the cool new content and features are coming to My Colony 2, as I simply do not have time to focus on both games, and the MC2 engine allows for far greater gameplay and development potential anyway.

I will probably do a new episode of the My Colony Podcast later this week to discuss some of the cool new features coming to My Colony 2 over the coming months, so stay tuned for that.

Anyway, that is today's update in a nutshell. Try it out and let me know what issues you find. The update is live right now on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher, and should be hitting all other platforms over the coming days.

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony

The Encyclopedia is very "unorganized" and you have to scroll over a lot of things just to find some info about a building, tech, etc. My idea is, In the Encyclopedia, There should be a search bar, the buildings, tech, etc. would be separated in 3 different tabs, "United Earth", "LIS" and "Insectoid"...aand arrange the things in alphabetical order.

Hello,

I too would like to see an in game search box for the encyclopedia like the one in the online reference.

I.e. when you click on the building list within the app encyclopedia, a search box should be at the top to allow you to find the building you want info about.

Even just having a sort function would be helpful too.

It doesn't really make sense that you could see buildings that you don't have the research for. It would be like if we saw what happens 100 years in the future we would work towards that instead of making other research and breakthroughs because we know that's where we are headed. All the information you need is on this website: https://www.my-colony.com/reference/index.html

However, looking it up in a website feels a bit weird, it should be the encyclopedia's job to inform the player of the game, so let it inform us. The information you need is already on the encyclopedia but the way its organised is just convoluted and hard to find the information we need. The encyclopedia needs a better GUI with better navigation in order to find exactly what the user wants. At the moment all it does is give you a massive scrollbar of all types of buildings, resources, technologies etc instead of separating the types of buildings.

Over the last week I have started working on 0.77.0 on the web client. I have been really busy with other non-app related things though, so the update has been going slowly. Towards the end of the week, I will have a lot more time to start developing again, so I will be able to go full steam ahead on My Colony. Here is what I have planned going in and what to expect. By the way, v0.77.0 is the Christmas Update, and as such, I plan on making it a big one!

Firstly, there are a great many bugs that need to be ironed out. Some have already been addressed, but more yet remain. If you are playing on the web with v0.77.0, please report bugs in this thread so they are easier to find.

Next, I am going to be totally revamping the in-game encyclopedia and owners manual for the game. The new encyclopedia is going to be merged into the Statistics window and is being totally rewritten.

The former printable owners manual is being totally rewritten and reworked. It will now be a complete comprehensive tome of My Colony data and information, and will be viewable in-app, exportable as a .pdf or .txt file, or printable. It will contain information on the game, outline the controls, all of the play modes, give a basic "starting-out" walkthrough, some backstory for all civs, and lay out the full statistics for everything in the game.

As I said, you will be able to view the full text in-app, and most people should use it that way. Not that I expect most people on the forums here to actually need a manual, but for new players it might help. If you really want it though, you can print the whole thing. The printout in total so far runs about 200 pages though (and it's still not done yet), so if you are really wanting to print it out, I would suggest having a duplex printer, or (better yet) printing it at school or work. Then you can throw it in a three ring binder and read about My Colony all day.

There have been many comments in the various app stores related to a lack of instructions or a proper owners manual, so this ought to cover just about everything. The new manual is not yet complete, there are still a couple of sections which need added, but you can see what it has so far by accessing it from the old (soon to be removed) encyclopedia interface.

Next up, I am adding a new 'Water World' map. I am thinking that each civilization will have access to the map, and it will basically be an ocean with some large islands on it. I am also considering having a random hurricane disaster on the map, although it wouldn't be near as brutal as the Lava World disaster.

Zolarg and Reptilians are going to get starship production, which is going to require several new buildings and techs in order to get there. Once all civs have starships, 0.78.0 should start to have the Trade Routes option I am planning, much of which is already ready to go on the server.

Finally, Federation voting seems to be having issues that need to be cleaned up. I also need to add the option to call a custom vote in the federation, so that the members can vote on Federation President. I will be adding Federations to the website, but this will happen between the 0.77 and 0.78 updates.

I have not forgotten about in-game moderators. There is just a lot more infrastructure that needs to be in place first. Of more immediate concern, I could use a moderator for the forum here to help fight some of the spam and to keep everything in line, if anybody is interested in that, you can PM me.

So far in 0.77.0 I have totally changed how "virtual" colonists operate (the fake colonists that 'exist' after your population crosses the 2000 line), so let me know if you are experiencing anything strange in relation to that.

Anyway, the last few weeks have been ultra busy at our house with non-Ape Apps related stuff, but everything should be calmed down by friday (at least until christmas week), which is why I hope to get a lot of My Colony work done in the downtime. Stay tuned!

Good news everyone, tonight I will be pushing out the long awaited v0.77.0 release of My Colony! This is actually a pretty big update, and truth be told there is a lot more I wanted to get added in there, but I ran up against a time limit since the Apple App Store will not be accepting any new app submissions after tonight due to the holiday, so I had to push it out now. There is still a ton of new stuff and changes in this update though, so let's dive in.

First, want to mention some engine changes, since several key components of the game have been totally reworked. The code for the simulated or "virtual" colonists has been completely redone. Because of the change, some extra large colonies might experience intermittent delays every minute or so that will look like short freezes. After a few hours of play, this should sort out as things in your game file are rebalanced. Normal sized colonies should notice any impact.

The path finding has been totally overhauled, again. Because of a new map class which I will discuss in a bit, I needed to rewrite the pathfinding to work with different types of passable terrain. I do not see any serious bugs with the new system, but of course let me know if I am wrong.

Several changes and updates have been made to Regions. The main region map has been updated and will now group connected cities into "metropolitan areas." Hovering over a city will now show what it's top resource outputs are. Capitol cities will have a Star on them. And when you start a new Region game, you can either pick a normal resource distribution, or have a completely blank map. Now if you look at your Resource stats in the Statistics screen while on the Region overview map, you will get pie charts showing which cities are producing what share of the resources. And now when you are inside of a city, instead of seeing "Regional" as a resource input/output source, you will see "Regional (City Name)", so you know which city is providing or consuming the resources.

Next up, infrastructure repair costs have been dramatically lowered. The price also scales down with the size of a building, so you will not see a giant building like the Hall of Congress drain your entire treasury on repair costs. Large buildings also decay at a slower rate than before.

I had a list of about 40 or so hard crashes that were reported through the various app marketplaces which have been corrected, as well as all Javascript based crashes that were reported through the analytics console.

Alpha Draconians have gained access to the Abandoned World map. The stats on many buildings have been slightly tweaked to balance gameplay and also to allow each Civilization to use the new Water World map.

Which leads to the next new item, the brand new Water World map.

I have wanted to implement this map for a long time, but I knew it would require a rewrite of the pathfinding code and I was not looking forward to it. But now the work is done and we have Water World! I wanted Water World to be available to all civilizations, and making that happen required a handful of changes to existing building stats, as well as a bunch of new buildings to support the new map across different tech trees. Here is the new content added that is related directly to Water World:

• Resource: Fish
• Terrains: Salt Water, Palm Trees 1 & 2
• Units: Enslaved Worker Drone, Enslaved Fisherbug, Fisherbot, Fisherbug, Used Ore Miner
• Structures: Small Wooden Bridge, Steel Bridge, Aluminum Bridge, Gold Bridge, Electromagnetic Bridge, Gold Reducer, Sand Path, Fisherbot's Hut

The map should be fully playable across all civs and in both single and region play. The difficulty will depend on your Civ, with Humans being the easiest and Draconians being the hardest.

Next up, both Insectoids and Reptilians now have Starship building capabilities. I am going to be adding Trade Routes soon, and so I needed to get all civs up to Starships in order for it to work. Draconians also got a new Level 3 capitol which is probably the tallest building in the game by far, the Chamber of Kings:

Next on the list, the GBT will now let you know what the minimum and maximum accepted trades by the server are, that way you do not submit a high or low trade and get the "Strike" message from the server.

There was a complete rewrite of the in-game Encyclopedia and the printable Owners Manual. Both are now found inside of the main Statistics screen:

The Owners Manual is now a lot more complete and can be viewed in-game, exported as a file, or printed. The printout is about 200 pages long though. The Encyclopedia is way more detailed than before and everything is hyperlinked together. It is now actually a useful tool for beginners. The Video Tutorials are now watchable in-game. I removed the link to the reference Google Docs spreadsheet as it has not been updated in over a year and the encyclopedia basically renders it useless anyway.

There is probably more that I forgot to mention, but I need to hurry and post this so I can start getting the update pushed out to all platforms before tonight. Hope you enjoy, let me know what issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

I am unable to update to to version 0.6

I am getting an error in JavaScript Module electron.

Console log;
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ./My\ Colony
A JavaScript error occurred in the main process
Uncaught Exception:
Error: Cannot find module 'electron-squirrel-startup'
at Module._resolveFilename (module.js:485:15)
at Function.Module._resolveFilename (/run/media/syther/Files/Linux-Files/Cloud/LinuxHomeFolder/syther/build/mycolony/my-colony-linux-x64-0.60.0/resources/electron.asar/common/reset-search-paths.js:35:12)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:437:25)
at Module.require (module.js:513:17)
at require (internal/module.js:11:18)
at Object.<anonymous> (/run/media/syther/Files/Linux-Files/Cloud/LinuxHomeFolder/syther/build/mycolony/my-colony-linux-x64-0.60.0/resources/app.asar/src/main.js:1:160)
at Object.<anonymous> (/run/media/syther/Files/Linux-Files/Cloud/LinuxHomeFolder/syther/build/mycolony/my-colony-linux-x64-0.60.0/resources/app.asar/src/main.js:270:3)
at Module._compile (module.js:569:30)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
at Module.load (module.js:503:32)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Anyone else on linux come accross this error?
Every Other version has run on my PC just fine, I am still playing on version 0.59

Regards,
Syther

Hi Guys,
I would like to suggest changing the file save system.
Currently it is so that all colonies, as well as the regions and their cities are stored in the same place (Pc->Documents -> MyColony->[ColonyName]/[CityName]).

I think that is very confusing/unclear, especially when you have a few colonys or regions with many cities, atleast for me it is.

I would simply suggest to add a subfolder for regions cities, in which all the cities of one region are safed.

As an Illustration:

Pc->Documents->MyColony-> File of the Region+Folder for the Region-> Inside the Folder for the Region: [CityName]

Thanks for reading and please comment your opinion.



[FFF] Pavlxiiv

With the latest update to My Colony 2, I went ahead and did a full migration of the game engine off of the antiquated Web App Core framework and transferred the game onto it's own unique domain. Seeing as this change went relatively smoothly, and how I have also committed to keeping the original My Colony up to date and supported for the foreseeable future, I think I am going to go ahead and do a similar migration to MC1.

Now, with My Colony 2, I had been planning for quite a while to migrate the code, so I already had some things baked into the game to make it a bit easier to do. This is not the case with the original, so this is going to be a bit larger of an undertaking. That said, if I am going to commit to keeping the code maintained and up to date for years to come, then I think that this is something I really need to do.

I have also been needing to migrate the original My Colony online server over to new hardware, and this change will give me an opportunity to take care of everything at the same time.

As with the MC2 migration, the MC1 migration will have the biggest impact to those using the Web version of the game, as non-cloud saved data will not carry over to the new game location. It will also require bookmarks to be updated, and PWA installs to be uninstalled/reinstalled using the new domain.

As for domain, I have not yet decided what the new URL will be for My Colony. mc1.my-colony.com is taken by the site that houses all of the user colony websites. I could do something like play.my-colony.com. I also own mycolony.net and mycolony.online, so those are options as well. I would appreciate feedback on this decision!

Anyway, please help get the word out to the other players of the game. Luckily, most My Colony 1 players are on mobile, and I do not expect them to be impacted (I have not heard of any mobile MC2 players having issues with that migration yet). I think most web app players probably use cloud sync and should be OK, but for those who don't, you should probably either turn it on or make sure that you have a local backup of your colony on your PC. As with the MC2 change, I will wait a few weeks before I start working on this, to give people time to prepare for the change.

#mycolony

Today I am updating the original My Colony to v1.30.0, bringing along some fixes, minor changes, and adding Seasons to the challenges system. Let's take a look!


Edit 2023-09-25: v1.31.0 has also been pushed out which is just a minor bug fix release, so there are no new notes for that update.

The largest change you will notice is that the Trophy leaderboards have been reset, and there is a new counter showing how many days are left in the current season. Trophy seasons will now last for 30 days, after which time the colony and the federation with the most trophies in the previous season will each get one Seasonal Trophy and everything else is reset to zero. This should hopefully give some other colonies a chance to appear on the leaderboards, since it was getting to be impossible to compete with some of the larger colonies out there.

There have been issues lately with players who are modifying their game data in order to get more resources for online play. I have started issuing 2 year bans for all colonies who are participating in this behavior, meaning that you and all of your colonies will be blocked from using MC online features for two years. In addition, there are new runtime checks in the engine that will reset all of a colony's resources to 0 if resource amount modifications are detected by the game. I really hate banning players for anything, but I can't just let abuse like this run unchecked.

For colonies with super large amounts of money and resources, there is a new Q abbreviation for numbers in the Quintillions and above.

I corrected an issue where the Ore Zapper and the House of Horrors were providing incorrect resource storage.

I also fixed an issue in this update where players were unable to restore backed up save files.

Finally, there has been an issue lately where certain ad blockers were blocking My Colony from download all of it's game data files, causing the game to hang forever on the loading screen. The game will now try to detect this scenario and give a warning message, so that the player actually knows what is happening instead of just seeing an endless loading screen.

That about wraps it up for this update. Let me know what issues you have with it, and thank you for playing!

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony

In the latest update, while playing on the ice world, I noticed something.
On the Encyclopedia it says that I AM able to build a regolith mine on the ice world. However i require the regolith miners to do that and on the encyclopedia says that they are only available to the lunar, asteroid and abandoned world bases. This severely slows down the ability to progress and develop on the ice world.
I hope this is looked into.

yes it is better if the Encyclopedia was organised like what say Koloude:
(race)
(filter 1)
(filter 2)
(filter 3)
and for filter :
alphabetical order-cost order-name-resssource needer...

The developer hasn't added that yet as the game is rather unfinished. The online encyclopedia is a user created site that Bastecklien (sp? - developer) hosts for us.

At least on the current Android version of the game, the encyclopedia leaves a lot to be desired... Some obvious improvements that come to mind are:

Search feature

Sorting, tags, etc.

Buildings, techs, etc. grouped into categories of some kind.

Clickable dependencies that take you to the entry for that item (resource, building, tech, etc.)

These may all be implemented in desktop versions of the game. I haven't tried those yet so I don't know.

Ok so i assume this has already been suggested lol. but i find that i am always running to the encyclopedia for the info of how much storage a building provides for a particular resource. there are little things like the fact that haunted houses store wood better than a lumber yard lol. yet this info is buried in the encyclopedia lol and honestly i only discovered it from a friend. my suggestion is to add storage info into the statistics of the buildings lol? to save us a step of running to the reference? would give us a bit more to go off of than the descriptions.

edit: if i am late on suggesting this or its already in the works-by all means remove this post and happy gaming :)

I am sorry to the people still having issues with the game. Crashes have been higher over the last 10 releases, particularly on Android, as the size of the game is now starting to outpace Android memory allocations on many devices. I have been doing work over the last few releases to try to trim memory consumption and speed things up. Here you can see the crash rate on Android over the last few versions:


Yes it is still too high, but it is getting better and I will continue working on it with each release.

Javascript performance has also taken a hit with the new mitigation from the Meltdown and Specter bugs, and I am trying to work around those as well. Again, I am sorry for the issues. TBH this is probably one of the bigger Javascript based simulation games out there, but I really am trying to get it resolved. I am not ignoring the issues!

One thing that helps, especially on Mobile, is to not open up the in-app encyclopedia, as this has to queue up all of the graphical assets in the game, and there are now so many buildings in My Colony that loading the graphics will crash most devices, even higher end ones. I need to totally rewrite the encyclopedia, it's just a matter of priorities.

bastecklein said:I am sorry to the people still having issues with the game. Crashes have been higher over the last 10 releases, particularly on Android, as the size of the game is now starting to outpace Android memory allocations on many devices. I have been doing work over the last few releases to try to trim memory consumption and speed things up. Here you can see the crash rate on Android over the last few versions:

Yes it is still too high, but it is getting better and I will continue working on it with each release.

Javascript performance has also taken a hit with the new mitigation from the Meltdown and Specter bugs, and I am trying to work around those as well. Again, I am sorry for the issues. TBH this is probably one of the bigger Javascript based simulation games out there, but I really am trying to get it resolved. I am not ignoring the issues!

One thing that helps, especially on Mobile, is to not open up the in-app encyclopedia, as this has to queue up all of the graphical assets in the game, and there are now so many buildings in My Colony that loading the graphics will crash most devices, even higher end ones. I need to totally rewrite the encyclopedia, it's just a matter of priorities.

You are honestly a brilliant designer, this is truly the best game I've played in years!! Thank you so much

Description:
Pressing the Online Reference button in the Encyclopedia opens the page that I cannot connect to.
First few seconds it tries to connect to https://coloniae.space/reference, then redirects to
http://localhost:8001/reference and fails to connect. I tried Opera and Google Chrome browsers.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Launch My Colony;
2. Start or load your colony (online or local);
3. Press ESC, open Encyclopedia;
4. Click Online Reference button;
5. Wait for your browser to open this page: https://coloniae.space/reference.

Platform: Windows 7 64-bit

Version: 1.11.0 (Steam)

I couldn't find any duplicates of this issue.

Today I am pushing My Colony 2 v0.16.0 which should be arriving to all platforms over the next couple of days. This release contains some important performance improvements, along with loading and saving time improvements, as well as some new content. So let's dive in!


For starters, two new tech upgrades have been added in this update, Human Cloning and Large Scale Construction, and with the addition of the latter comes the return of the Megabot!


The Megabot is required to build three of this updates new structures, the Large Living Quarters, the Uranium Enrichment Facility, and the Cloning Facility. In addition, this update also adds the Gold Synthesis Lab, the Canteen, and the Advanced Water Pump (the models of which were provided by @GeneralWadaling ).

I have added additional information to the Settlement statistics screen (and also the "s" hotkey for opening the stats window). Now when you click on a settlement, you can see some basic stats, including the current rate to which the colonists Education, Entertainment, Medical, and Security needs are being fulfilled.


More stats will be coming as time goes on, but at least now you can tell what you need to build in your settlement to attain optimal production levels. Although the above stats do currently impact production output, the game does not yet calculate colonist happiness and approval ratings. This will be coming soon, so be sure to use the new information on the Stats screen to get your settlements running properly before the next update.

The Encyclopedia now has a little bit more information when you click on a structure, but I realize that I still have a lot of work to do in that area. Be patient, all of the encyclopedia information found in MC1 will eventually be available in MC2 as well!


The MC2 update is live now on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher, and will be hitting mobile devices over the coming days. So thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more My Colony 2 goodness in the weeks ahead!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2

I just recently started to play the Alpha Draconians. I have just started to put down the Universal Commodities Exchange. Now I'm getting a message telling me there is no charcoal storage. I looked through all of the storage silos in the encyclopedia, and none of them list charcoal. I looked through all of the other Alpha Draconian buildings in the encyclopedia ( at least I think I have), same--no charcoal storage. I really don't care if there is no storage, as long as it is removed from the Universal Commodities Exchange (since it looks like I would just end up selling it like wood as nothing uses it). The message seems to be coming up a little to often, and it is starting to get very annoying.

Hello there, i played a long time ago in my colony at android, and as i remember, you can easily watch description of building/drone in the building menu by holding the icon for few seconds, and then click encyclopedia
But that doesn't work for iphone users. Holding on icon of building doesn't show the encyclopedia menu, and i cant check normally how mush resourses i need for building/drone
Can somebody help me?

Hello. When I surfed the game encyclopedia, I found a "shuttlepod" object that is not released in the game yet. I have some questions about its release:

• When will the shuttlepod be released?
• Will there be starships in the game? if so, when will it be released?
• Why did the developer (@bastecklein) place the shuttlepod in the encyclopedia?
• Where will the shuttlepod be accessible?
• How will the starship system (and shuttlepod) function?

I want somebody to answer these questions for me. Thank you for playing MC2!

I hope everyone is having a good week! Today I am releasing My Colony 2 v0.36.0 and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This update cleans up a couple of things, adds a couple of things, and fixed some things. So let's take a look at all of the things...


The My Colony 2 engine now supports a second level of user color customization on buildings, besides the random splashes of settlement color found in some places. Voxel models can now specify a second replace color, allowing the user to fully customize the color of their structures. This is currently enabled on the Bunkbed Shelter, Large Living Quarters and Extra Large Living Quarters, and also the brand new Decorative Tile. The "paint job" can be done by clicking on a structure, and you will see a new color wheel option if the structure supports user defined coloring.


Custom colored structures could be a great way to give your settlement character, define districts, or just liven things up a bit. This release is sort of a test of the feature, and it will be certainly expanded to more buildings in the future. If you are a voxel model creator, you can specify areas of a building that can be custom-colored by using the cyan hex code #00ffff.

More statistics have been added to the building mini-stats popup window, which now shows capacity and utilization graphs for medical, education, entertainment and security, similar to what was available in MC1.


Moving along, the My Colony 2 Online stats window has been updated with a new listing for Settlement rankings, now showing the top 30 online settlements listed by population. I plan on adding more to this soon. You will also (at some point) be able to click on both worlds and settlements to get a detailed breakdown screen of each, and I may end up using this screen for future diplomacy related options.


Ok, now for the potentially controversial update, I have added the ability to instant-purchase any structure using Ape Coins instead of paying with resources. I realize that this is somewhat of a pay-to-win, but the truth is that since MC2 lacks the advertising found in most games, I need a way to generate more revenue for the game, that is just the sad truth of it. Let me explain more about it though.

I think I have set the Ape Coin prices high enough that it should deter just rushing through the game, unless someone really wants to pay a lot. I suspect it only to be used in one-off scenarios when someone really does not want to wait to build something, or at the very beginning of the game when prices are low anyway.

The way it works is that the Ape Coin price is calculated at run time based on the GBT value of all of the resources needed to construct the building, with a minimum price of 10 Ape Coins. Since resource prices scale up a lot on the higher end, a player would have to pay serious money in order to build the later game structures, which is why I do not think this system will be abused much later game, which I believe cuts down on the "pay-to-win" aspect of it.

The reality is that nobody is going to pay $15 to purchase an investment bank, or if they do, they sure aren't going to be using this function to spam a bunch of investment banks. So this price calculation being what it is, I think it will safely protect online stats from pay to win abuse. It also cannot be used to purchase buildings that are above your settlement level.

To build a structure using Ape Coins, you just click on the Ape Coin button instead of the green checkmark button on the new construction bottom bar. There is a confirmation dialog, so you are not going to accidentally spend coins.


One more thing to note, if you purchase a building with Ape Coins and then accidentally place it somewhere where it cannot built, like a blocked space, the building goes into a queue on the server, and you can then build it again without clicking on the Ape Coins option. There is no UI to tell you this yet, but the game will actually let you place the building, even though it says you do not have enough resources.

Finally before moving on to new content, I added structure defensive stats to the Encyclopedia window, which now shows Attack Power, Range and Rate of Fire.


I have not forgotten about the poor encyclopedia, it just has not been on the top of the priorities list.

Ok, let's go to new content now. There are three new techs added this time, Mass Data Management, Colonial Bureaucracy and Extremely Deep Excavation!

Mass Data Management is used for the new Alien Uplink Station upgrade (model by @SPARKY0303 ), while Colonial Bureaucracy gives us the new Department of Advanced Fish Mating Studies (model by @spamdude ), which is basically just a big worthless (but pretty) government jobs farm. The new Museum ( @spamdude ) is a nice entertainment/education combo structure, and the new Decorative Tile is basically a blank slate that you can choose your own color for. Could be used to do pixel art on the grounds of your settlement.

Next up, @therealchromedino provides us with the new Bunker of Last Resort. This is a good structure to place somewhere in the center of your settlement, as it can be used to rebuild in the event that you are on a sever and your settlement gets raided by an enemy army.


The Bunker provides storage for basic building materials, minor housing, utility generation, can construct Builder Bots, has an attack rating slightly better than a pillbox, and an extreme amount of hit points. It is not indestructible, and a tank army would still be able to take it down, but it is a good insurance policy, and every major settlement should have at least one or two of these in the event of an emergency.

The big new structure in this update is the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility by @spamdude and to be honest, I could not afford to build it on the colony I was doing my game testing with, so it is possible that it will need to be tweaked a bit in the next update, just let me know in the comments what you all thing. It is an across the board stat improvement over the current Advanced Drilling Platform, and also provides Crystalline which the original one did not.

Ok so I think that is all of the major stuff in this update. For the next update (v0.37.0) I plan on adding Diamonds as a Lunar World exclusive resource, that will be obtained by excavating. There will also be new units/structures associated with the diamond trade. I think I am also going to have the "Online" version of the Player Mode at least somewhat functional for next update, possibly including the star gate travel between worlds (right now there are only 9 active Star Gates in the MC2 universe). So let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, thank you to all who contributed artwork for this update, and stay tuned for more to come!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2

Today I am happy to announce the release of My Colony 2 v0.45.0! This update continues to clean up some of the fallout related to the conversion to a statistics based simulation model, and adds a couple of new things along the way. Let's take a look!


Let's discuss fixes first. I think that I have finally isolated and corrected the issue where settlement utilities would be completely messed up when loading up a game save, but it may require one load/save/quit/load cycle to fix. Please let me know if you are still having this issue though.

Moving on, buildings now require workers again in order to operate. For the last few updates, worker shortages were no problem at all, but now you will actually have enough people to man your factories and shops.

Also, settlement approval rating was not being properly calculated before this update. It should now be working again like it used to.

Moving right along, there was a bug where disabling player building colors was not having any impact on the game. This should be working again.

Now on to game changes. If you are playing in a larger sized viewport (bigger than 1280x720), the overall game UI has been changed slightly.


Game UI elements have been "detached" from the sides of the viewport and are now floating a bit, with a new black border around everything. I think it looks a bit nicer, but you can let me know if you disagree. I have also increased the padding around all popup windows, which I also think looks a bit nicer than before.

In addition, I have changed most of the icons in the popup windows from ionic icon set based .svg icons to the icon font used by most Ape Apps applications, which should load a bit faster than the old icons did. I am probably going to change all the icons on the title screen soon too.

In the encyclopedia, the Units section has been expanded a bit, and I have also started adding the Research section. Still a lot of work to do on the encyclopedia, but we are making some progress!

The video section in Engine Settings now has a new slider to adjust the game rendering video resolution.


I am hoping this can help performance a bit, especially on the mobile side of things. There are lower end smart phones and laptops out there that barely have a GPU, but include super high resolution displays. With this new slider, you should be able to scale the output resolution down considerably. If it ends up making a big impact, I might have the resolution lowered by default on some mobile devices.

Next up, Ape Chat comes to My Colony 2! The in-game chat in the original My Colony has long been powered by the Ape Chat system, and now My Colony 2 has been migrated over as well. If you are using the stand alone Ape Chat client, you can join the in-game My Colony 2 channel #mc2.

The channel does not have its own custom icon yet, but that will be coming soon (I actually need to do an Ape Chat client update first). One of the benefits of running the in-game chat off of the Ape Chat service, is that you can subscribe to the channel and get notifications when people are talking and playing in the game, allowing you to jump into the game when activity is going on. You can also help people with their questions without even having the game open.

I will be watching the #mc2 channel to make sure things don't get out of hand. There may come a point where moderators are needed for the chat room (I might also need some new mods for mc1 chat), so keep that in mind if you are interested in helping in that regard, and if/when the time comes for moderators, I will reach out to people who have expressed an interest in the position.

Continuing on. If you look in the settlement stats window, you will notice a couple of new things. First, unemployment rate now shows up, so you can keep track of how many of your people do not have work. Unemployment can be caused by not enough jobs, but is also impacted by health, education and other ratings, and will weigh down on your overall approval rating.


Next, there is a new placeholder status bar for Faith. In the building editor, there is also a stat for structure faith rating. This is a new mechanic that will be coming soon, but at the core of it, there will be an opportunity to add faith related structures to the game, statues, temples, shrines, churches, etc. This will be sort of another stat like entertainment, but I also want a mechanic to where players can create a religion. They can then send missionaries to other settlements, or even to other worlds via the star gate system. There will then be global stats on which religions are spreading and to which planets/settlements. I think it can be a cool mechanic, so if you are interested in helping design this new feature, post some ideas!

Let's turn to some new content next. There is a new planet type (pictured in the first screenshot to this post) called Dusk World provided by @therealchromedino and it's awesome! This world provides a new resource called Duskshrooms, as well as a new rover and the Small Thermal Plant and Duskshroom Market structures. If you were looking into starting a new world, now might be a great time!

For Lunar maps, @RekEm1999 has provided a new upgraded Diamond Drilling Operation for advanced diamond extraction.

For expanding out the Alien Tech line a bit, I have added the Alien Power Tower, the Quantum Warehouse, and the new Quantum Housing Pod, a (very) high density housing upgrade to the base Bunkbed Shelter.


There are a few other new structures curtesy of @therealchromedino in this release. The Small and Advanced Blood Banks are new medical structures, the Cartel Prison is a new security structure, and the Transcendent Solar Tower is an epic new solar tower for those with Transcendent tech that can best the output of the Small Nuclear Reactor.

So that is about it for this update. There are still a lot of things that need fixing, and a big one is the combat system, which may be the focus of next update. Until then though, thanks to all contributors, thank you all for playing the game, and stay tuned for more!

https://mycolony2.com

#mycolony2

Today I am finishing up and releasing the v1.22.0 update to the original My Colony, which includes a whole bunch of under-the-hood changes and a bit of new content. So what are we looking at in this release? Let's find out!


In the previous release notes for MC1, I mentioned that I was thinking about offering limited time release "collectors" edition buildings that you could get with Ape Coins for those who were interested. In this update I am testing the system out to see how it works, with the trial of a Dev Solar Panel structure (which you can see in the image above, modeled after the MC2 solar panel somewhat).

Here is how the system is (supposed) to work, which will probably need ironed out over the coming updates, but is in active testing right now. From time to time, new limited edition buildings will be made available that you can get with Ape Coins. When there is a new building available, you will see a notice on the construction sidebar like this:


Clicking on the notification will bring up a window that shows all of the current limited edition structures that are available (currently, only the testing structure is there).


This structures are purchased with Ape Coins and are tied to your Ape Apps Account, meaning that you can use them on any city on your account, and you can build as many of them as you wish. You will notice that you are able to buy multiple "copies" of them as well. The reasoning is to facilitate either trade, or to allow you to gift them to your friends who may not be able to afford them.

To trade structures with other players, you can bring up their profile card by either clicking on one of their chat messages as usual, or selecting them from your Friends list in the statistics window. Once opened, you will see two new buttons in the corner.


The Coin button allows you to just gift Ape Coins to another player. This is generally so that you can help a friend/family member buy Premium or extra content themselves using Ape Coins. You could already donate Ape Coins to another player using the Ape Apps website, but this just makes it easier, and since people have asked for the feature, they obviously did not know that the option existed on the website anyway.

The Trade looking button allows you to offer one of your purchased buildings to another player. You first select one of your owned buildings, and you then select a price. You are able to select anything between Free and 500 Ape Coins. If you want to work out a deal for more than 500 Ape Coins or for something other than Ape Coins, you will have to facilitate it outside of the app, and that is up to you. Once the offer is made, it is sent to the other player who then has one week to either accept or reject it. If they accept, the ownership of the structure is transferred over to their account.

If you look at the image above, the little golden wrench in the corner of the solar panel icon is the Set/Series icon for the structure. Collectable structures will be grouped into different sets. I am going to be working on adding a Collectables section to the Encyclopedia that will show all of the sets, all of the buildings in them, and their rarity, or how many "copies" of each building are in existence, this way in the future, people who are collecting or trading them will have an idea of their relative value.

So that is what I have so far on the collectables system. This update is for testing and refining the system, and in mid-October I plan to start releasing the first "real" buildings and sets, starting with a Halloween themed set.

I want to note that the whole collectable buildings system is meant for people who are interested in collecting things and also just want to add some extra "flare" to their colonies, and also to help support the further development of the game. There will not be any OP type structures, or structures that give a big leg up in the game. This system is going to be more for fun.

Ok so moving past the collectables stuff, this update makes a change to Poverty and Wages. Before now, it really didn't matter if you paid your colonists or not, but now it does. Colonists living under the poverty line will contribute to your disapproval rating, as will colonists earning a wage that is far below your GDP per capita. To help work your numbers out, I have added a breakdown of the monthly income and poverty levels, since the colonist salary settings are set on a monthly basis.


Right now excessive poverty will cause the crime rate in your city to rise, further damaging work efficiency and approval rating. I was planning on also making the workers go on strike, but upon testing it ended up bring pretty brutal, so I will hold off on implementing that part of it, until people can get their workers wages normalized.

This update also brings a change to Charter Codes. Since there have been a lot of charter code collisions with new colonies, all new charter codes are now 10 characters long instead of 8. @Sobeirannovaocc I hope that does not cause problems for Coloniae or any of your other tools!

Moving on. I have also basically rewritten the entire layout for Desktop, Mobile and TV of the game. I have done testing on each platform, so I hope it's not messed up, but please let me know in this thread if the layout is jacked up anywhere so I can get it fixed. For those who do not know, My Colony is written in HTML/Javascript, and I have moved the HUD UI from using absolute positioned elements to using CSS grid, like My Colony 2 does. Again, I pretty much changed everything in the stylesheets, and I think it basically looks the same as it did before, but please let me know if I borked something!

Next up, buildings in the Construction sidebar are now sorted, instead of just being thrown in there in the order that they were added to the game. The sorting uses pretty much the same scheme that My Colony 2 does, putting roads at the top, and then sorting everything else by price. Whether or not you think this is better or worse I suppose will depend on the player.

Finally, let's get to the new content in this update! I have added a new tech called the Military Industrial Complex, which in turn unlocks a new Weapons Factory which produces a new resource of Weapons of Mass Destruction! Once you have some WMD's, you can create the new Octagon structure, a military HQ that sends Starships and WMD's out into space and brings back plunder. It should be noted that the Octagon was originally going to be the Hexagon which I think sounds cooler, but I tell you that I spent a whole afternoon trying to draw a decent looking Hexagon shaped building and I just couldn't make it look right, so here we are with an Octagon instead. Deal with it!

So anyway, that about covers it for this release. The new Starship and Military content I think will fit hand-in-hand with the content coming next update, a new Dark Matter tech tree with accompanying structures that is being created by @Electrogamer1943 that you can all expect in the next update. On top of that, you can look for the new Halloween content pack coming later next month!

As always, thanks for playing the game, let me know what issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony

First of all, can someone pin this? I like many others have told a selected few that guns and PvP will not be in MyColony, Back is making a game called Colony Wars that will sate your PvP/PvE desires. He has no desire for combat in MyColony just to let ya know! Remember look around before suggesting something.

As of today, NOZ is the Biggest MyColony Federation on Discord. So come on by and see what the fuss is about.

As we all know Antiquitas is starting to grow, now with this growth we have the potential to expand and get a bigger following. I have created a server on discord like the federations of My Colony while it is not as advanced as the federations of MyColony it should work. I just need permission of some kind to advertise this and potentially bring this game extra followers from MyColony as well.

It's still the oldest and the largest it depends on the criteria you use. Noz and us had a heated debate about it.

The basic concept of a Federation hasn't changed, a community based on discord based on mycolony enthousiasts. Commonwealth leaders, their members. Anyone who plays MyColony or antiquitas is welcome.

The community (federation) is there to have fun talking about the game and helping you grow. With trades, tips & tricks, sharing knowledge.

We are smaller now then we used to be. Due to certain changes in the game a lot of people stopped playing and left the fff or were removed after several weeks of inactivity.

We are always looking for ways to improve our colonies and our federation.

Just come to the server and see for yourself, you don't have to officially join if you don't want yet. But you can be on the server and talk to people. Until you decide you want to join, members have some benefits others don't like more channels and options to grow inside the federation to be important and help actively improve the FFF.

WhenI try to login I always get this for the first 1-2mins

After I can enter my Username and PW the screen remains the same for another 1-2mins until the Window goes off and I am rather logged in or not - mostly not today I had to login 6 times after it worked.
This is just on the client Versions, web is kinda Instant.

This is on Mycolony itself and for the Launcher
Even if im Logged into the Launcher and start Mycolony I have to Login again whicht wasnt so in the past.

Also reinstalled both several times - didnt work

Win 7 64
x64 Clients (newest)
400mBit Internet

It was the same Issue on 0.76, today I tested 0.77 and so far it was a huge difference, like on Web Version.
But whats the difference between Mycolony 0.77 Standalone start and Ape apps start? isnt it the same MyColony that is start?^^

yoyotiti said:Just a question.... Is it a new game or a "game mode" of my colony ? Could we use our colony to fight others and so on ?

New game, it shares the mycolony theme. But for the rest they aren't connected. Mycolony will always stay a peaceful simbuilding game.

Colonywars is about building a base and conquering the map by destroying other bases.

Now in 0.92 I can not open the game at all (Steam)

Steam- Error
Unable to Start Process of MyColony :
"Access Denied" (0x5)

This might be related to my virus protection that declares the Mycolony.exe as infested by a "FileRepMalware"...