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This is a new concept for MC2 and a change from the original My Colony, so the concept is important to understand. This is still being worked out, but here is how it is shaping out so far.

In MC1, a game could consist of a Region with different subcities, and a region and each city was a defined space.

In MC2, a game consists of an entire Planet, and within the planet are different settlements, which can become any size and can be thought of as Cities (or bases, or anything else).

Behind the scenes, an MC2 world is divided into Chunks, which are 16x16 tiles in size. When a player places a building or lands a lander in a chunk, the game will check if this particular chunk is part of an existing settlement. If it is, then that new building becomes a part of the settlement. If not, a new settlement is created, and the player becomes the "leader" or perhaps mayor of that settlement. Each chunk can only be a part of one settlement, but a settlement can contain an infinite number of chunks. So if your settlement spills over to the next chunk, that entire chunk becomes a part of the settlement. The founder of the settlement gets to pick a name for it as well, and each settlement can have a custom color.

A settlement can be thought of as equal to a single map city in MC1. Power and utility grids are going to be divided by settlements, so the entire planet does not share the same utility grid, but each settlement does. Population is also broken out into settlements, and when a transit network is build between settlements, Colonists will be able to migrate from one to another for better work or living conditions.

There are two kinds of buildings, which are "outpost" and "non-outpost." Really the names don't matter, that is just for development purposes. An Outpost building is something like a Lander, which can be used to create a new settlement. A non-outpost building must be constructed within an existing settlement. To start a new settlement, you will move an outpost type unit, such as a Lander or some future vehicle into a new area and deploy it. If you deploy it in an existing settlement though, it will not create a new one.

Settlements will have distinct laws/policies from each other, and each player on a server can run multiple settlements. Settlement leaders can set the policies, tax rates, etc. Settlements will be able to connect to each other through roads or pipelines to trade resources or buy/sell utilities. Perhaps multiple settlements can even join together to form a country with a shared set of laws/policies/taxes/etc.

This is all still a work in progress, keep in mind.

Today I have finished Epic Adventure v0.14.0 which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This update adds Charcoal which can be created by smelting a Log in the furnace. Also, pretty much all wooden items can now be used as furnace fuel. This update also vastly increases the speed at which logging/mining/attacking occurs.

Beyond that though, I wanted to discuss the future of Epic Adventure a bit. The truth is, there are a lot of really good ideas and things I want to do with this game, but they are all sort of hampered by some stupid design decisions that I made from the very beginning of development, making it exceedingly difficult and time consuming to add new features and content to the game.

Even the graphics are a hassle, as simple as they look. For instance, I have been wanting to add more walls to the game beyond the simple wooden wall that exists. However, each wall object in the game requires 48 different images which all need to line up together so that all possible configurations of creating a wall will properly connect. The same goes for rocks in caves and other terrain elements. This is a very annoying and time consuming process in and of itself.

The game world is split into chunks, which is fine, but I originally implemented this is having each chunk be a totally separate map, whose processing and entities are completely disconnected from the rest of the game world. What is happening in one chunk has no relation or impact on what is happening on the chunk next door, and changing this requires a complete reworking of the server side code.

For rendering, Epic Adventure uses the Scroll2d engine that I originally created for My Land. This engine does not lend itself particularly well to the chunk layout of the game, as it works on an x:y coordinate system that cannot go below 0:0, meaning negative numbers are not possible. This is why in My Colony 1, the map could only be expanded East and South when using the annex land option, and not to the North and West. This is an issue in Epic Adventure because I would like to make game "look like" it is not broken up into chunks, even though it technically is, similar to My Colony 2.

Because of this, I have determined to consider Epic Adventure a proof-of-concept or a tech-demo for a brand new game engine that I will be switching to, and to end development of the game at this point. I will be taking the best parts of Epic Adventure and reusing a lot of it's code, but pushing it into a brand new open-world RPG engine that I can use across several games, including Gone Rogue 2, as well as whatever will be the spiritual successor to Epic Adventure, which I am thinking about calling My World or something to that effect, in tradition of keeping with the "My" series of games.

So for the purpose of the rest of this post, I will be referring to the continued development of what is now Epic Adventure as My World, however there is no guarantee that My World will be the final name. But I need to use something to talk about what will be changing in the new engine, and what will be carried over from Epic Adventure.

To start with, the My World engine will probably straight-copy the game HUD/UI from Epic Adventure, including the crafting/smelting menu, as well as the "belt" inventory and so on. Not that these things don't need improvement, but copying what is already there will give a big boost to the development.

For rendering, I will be replacing the Scroll2d engine with the Scroll3d engine that is currently being used in My Colony 2. Scroll3d is vastly more advanced than Scroll2d and renders faster on more devices thanks to using WebGL instead of software rendering. My World .png artwork will be replaced with Voxel Paint graphics like in My Colony 2, and player characters will still use My Tokens characters thanks to the new Mini Voxel Tokens introduced in the latest My Tokens release.

The reason for this change is that it simply makes it way faster and easier to create graphics and assets for the game. For instance, I said that a wall in Epic Adventure requires 48 different images. In My World, it could be made with either 1 or 2 images, one for the sides, and optionally a different one for the top. Scroll3d was also build with chunk-type worlds in mind right from the beginning, again look at My Colony 2 for reference.

My Colony 2 has a complete game-editor and modding platform built in, and I want My World to have the same thing. Not only does this allow other users to create content for the game, but it allows me to work on the game from a web browser from anywhere. For instance, if we spend two weeks with family, I can take my laptop and still work on My Colony 2, because I have the game and Voxel Paint in my web browser wherever I'm at. It would be nice to be able to do that here as well.

I mentioned that I want this engine to also support Gone Rogue 2, which I've been wanting to make for a while now. This means support for other RPG style elements. It will need a full dungeon generator, as well as support for NPC's, shops, dialogs, etc. A lot of these things I was planning to add to Epic Adventure anyway, because I was originally going to use the Epic Adventure engine to make the Gone Rogue sequel. But to have this in the new engine, along with the game editor built right into the game, will actually give players the ability to create their own RPG adventure games as My World mods. There are a lot of possibilities here.

Anyway, this is a long term project. What I want to do is take what I've learned about crafting games from Epic Adventure, what I've learned about modding/endless worlds from My Colony 2, and what I've learned about multiplayer from a whole host of games, and merge them into a new Open World/Adventure Game engine. It might be called My World, and the first version will be pretty similar to the current release of Epic Adventure, except in 3d. It will be a lot like when I originally converted My Empire from Scroll2d to Scroll3d, except this requires more substantial changes than that one did. But for the first release, I plan to have everything that the current Epic Adventure has, and then move forward from there.

So there it is, I hope that this doesn't disappoint anyone, but I think that the new game has potential to really shine in ways that it would be hard to make Epic Adventure do so. But let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more!

One of the long-standing issues with My Colony 2 is that roads currently cannot be deleted. The reason for this has to do with the way roads were set up at the beginning of development for MC2.

For those who don't know, every game of My Colony 2 consists of two parts, the server and the clients. Even if you start a single player game on your own device, the game engine spawns a server on a separate thread, and a game client that you connect to the server with.

Additionally, the game world is split into chunks (kind of like Minecraft). As you scroll around the world, the server has to transmit all of the information about the chunks in your view area.

Further, the "Road" items in My Colony 2 are technically structures, just like the greenhouse or the ore refinery. You can see this in the Game Editor. So each tile of road that is laid down is similar to building a structure.

Since there is the potential to be way more road structures than regular structures, this can eventually lead to there being a ton of road objects created on the server, and a lot of data that needs to be transmitted from server to clients. This is further compounded by the fact that My Colony 2 maps are unlimited in size, potentially opening the door for tons and tons and tons of roads.

To try to get around this, instead of creating a road object for each tile of road placed, My Colony 2 creates one road object for each set of roads you build, and then remembers the end points of that road. So if you start drawing a road at coordinate x,y, and then move from point a to point b to c, d, e, f, and so on, the game just remembers that you build one road network with several points. Then the game just plays "connect-the-dots" by drawing your road from one point to the next.


If you look at the image above, this entire thing would be considered one single data object on the server. This saves a ton of space when saving the game, and a ton of bandwidth when transferring data from server to clients.

Since the roads are just a collection of endpoints, the don't technically "exist" on each individual tile that they occupy. This is the reason why you are currently unable to delete roads in My Colony 2, and the reason why roads can be built on top of other occupied spaces. Roads are basically just an illusion to the game right now. You may have also noticed that roads that provide a utility, such as the Solar Road, only provide one tile worth of power, even if they look like they take up 1000 tiles.

So I have been thinking for a while of a good solution for roads that will make them work better, allow for them to be demolished, and not break the bank for save file size and bandwidth. So here I want to share what I am thinking of changing, and maybe some of the people out there who are smarter than I am will have some comments or better solutions in mind!

Firstly, roads will no longer be counted to the engine as structures. This will remove the necessity of storing as much data for roads as is required for structures. The downside is that the game will not be able to have all of the features of structures, but of course none of the existing roads do anything fancy anyway.

For each chunk in the game, the server will store an associative array of road types (pavement, solar, brick, etc) and an array of coordinates in that chunk that has each type of road. That way when the game has to transfer chunk data to a client, it just says hey, here is a list of tiles that have pavement, and here is a list of tiles that have bricks, etc.

Finally, roads will no longer be tied to a settlement like structures are, and will no longer have an owner. For power generating roads like the solar road, they will simply add to the utility pool for the settlement they are in. If they are out in the middle of nowhere, they will not do anything.

So basically, any player can drop any kind of pavement wherever they want. Now there can be restrictions, like you cannot build anything in a chunk that is "owned" by another player. But his will allow players to build roads outside of their settlement boundaries. This will also allow for the building of long highways connecting one settlement to another, without expanding settlement borders.

So anyway, those are the road changes I am considering for the next update. Let me know what you think or what suggestions you have on how to make roads better in My Colony 2!

Ah, so mc2 will be more like infinite terrain/chunk style terrain and region style. In that case, for things like resource deposites, “Factorio ” could be a good place to get inspiration from because it’s infinite terrain and the deposits are procedurally generated.

I posted an idea on your rover thread about resources and building construction, but I didn’t know mc2 was to be chunk based. Even so, most of what I put could still apply in a chunk based map.

I like the idea. I remember you showing all of the images that you had to draw for one wall. I know how tedious game design can be.

The scroll3d engine would be better because it could allow you to have an elevation and sea level element, or even an underwater element. I’m feeling like “My Realm” sounds better since it is an rpg game, but that’s just my opinion. How will you implement underground mining and house construction though?

I feel like you could create a cave system via z-levels. For example, each Z coordinate could be tied to a different playfield. ground/sea level could be z:0, higher elevations could have a negative z value, and lowlands/caves/underwater/underground could have positive z values, or vice-versa. You could traverse between these playfields/coordinates via stairs/cave entrance just like the old game.

Each chunk could contain data for all playfields at the same x and y coordinates(kind of like how minecraft chunks go all the way down to the bottom of the world), eliminating the need to repeatedly unload and load chunks when switching playfields. This way, you just need to pull different tile and object data from each chunk depending on the value of z. The chunk object is always in memory, but not all of its data has to be. You would only have to load/unload chunks when the player moves around along the x and y axes.

If the player is at or above sea level, they will want to see the ground below and above them. I’m not sure how this could be done when each z level is a separate playfield. People might want to dig into a mountainside to make their base, and that wouldn’t be possible if you put everything at and above sea level into one playfield.

Either way, i look forward to the future changes.

Well 115 million is a chunk but 11 billion is a bigger chunk and i keep most of my assets in resources .
as I dont trust the game not to steel coins .
Has happened to me 4 or 5 times now bam coins are zero and wile its rare and may be fixed ill not chance it as even old bugs that are (( fixed )) still show up from time to time .

Ps bast has done a good job at reducing them and the agme plays great .95% of the time .

I have all of these except transcendent academy. It's been 1 real life week since my IQ stopped at 110 but a large chunk of my population is student in the high end buildings who has lots of teachers, but there is no progress and not a SINGLE colonist seem interested in some jobs.

All students and all teachers under view have no age, no happyness, no money number, all NaN style, so I suspect the game sorta simulate what it can't calculate individually --- but for some chunk of education that's done wrong.

And of course my population is terminally unhappy from being uneducated for the duration, except logically the teachers (I have max teachers in each school) but even calculating how many teachers I have in my small community college, the number of people unhappy from lack of education doesn't make sense since the requirements of that teacher job. It's same in all my education building types.

So where does the database help???

NONE of the buildings have a education/IQ gained by tick math on it. I can't know if one is 1000 times less efficient than the other, and how much 1 teacher is different from 0, and so on. GUESSWORK hasn't worked and having some of each never broke the 110 IQ limit.

There are currently 250 people in the small community college, whose IQ limit is 130, the teachers are maxxed and teachers require 130 IQ...

...yet since ALL students and ALL teachers in ALL education buildings have NaN stats, and are probably estimated from the non-simulated truly calculated individuals (of which there is none) then that means no education progress. IS THAT THE PROBLEM? Fire drills doesn't fix it. Killing simulated colonists doesn't fix it. 1 week of real life time doesn't fix it.

I looked at the entire database, there is no info in the database about education that isn't in the ingame information. The database does not have an "IQ" entry either. There is simply no way to know for sure ANYTHING about why my colony is stuck.

And oh, it's probably stuck at several undocumented levels simultaneously, but education is an obvious one.

Have been messing around with terrain generation for MC2. I am developing a world "seeding" mechanism, in which a unique seed will generate the exact same world terrain + biome placement every single time. In this way, not only can players share world seeds that they enjoy, but the game also does not have to internally store it's topography information, allowing for much smaller save file sizes given the potential "infinite" size of MC2 planet maps.


This is just a sample MC2 red planet with some ice patches, a few tiles of which are actually liquid surface water.

Anyway, I still have some work to do on terrain/biome generation, but if I can get it to always create the same thing every time with a given seed, it will cut down massively on the amount of data needed for save games, not to mention the amount of data which needs to be transferred from server to clients, as it would be a lot easier for the server to simply transfer a single seed string VS a bunch of compiled terrain data.

I still need to decide if lower-level terrain features, such as natural resource placements/rocks/trees/etc will also be determined by the seed, or if those would vary by game. I can't really let the client generate those based on the seed, since they will always be changing. For instance, trees can spread or be cut down, resources can be consumed, etc.

I have thought of other technical considerations as well. For example, if MC2 v1.0.0 ships with a Red Planet that has 5 available biomes, and then the v1.1.0 update comes along and adds 4 new biomes, the game seed may end up assigning incorrect biomes to different places. For example, if chunk x:y is designated as a winter tundra biome, but the new update changes the number of biomes, the generator may get confused and change chunk x:y into a canyon or something.

One solution would be to keep a record in the game file of all assigned biome locations, although the downside is the added data being stored in the game file. Another solution is to keep a list of available biomes in the game file that is stored when the game is created, and if new biomes are added, they will not be available on existing maps.

Anyway, these are the technical parts of MC2 I am working on before I even get into adding an interface, buildings, or rovers!

Today I am happy to announce a big new update to Epic Adventure - v0.12.0! My son has started playing a lot of Epic Adventure, and as such his demands for updates have become impossible to ignore, which in turn has placed Epic Adventure on a higher update priority than it has previously been, so expect a lot more from this game in the coming months. Until then though, let's take a look at all the changes in this release!

To start things off, crop farming has now arrived in Epic Adventure! Before, you could collect seeds from tall grass, and you could plow dirt with the hoe, but you just couldn't combine the two efforts into one. Now, you can plant those seeds in the dirt to produce a brand new entity - Wheat!


Once the wheat is ripe, you can harvest it, and using the crafting menu, six wheats can be converted into another new entity - Dough. Of course, what good is plain dough? Not very tasty. But wait, there has been a non-working object in the game from the very beginning, the furnace. Non-working until now, because the furnace is now fully operational, with the new furnace interface. Loading your furnace with the dough and a fuel source such as coal with convert your dough into another new entity, the delicious and edible Bread!


The last update to Epic Adventure added the first mob, Chickens, to the game, but you couldn't do anything with them. Sadly for the chickens, this has changed, as they can now be slaughtered using your weapon of choice. A few hits with an axe or pickaxe ought to do the trick.


The Chickens currently are a little over powered for what they are, so you will need some sort of weapon to kill them, but they will eventually be nerfed a bit. Regardless, killing a chicken will provide the new entity Raw Chicken and also a random chance to get another new entity, the Feather. There is no practical use for the Feather yet, but the Raw Chicken can be thrown into the furnace to create Cooked Chicken, which provides a great boost to your health and energy.

Speaking of health and energy, Death and Respawning are now fully implemented into the game. Eventually you will be able to create a bed to set a new spawn point, but for now the spawn point is locked at chunk 0x0x0. When you die, your inventory will dump at the site of your death and you will have to return to your body to collect everything. Premium users have the option to respawn at their body if they want to.


Going forward,, I plan on increasing the Epic Adventure update cycle from "whenever I feel like it" to once per month. A big part of creating a game is implementing all of the engine features, and once that is done, adding new content can go quick and easy, rapidly expanding the game. I am getting closer to the rapid content expansion phase, but there are still engine enhancements and changes I wish to implement first.

In a prior post, @Amorphus suggested the concept of rooms, towns, and limited visibility. For the most part, I agree with these concepts completely. Right now in the game, you can easily scroll around the map and see everything. I plan on changing the mechanics to something more resembling my game Gone Rogue, in which a player has a certain line of sight which is also blocked by walls and other obstacles. Additionally, caves and enclosed rooms are going to be dark, requiring torches in order see inside of them. I also plan on adding a day/night cycle to the overworld.

Farming needs to be expanded well beyond the current Wheat. There was a thread a while back with contributions from @Amorphus and @GeneralWadaling concerning Agriculture, and now that the basic engine mechanics of planting, harvesting, and cooking have been implemented, I plan on following many of the suggestions in that thread. Expect a lot more to come in the area of agriculture in the near future.

In this thread, @GeneralWadaling laid out a ton of suggestions regarding food and cooking, and many of these will be finding their way into the game shortly. Wadaling suggests a kitchen stove object, and I might implement that and change the furnace so that it just deals with smelting of metals (whenever I add metals to the game). I will also be adding the camp fire, which will allow cooking but will "burn out" after time.

v0.11.0 introduced engine capability for mobs (the chicken), and this update allows you to kill them. We also need mobs that fight back. Monsters, skeletons, bandits, etc. Look forward to all of these things. That's not all though, because Epic Adventure needs some dungeons to explore. My plan is to repurpose the dungeon generation routines I wrote for both Gone Rogue and Dungeon Infinity in order to have random dungeons to appear on the map that you can loot and explore. Dungeons will be filled with items, treasure, and monsters and will give the player the chance to kind more items, gear, and to gain experience and level up, which are two more concepts headed to the game.

There also needs to be a lot more biome types, including the introduction of Water. There is already a little bit of code in the engine to support water (including accelerated crop growth when near water), but there is no actual water in the game. This will be changing. You will also be able to build ditches/trenches to move water from one location to another.

One thing that really bothers me about Epic Adventure is how only one chunk of the world is rendered at a time and you cannot manipulate objects in nearby chunks. I plan to make the world more seamless (like how it works in My Colony 2) to where the entire world feels like one continuous thing instead of something broken up into chunks.

Anyway, I have a lot of plans for Epic Adventure and I think that things are going to start happening a lot faster in this game now going forward. If you have suggestions on things you would like to see, feel free to let me know here in the forum, and let me know what bugs you find too. Beyond that, thanks for playing Epic Adventure and stay tuned because a whole lot more is on the way!

And if you haven't tried Epic Adventure yet, you can play in on the Web, through the Ape Apps Launcher, or find it on various app stores.

#epicadventure #dungeoninfinity #gonerogue

The gameplay mechanics:
[*] The player will spawn near chunk 0:0 (up to chunk [+-2:+-2])
[*] The player will start with a lander, with food, water, wheels and a wooden pickaxe. The lander texture will depend on the faction.
[*] The player will have to harvest stone, until they find an ore block. These blocks can either be under the surface or in the form of an terranean deposit, which contains 5000 ore. There will also be harvestable gold, aluminum, diamond, obsidian, and/or trees (see requirements below). The player can also harvest dirt, but it counts as a loss of biomass (1 ton).
[*] The requirements for plants and dirt to appear is 272-374 K heat, 0.1 to 1.9 bar atmosphere, 10% to 32% (100‰ to 320‰) oxygen, and 37.5% to 75% water. The player must terraform to these values.
[*] The player must build terraforming buildings to terraform the planet. These structures require people to operate, otherwise operated manually by the player.
[**] Population can be added via shelters.
[*] There will be an power resource, in which the player has to build a small solar panel (the solar panel provides 8 power, while the lander provides 3 power)
[*] There will be space ports (also spaceports) that the player will build. It gives access to satellites, and gives the player money. Mines also exist.
[**] Money may also be obtained using mines. There are different kinds of metals the player can mine:
[***] Ore - Very common, Very low price
[***] Gold - Common, Low price
[***] Aluminum - Average, Average
[****] Has a 5% chance to mine pure steel (al only)
[***] Uranium - Rare, High price
[***] Diamond - Very rare, Very high price
Mining mechanics:
These mines can let the player gain resources and money, depending on how many the metal density is there, e.g if you have 4737 ore in a mine, you will get $473.7 and 4737 ore if the entire mine is completed. The mine can store a maximum of 1000 resources if level 1, 2000 for level 2, 3000 for level 3, 4000 for level for, etc. The maximum levels for mines is 10. This is also the max level for buildings. More will be shown later. Thanks!

Hi. I propose an feature being added into the game, called native civilizations. These civilizations are spread all across the planet and the natives are involved in housing, commerciality, trade, resources and diplomacy. You will interact with civilizations, but not control. I wanted this because I was inspired from my terraforming game.

There will be 3 non-random native factions (LIS, Zolarg, Alpha Draconia), and a bunch of scattered randomly named civilizations. A chance of a player finding a non-faction native civilization will have a 1 in 100 chance, meanwhile finding faction is 1 in 10 chance. The natives, especially factions, will be implemeted with an AI that makes the civ mine, build and research.

Here are the required conditions for faction-controlled natives:
[*]There should only be one of the either: Independent State, Zolarg, Draconia
[*]The civilization must be within 16 chunks of 0:0 (-16:-16 to 16:16)
[*]The civilization should have medium resource density near them
[*]The civilization must start out with 1 civilization center, 5 civilization pavements connecting to the first civilization shelter, 1 civilization center, and 1 civilization rover. The civilization will start with 3 people.
[*]The civilization must not within be 1 chunk of the player spawning chunk
[*]The player cannot build inside the civilization's boundaries. They may, however, surround the civilization with another one made by the player.

The civilization buildings cannot be built, because as stated, they are controlled by an AI. An deposit marked as an civilization deposit (by a civilization rover or a civilization marker) cannot be mined by the player. I also encourage research, money and civics in the civilizations.

Here are the buildings and vehicles of the civilization:
[Name of civilization: LIS/Zolarg/Draconian/other] [Civilization [Name]]
Center* (smelts $1 into 2 civics every 3000 ticks; 1000 ticks with all workers)
Shelter
Greenhouse
Water Pump
Solar Panel
Light Post
Pavement
Ore Refinery
Food Silo
Ore Fracking Operation
Internet Relay Booth (generates 1 research every 5500 ticks)
Mint (smelts 1 gold into $10 every 1000 ticks; 333.33 ticks with all workers)
Barracks
Research Lab
Construction Yard
More in this list will be shown later. I need suggentios, please reply. Thank you!

In time for the weekend, My Colony 2 has just been updated to v0.27.0 and should be hitting all platforms shortly! This update has a critical fix that might actually end up killing some existing colonies, so you are going to want to read on to find out what's new!


First for the big change. As I was implementing one of the new buildings for this update (the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory), I noticed that during it's production cycle, it was not consuming any Alien Artifacts. I tweaked with the building in the game editor a bit, and still no consumption. Upon further investigation, I noticed that no building was consuming any resources, and it's been like this all along!

How I missed such an obvious flaw is beyond me, although I don't know if anybody else really noticed it either. It's easy to overlook a bug that actually benefits you, I suppose. Looking back though, stockpiling resources did always seem a bit easier in MC2 as compared to MC1.

Anyway, I went ahead and fixed the issue, loaded up my main colony, and it immediately died. Stockpiles of Ore, Gold, Wood, Charcoal, Crystalline, Rum, Uranium, you name it, all quickly evaporated. My settlements had been running so long on a balance based on zero resource consumption, I never built up the necessary production and gathering capabilities to handle the industrial output. Needless to say, it pretty much brought my entire colony to a standstill. Not only that, but since I had several settlements connected to the same resource pool using trade depots, every single one was brought down to a grinding halt!

It actually took me several hours to recover my game from this calamity. In fact, the fix required me to alter the stats of several buildings, because it became plain once resource consumption was factored in that many buildings were either under producing or over consuming resources. Because of this, production and consumption stats have been altered in this update for the Sugar Extraction Lab, Tree Farm, Charcoal Factory, Uranium Enrichment Facility, Canteen, Gold Synthesis Lab, Ore Fracking Operation, and Rum Distillery. I think I have a reasonable balance going right now, but of course there are likely things that I have overlooked. If you find structures that need rebalanced because of this changed, either buffed or nerfed in some way, let me know in the comments to this post.

Now, while I was trying to figure out this new balance, it was actually quite difficult to do at the beginning, as My Colony 2 lacks detailed resource consumption/production stats like you would find in My Colony 1. At least it did lack those stats, as this update now adds a new Resources tab to the Statistics window!


As in My Colony 1, you can select each resource to see the breakdown on which buildings are providing/using a specific resource, which is a huge help when trying to work out and balance your settlement production levels.


Of course, the resource stats are not exactly, and cannot be exactly as they are in MC1, due to the nature of resource pools in MC2. Resources in this game are not kept per-player or even per settlement, but are rather stored in dynamic "pools" that can change as time goes on based on the existence of logistics stations, outposts and other such structures. This made putting together the stats collection and reporting a bit more difficult than it was in MC1, but it's mostly working here now. To view the stats of a resource pool, you have to move your camera/viewport to a settlement first, and you will be shown the stats for the resource pool that you are currently active in. At some point I will probably make it possible to view a list of all resource pools and which settlements they are connected to, I just have not gotten to it yet.

Moving along, this update brought a few big changes to roads, changes that I started working on a few updates ago and neglected to finish until now.

Firstly, roads with either production or consumption properties (such as the Solar Road) are now finally functional. Prior to this update, you could build a huge Solar Road network with 200 tiles, and it would only produce power based on the first tile placed. Now, they work as you would expect.

Next, Roads are now actually factored in to the path finder, and their "drive speed modification" stats now actually work! You may or may not have noticed, but before this update roads had basically no impact on what your Rovers did, other than providing an aesthetic look. Roads are now fully functional, and will work in basically the same manner as they do in MC1.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you can no build roads (and some other structures) anywhere you want, no settlement required!


Wouldn't it be nice to build a big beautiful highway connecting all of your settlements together? You couldn't do it before, but you can now! Roads can now be built anywhere, as long as you have an appropriate Rover in range. The resources used to pay for the roads will come from your closest settlement to the road in question (the closes settlement owned by the player building the road). The only restriction is that you can not build a road in a chunk/settlement that is "owned" by another player.

The Game Editor now also allows you to specify other buildings, besides roads, that can be built out-of-settlement. The only one right now is the Commemorative Plaque, since I figured it would nice to be able to place signs along the side of your highways.

Moving along, I did a lot of focus and work on performance optimizations in this release. When a map had larger settlements, the game was starting to get so laggy (at least on my M1 Mac) that it was barely playable anymore, so something had to be done. Obviously there is always more performance work to be done, but here are some of the changes so far.

Firstly, I reduced the radius of chunks that are generated around the camera, and I lowered the time that it takes before the engine clears out chunks that are no longer active around the camera. This provides a pretty large reduction in memory usage when you are in a big settlement, as it can reduce the number of .vpp models loaded in memory significantly. At some point I will probably make this a setting in the Engine Settings window, so people with epic desktop computers and RTX video cards can turn their chunk render distance way up if they want to, but since most players right now are using a smart phone, I decided to lower the default setting.

Speaking of default settings, most of the "pretty" engine settings, such as Anti Aliasing, Depth of Field, Dynamic Shadows, Fancy Water, etc, are now turned off by default. These you can always just turn back on in the settings menu if your machine can handle them, but I wanted the default settings to be low so that a new player wont get in the game and immediately experience lag if they are using a lower end machine.

A lot of improvements have also been made to the server code, which runs on a separate thread from the renderer. There was a pretty big issue where the game server would lag down hard if you had a ton of rovers in your game, since every "tick" a rover checks to see if it should be building something or not. To address this, the server now keeps track of whether or not there are actually buildings under construction, and so Rovers will only check if they should be building when there is actually something to build. Makes sense, right?

Moving along, since the last update introduced the Excavator and digging, it basically became possible to turn the Desert World map into a little water world by digging out your own lakes and rivers. Because of this, it only made sense to allow all of the water based structures and units to be constructed on the desert map.


You are now free to terraform your Desert World map into the holiday paradise that your colonists have been yearning for.

Next up, this update adds the classic Crystalbot from MC1, and with it comes the ability to create and grow Synthetic Crystalline Deposits. Be careful though, because the Synthetic Crystalline is a cancer that is as aggressive as ever, so I would suggest not building it too close to your settlement...


My original inspiration for Crystalline (back in MC1) was the Tiberium from Command and Conquer, a substance that provides power but that also spreads and can become an environmental catastrophe. For this reason, you need to take extra precautions when dealing with the synthetic stuff, as it can easily get out of hand if you let it.

I think I mentioned earlier in this post that the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory has been added to the game. This along with the Crystalline stuff requires two new techs, Ancient Alien Manufacturing and Crystalline Synthesis. I also added the new Luxury Townhome, a decorative housing unit for Premium players.

Since I was on the topic of new Research, I will mention the final engine change to this update. Players who are either in a hurry or want to speed through a new game can now instant-unlock new research using Ape Coins. Like I mentioned in the last My Colony 1 release notes, I am going to be looking for better ways to monetize the My Colony games without resorting to heavy advertising, and this seemed like a reasonable way that is totally optional and does not fundamentally change the game for existing players.

So all in all, this was a pretty big update for My Colony 2. I would suggest that all players be careful when they first open their games after the update, and to comb over your settlements and their research stats, because there will probably be things you need to change, particularly if you have an older established colony.

Moving forward, my near-term plans are to continue expanding the Alien/Quantum tech trees. I am also going to be bringing a Galactic Board of Trade to My Colony 2 in some form (gotta work out the details on that one), and I will also probably be adding a Spice World (not related to the Spice Girls) to implement some of the Spice suggestions from @Architecture1134 and others. There is also a lot coming soon to the original My Colony and to Colony Wars, but more on those another day. All in all, a lot of excitement coming to the My Colony Universe of games, and I should probably put together another episode of the My Colony Podcast to discuss it all. But until then, check out the new update, enjoy, have a good weekend, let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, and stay tuned for more!

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

#mycolony2

[[1]]
I have a new map mode suggestion, apart from regular single city and region. In this mode, the map is infinite.
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Core Functions:

There will be obviously render distance, similar to MC2. You can adjust this in the engine settings and variable can be 50x50, 100x100, 200x200, and 500x500 for those high end pcs. This settings is for ingame, buildable, interactable setting.

For when you do move (pan up, down, left, right), the game will decompile/compile to load those size-controlled chunks. This process will happen in the background, similar to when the game autosaves in the background, so that you can still move around and stuff, not be stuck waiting for chunks to load.
The way the resources will come in from other compiled chunks is that the game will calculate the buildings' resource production and add upon the resource stat. The time interval for each time the game adds the resource can be how it is collected when you are in region view, but I figured that it could be 8 times faster intervals ((theUsualRegionResourceStatTimer) / 8), or it can be 4 times fast intervals, or engine settings (2x, 4x, 8x, up to 16x). This though depends on performance reasoning, so if you decide just to stick with 4x faster than region collection timer, it's fine.

When you load the game save, have it so it's like region view so that you can easily go to that chunk instead of loading into the game right away and move to that spot while it decompiles/compiles. These chunks from region view can be a simple 100x100 chunk distance between each other, so not necessary engine settings. It's good for you to have region view so that you can practically 'teleport' to that part of this infinite map conveniently better.
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My Reasoning For This:

The reason why I want this cool mode because I always thought and wished of having it and I thought it won't be a whole another long project, as it only requires a few extra functions. I always wanted to just build those ore refineries forever and ever in those lines lol, and ofcourse watching my steel go up, making the game really fun for the user. Also, it could be a potential premium feature or not, this is obviously up to you.
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Questions From U Guys And Developer Bast:

If there are any questions or problems as you think it might be hard to develop this feature, let me know so I can help and hopefully find a solution.
I hope this might be popular. :)

Last thing, I did see RekEm1999's post ( https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=44761 ), much later after this thought of this feature. I hope this could be a better solution, because it would be buggy if region maps' grid overlaps or something when switching cities, so that I want to point out, but overall idea, I'm with RekEm1999.
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[[2]] QOL Improvements:

Add upgrade for Potato Patch (Potato patch to Advanced Hydroponics),
Add upgrade for Charcoal compactor (Charcoal compactor to Charcoal converter),
Add upgrade for Charcoal pile (Charcoal pile to Subterranean Charcoal Cavern).

It will be cool to see when you are building, you can click on one corner and click on some other side (kind of Voxel Paint's fill option) and you can build mass amounts of buildings quickly and conveniently. I think it would be a great addition to the building category, as for some people in region cities would like to just easily build building blueprints using less time.
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[[3]] Additive Content (Not majorly suggesting):

Add tiers for:

- Ore Refinery,
- Microchip Factory,
- Textile Mill,
- Ant Paste Synthesizer,
- Charcoal Converter,
- Gold Synthesis Lab,
- Cloning Facility,
- Shipyard,
- Helium Nanomine (if you not planing with Gold Synthesis Lab or other buildings, but recommended not
to do this buildings (Helium Nanomine) to find reason for other buildings individual uniqueness in
resource production),
- Any other building I missed that is tiered from a previous building, obviously not all buildings,
- Obviously not all buildings will get upgrades.
- Tech for these buildings will be in Simulated Fabrication (The 35B Research one).

Overall point is that this 'simulated colony' is fabricated virtual resources and is sending it to the real colony.
Building themes (colors, etc) can relate to Simulated buildings like Nanite Factory and Software Studio.
Some existing buildings might be adjusted (example: Brick Factory, being very vigorous in it's fast production) to balance out the game and have that feel of My Colony - ness.

Again, not wanting this 'upgrade tier' feature, but a potential.
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Have a good day!

Notes: Important Targets for this suggestion: Only [[1]] and [[2]].

Well if you build 30 clone factory that will out preform 100 landing pads so if your still stuck with no colonists arriving this will get around that .
Heck my main had 35 colony factory's and No landing pads and i can add ten k colonists and they arrive twice as fast as the 100 pads i had did .
As for not building yes that happens from time to time a reload usually fixes it .
Ill tell you what i did once when I had that problem but its extreme .
Be sure you have the bot factory and if you have drones ( plastic factory builds them .
Then destroy all drones and bots and build all new ones .
It is extreme but it worked for me I even had to destroy all the alien bots lost a chunk on that .
The not being able to change jobs is a bug that is known and a fix is on the way .
I found it is best to limit miners and builders working at once . Limit is high but if you have 3 types of builders and the two types of miners all going at once even now it does cause lag .
I switch to the buildngs that produce gold or ore or reg as soon as possible my self .

colbya said:Well if you build 30 clone factory that will out preform 100 landing pads so if your still stuck with no colonists arriving this will get around that .
Heck my main had 35 colony factory's and No landing pads and i can add ten k colonists and they arrive twice as fast as the 100 pads i had did .
As for not building yes that happens from time to time a reload usually fixes it .
Ill tell you what i did once when I had that problem but its extreme .
Be sure you have the bot factory and if you have drones ( plastic factory builds them .
Then destroy all drones and bots and build all new ones .
It is extreme but it worked for me I even had to destroy all the alien bots lost a chunk on that .
The not being able to change jobs is a bug that is known and a fix is on the way .
I found it is best to limit miners and builders working at once . Limit is high but if you have 3 types of builders and the two types of miners all going at once even now it does cause lag .
I switch to the buildngs that produce gold or ore or reg as soon as possible my self .

Does it matter the number of people in the cloning facilities?

Forcedminer said:sounds like a dangerous way to risk owning alot of money to another colony or possibly until a AI government.
I like it.
hope loansharking doesn't become a thing if its added. :P

Thanks @Forcedminer, I agree that there would be a big risk, and that would become part of the challenge of the gameplay. I think it would be cool to make a money focused colony and build up a reputation for loaning money to other commonwealths with reasonable interest. If a colony were to build up its reputation to where they have loans out to maybe 40-50 people, they could get a nice chunk of income.

There would have to be consequences though, since if there aren't any, people could just loan money and never pay it back. You could do several things, but I think that giving each colony a reputation score on their website would do the trick. That reputation score would be listed by that colony's name should it happen to appear in the randomized charter list that you get when you are starting a new game. And, I would also make it appear on embassy stats and requests to build embassies. That way, if one commonwealth start to cheat another commonwealth, that lending commonwealth can add a demerit to the lendee commonwealth's reputation. I would only allow the lending commonwealth to tack on one merit or demerit per day though so that you can't spam demerit and completely crush someone's reputation or spam merit and give them the best reputation in the world. I would also have each payment that you pay correctly automatically add a merit to your reputation and each time you refuse a payment or try to pay and don't have enough money, it would add a demerit.

I'm thinking of a posetive/negative system. When a colony first starts out, they start out with 0 reputation. However, if they are merited or demerited by their commonwealth or other commonwealths, their reputation will go positive or negative. I would give a range of -1000 to 1000 so that it would take some time for a colony to build up a fully good or bad reputation. 1 demerit/denouncement would lower it by 1 point, and one merit/praise would raise it by 1.

This could also detirmine how much of a loan that colony can take out, but if that is too complicated, it isn't a necessary feature. So all in all, if you have an awesome reputation score, you will get more sub-colonies to your commonwealth, people are more likely to loan to you, and you can loan a bigger amount with better interest rates, and you also have more leeway to screw up. Whereas if your reputation is bad, you won't get any subcolonies to your commonwealth and nobody will loan you anything, or at least not anything with a reasonable interest rate.

What do ya think?

i am experiencing the same thing on a larger scale. i dont have screenshots right now bc im posting quickly between work at my job but...basically what you have going on is the same for me but mine is amplified. i hav about 7k colonists and it always "says" i have like 200 jobs not filled and yet there is unemployment lol. i believe that the economy page is a bit broken atm. and i never did a fire drill thank god (last time i did my colonists broke). i belive that a workaround (for me anyways) has been to just build slowly for now. see if a building fills with workers. if it has workers missing=population too low. and then add housing accordingly. but remember it takes a minute or two for colonists to even get there if wandering. beck may be reworking the economy page of statistics. sometimes its hard to tell what hes working on.
but honestly this could be him working to make it seem more realistic and sporadic? because in america there are jobs not filled :) and still a large chunk of unemployment lol. im curious what the creator himself would say to this. can we expect more chaotic colonist behavior? or rather finite information with employment and such being very clear?
html 5 version on a windows pc.

well alien Aluminium plant makes it but first you need dig sites to get the artifacts you would need .
Starting game is about gaining resources not profet .
First you need the resources ( investment ) then you reap the profits .
you want to speed it up buy teh al from glatic freight build digsites 100 of them in 2 days you have enough arts to build al plants and sell at 2.5 million per 1 k .
The first investment takes a a chunk .
But done right in less then a weeks time from start you can have a colony that brings in 5 k arts a hour ( that is were the real money is .
and once you can build teh star gate you can export most anything for quick coins .

Trying to implement floor and ceiling casting into the engine. Currently takes a pretty big chunk out of performance though. Next time I make an FPS game I will probably use one of the WebGL engines.

Sorry for necro, but I preferred not making another thread as this issue still seems to happen in version 0.67.

Another colony, 100% approval, people mad of homelessness, depression and unemployment even with more houses and jobs than there are people. And yes, I know how the chart works, but what happens when all people aren't mad of anything? It just falsely claims that people are mad for a random reason? Why?

With a small ish colony (round 400 colonists) and 100% rating it should mean that there are only a maximum of 4 people mad. Some calculations tell me that the chart ratios dont really fit well with just that few people.

Immigration disabled for a decent chunk of time so that the graph can't show the unhappiness of past immigrants (as you mentioned), and still happens.

Don't mind the fatigue lol, workplaces are rather far away as I have 4 districts for my colony: housing, government and entertainment, light industry, heavy industry. A light work policy just zeroes out all fatigue as it seems.

Yeah I agree with this. The Commonwealth chat takes up a decent chunk of the screen so I normally don't have it open but I can't tell if I get any messages so I can respond quickly. If there was some notification over the button that sort of flashes a little to get your attention or something to that effect would be nice.

Well, mc encountered a setback. Mc was crashing so much in android phones that the game was blacklisted by google play store. this took a large chunk of bast's profit away from mc, so updates started coming much slower. I even stopped playing mc for a time as well. But then, mc is making a slow comeback in my opinion. It seems that on top of trying to resolve the android issues, he's coming up with new ways to make mc more valuable, like adding a regions feature, which I've actually suggested before. He also plans to add textures that run through the maps of a region.

I think that mc needs to make a full come back before we start seeing things like federations added to the game, since the forum is still pretty dead and there wouldn't be many people to actually fill the federations.

Amorphus said:Well, mc encountered a setback. Mc was crashing so much in android phones that the game was blacklisted by google play store. this took a large chunk of bast's profit away from mc, so updates started coming much slower. I even stopped playing mc for a time as well. But then, mc is making a slow comeback in my opinion. It seems that on top of trying to resolve the android issues, he's coming up with new ways to make mc more valuable, like adding a regions feature, which I've actually suggested before. He also plans to add textures that run through the maps of a region.

I think that mc needs to make a full come back before we start seeing things like federations added to the game, since the forum is still pretty dead and there wouldn't be many people to actually fill the federations.

ah, I see. I was also gone for a while, so I missed this stuff.

Amorphus said:Well, mc encountered a setback. Mc was crashing so much in android phones that the game was blacklisted by google play store. this took a large chunk of bast's profit away from mc, so updates started coming much slower. I even stopped playing mc for a time as well. But then, mc is making a slow comeback in my opinion. It seems that on top of trying to resolve the android issues, he's coming up with new ways to make mc more valuable, like adding a regions feature, which I've actually suggested before. He also plans to add textures that run through the maps of a region.

I think that mc needs to make a full come back before we start seeing things like federations added to the game, since the forum is still pretty dead and there wouldn't be many people to actually fill the federations.

except this is all premium stuff and doesn't help non premium players!

Sometimes you need to manually post 100+ things to SELL in a row, and then once you run out of the stuff you accidentally post 180+ BUY at the same price accidentally.

The "sell" button shouldn't disappear when you run out of stuff, it should BECOME GREY so that distracted people posting 100+ things don't accidentally buy what they want to sell PRETTY MUCH 3-4 TIMES A WEEK FOR A LARGE CHUNK OF THEIR INCOME LOST.

The fact you can't take your own deals only adds to the frustration

DillGuy9 said:@Amorphus The new map for United Earth does not have a base road.

The Fisher shack is producing electricity currently, so I don't think that is right.

I agree with the salt, decorations, and botanists.

As in water wall, I mean a wall that can be built in water.

For sedimentary rock, a few resources are in a small clump where you can mine them. I will elaborate later.

Thanks

no problem man, didn't notice that the shack was producing electricity. Yeah that does seem right. Walls that can be built over water would be a nice addition, I can see other people using those to build decorative bays are ports. I can understand the idea of sedimentary rock, being able to mine all of the basic resources from one mine/chunk. This could work, but I would make it so that the first resource has to be depleted in order for rovers to start gathering the second resource, and the same for the third and fourth.

Well I for one like the idea. I think that Magnus and forgotmypass are thinking around the same concept, but stacking multiple entities into one would definately save on RAM.

It also could be that bast isn't using spacial hashing when it comes to the bots. Spacial hashing is when an object(rover/worker) basically only looks at the tiles of the map that it needs to, like the areas immediately around where it is and where it needs to go, in order to path-find to a target tile.

Regular spacial coding forces each object to check every tile in the map for obstacles to it's path before the end of every game tick while it's moving. It happens very quickly, so a few bots don't make a difference, but once you build lots of them, you see a major difference because each bot is performing millions of processes per second opposed to only thousands with spacial hashing. I don't know how to do this spacial hashing myself, but I know that the technique exists and the concept behind it.

Why do you think in games like minecraft that the game doesn't slow to a crawl when you have thousands of items on the ground from where you've mined out an entire quarry in the ground with your instant-mining tool? Those items aren't checking every block of every chunk that you have loaded on every tick. It's because all of those items only look at the tiles/blocks around them to decide whether it should fall down, stay still, or be pushed around. Granted, pathfinding is a little more complex, but it is still possible to use pathfinding in combination with spacial hashing, but it would be more difficult of a challenge.

Ooh, this sounds promising @basteklein. How deep into crafting are you hoping to go? Will you be adding ways to automate some things? Will there be a leveling and class system? If this game becomes popular, do you think you would go as far as giving us the ability to travel to other planets/dimensions?

Speaking of infinite lower levels, you could also have infinite higher levels as well . Would be cool if the first floor of a building can be a part of the world map so you can pass right through the first floor of a building without having to go to another map, while upper and lower levels would have to be in separate maps. Instead of adding a map for every single staircase that a map has, just have each staircase or hole lead to the same level. for example, If you are building multiple two story houses on one map and you climb up to the second floor of one house, you should be able to see the second floor of the other houses, since they are all in the same level. This keeps all of the levels going up uniformely, creating a "column" of maps that exist one on top of the other and with the same amount of space.

I also like the fact that you can move into a new room when you get to the edge of a room, that could make different biome generation easy because you just need to designate the biome for each room and generate different things based on each biome. We could also do with a chunk map that shows all of the rooms/chunks that we've been in and the biome types of each. The map should focus the room that the player is in at the center so that you always know what's around you, but sooner or later we will want to be able to zoom out further and pan around the map, especially if we've done a lot of exploring. If you are planning to add at least a minimal amount of automation, I recommend being able to keep a number of rooms loaded(but not visible) in a radius around you so you have room to move while your automations do their thing, or what if only the column that you are in was loaded, so that automations above and below you can operate.

What are the texture specs so we can contribute to decorations? Would be neat to work on floor and wall types, resource images, plants, and other terrain types. I especially want to work on resources, I have many ideas for them.

I have an idea for a resource chain that you might like below. The chain leads you through the main crafting materials of the game, and some of the main buildings and furnature that could be added.

flooring: plank floor
flooring: cobble floor
wall: plank wall
wall: log wall
wall: cobble wall
furniture: wooden chair - should be able to sit in the chair, food grants bonus hunger points when eaten whilst sitting in a chair and health regeneration should slightly increase while sitting. Food should grant even more bonus hunger points if you sit in a chair that's facing a table while eating it.
furniture: wooden table
furniture: torch - crafted from sticks and coal. obviously spreads light in the darkness. that's if you are planning on adding light.

overworld structure - gravel pile - mined to obtain gravel, and sometimes flint
cave block: gravel - mined to obtain gravel, and drops flint more often.
item: gravel - used mainly for pathing
flooring: gravel path
item: - flint - used in many crafting recipes

furniture: furnace - basic cooking and smelting - requires stone and flint

cave block: coal ore - mined to obtain coal
item: coal: 1 coal can smelt 4(?) items. can be obtained by smelting wood in a furnace or mining coal ore in caves

cave block: copper ore - can be mined to obtain copper ore
item: copper ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain copper
item: copper - used in many crafting recipes.

cave block: iron ore - can be mined to obtain iron ore
item: iron ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain iron
item: iron- used in many crafting recipes.

cave block: gold ore - can be mined to obtain gold ore
item: gold ore - smelt in a furnace to obtain gold
item: gold- used in many crafting recipes .
item: gold coin - the main game currency, one gold ingot crafts into multiple coins.

furniture: forge - tier 2 smelting, only accepts coke for fuel - requires 1 furnace, lots of iron
item: coke - 1 coal refines into 1 coak in a furnace, used for forging steel from iron and iron ore, and 1 coke item smelts 1 item in the forge, this is to make steel a bit harder to obtain at first.
item: steel - used in many crafting recipes

furniture: alloy forge: a more efficient smelter with 2 inputs and 2 output slots. made with a forge and lots of steel. 1 coke smelts 2 items. If the right combination of 2 items are inserted and smelted, a new material is created, but if two items that won't mix are inserted, the alloy forge will act like a double furnace, smelting both items at once into their normal products.

item: antanium - a mixture of steel and gold, a very durable material. used in many crafting recipes

That's as far as I've gotten Obviously, each metal should have it's own set of tools and armor built from it, and each tier of tools are faster and more durable that the others. You can mix this up and complicate the process as much as you want, I was just trying to provide a skeleton plan for you to build off of in case you didn't have one yet.

Anyway, hope you like at least some of these ideas, let us know about the texture specs.

I have to preface this by saying this is mostly a pet peeve than a legitimate feature, however I think this could make the game feel a tad more diverse and vivid. I believe ore should be renamed to iron ore or perhaps just iron. My main reason for this is that over time more and more metallic and mineral resources have been added with unique names and uses, yet the one you see the most of and stays with you perpetually throughout the game now matter what planet or species you play on or as, ore is just generic ore. As for why it should be renamed to iron, it already looks like a chunk of iron ore currently, which would prevent the need for any retexture. Another reason is that the second most frequent use of ore is to be turned in to steel. And to make steel in real life, what do you need? That's right, iron (and a little hit of carbon but it's very minute). Overall though, I feel ore is too generic a name and needs updated to fit the much more specific names of pretty much every other resource.

It would be nice if federations had a purpose in game instead of being a symbolic group of colonies. I have made a list of features that I think should be added to federations in My Colony 1 or 2.

1. Federation territory: federations should have the ability to control a section of space on the the my colony grid map. Perhaps they could annex ungoverned space using starships. All colonies located in the fed territory will have to abide by fed rules, even if they are not a part of the federation. This means the federation would be able to tax all subservient colonies and commonwealths, impose restrictions on their production capabilities, and more.

2. Fed wars: to make the game more dynamic, federations should have the option to go to war with each other to gain territory. When 2 feds declare war on each other, they will each send star ships to start attacking each other. The starships will be sent out in batches and controlled by players in each federation. In order to capture territory you must fly your starships over enemy territory for 5 minutes, after which a chunk of the territory will be siezed. There are 3 ways to end a war, 1st is to surrender, and let the other side take full control, the 2nd is to negotiate an end, and the third is to capture the the main colony of the commonwealth that is currently leading the opposing fed resulting in a complete victory. If you choose the second option you will still lose some territory but your fed will not be erased from existence, like if you where to surrender.

3. Federation eez and other economic features: federations should offer some kind of economic zone where all members can trade freely and establish colonies without fear of them being annexed. This will give players another reason to join federations, especially new players who still need help to Jumpstart their economy.

Thats all I have for now, tell me what you think in the comments.

What would be such specific actions? Would a fed be intra-server or inter-server?

I don't know if in-game federations would be relevant in MC2, because a server is already like a Commonwealth (maybe even completely shared resources), so you players join a fed independently of their server? Or would the entire server join a fed? As the servers are decentralized, the latter would be rather hard to do.

The analogy we could make is:

MC 1	MC 2
City	Chunk ?
Commonwealth	Planet (one whole server)
In-game Federation	Community-made (not in game) cross-server trade agreements

One more, with the draw dist turned up. Still performs pretty well, there are several hundred chunks loaded at once in all directions, and I was originally planning on having the default draw distance set to 2 or 3 chunks (with a chunk being 32x32 area). Really makes it seem like you landed all alone on a big empty world. I want to play the game now!

The bad performance with large maps in MC1 was largely from the combination of pathfinding/rovers and sprite rendering, and not necessarily related to the server. The primary reason for decentralizing MC2 is to allow multiple players to build on a single planet. This would require a lot more server capacity VS MC1. The real question, is if that feature is even necessary? Does going decentralized add a lot of unneeded headaches for a feature that may or may not be that great?

I think that decentralized infinite maps will oddly perform better than the current small map + region model. The reason is that, although unseen by the player, this model is somewhat similar to the region model anyway, at least in the way I envision it. The planet is broken into "chunks" of some fixed size, perhaps 32x32 tiles, and at any one time the game is only "actively" processing your "chunk" and the ones surrounding your current camera position. The others are still being updated, but at a lower less intensive level. And your client is not rendering them anyway.

Also in MC2, most of the game logic will be occurring on a separate background thread, which should in and of itself afford a significant performance boost.

Finally, using WebGL instead of the software canvas should improve performance even further.

Whether it is centralized or decentralized, I do think performance will be a lot better than MC1. The main bottleneck will be in allowing multiple players to build on the same map, since on some level you will need to keep all players in sync, and one player with a slow device or connection could kill it for everybody. Now, since the game isn't as fast paced as, say Colony Wars, you may be able to let one client fall behind, but it could become an issue if players are right next to each other.

Actually the game could just as easily have both options. If the clients are not using modded content anyway, what does it matter if you are in a one player game or a planet with multiple people? If basically all the centralized server is doing is managing trade routes and resource prices, any un-modded non-creative game type should be able to connect.

Well no matter what there will not be a centralized server for "building-in-the-same-map" multiplayer, as I cannot afford that kind of infrastructure. That would only work decentralized. I am fine with still allowing decentralized multiplayer, as it would not be overly difficult to implement, it just requires the understanding that other players would not be able to connect when the host is offline.

Thinking of the lag, I think it would only really be a major issue if two people were building right next to each other at the same time. If the server only transmits to the client the information needed for the current "chunk" of the map that the client is currently focused on, it wouldn't really matter so much if a client was lagging behind. It's when you get several players all building in the same area that issues would start to arise.

I guess it really depends on how much info needs to actually transmit between server and client. For example, if all rover activity is just simulated client-side, then no path information would have to cross the network, which would be the majority of the network activity if the current version of My Colony was online. Really, the client wouldn't even need to know any of the stats for any of the buildings until the player selects one. So it's hard telling. Really the biggest issue is going to be when the host player is offline. That is really going to bug people.

Love to see work on MC2 is doing great! Can't wait to see more :P

As for the problem with terrain generation and save files size, go simple and save the terrain. It would be too painful for long time players to not be able to profit from new features.

What you could do to save some space is instead of saving the entire terrain (all the blocks) you just save the version at which the chunk was generated, and from that the game would figure out which biomes did exist at that time, and get the correct terrain (just like it was generated the first time). Does that make sense ?