Ape Apps

A couple of weeks ago, I announced that I was considering discontinuing the Ape Apps Launcher and most of my native desktop applications in favor of directing users towards the Progressive Web App (PWA) edition of my apps and games.

The Ape Apps Launcher was first released in early 2018 using Electron, and was initially created because there were a lot of capabilities required by my apps that I was just not able to deliver through the web browser. In the last 3 1/2 years though, a lot has changed. Both Microsoft and Google have gone all-in on PWA's, and between the two of them, they make PWA's installable, offline capable, with almost the entire native all feature set on nearly every platform. Because of this, it no longer makes sense to put in all of the hours and effort required to maintain the Ape Apps Launcher and the native Desktop host platform, when their entire purpose is now integrated natively into every major platform.

That said, the Launcher does offer a few things not found on my website, and also provides a nice place to access everything Ape Apps from one single desktop application. I do recognize how handy it can be for some people, so going forward I plan to "sort of" keep the launcher going, but with a bit of a twist.

The Ape Apps Launcher itself is going to become a Progressive Web App, which you will be able to install on any device, even mobile. I will still maintain the native download edition of the application, but it will basically be a wrapper for the PWA. This will allow me to continue providing the capabilities of the launcher, but without having to maintain the separate Web App Core codebase for Electron. It also means I will be able to make updates to the Launcher itself without having to upload new binaries whenever I want to publish a change.

Similar to the new PWA launcher, I will also be releasing another PWA called Ape Web Apps TV Mode, which is sort of like the launcher except built with a 10 foot interface and can be controlled entirely using a gamepad. This is designed for computers connected to a TV (like home theater PC's) and gives a console-like interface and access to all of your Ape Apps games and applications. You will even be able to use the Ape Web Apps TV Mode launcher on gaming devices like the Xbox One/Series S/X, which will be getting the new Chromium based Edge soon, along with full PWA capabilities, or on Android TV devices. Below is an early-build screenshot of the TV Mode launcher.


You can think of the TV mode launcher as basically an Ape Apps gaming console that runs as an app within existing devices/consoles, and should give you access to the entire Ape Apps library on any television (you can also just use it on a PC or Phone if you have a bluetooth gamepad connected and prefer the interface).

So that it was is in store for the Launcher. There will not be any more work going in to the current Electron build of the application, as I move all important code directly to my server. If you are currently using the Ape Apps Launcher, it will automatically be upgraded to the new PWA-hosted edition once it is ready, so there is nothing you need to do. And I will make a separate post/announcement when the TV launcher is complete and ready for use.

#apeappslauncher

I am just putting the finishing touches on My Colony 2, and the update should be rolling out to all devices over the coming weeks (yes weeks, more on that in a bit). There are a few goodies in this release and a slew of bug fixes, so let's take a look at what's included!


I got some heat in the Play Store reviews section for MC2 not having many decorative items as compared to MC1, so to start addressing this, v0.25.0 adds a few decorative items that MC1 players will be used to: the hedge wall (made of Plastic in MC2), as well as 6 different color options of decorative flower beds (also made of plastic). I should not have underestimated the degree to which players like to decorate and customize their colonies, so from here on, I will attempt to include at least one new decorative item in each update. If any of you voxel modelers out there have ideas and submissions for items that are purely of a decorative nature, feel free to submit them for inclusion as well!

The Advanced Networking Infrastructure tech is now available to unlock, and with it comes the new Uplink Station (model by @GeneralWadaling ), which provides significantly more bandwidth than the current small server building. The Uplink Station also requires a Level 2 or higher settlement, and is built with the Construction Drone.

Next up, @spamdude recently submitted a model for an upgraded Vehicle Factory. The model was great, but I wasn't sure there was a need for it in the game, since it really does not need a bunch of new rovers. But I wanted to add it anyway, so I made some adjustments to the gameplay. The new Vehicle Factory is now an upgrade to the existing Construction Yard. The Construction Yard now maxes out at building the Advanced Builder Bot, and to get any of the newer bots, you will need to upgrade to (or outright build) a new Vehicle Factory. Keep this in mind, if you get the MC2 update and suddenly lost a lot of unit construction options, it's because you need to upgrade to a Vehicle Factory. It adds a bit of progression to the game. The structure also produces a ton of Spare Parts.

I mentioned this update could take weeks to arrive. If you play My Colony 2 on the Web (or have the Progressive Web App installed), the Launcher, or the Windows Store download, the update should be available to you today, if you haven't been updated already. iPhone users can expect the update next week sometime. For Android, who knows when it will arrive.

I have noticed a serious backlog for app updates getting approved to the Play Store recently. I still have apps that have been sitting in the "waiting for review" queue since August 15 (12 days as of this writing), which is extremely odd, since the normal review time has been a few days or less. Not sure what is going on over at Google lately, but if you are using the Android app, you may not get the latest MC2 update until early-mid September (unless their process greatly speeds up).

Of course, super slow app store updates give me yet another opportunity to plug the Progressive Web App (PWA) version of My Colony 2. Over the last few years, and even more-so beginning this year, PWA's have been my primary development focus, and I consider the web releases of all of my games to be the primary/best editions, and they are the only editions I personally use on my own devices. The native mobile apps are actually just wrappers for the PWA, but they are in a way gimped versions (particularly on Android) due to limitations imposed on the embedded WebView component VS the features afforded to the browser. The PWA, when properly installed to the home screen, gives you the full app-like experience, is always up to date, and is better supported than and other release.

To install the PWA onto your Android device, simply navigate to the MC2 Web App URL using Google Chrome, and you should automatically get an "Install to Homescreen" banner: https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

Anyway, now that my semi-annual PWA sales pitch is out of the way, that is it for this update to My Colony 2. Go check it out, let me know what needs fixed, let me know what you would like to see added, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

So the Ape Apps Launcher has again been updated, this time to v1.6.5. This release fixes some bugs and also adds some new features.

Firstly, the previous release of Ape Apps Launcher has a bug related to auto-updating on Windows. If you are using Windows and you download the update, only to have the app restart to the same version you were on before, then you are impacted by the bug. To fix it, you can either re-download the app from the Ape Market, or you can navigate to the following directory on your PC:

C:\Users\YOUR USERNAME HERE\AppData\Roaming\Ape Apps Launcher\apps

and delete the folder named updatetmp. After that, the in-app auto-update will work again as intended, and this issue will no longer be present in future releases of the Launcher. Linux and macOS are not impacted by this bug.

This release also fixes a couple of bugs related to desktop launcher icons on Linux systems.

The launcher has been upgraded to a new base-release of the Electron framework, which I hope will help with come of the CPU issues @Ansom mentioned in a prior thread.

Finally, in-launcher Live Stream viewing has been added. There is a new video camera icon at the top of the launcher, and clicking on it will show all users who are currently live-streaming their gameplay.


As of now, game clients require a patch before they will show up in the Currently Streaming list, so no games will appear until the next cross-platform updates of the 4 games that currently support the Live Streaming feature (My Colony, Antiquitas, Gone Rogue, and Hell and Back). But the viewing functionality is now there in the launcher, and more exciting live-streaming related features will be coming across the entire Ape Apps ecosystem in the coming weeks.

Also over the coming weeks, and this will be important information for some people, I am going to discontinue packaging stand-alone desktop applications for distribution through the Ape Market, and instead be directing users to use either the Ape Apps Launcher or the Progressive Web Apps available on Ape Web Apps. At this point, both the Launcher and the PWA's are becoming mature to the point where either now allows you to install and launch an app as a stand-alone window straight from the OS without having to open the Launcher or navigate to Ape Web Apps first. Standalone desktop apps are also available for most apps on the Windows Store, and some are on Steam, for those who do not like the Launcher or the PWA's.

The reason for the change is because I am running out of storage space on my server to continue packaging and hosting stand alone desktop downloads for everything, and it also takes a lot of time and bandwidth to maintain. With the Launcher and the PWA's, I am still able to serve an extremely wide range of users with a lot less time and effort. In addition, the Launcher and PWA apps allow me to make across the board updates to every application in my library and push them out immediately to users, rather than having to go back and make a ton of updates to individual packaged applications.

There might be concern for those who wish to archive certain versions of games for posterity or so that they can install them in the future without an internet connection (or so they can still install the games after I get hit by a bus or something). I am working on a solution for those scenarios, where the Ape Apps Launcher will give you the option to extract an archive of any of my apps. You will then be able to double-click on that archive and the Launcher will open and run that game independently of the latest version on the market. For example, you could archive the current version of My Colony (1.12.0 I believe) to a file called something like my-colony-1-2-0.aal (theoretical extension), and you would then be able to double click on that file at any point in the future to launch that version of My Colony, even if the current version on the launcher is 1.50.0. Even if my server is long gone and dead, as long as you still have the archive file and the Ape Apps Launcher download, you would be able to run the application without issue.

So anyway, I reccomend that users of various stand-alone Ape Apps desktop apps to migrate over to either the Ape Apps Launcher or the Ape Web App edition (all of which can be installed to your system as a PWA). Doing so will ensure that you continue to receive fast automatic updates. Keep in mind that this change applies to apps downloaded through the Ape Market. Windows Store and Steam apps will continue to be updated as usual.

Ape Chat has just been updated to v2.3.0, and this update brings a ton of improvements, including bug fixes and exciting/long overdue new features. Let's take a look!


To get started, Ape Chat now finally supports push notifications. Prior to this update, you could get a notification if the Ape Chat window was minimized and you got a private message, but what if you didn't have Ape Chat open? Well now when you open the Ape Chat application (https://chat.ape-apps.com/) you will get a pop up notice asking if you want to enable push notifications (if you say no, you can show the popup again by finding it in the main slide-out menu). Once you activate push notifications for your client, you will get a notification whenever another user sends you a private message through Ape Chat.

This feature isn't just for private messages though. Now if you right-click on one of your channels on the left sidebar, you will see a new Subscribe option.


Subscribing to a channel will allow you to get notified when new chat messages are posted to that channel, even if Ape Chat is closed. If you grow tired of being notified, you can unsubscribe in the same manner.

The Push Notification options will only be available if your device/browser supports the Web Push API, which as of this writing is pretty much everything except for browsers on iOS (which will supposedly be coming soon).

Speaking of mobile devices though, one of the biggest issues with Ape Chat has finally been rectified with the all new mobile interface.

Running Ape Chat on mobile will now give you a bottom toolbar, finally allowing you to access the Chanels and Users listings, which were previously unavailable on mobile. This new interface upgrade now makes Ape Chat fully usable from a mobile device.

In addition, the PWA/Add to Homescreen support for Ape Chat has been greatly improved, on both Desktop and Mobile. Installing Ape Chat as a PWA on Desktop (you should see an install icon in the address bar on supported browsers) gives you a clean user interface, making Ape Chat look and feel like a native app on your device. On mobile, the installed PWA interface (on iOS, you have to do the "Add to Homescreen" feature) now detects devices that have a Notch (like most modern phones do) and updates the layout to work around the notch cutouts.

Other than the new feature additions, a whole host of bugs have been corrected in this release, including a lot of the bugs that would cause the chat server itself to crash and restart (thus filling the chat roll with "Server Disconnected, will try again soon" messages). And speaking of the "Server Disconnected" message, it no longer prints a message to your standard chat roll, but will now just give a small notice at the bottom of your screen, which will go away once the server connects again.

All in all, today's Ape Chat update is probably the most significant one in the last two years. If you use any of the Ape Chat channels, or want to be notified when new chats are posted in the My Colony or Ape Apps forum channel, consider installing the Ape Chat PWA or adding Ape Chat to your Homescreen, and enabling Push Notifications. It's a great way to keep up on what is happening in chat, and also finally makes the private messaging feature in Ape Chat useful!

Ape Chat can be used on all platforms right from the web browser at the link below. The Website/PWA is now far superior to any of the older "stand alone" Ape Chat clients released to the various app stores, and should now be considered the primary/definitive version of the service.

https://chat.ape-apps.com

#apechat

The Ape Apps Launcher has just been updated to v3.11.0 and gains a handful of important fixes for specific apps, PWA shortcut support, and support for the new web+apelauncher:// uri scheme.


The main change for this update is support for the new web+apelauncher:// uri scheme, which works in a similar manner to the Steam browser protocol (if you have the Steam app installed on your computer). Right now the protocol handler only works on the PWA version of the Launcher (and may require you to uninstall/reinstall the pwa before it activates), but it will soon come to the native Desktop clients as well. I am also considering releasing an Android client for the launcher, and it would also support the protocol launch.

The purpose of the launch protocol is to be able to launch or activate the Ape Apps Launcher with specific startup instructions, to open the launcher from other apps/websites, pass launch data or instructions into the launcher, etc. It will likely be expanded in the future as use-cases arise, but here are the currently supported launch endpoints:
So those are the protocol options as of now. As you might be able to tell (particularly evidenced by the web+apelauncher://friends endpoint), one of the purposes of this is for developer programmatic control of the launcher. Since the launcher is a PWA at it's core, it needs to be able to accept incoming data the "web way," and since protocol handling is widely supported on all platforms, the same protocol can be implemented for desktop and mobile platforms as well.

If you are developing any sort of application and would like to see a way to pass data/instructions/commands into the Ape Apps Launcher, please feel free to let me know and I can expand the protocol launching to fit many scenarios.

One cool thing that uri protocol launching could allow, which I have not yet implemented, would be the ability to launch Steam games from the Ape Apps Launcher. For example, if you have Steam installed, you can launch My Colony by clicking on a steam URL like this steam://launch/964130. So the Launcher could be made so that, if there is a Steam version of an Ape App available, it can launch that instead of it's own version, if the user wanted it to do so (for Steam stats perhaps). The user could also be given the ability to add any game from their Steam library to the Ape Apps Launcher, if they wanted to do such a thing.

There are actually a lot of different applications that can be launched using different URI protocols, so if you know of any that you think could be integrated into the Ape Apps Launcher for a useful reason, feel free to let me know!

https://launcher.ape-apps.com

#apeappslauncher

Some of you might know that Ape Web Apps supports two release channels, "stable" which is the regular URL of an app/game, and "beta" which is accessed by appending /beta/ to the end of an apps url, eg: https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/beta/.

The stable channel is the code that propagates out to installed Progressive Web Apps and to the Ape Apps Launcher, while the beta does not. The issue is that I have not been utilizing the beta channel for MC2 development, but the PWA and the Launcher only auto-update when the actual version number of the app changes. This is a problem because if your Launcher or PWA update at 3pm when I have some borked code uploaded to the server and then I upload a fix at 3:15pm, the Launcher and PWA will not update to the new code until the version number increases.

To address this, I have now broken development into the two channels, and have upgraded the "stable" channel to v0.5.0 and the "beta" channel to v0.6.0. The stable channel will only be updated once per week, while the beta channel will be updated multiple times per hour while I am working. This way, you can install My Colony 2 from either the Launcher or the PWA and your build will remain stable and consistent with other users on the stable channel, until the next weekly update is pushed out.

Regardless, do not confuse the naming convention of the two channels with the actual state of the game, that is just what my server uses. For MC2 purposes, you can consider the two to be dev/pre-alpha and alpha.

An exciting new feature is now working in the Voxel Paint Progressive Web App (PWA) that allows you to launch and open .vpp files by simply double-clicking them on your computer, as would work with a normal installed desktop application. Voxel Paint now supports *.vpp file type association, but there are a couple of things you need to do first in order to set it up.


The first requirement is that you need to enable the new File Handling API in the experimental features of either Chrome or Edge. Browse to either chrome://flags or edge://flags (respectively) and find and enable the #file-handling-api flag.

Next, Voxel Paint has to be "installed" on your system as a PWA. This is simple enough. If you browse to the Voxel Paint web app (https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/), you will see an Install or App Available notice in the right side of the address bar. There might also be an Install option in the Help dropdown menu. Once you do this, Voxel Paint will look and behave as a normal application on your system.

Although still in the experimental stages, the File Handling API is a great new feature coming to modern browsers that will go a long way towards giving PWA's feature parity with many existing desktop applications, and I look forward to implementing the file associations feature with other apps in my catalog over the coming months!

#voxelpaint

Unless you utilize a platform-specific feature such as LPT/Dot Matrix Printer sharing, the best way to utilize the Ape Apps Launcher on your Desktop is by installing the Progressive Web App (PWA) using either the latest Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge web browser. But did you know that you can also have the installed PWA launch automatically when you start your PC?

It's simple. Once the PWA is installed, open your browser menu, select Apps, and choose Manage apps. You can then right-click on the Ape Apps Launcher icon and choose to start the app on system startup. Then you get the same run at startup functionality as the packaged Electron edition of the app, but without the 200MB download and extra memory overhead.

Give it a try!

#apeappslauncher

My Colony v1.10.0 has started going out recently and is hitting various platforms at different times and in different iterations. This is a bit of a different update, as there is nothing new to My Colony itself.

Over the last few weeks, I have been busy doing a total rewrite of Web App Core, the cross-platform app wrapper that hosts most of my apps and games, including My Colony. This rewrite cleans out years of outdated/unused code, is more efficient, and should bring more consistency between all of the various platforms. The problem though, is that this project is massive and is taking me longer than I anticipated.

Since the rewrite is quite massive and touches every single function available to Web App Core, I went ahead and published it on my two biggest cross-platform applications, My Colony and PDF Document Scanner, so I could collect crash reports and see what is and isn't working. I know that this isn't something a "professional" company would necessarily do, but I did (mostly) test everything beforehand 🤐

Anyway, you may see several iterations and releases of the 1.10.x branch on each platform over the coming weeks as I work everything out, so you can report all issues you find in this thread.

While I am talking about Web App Core, I might as well give an overview of what I am changing on that product, since it is a large part of My Colony as well. My Colony is currently running on v3.7.6, and after I have all of the bugs worked out on all platforms, Web App Core will be bumping up to v4.0.0 and getting a ton of cool new features that will help My Colony and other products as well.

If you are not aware, Web App Core is basically an abstraction wrapper I wrote starting in 2013 or so that allows my apps and games to use device-specific native functions while sharing the same code base. It's basically what allows me to release updates to all platforms in a fairly short amount of time. It's not a third party library or anything, so I have total control over it's features and capabilities.

One of the new features coming to Web App Core v4 is the ability to fully customize the theme/look of the wrapper. For example, on all of my current apps, the default left-hand slide-out menu looks the same for every app on a specific platform. So all of my Android apps have the exact same looking slide-out menu, same looking title screen, same looking dialog popups, etc. They are all very generic and the same across the board. A productivity app like PDF Document Scanner uses the exact same looking menus and dialogs as a game like My Colony. With Web App Core v4, My Colony (and other games) will be able to have their own customized UI and look more "game" like.

Web App Core v4 will also bring full local filesystem access to My Colony on the Web. This means that on the My Colony web app, you will be able to choose a local folder on your PC or Android device that you want My Colony to use, and all game data will be saved there, instead of on the cloud or in the browser's internal database. Since saves will no longer be limited to using the database, game compression should be unnecessary, and this change should virtually eliminate file save corruption on the web edition of the game. This will also make backing up your data trivial, as you can just copy/paste your save files any time you want.

Web App Core v4 will also start making way for upcoming web technologies that are not yet available in stable channel browsers, but will be coming in the months ahead. For example, installed Progressive Web Apps (PWA's) will soon be gaining the ability to become the default application for certain file types. For example, if you had the My Colony PWA installed on your device, you will eventually be able to simply double click on a game file on your desktop, and it would automatically launch the game (and your colony). Same thing with apps like Voxel Paint, simply double clicking on a .vpp file would launch the app and the voxel model.

Anyway, there are a lot more capabilities coming soon that have nothing to do with My Colony, so I wont bother polluting these release notes any further. If you've been following my work for any length of time, you may know that I really dislike the various App Stores, their draconian content rules and restrictions, their 30%+ cuts on all transactions, etc. My ultimate goal is to have the web editions of all of my products just as capable (or more) than their native counterparts. I am a big fan of Progressive Web Apps, and as time goes on I believe they are going to become more and more indistinguishable from native applications. I am going to continue to be on the bleeding edge of the PWA side of things!

Today I am publishing the v1.15.0 patch for the original My Colony, which should be hitting all platforms over the coming week (except the Windows Store, more on that in a second). This update addresses a few bugs which have cropped up over the prior months, as well as updates the Scroll2d engine and all native platform wrappers to their latest releases.

There was an issue where online regions were not saving correctly when first started. I think this was the issue that @colbya was reporting a couple of weeks ago, although I'm not 100% sure. Either way, several issues have been fixed in this department regardless.

The menu icons have been migrated over to a different icon font, since the other icons were not rendering properly on some Android and Windows devices. This hopefully fixes the issue.

I have made some UI changes to better support devices that have a camera notch or rounded corners. I don't know if I am completely satisfied with the result, so there may be more tweaking on this front over the coming updates.

I may (or may not) have pinpointed the NaN% issue in the statistics window. At least it was fixed on the colony I tested it on, we will see what happens.

Finally, some important information for users of the Windows Store edition of My Colony. The legacy Edge rendering engine that powers the current Windows Store app has been depreciated by Microsoft, and I need to move the app over to the new Chromium Edge rendering engine. Sadly, the two app containers are not completely compatable, and so the update will cause all users to lose all saved data. It is therefore important for all Windows Store users to backup their game files before updating.

To make this less painful, I have removed the current app from sale and will hold off on posting the update to Windows for several weeks, to minimize the amount of people who will be impacted by this. In the meantime, those who purchased My Colony through the Windows Store are encouraged to use the Progressive Web App instead (PWA) until the migration is complete (the new version will be based on the PWA anyway). If you signed into the Windows app with your Ape Apps Account, the purchase will be synced to your account anyway, so you will still have premium.

Players who use the Cloud Sync feature should be unaffected.

My Colony PWA: https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony/

#mycolony

The Ape Apps Launcher v3.0.0, which represents a total rewrite from scratch of the Launcher, is now available for beta testing (in PWA form) at it's new URL:

https://launcher.ape-apps.com/

The new launcher has all of the features of the original, with the addition of light/dark theme (as well as accent color customization), support for newer Ape Apps that are not hosted at apewebapps.com, support for adding third party web apps to the launcher, support for a new gamepad/tv mode interface, and more.


To get the most out of the launcher, you are going to want to install it to your system as a PWA using one of the Chromium based browsers, such as Chrome or Edge. Native desktop releases will also be coming sometime in January.

The Launcher was rewritten from scratch, so let me know of any issues you find. As of right now, My Colony 2 is unable to play from the Launcher, but this will be fixed on it's next update (which is coming soon).

Until then, check it out, update your bookmarks if you are using the current version of the PWA, and let me know what issues you find!

https://launcher.ape-apps.com/

#apeappslauncher

Today I am releasing v0.37.0 of My Colony 2, and from a technical perspective, this is the largest release since the game first came out in late 2020. My Colony 2 has now been moved off of the antiquated Web App Core framework that I first developed back in 2012, and is now being hosted at it's own domain at https://mycolony2.com/. There are some important implications associated with this change, so let's get into it!


The most obvious change is that the game is now hosted at a new URL. Since the majority of My Colony 2 players access the game through the web client, everyone is going to need to update their bookmarks to the new location. If you have the game installed to your device as a Progressive Web App, you need to know that the PWA will not automatically change to the new URL, so you need to first uninstall the old PWA and then install the new one. I realize that it is a bit of a pain, but the change will be worth it in the long run.

The biggest impact this will have is related to save data. Users who sync their save file to the Cloud or who have exported their save data to the filesystem (which I highly recommend) will not be impacted at all, but if your save game is stored in the internal app cache (the riskiest solution with a browser-based game), data will not carry over to the new domain. I hope that most players took heed of this change when I announced it about a month ago! If it ends up being an issue, I might be able to cook up some sort of migration solution, but I think most players will be fine. I think (hope) that the mobile versions of the game are not impacted by this.

Beyond what was stated above, the migration off of the Web App Core framework resulted in considerable changes to the game engine "under the hood." The Web App Core functions touched almost everything, so in many ways this update constitutes a serious rewrite of major portions of the game. Because of this, I would sort of expect there to be some issues here and there. Surprisingly, I have not run into many of them during testing, so maybe things went more smoothly then I had planned, but please be on the lookout for things I may have missed, and please post about what issues you find here in the forums.

Since so much of the code was being changed in this release, I did take the time to work on a few issues that had been plaguing the engine for a while now. First of all, the issue with faded/muted colors I think is pretty well fixed. There may be a few models left that still have color balancing issues, and if you notice any of them please post a list in the forum here so I can get them re-color balanced for the next update.

There had been an issue where Spice deposits were not spreading properly on the Spice World, and this has now been corrected.

Additionally, there was an issue where players who were connected to a remote dedicated server were unable to access the Galactic Board of Trade or other MC2 Online features. This should now be fixed as well.

Game loading and startup should be a lot faster now than it used to be, especially after the first load. I decided to stop compressing the main game data bundle, and even though this added 4mb to the initial game data download, I figured it was not a big deal, since after the first load, the browser stores the bundle data anyway. This means that the data no longer needs to be decompressed when the game is starting up, which on some devices (especially mobile) this could take quite a long time. The start up time improvement can actually be pretty significant, especially if the app is installed to the system as a PWA. I have noticed start up times on the new release of just a few seconds.

Big improvements have been made to flying units. They were sort of borked before - drones randomly disappearing or flying up into the stratosphere, landers not moving, etc. They should just work now.

Don't you hate it when you join a world, then you scroll around the map trying to find a good landing spot, only to never be able to find your lander again? Fear not, if you have not yet deployed your lander, it will not be automatically placed in the Bookmarks tab, so you can always go and find where your lander is sitting.


A major rebalancing has been done in this release, thanks in large part to a document put together by @SPARKY0303 (which you can find here). There were a ton of changes implemented from this, so here is just a rough readout of everything I did:

• Increased firing range and reduced money cost of the Brick Wall Turret
• Increased the gift capacity of the Galactic Board of Trade to 25k
• Fixed the borked stats on the Museum
• Increased the ore cost and output of the Medium Software Studio
• Increased the uranium cost and the artifact storage of the Giorgio Institute
• Increase the build cost and money/civics output of the Investment Bank
• Increased the output and worker requirement of the Bank
• Increased the cost and research output for the Center for Artificial Learning
• Increased the build and input cost of the Robotics Factory while also increasing the robot output
• Increased the cost and doubled the production rate of the Plastic Factory
• Increased the cost and production output of the Advanced Microchip Factory
• Increased the cost and production rate of the Advanced Plastic Factory
• Increased the build cost and production output of the Synthetic Wood Lab
• Increased the worker requirement of the Synthetic Oil Lab while doubling production input and tripling output
• Increased the rum cost and consumption for the Galactic Stock Exchange while also increasing the money output
• Increased the food cost and money output of the Canteen
• Increased the cost and attack power of the Pillbox while decreasing the attack range
• Added worker requirement and increased salt water consumption for Fish R Us
• Increased the worker requirement and food output of the Hydroponic Farm
• Increased cost and production output of the Vertical Warehouse Farm
• Increased cost and software cosumption of the Research Facility while increasing research output
• Decreased Rum consumption and increased Money output for The Rum
• Increased money output for the Trading Depot
• Decreased build cost and aluminum output of the Advanced Drilling Platform
• Increased the cost and artifact output of the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility while decreasing the aluminum production
• Increased the cost, money output and rum consumption of the Galactic Trade Authority Office while decreasing the worker requirement
• The Spice Den can no longer be built on Spice Worlds
• Increased the worker requirement and production rates of the Aluminum Generator

There may be more rebalancing work to do in the future, so let me know what your thoughts are on the changes.

Some other things have been changed as well. The Blue Dorms have been renamed to the Painted Dorms, which you can now specify your own color for. The Ancient Alien Ore Refinery has been re-skinned with a new model provided by @SPARKY0303 .

Also fulfilling a big request from MC1 players, there are now Building Counts available on the construction sidebar.


I have also added a new option to the Performance Tweaks section of the Engine Settings menu, allowing users to customize the number of chunks that the game renders around the camera.


We also have two new models in this update from @spamdude , including the new Fish Bin Complex (for storing lots of fish), and the giant new Large Brickworks, for bumping out lots of bricks!


Next up, as hinted to in the previous update's release notes, Diamonds have been added to this update, along with the Diamond Miner and the Diamond Solar Tower.


Diamonds are a Lunar World exclusive, and can only be discovered through digging. Once you uncover a diamond deposit, the Diamond Mining tech is automatically unlocked, allowing you to construct the Diamond Miner. Diamond utility will be expanded in the coming updates. At some point once every world has it's own unique resource, there will be some late game super structure that requires a ton of the unique resources from all of the different worlds.

Ok so last but not least, probably the biggest and most common request I get for the game via the in-game feedback is to bring back the Ore Mine from MC1. I never considered the Ore Mine to be necessary, since the world sizes are infinite and you can always just go and find more Ore, and later on you can just generate Ore on all worlds. That said, people have always wanted it, so today I am introducing MC2's version of the Ore Mine, which is the new Ore Drill.


The Ore Drill works sort of like the Spice Vane that occurs naturally on the Spice World. You build it, and then every once and a while it will plop out a small Ore Deposit. Once you build your settlement up to the point where you can make your own ore, you can simply bulldoze the drill. I think this is a reasonable solution for early game Ore, and I might make a Gold version of it in the next update as well. The Ore Drill is only available on maps that have surface ore.

So that is v0.37.0 in a nutshell. The update is available right now on the Web at it's new location (https://mycolony2.com/) and will probably hit the various mobile platforms throughout the weekend or early next week. Please let me know your thoughts on the changes (good or bad), spread the word that the URL for MC2 has changed, and stay tuned for more MC2 goodness to come in the months ahead!

#mycolony2

aDOS Player is a new front end games launcher for playing retro DOS games on any device that supports Progressive Web App (PWA) technologies. Built on top of the js-dos library, aDOS Player utilizes *.jsdos bundles to make launching and playing retro DOS games a breeze. And on top of the standard .jsdos bundle file supported by the default js-dos implementation, aDOS Player supports a few custom enhanced bundle features that allow the player to show things like game box art, information, genre and more. This post will detail how you can create your own .jsdos bundle files so that you can play any of your old DOS games in the aDOS Player application.


The first thing you are going to need to do is install the aDOS Player PWA on your system. This can be done using a Chromium based browser (Chrome, Edge, etc). To show the install prompt, navigate to the PWA using the link below, click on the Settings gear icon, and the top option should be Get the App. Clicking on that will begin the quick install process. Installing will allow local folder read access so that aDOS Player can read and manage your game library, and also file association to *.jsdos files, so you can launch into a DOS game by simply clicking on it's bundle from your computer.

https://adosplayer.com/

Next you will need some *.jsdos bundle files to get started. aDOS Player will work fine with any existing *.jsdos file you may have or find online, but you can also create your own fairly easily. A .jsdos file is simply a .zip file with a different file extension and some extra information. I am going to go over the basics here, or you can read the technical document from the js-dos developers here.

First, if you just want to quickly put together a playable bundle and do not care about the extended aDOS Player features such as box art, you can simply go to the dos.zone Game Studio tool and it will create a bundle for you automatically. I plan to eventually have similar functionality built right into aDOS Player, but have not gotten around to it yet as of this writing.

To roll your own, you need to create a .zip file that contains your DOS game as well as a folder named .jsdos with a dosbox.conf file, and a jsdos.json file. Additionally, you can put the boxart.png file in this folder, as well as three screenshot files (screen1.png, screen2.png, screen3.png).

For a demonstration of how this looks, download the following .jsdos file of the game Sim Ant. Change the file extension to .zip and look at it's contents on your computer.


You can actually use the above file as a template for packaging your own games. You can also package your game using the before mentioned dos.zone Game Studio game studio tool, download it, change the extension to .zip, add your box art, change it back to .jsdos, and you are good to go.

As mentioned before, you can also add meta data to your .jsdos bundle that can be read by the aDOS launcher. Open up the .jsdos/jsdos.json file. On top of it's standard entries, you can add a new property to the root JSON object called "adosplayer" with the following options:

"adosplayer": {

	  "title": "game name",

	  "desc": "game description",

	  "year": 1992,

	  "publisher": "software company",

	  "genre": "arcade",

	  "id": "282fc6b0-3f7b-4fc2-8522-253c2ad6f071"

  }

All fields are optional. The "id" field is just a random GUID that you can generate anywhere, but should be unique to any other .jsdos bundle. It is not required and the player will create one automatically internally if it is not there, but it is going to be used for future cloud save syncing, so it is good to have a unique one for each bundle.

Anyway, over time I will be packing some of the most popular DOS games into aDOS Player enhanced bundles, and will be adding a function in-app to be able to browse and download the bundles automatically. In the mean time, feel free to attempt packaging your own and let me know what issues you find or requests you have. To get you started, here are the jsdos bundles for both SimAnt and Wolfenstein 3D that you can so ahead and play using aDOS Player right now.


Enjoy!

#adosplayer

Update (20191016): Google Play has accepted my appeal and My Colony is back in the store! Thanks to all who contacted them to help them "see the light." Original post follows.

Without warning, Google has taken the extreme step of removing My Colony from the Google Play store for violating their malicious behavior policy, while offering no explanation or examples as to the reason for their decision. You can see further information related to this removal on this thread. Please feel free to contact Google Play regarding this decision.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7100415?hl=en&ref_topic=3364260

The following e-mail is all of the information they sent me regarding the takedown:

Hi Developers at Brandon Stecklein,

After review, My Colony, com.ape.games.mycolony (Version Code 149), has been suspended and removed from Google Play as a policy strike because it violates the malicious behavior policy.

Apps that cause users to download or install applications from unknown sources outside of Google Play are prohibited.

Next Steps

1. Read through the Malicious Behavior policy for more details and examples of policy violations.
2. If possible, make changes to bring your app into compliance. Remember your app must comply with all policies listed in the Developer Program Policies and additional enforcement could occur if there are further policy issues with your apps.
3. Sign in to your Play Console and submit the policy compliant app using a new package name and a new app name.

Additional suspensions of any nature may result in the termination of your developer account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts. If your account is terminated, payments will cease and Google may recover the proceeds of any past sales and/or the cost of any associated fees (such as chargebacks and transaction fees) from you.

If you’ve reviewed the policy and feel this suspension may have been in error, please reach out to our policy support team. One of my colleagues will get back to you within 2 business days.

Regards,

The Google Play Review Team

To me, this is insane. Anybody who has played My Colony on Android knows that it does not cause users to download or install applications from unknown sources outside of Google Play. The only app it asks users to download is the Helios File Manager app if they want to export a game file, and this links directly to the Google Play store listing, which is not an unknown source.

If they are referring to a download link from an ad inside the game, that is equally insane, as the game uses Google's own AdMob ad network, and any third party apps advertised in the ads come directly from them.

I have sent an appeal request to Google Play, but have yet to hear back. Just going from prior experience of dealing with Google and from experiences I have read from other developers, the odds of a successful appeal are somewhat low. I can re-upload the game using a different package name, but it would lose all downloads and ranks, would not carry over existing Premium purchases, existing users can not update without reinstalling, and if Google bans it again for the same reason, they are likely to close my entire account, as each suspension adds a "policy strike" to your account.

As I showed in a chart on this thread, Google Play accounts for over half of the My Colony downloads, so this action would be a significant blow to the My Colony community, so any contact or pressure sent Google Play's way probably wouldn't hurt.

In the event that the game is not able to be reinstated, Android users still have options to play the game. The My Colony web app can now be installed to your homescreen as a Progressive Web App, and given the new filesystem limitations in Android 10 which block saving data directly to the external storage anyway, you really missing much by using the PWA vs the Native App.

To install the Progressive Web App, go to https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony/ on Chrome, open the "three dots" menu from the top-right corner of the screen, and select "Add to Homescreen." The only primary limitation is that in the PWA version, the back button does not work as it does in the native app.

Anyway, the loss of Google Play is really a significant blow to the game. As I indicated, I have started the appeals process, but any help from the community on this issue, whether getting the word out or contacting Google Play, would be welcomed. I don't really see why they shouldn't reinstate the game, as their reason for taking it down is entirely bogus. Although it's also possible that they just prefer to have IAP-diamond festival games on their app store, since that it what it is filled with currently, and those probably make them way more money.

I will keep you all posted with any information that comes forward on this front!

The title says it all, I am considering discontinuing development on the Ape Apps Launcher.

I originally created the launcher in order to fill in the missing capabilities that were not available to my apps on Ape Web Apps when run from within a browser. Since then though, the situation has changed considerably. Every app on Ape Web Apps is now fully and easily installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) on Windows, Linux, MacOS, and even Android through either Chrome or Edge. Once installed, the apps all have native file system access for saving, and can even automatically launch by double-clicking on their associated file types (such as .vpp files) when the #file-handling-api feature is enabled in about://flags (soon to be enabled as standard). Installed PWA's also work without a live internet connection.

The only real remaining benefit on the Launcher is the system try access to friends notifications, but I do not think that by itself is enough of a reason to continue to develop the thing, and I do have an idea to replace that as well.

The bottom line is that there is a lot of work required to maintain the Ape Apps Launcher, and at the end of the day it only has about 300 active users during a given week. In addition, both Windows and macOS give out security warnings and require users to jump through extra hoops just to run the thing after downloading, since I am not paying for a signing certificate for the thing.

At the end of the day, Web Apps are becoming far more capable, and I think that the Launcher is largely obsolete at this point. My proposal is to discontinue the product, and in its place, offer a small Ape Apps browser extension for both Chrome and Edge that will help fill in the last remaining pieces, such as friends list management/notifications, account management, etc.

So anyway, I wanted to through the idea out there to make sure there wasn't going to be a public outcry over the loss of the Launcher. If everybody really loves it, then I can keep it around. But it does save me a ton of time to not have to keep the Launcher up to date, and I think installed web apps are the way of the future anyway. Basically, it's the same thing that the Launcher does anyway, and as I mentioned earlier, I think I can close the remaining functionality gap with a simple browser extension.

#apeappslauncher

Today I have added a couple of new features to the Ape Apps Launcher.

First, if you right-click on one of your installed apps now, you will have the option to switch to the Beta channel. Now you can run the Beta edition of Ape Apps software right from the launcher.


Next, I have started to improve the mobile interface for the Launcher, so that you can install the PWA on your Android or iOS device.


To get it, browse to https://www.apewebapps.com/launcher.html on your mobile. On Android, there will be a green Install icon in the top-left corner of the app. On iOS Safari, click on the toolbar button that looks like a rounded square with a up arrow in it, then scroll down and select Add to Home Screen.

I will continue to improve the launcher as time goes on. At this point, the installable Progressive Web App edition (same link as above) is considered to be the primary and will be getting the most development attention, although the downloadable Desktop editions will receive support as well. Given the increased restrictions on un-signed desktop apps, especially on mac, but on Windows too, non-Linux users are encouraged to switch to the PWA edition. Well, everyone is encouraged to switch!

Until next time, let me know what launcher issues you have or features you want added, and stay tuned for more!

@CRJGoe Your account says Premium so you should be good.

I would suggest installing the PWA edition of My Colony instead of downloading from the Windows Store:

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

Just go to the web app with either Chrome or the new chromium Edge, and select Install from the slide-out menu, and then it will be installed to your system and work offline.

The PWA is going to be replacing the Windows Store package soon anyway.

The Windows Store app uses the discontinued and outdated rendering engine from the old MS Edge (the pre-chromium edition) which is no longer being maintained by Microsoft.

A couple of months ago, I announced that I would begin phasing out Web App Core, the cross-platform app wrapper I have been developing and using since around 2012. I have been making this change due to the fact that Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have now become the primary development target for Ape Apps, and their capabilities have reached the point to where using a big, heavy and bloated app wrapper like Web App Core is no longer a necessity. In addition, many of the features of PWA's work better when each app is hosted on its own domain or subdomain, as opposed to having every single app hosted on the same address like Ape Web Apps currently does. So this migration away from Web App Core/Ape Web Apps and towards individual domains has been a slow one and has taken up a lot of my time over the last couple of months, but progress is being made, and the next title on the migration list is none other than the long-in development game Colony Wars!


As of today, Colony Wars can now be accessed from it's new URL on the main My Colony Universe website: https://wars.my-colony.com. I think it is now almost up to fully functional from its previous release on Ape Web Apps, minus the Map Editor which I am still converting off of Web App Core. Out of all of the titles I have already moved off of Web App Core, Colony Wars has been the most difficult, as it utilized nearly the entire suite of Web App Core provided functions. I hope to have the conversion fully completed by the end of the week.

This conversion will bring Colony Wars up to v0.8.0. The primary changes in this release will be (obviously) the migration off of Web App Core, but also some new features as well. I have added a new Skirmish option, which will allow you to more quickly launch an offline battle VS the AI players without first going through the online multiplayer lobby. I am also adding an even faster Quick Match option, which will immediately put you into an offline Skirmish match on a random map with AI players already set up. There are also some bugs/UI issues that will be cleaned up that have been on the to-do list for ages now.

Beyond v0.8.0, I am planning to bring Colony Wars back to life off of the back-burner. Spending some time playing old school Command and Conquer with my son as convinced me that Colony Wars needs to be completed. Beyond new units, buildings, and maps which are all needed, I also need to start working on the single player Campaign. I want to have cheesy cut scene videos like in old Command and Conquer games, although I am not going to be hiring actors and doing any filming. I think I am going to render all of the cutscenes using Death 3D, creating characters using My Tokens and scenes with the Death 3D map editor. I have begun scripting out the story, which takes place in the year 2083 and begins with the LIS declaring independence and ambushing the United Earth Space Marines detachment on Terra Nova. Chronologically, the Colony Wars story takes place about a year before the events of Death 3D, and about a decade or so after the events of the Deimos trilogy.

So anyway, that is a look at what is coming down the pike for Colony Wars. If you want to check it out at it's new domain while it is still being worked on, you can access the site using the beta URL parameter to prevent it from activating it's service worker and caching the in-development code: https://wars.my-colony.com/?beta=1

#colonywars

The purchase is on your Ape Apps Account, but I can't unlock the Window Store download for you. Luckily it does not matter, as the Windows Store edition is just the PWA (progressive web app) with the premium license included, so all you have to do is open the PWA on your Windows PC and sign in with your account. You can install it to your desktop if you are using Chrome or Edge and then it will be exactly like the edition that comes from the Windows Store:

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

Today, Basic Modeler has received it's first major update since becoming it's own app and moving to it's own domain (basicmodeler.com), and this update is fairly significant, so let's take a peak at what is new!


To begin with, Basic Models now support texturing, which is a huge improvement over plain color models. You can see an example in the image above, where an Earth texture was applied to a sphere. Adding a texture is fairly straightforward. There is a new Textures panel next to the code input panel, and each texture you add to the model gets a new variable name (ex $tex0, $tex1, $tex2, and so on). I will do writeups in the new Sharing and Examples forum soon with examples and instructions on how to apply textures to each different type of primitive shape that the app supports.

With this update, the #scroll3d engine now includes full built-in support for rendering Basic Models, so future games written using the engine will be able to use Basic Models for graphics, as opposed to (or along side of) Voxel Paint models. I am also in the process of overhauling the Death 3D engine (which also powers the game Dungeon Infinity) to use Basic Models instead of Sprites for game objects, which is a pretty significant undertaking, but was somewhat necessary to facilitate the support of full VR for those Death 3D based games, which I am also in the process of working on.

When I first showed off the Basic Modeler concept eight months ago, I demonstrated how the system could be used to create a basic Blockhead Token (the latest Token type from My Tokens), but the model was simple and non-textured. With the new enhancements to the Basic Modeling system, all Blockhead Tokens code is in the process of being migrated to the Basic Model format, and you will soon be able to export your Blockhead Token character to a Basic Model file (will be available in the coming My Tokens update).

I have added a new mobile-friendly layout to Basic Modeler in this release, so the application can now be "used" on a mobile phone. I still do not suggest using it in this way, but the possibility is now at least there.

Basic Modeler now has a new Add Object button, which will automatically create all of the primitive types that the system supports, as well as a few small example objects that you can look at to get a better understanding of how Basic Modeler works.

Finally, Basic Modeler now support full file type associating when installed as a desktop PWA using a chromium based browser (Chrome or Edge). If you install Basic Modeler as a PWA, you will now be able to simply double-click on a *.bm file on your computer, and have it automatically open up in the app.

What is the point?

So you may be wondering what the point of Basic Modeler is, what it's for, where it fits in the Ape Apps ecosystem, and why not just use something like Blender to make models?

The primary reason for the Basic Model system is to be able to quickly and (somewhat) easily generate 3D models in code, so that a future game engine of mine can automatically create new items/objects on the fly.

A game could, for example, have a sword, and the game package could include one base sword.bm model file, and through code, several different sizes, shapes, colors, and other variations of the sword could be generated by making simple small modifications, to where the game could include hundreds of different swords based on the same model script.

Anyway, I do not necessarily except anybody other than myself to be using Basic Modeler, at least not until a game comes out that uses it and supports modding, it is there to play with nonetheless, and is going to be an important part of content creation for Ape Apps games in the future!

What is coming next

The next major feature I need to add to Basic Modeler is model animations. You can already do animations in code if you assign your objects to variables, but I want a way to predefine them within the model file so you can automatically run them by simply setting a flag. So that is what is next for Basic Modeler.

So anyway, if you are on a desktop computer and interested in modeling, you can check out Basic Modeler today!

https://basicmodeler.com/

#basicmodeler

So about a year and a half ago or so, Microsoft depreciated the original UWP WebView control and move all of their development efforts over to the new Chromium based MS Edge. This was fine, except for that My Colony on Windows ran under the old Edge WebView, which was no longer receiving any updates. In order to allow My Colony to keep running on the latest engine, I took down the original Windows package and replaced it with a PWA pointing to the Web version of the game.

This was good, except for that MS does not allow non-Microsoft Store in-app purchases for games, so I had to make the game paid on the Windows Store, and buying it just added Premium to your account. This of course led to a pretty big drop in Windows users, since a free game obviously does better than a paid one.

Meanwhile though, Microsoft came out with the newer WebView2 control for UWP apps, based on the new Chromium Edge engine. In my spare time I have been updating my Windows Web App Core code to take advantage of this new engine, and now that the work is complete, I am pleased to announce that the free version of My Colony is once again back up and running on the Windows Store!

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBLGGH4X533

I have unpublished the paid edition so there is no confusion by having two versions of My Colony available, but if you previously bought the paid edition from the Store, then it will still show up for you like always.

So that is the change for the Windows Store release. I will probably be making the same change to My Colony 2 the next time I update that game, so there will finally be a free MC2 package available to Windows Store users.

Moving on though to the non-Windows Store desktop clients.

I quit updating the Windows/Mac/Linux desktop clients quite a while ago, and converted the Steam client to be basically a wrapper for the Web App that unlocks premium on the users' account. This worked pretty good on Steam, but a lot of people were taking advantage of how it worked in order to give free Premium access by letting their friends log into their Steam using their Ape Apps Accounts. So to combat this, and also just to improve the experience in general, I am bringing back the native clients for Windows, Mac and Linux, and they will all be natively packaged as well, not just hosts for the Web App version of the game.

When this change occurs though, I will be removing the "Steam Premium" flag from every account in the Ape Apps database. Then, the first time you sign in to the game using Steam, it will ask you to link your Steam account to your Ape Apps account, and there can only be one Steam and Ape Apps Account linked, so you can no longer share your Steam purchases with other users. Linking your account will also enable automatic sign in for all Ape Apps games through Steam. For added security, the Steam editions of the game will no longer be able to run unless Steam is also running and signed in.

In addition, the Steam clients will now implement the Steam API, and I am looking into adding Steam cloud saving, workshop, achievements, IAP, etc.

Finally, the Ape Apps Launcher is getting a massive overhaul and update sometime in January, so the experience there will be improving quite dramatically as well, so be on the lookout for that. It is going to run as either a PWA or a native packaged app, and will support interfaces for Desktop, Mobile, TV and VR users. Should be good stuff!

So anyway, those are the changes coming to the Desktop apps.

Today Voxel Paint is receiving a major upgrade to v2.0.0, which brings about major performance improvements, new features, and a new URL. This update represents a substantial rewrite of many parts of the application, so let's take a look at what is new!


The first major change is the fact that, like Voxel Playground did the other day, Voxel Paint has now moved to the voxelpaint.online domain. If you have the previous Ape Web Apps version of Voxel Paint installed on your device as a Progressive Web App ( PWA ), then you should uninstall/delete it and install the new version from the following URL:

https://voxelpaint.online/

Over the coming days, I will be updating this website to render uploaded .vpp files using the new version of the application.

There have also been massive performance improvements made with this version of the app, which should be particularly felt when working on large and complex VPP files.


The performance improvements are thanks to the fact that I have largely rewritten the application under the hood. Voxel Paint was the very first project I created with the Scroll3D engine, and my knowledge of working with WebGL has increased a little bit over the last couple of years, so the fruits of that knowledge should be felt in this Voxel Paint update.

Now, since I did basically rewrite the entire app, there are probably bugs that I missed in testing. For this reason, I am only releasing v2.0.0 on the Web (and the Ape Apps Launcher), at least until I am sure that it is functioning properly. The Android and iOS releases will remain on the previous version for the time being.

Moving on, Voxel Paint can now actually import paintings made by it's 2D sister application Pixel Paint. When you click on the Import menu and select Model, the file chooser should now let you select to import either a VPP, VOX, or PPP file. Importing a Pixel Paint file converts it into a standing 3D model.


Nex up, custom user defined variables can now be embedded into .vpp files from within the app. There is a new Variable Editor included in the Edit menu where you can append any number of name/value pairs to your model, which can be utilized by various engines or applications. As of now, I am using the new system to store some meta data about the .vpp files, such as create/edit time stamps, the scene lighting color, etc. But I kept it generic and user-definable enough so that it can be easily used and expanded for multiple uses in the future.


I added a new feature to the context menu that appears when you right-click on a voxel called Select All Above.


Here is a use case example. You can select all voxels above a point, and then use the up arrow button on your keyboard to shift all of the selected voxels upwards. This could potentially be used for doing things like making a building taller...


There have also been some smaller changes here and there. Obviously the theme is changed a little and the menus are reorganized a bit, but all of the options are still there. Clicking twice on the "selection mode" tool will now do a select-all function, and clicking on the eraser tool when you have voxels selected will now bulk delete them, two functions that were previously impossible on touch screen devices.

Anyway, update your PWA installs and your bookmarks to the new release of Voxel Paint, and do let me know in the forums here what issues you find. I did change a considerable amount of code in this update, so it is likely that there are some things I missed, so try it out, let me know, let me know what else you want added to the app, and stay tuned for more!

#voxelpaint

Today Noteastic Notepad, the classic note taking solution from Ape Apps, has moved to a new domain and undergone a complete application rewrite from the bottom up. Let's take a look at what has changed!


The largest user facing change is that Noteastic now supports Markdown syntax for notes. Markdown is a popular document markup syntax that is used on many websites, particularly those oriented towards software developers, allowing users to quickly and easily add basic formatting to their notes. New Noteastic notes are also saved in a markdown file format, and if you previously had Noteastic data stored on the Ape Apps Cloud, your notes will be automatically converted to the new format when you load them in the new version of Noteastic.

The Noteastic application itself has been moved off of Ape Web Apps and is now located at it's own domain:

https://noteastic.com/

The new site is installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA) and should run on any device. This initial rewrite is primarily focused on desktop class devices, so I did not spend a ton of time working out the mobile interface, which is why (for now) this version of Noteastic is being released to the Web only, but will be coming to both Android and iPhones the next time I update it.

The next big new change is the addition of offline Workspaces. Before now, Noteastic only stored note data either in the Ape Apps Cloud or in the application's sandboxed storage, meaning there was no real way to access your data outside of the app. With this release, Noteastic gives you the option to choose any folder on your device as your Noteastic Workspace/


The workspace can be any location on your device that you choose, and you can even have multiple separate workspaces to keep things organized. You can even store your workspace on a third party cloud service such as Google Drive or OneDrive. The Workspaces feature is a great way to take total control over your note data, and store/backup your information in any way that works best for you.

Finally, Noteastic adds support for Note Linking, allowing you to add a hyperlink to another note in your Workspace. While you are tying out a note, simply place the name of another note in double brackets [[like this]], which will create a link to the other note. Clicking on the link will quickly bring you to that note, or automatically create the note for you if it does not already exist. Some other note taking applications have a similar feature, and I though it would make a lot of sense to add it to Noteastic as well. I plan to expand on the linking and referencing features quite a bit in the coming releases.

So that is what is new with Noteastic v3.0.0. Check it out at the link above, and if you have the previous version installed as a PWA, consider uninstalling and switching to the new release. If you do have a lot of note data stored in the previous version of Noteastic, you might consider doing the full backup option before switching over to the new Noteastic, just in case! I have tested the process for converting all of the old notes over to the new format, but you never know what is going to happen...

#noteastic

NatetheninjaALT said:I tried using https://doom.ape-apps.com/, but it doesn't work. It redirects at the last second to the marketplace page (here: https://market.ape-apps.com/aazdoom-launcher.html). The windows version works for me, but no matter what device I use, the PWA version does not work.

Is this a glitch/bug or is it just like that for now?

The app requires to be run in the Windows host in order to launch the GZDoom application, since PWA's right now do not yet have the ability to launch a native desktop application unless they can be launched via URI (which GZDoom can't afaik)

The 1.32.0 patch for the original My Colony is now available and should be hitting all platforms in the coming days. This is a minor update containing bug fixes and updates to the latest libraries and whatnot. I have also updated the desktop packages for both Windows and Linux (x64 and ARM) on both the Ape Market and Steam, since some users were reporting issues launching the desktop clients before.

Note that there are no new macOS builds in this update. I do not plan to support macOS any longer as it's usage on my desktop apps has fallen below even Linux, and the latest releases of macOS make it nearly impossible to install third party software that has not been notarized by Apple (a service that Apple charges an annual fee for). Mac users are encouraged to just install the PWA version of the game using a chromium based web browser. The PWA can be found at the following URL:

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony

Today I have published an update to the original My Colony, bringing it up to v1.34.0, which should be hitting all platforms soon. There are a few changes here, so let's take a look!


First, I have reverted the in-game popup style menus to the big full window height slideout menus. Some players (on mobile in particular) were having issues with the other menu style, so I decided to just go back to the old reliable slideout menus that nobody seemed to have an issue with.

The Music Rendering engine has been completely replaced and is now using a new library called SpessaSynth that I have been following for a little while now. The developer of this new MIDI sequencing library is very good and is quite active, and has been super responsive when I have had questions or issues with the library. If you wouldn't mind, go to his Github repo and leave it a Star, because he does good work.

https://github.com/spessasus/SpessaSynth

This new library uses more modern JS coding techniques and renders .mid files in a worker thread, and so it does not impact game performance like the old MIDI renderer did. With this change though, you may notice that the music sounds a little different. Since the new library makes use of standard .sf2 sound font files, I am currently using with the game the widely available General MIDI soundfont, which is only a fraction of the size of the music patches that were being used with the old renderer. That said, this sound font objectively does not sound quite as good.

The good news is that the new library supports custom sound fonts, whereas the old one did not. If there is interest from players, I can add an option to the game that lets users select their own *.sf2 sound font file and then they can make the music sound however they want it to. For copyright reasons though, I will probably stick to the free one as the in-game packaged sound font.

Finally, this update includes beta-level support for a new Ape Apps-wide feature I have been working on behind the scenes for a while now, which is Private Cloud support. Currently, users of all of my apps, My Colony included, who opt into Cloud Sync have their save data temporarily stored on one central Ape Cloud server. Since it is expensive (and out of the scope of my business) to run mass cloud storage hosting, files are routinely purged from the server after several months of inactivity, which is why the server is branded as a sync server and not a long-term storage server.

With the new Private Cloud feature I am working on, users may set up their own private cloud server at their own location and use it as their default save location for their data. I have already been testing this on a handful of other apps, and now I am rolling it out to My Colony.

The Private Cloud system is a part of an application called the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge, which is available as both a Progressive Web App and as a stand-alone application for Windows or Linux.

To get started, install the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge (either desktop or PWA edition, for private cloud I would suggest the full desktop download) and signs in with your Ape Apps Account. Once signed in, click on the Add Resource button and select Private Cloud.


From there, you can select a folder on your computer that will be your new private cloud sync folder. If you are using the PWA version, you will probably need to re-enable folder permissions every time you restart your computer, so keep that in mind. The desktop client does not have that limitation, which is why it is preferred.

If you are going to try using the Private Cloud, I would suggest setting your computer to automatically start the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge on startup. The desktop edition can be minimized to your system try, so it is non-obtrusive.

Once Private Cloud is set up, restart My Colony. If you are signed in with your account, you will see a new Cloud Sync Location option on the title screen menu.


If you only have one cloud sync folder enabled on your account, then it will automatically be set as the default, so keep that in mind. If you are given permission to multiple cloud sync locations, you will default to the central Ape Cloud service and you will have to manually select which server you want to use.

If you decide to give the new Private Cloud feature a try, please let me know how it works for you. This feature was originally designed for some business users using EZ Office applications whose business policies did not allow them to use the central Ape Cloud servers, but in my testing so far it is working quite well for My Colony saves. Theoretically you could set a lot better saving/loading performance, especially if you are at your own house while playing.

And yes, you can still sync to your own Private Cloud, even when you are not at home.

Another Private Cloud benefit is that you can easily back up all of your Ape Apps data whenever you feel like it. It would be trivial to compress your entire Private Cloud folder on a regular basis and keep backups in any way which works for you.

How does it work?

The Private Cloud feature uses a private channel on the central Ape Apps Signaling server, tied to your individual Ape Apps Account, to locate any AWA Desktop Bridge instances you have running. When Bridge instances are located, the Signaling server then initiates a peer-to-peer handshake to make a direct WebRTC socket connection between your My Colony instance and your AWA Desktop Bridge instance, similar to the way that My Colony 2 dedicated servers work. The Signaling server then gets out of the way and you are operating with a direct peer to peer link to your own Private Cloud server, wherever it is located.

In theory, this direct peer to peer connection should perform better than the centralized Ape Cloud server, because a) it obviously has a lot less traffic going to it, and b) it is using a persistent direct connection instead of making constant HTTP requests.

So that is the Private cloud system in a nutshell. Like I said, give it a try and let me know how it works for you, or what issues it gives you. I have been using it for a little while on some EZ Office applications and it has been running without issue, but they generally have smaller file sizes than My Colony saves, so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

So that is it for this update. It should be rolling out everywhere soon, so let me know how it goes, and stay tuned for more!

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony

This is just sort of a P.S.A., but with the recent release of Chrome 70 on Windows, Chrome now has support for Progressive Web Apps on desktop, and My Colony just so happens to conform to the new PWA standards. This allows you to "install" the Web version of My Colony to your Desktop, and it will open as an application in it's own window.


Installing gives My Colony it's own framed window and it's own icon on the taskbar/start menu. This is a good option for those who like the look and feel of the Native Client, but like to have the latest in-development code before it gets pushed out to all platforms.


I'm pretty sure this works on Chromebooks too, although I am not sure about Mac and Linux. Anyway, if you use the browser version and Chrome, it's worth checking out. The same thing should work for pretty much everything on Ape Web Apps too, as well as on Chrome for Android.

Today I have made a great improvement to productivity apps hosted on apewebapps.com, as well as improvements to all Ape Web Apps that you install to your desktop as a Progressive Web App using either Google Chrome or the new Chromium based Edge browser. To demonstrate the changes, consider my app EZ Register, the free personal accounting and finance application from Ape Apps.

Productivity apps that use the Toolbar interface will no longer use the slide-out side menu that my games use, unless the current window size is under 600px wide. Instead, you will now be presented with a more traditional desktop-like menu bar, where items are better organized than before.

In addition, if you click on the Help menu, supported browsers now have an "Install" option which will allow you to easily install the web app as a PWA desktop application, complete with it's own icon and native window.

The installed application gets it's own themed window and can be pinned to your taskbar, start menu, or desktop.

The application window theme will also automatically update itself to match the underlying app theme color.

And for applications that do not use a toolbar (like games), you can still install them to your desktop for the native experience using Chrome's (or new Edge's) built-in install option:

Installing your favorite Ape Web Apps to your desktop is a great idea. Not only do you get a dedicated window and launcher icon, but also using the Progressive Web App version of the applications allows them to run when your internet connection is down (as long as the app itself does not require online access). So go ahead and give it a try!

#ezregister

After I get back to work in January, I am going to take a bit of time to update the My Colony web interface a bit, and also change how Beta works. From then on, to play the in-development 'beta' of the game, you will have to put in an address like apewebapps.com/my-colony/beta/, and the regular web app will show the same version that all other platforms are on.

I am making this change because I would like to get more people to use the progressive web app version of My Colony as their main platform, vs the regular app store versions. It can now be "installed" as an app on pretty much any operating system, and it's easier for me to update than all of the stand alone "native" apps. Also as we saw earlier in the year, app stores like Google Play can just nuke the app on a whim, and on my own website, nobody can touch it.

Anyway, it will probably be a few years still before people are more comfortable with PWA's vs native apps, but I do think long term, that is the way a lot of things are going, especially given all of the work both Windows and Android are putting into supporting them. I will of course keep all of the mobile and desktop apps up to date for the foreseeable future, but I can also see a day when web apps become a lot more common place, and I want My Colony (and all of my others) to be ready to go for that time.

So anyway, to sum it up, starting next year, you will no longer have to worry about the web version breaking your game during development cycles, as you will have to manually opt in to using the beta code. Hope that makes sense!

Thanks @Ansom , they are switching everyone away from packaged web apps to Progressive Web Apps (PWA's), which My Colony has already transitioned to a while ago. So we are ready to go!

The Ape Chat server has just been updated with some new content which you can now take advantage if you are using the Ape Chat web app (https://chat.ape-apps.com/) or the client that is built into the Ape Apps Launcher. Here is an overview of the new features.

Firstly, on the left chat sidebar that has the channel listing, you will now see two new sections for your Private Channels and your Private Conversations.


This helps you keep things grouped together nicely. And speaking of Private Conversations, there are private conversations now! Previously, you could send somebody a direct message using the @username switch, but the message would only be delivered if the user was currently in chat. Now, private conversations are persisted on the server as a personal one-on-one chat room. Private conversation chats can only be accessed by the two users involved, and are also voice-enabled channels for one on one voice chat.

In addition, if you right-click on a username from your private conversations list, you will see a new Private Window option. Clicking on it will open a new mini-chat window for your one-on-one conversation, so you can have multiple one-on-ones going separate from the main chat.


Eventually, if you install Ape Chat as a PWA on your system (which, by the way, you can now do in Chrome and new MS Edge), you will also receive desktop or mobile notifications when you get a new private chat message, even if you don't have Ape Chat open. This will also work by having the Ape Apps Launcher installed.

I have expanded Ape Apps Account friends list capabilities. If you open your Friends List from either the Ape Apps Launcher or clicking on the new 'Friends' icon at the top of the base Ape Web Apps website (https://www.apewebapps.com/), you will get the updated Friends List popup window, which will allow you to accept or reject friend requests, see who is online, view friends' profile, or open the private one-on-one chat window right from the friends list:


I plan on expanding Friend List management further, and also making the friends window accessible from the individual apps and games, but for now the best way to access it is by going to https://www.apewebapps.com/ and clicking on the Friends List icon.

So that's it for this Ape Chat update. I still need to push the changes out to the Ape Chat Android application, but I plan to keep improving the Ape Chat service as time goes on, integrating it further into the Friends service and into the individual apps and games!

Epic Adventure v0.11.0 has just been released, and adds the first "mob" of the game, Chickens!


This is more or less a test of the mob spawning algorithm. The chickens are theoretically able to drop a new "raw chicken" item when killed, but since I haven't gotten combat implemented yet, you are currently unable to retrieve the item.

This release also includes improvements to multiplayer. In-game chat has been added, and if you have Epic Adventure installed as an app (either from Google Play/Windows Store or the PWA installed to homescreen), you can now quickly join with the new Friends List integration.


Finally, there have been various bug fixes and you can now also move diagonally.

There is a lot more to come to Epic Adventure in the months ahead. The game is starting to build up some players, particularly on Kindle Fire devices, so the updates will probably start coming more frequently now, so keep the suggestions coming. Next on the to-do list is getting combat up and running, either Player vs Player or Player vs Mob (so you can kill and eat these chickens). You will also be able to build a campfire to cook your chicken meat, or mix other recipes together. Cooking will also be possible on the furnace. I am going to get Seeds working, since you are currently able to plow the land, but not plant the seeds you collect. Also, procedurally generated surface buildings and underground dungeons are coming to the game, with the dungeons including new mob types that you can fight for loot (and glory).

So stay tuned for more, because Epic Adventure will soon be morphing into a full-fledged multiplayer procedurally generated role playing game!

#epicadventure

I suppose if you wanted to go all out you could have it open in the launcher, the pwa, the steam client, the windows store client, and on your phone lol.

Are you saying that you want the option to transfer a city to a different account?

bastecklein said:I suppose if you wanted to go all out you could have it open in the launcher, the pwa, the steam client, the windows store client, and on your phone lol.

In theory, yes. But.. when i have both account open (ape apps launcher and standalone version), some time a colony, or both account, they interrupt the connection to the server. After i need to relog. In particular when i change Map, the other account need to be resetted.

bastecklein said:Are you saying that you want the option to transfer a city to a different account?

Yes, could solve most of my problem (and other players problems, pretty sure i'm not the only one with 2+ account active).

I did not have a lot of time to work on My Colony 2 over the past week, so there isn't a ton to report in this weeks update, however changes were indeed made, so your PWA and Ape Apps Launcher releases should be automatically updating themselves soon, if they haven't already.


I am probably going to be implementing utilities next, so gameplay is going to change quite a bit soon. Utilities in MC2 will be similar to MC1, with some small differences. Firstly, Water will be a utility in MC2, as opposed to a resource like in MC1. Maybe Food too, I haven't decided. Utilities are going to be on a per-settlement basis, although there may be a way to trade utilities between settlements, perhaps for profit.

Anyway, not much else to say. Keep those suggestions and reports coming, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2