Ape Apps

Bulldozer, but 2x2. A powerful excavator that can reshape the surface of your settlement or bore into the ground to find buried mineral deposits.

Pretty soon you are going to be able to dig out the hills in MC2, which will make new resources appear. Sometimes the resources will be the standard stuff that is on the surface, but you might end up finding things that are more rare (alien artifacts?). Of course, as you can see from the pic, there are still glitches to work out..


Thanks to @spamdude for the excavator model!

If you were wishing for back-to-back My Colony game updates this week then you are in luck, because right off of the heals of the MC1 update from the other day comes the v0.26.0 update for My Colony 2! What's new in this release? Let's find out!


This update brings some pretty large changes to the engine code, which means that new bugs could be showing up, so please let me know if you find things that are broken. I have added support for modifying the terrain heights that are generated by the world seed, which itself constituted a pretty large change to the base code. A new concept of "subterranean resources" has been implemented, where there are now resources present under ground as well as on the surface. Several new scripting flag types and scenarios have been added to the game, and the engine now supports techs that cannot be unlocked through research, but by some triggered game event. All of these engine features are available now in this update in various forms.

First we introduce a new resource for this update, Alien Artifacts, which we all know and love from MC1. Getting them though is a lot different (and possibly more difficult) than in the original My Colony. The first thing you need to do is unlock the new Deep Excavation tech, allowing you to construct the new Excavator unit (created by @spamdude ).


This is a large, slow 2x2 unit that can be used to flatten out hills on the terrain. Once a hill has been removed, there is a chance for new subterranean resources to be exposed, giving you access to more resources you can harvest. This is probably as close as I will come to adding the different Mines from MC1 to the game. Besides the usual resources, you may end up discovering some Ancient Alien Ruins under those hills. Discovering the ruins will trigger an engine flag, automatically unlocking the new Ancient Alien Language technology.


It is not possible to unlock Ancient Alien Language through traditional research. You must either discover ruins through excavation, or be gifted Artifacts from another player.

Once unlocked, you get access to a new Unit and a new Structure, the Artifact Extractor and the Giorgio Institute for Alien Research. The Artifact Extractor is built from the Robot Factory (so you need Robot abilities as well) and is a flying drone used to extract Alien Artifacts from ancient ruin sites. Alien Artifacts can be stored in small amounts in the current Warehouse building, but for additional storage, the Giorgio Institute provides a ton of space for Artifacts, and generates Research as well.


Once you have collected some Artifacts, you can then build the new Extraterrestrial Builder, which in turn is able to construct the new Aluminum Generator!


For those who want some more decorative items, the Single Family Home from MC1 is back, allowing you to build some lower density subdivisions for your colonists. I will probably add the other color variations of the house at some point too.

Finally, when you start getting to the point where it's hard to keep up with food production for your colonists' demands, the Vertical Warehouse Farm is back, providing large amounts of nutritious food to help feed a growing population.


There have also been a few tweaks here and there. I have extended the operating range of the Logistics Station (nearly 2x), since it seemed like setting up connected outposts had far too small of a range. I might end up extending it even more, you guys can let me know what you thing.

I have also turned CloudSync on by default for saved games, for users signed in with an Ape Apps Account. I haven't had many reports of issues with CloudSync lately, and it can really help save your colony in the event of a catastrophe.

I also changed the UI of the zoom buttons on the Radar a bit to make them easier to use on touch, and put the Radar Size button on the radar overlay as well, since on some smaller screen devices, switching the radar to large would hide the other button, never allowing you to switch back.

With this updates in hand, the next release will focus on ironing out whatever I broke in this update, as well as introducing new Alien techs. A lot of the bigger manufacturing structures are probably going to be needing their "Ancient Alien" upgrade, such as the Microchip Factory, the Refinery and so on. I am also debating on whether or not to add a Galactic Board of Trade to MC2, like in MC1. You can let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Other than that, that is all for this update! I hope you guys enjoy both of this weeks My Colony updates, keep the suggestions and bug reports coming, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

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

Today I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony 2 v0.28.0 which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This update includes something new that @Architecture1134 has been pushing hard for weeks now, so let's take a look at what's included!


A couple of years ago now, Spice was added as a resource to My Starship, another title in the My Colony Universe, and now it makes it's way to My Colony 2 on the brand new Spice World map!

Spice World plays a little different from the other maps, as there are no surface resources whatsoever except for Spice. Spice is generated by Spice Veins which are scattered about the world and will continually produce more Spice deposits, so it is probably a good idea to found your first settlement near a Spice Vein.


From there, starting a settlement on a Spice World will be a long and slow process. You must fashion your initial structures out of Spare Parts which are slowly generated by your lander, and until you are able to build the Construction Yard, you will be spending some time waiting for Parts generation. The first structures you are able to build will be the new Spare Parts Bin (needed because the Lander only holds 4 Spare Parts) and the Basic Drill, a small simple drilling platform that will very slowly provide you with Ore.

While you are waiting for resources to generate, you can harvest some nearby spice with the new Spicebot. The Lander can hold 50, but you will eventually want to build a Spice Silo so you can store more Spice. Both Power and Water on Spice World are generated from the Dune inspired Wind Trap (since we are already on the Spice theme anyway), and you will need a lot of them as your settlement grows, until you are able to research and afford Nuclear Power.

Once you progress far enough in the game you will be able to harvest resources the old fashioned way using the Excavator, but until then, the new Supplies Field will provide you with a slow steady stream of Money, Ore, Gold, Aluminum and Uranium, in exchange for valuable Spice.


In the next update or two, I plan to implement a global unified server for My Colony 2, along with a new Galactic Board of Trade. At that point, you will be able to trade Spices off to other planets for profit. Until that time, Spice World is the only way to play with Spice. I will not be adding any sort of Spice Factory or other automatic Spice generation to the game, on this world or any other, so harvesting and GBT trade will be the only way to acquire Spice in the game.

Of course, Spice isn't the only new thing in this release. User @itsLiseczeq (aka cakedon) has created a new Regolith Extraction Plant which is now available on all Regolith using worlds, which was sorely needed after the changes introduced to resource consumption in the last MC2 update.


And finally for new content, if you were tired of building hundreds of greenhouse parks in order to slowly generate wood on non-atmosphere worlds, you are in luck, because the new Synthetic Wood Lab will generate wood a heck of a lot faster, as long as you can keep the factory fed with Oil and a bit of Charcoal.


Beyond the new content, and as always, a handful of bug fixes and performance improvements are along for the ride in this release as well.

As I hinted to before, next on the agenda is going to be to create a new global My Colony 2 server, similar to what MC1 has (but expanded), and implement a new Galactic Board of Trade for the game. Of course the system is made a bit more complicated by the fact that the game allows for extensive modding, but it's nothing that cannot be overcome. And of course, content updates and fixes will always be included as well!

So that is it for this update to MC2. Let me know what you think! If you find issues with the new Spice content, let me know, since I'm sure it will need expanded/changed/rebalanced as well (as new content usually does). Until then, enjoy the game, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

I have just pushed the My Colony 2 v0.30.0 update to production on Ape Web Apps, and the patch should be hitting mobile platforms over the coming days. There are no new features or content additions in this update, this is a straight bug fix and performance tweak release, with the following corrections:

• Fixed issue with Excavator crashing the game server
• Fixed long standing issue where a reset in the Ape Apps Signaling server would put all online MC2 games offline
• Fixed major performance issue related to unit harvesting
• Fixed major server hangups that would occur during game saves
• Improvements to news ticker scroll speed
• Terrain objects on non-active chunks are now placed in a simulated state so they are not updated every singe game tick
• Communications from game server to game clients are now bundled and sent only once per game tick to reduce network bandwidth and packet decompression times
• Units that are located on non-active chunks no longer do elevation checks while moving

In addition, this update brings in the latest version of the Scroll3D library, which received several performance improvements and bug fixes during the last update to the My Tokens app.

Important to note: due to the new server-client packet bundling code, game clients v0.29.0 and lower can not connect to servers v0.30.0 or higher, so if you cannot join a game and you do not have the update yet, do not report this as a bug.

As I said, the update is now live on the Web and should be hitting everywhere else over the coming days. Sorry for the delay in getting the fixes out, let me know what further issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

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

#mycolony2

just some of the stuff I've made recently

Bigdozer Remodel
I was not expecting the original version to actually be used as an excavator, but it seemed a little too chunky and incongruous to me, so I redesigned the whole thing. No scoop on this one, but it was kind of strange to have the scoop on the front of the first one.

Ultra Deep Drilling Facility
Compiled version; took a full 15 minutes to do so. An upgrade to the Advanced Drill Platform, though this one's 5x5 in size.

Generic Synthesis Facility
#ff00ff can be replaced with the color for gold, ore, regolith, or anything else. Just a simple upgrade to the "synthesis lab" template, though I'm not sure what else it would consume in-game.

Let me know what you think of these!

An Alien Excavator sounds like a good idea to add to the mix for active generation.

well, maybe not necessarily alien, but a better excavator would be a pretty neat idea

I just thought the theme of an Alien Excavator was cool to be honest. It doesn't actually have to be the Alien theme to work.

Hello! I have an idea for an extremely challenging world type, so I will share it with you. I call it the Veiled World. It has zero surface materials, but a TON of resources underground. Your MC2 knowledge will be put to the test. Can you survive the Veiled World? I believe you can. I have attatched a model of the Veiled World, a sprite of it, and a .c2m

The .c2m changes very little, but some things needed to be changed to make it possible.

Greenhouse Parks can now be built by Builder Bots
Recycling Centers no longer cost Aluminum
The Wind Trap and Basic Driller can be built on Veiled World
All the ether stuff can be built on Veiled World
Ether Reactors now produce trace amounts of Uranium
Regolith Extraction Plants can be built on Veiled World

I would believe the order of progression goes like this:

Lander->Spare Parts Bin->Basic Driller->Ore Refinery->Greenhouse Park->Charcoal Hut/Charcoal Factory->Gold Extractor->Microchip Factory->Small Software Studio->Recycling Center->Regolith Extraction Plant->Ether Pump/Ether Well->Ether Reactor->Excavator. After that, gameplay becomes normal from there on out.

Right now, excavation is pretty much limited to a single tile of depth and the good ol’ excavator. I get the feeling that this is likely in part due to technical limitations, but if overcome, excavation could become a much fuller and more engaging part of MC2, possibly even introducing room for lore. In my visions for a new system of excavation, settlements could eventually dig holes a hundred tiles deep with the help of a new branch of excavation-related techs, structures, and vehicles. Scarce or “delicate” resources such as clay would be found in abundance at specific depths and many new structures would be specialized to tap into underground phenomena, for example, magma-powered electrical plants or supercharged water pumps. Terrain editing would also become available with vehicles called Landmovers, allowing you to form artificial mountains or reclaim islands on ocean worlds.

The major gist of this new excavation system would be the separation of the ground into many roughly-defined layers, each containing distinct resources and geological features, though different world types would have disparate layer compositions as well as their own unique features. Rich deposits of Crystalline could occur in heavily saturated caves on Frozen or Desert Worlds, rare heavy metals could be scattered beneath the surfaces of Lunar Worlds as a result of ancient meteorites, and naturally, oil deposits could be found beneath the ocean floors on Ocean Worlds. Alien ruins would also become more and more common at greater depths, eventually culminating in an ancient layer of all planet types housing the remnants of a staggeringly advanced Alien civilization.

The Alien layer would contain hundreds of unbuildable Ancient Alien buildings clustered into small outposts and larger cities in various states of disrepair, spaced relatively far apart from each other. These Alien buildings, operating beyond the knowledge of the current corpus of Ancient Instructions, could produce valuable resources such as artifacts to any settlement which harnessed them, but all Alien settlements would be guarded by extremely powerful automatic turrets, capable of vaporizing a Main Battle Tank from three chunks off. In fact, they'd deal extremely high, unmitigated area damage, so that low-level settlements would not be able to immediately tap into them. Many of the “true” alien buildings found in a conquered alien settlement would provide powerful and unique benefits to its conqueror, such as specialized Artifact production or efficiency boosts for certain utility providing buildings in other settlements. A new intermediate class of "inspired" alien buildings would also be exclusively unlocked by controlling alien settlements.
Possible research branches and associated mechanics

• Deep Excavation (existing tech, unlocks Excavators with 5-tile excavation range)
• Advanced Geochemistry (requires Deep Excavation, unlocks entry-level elevation-specific structures and Survey Probes, gateway tech to other excavation-related techs)
• Earthmoving Techniques (requires Advanced Geochemistry with a level 3 settlement, unlocks Landformers for filling in holes/creating mountains and Borers with 10-tile excavation range)
• Underground Infrastructure (requires Advanced Geochemistry and Ancient Alien Manufacturing with a level 4 settlement, unlocks more permanent elevation-specific structures and large Mobile Excavation Platforms with 20-tile excavation range)
• Ultra Deep Exploration (requires Underground Infrastructure and Artificial Intelligence with a level 4 settlement, unlocks expensive Quantum Boring Platforms with 50-tile excavation range)

Possible significant excavation depths

• 3 tiles: Alien structures begin to appear occasionally
• 6-10 tiles: Planet-specific underground phenomena begin to appear
• 15-17 tiles: “Intrinsic” underground phenomena such as saturated rock begin to appear
• 20-23 tiles: Isolated alien structures begin to appear very rarely
• 37-40 tiles: Alien layer begins

Overall, this system might end up significantly changing the progression to Alien and subsequent tech, but I believe it will be a good thing for preventing Alien Artifacts from becoming just another individually nondescript resource as it did in My Colony. Bast took steps towards making Artifacts special with the initial introduction of the excavation system, and similarly with Spice and Spice Veins. MC2 was designed in 3D, so I think it may as well play into that topographically as well. Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think of this idea in the comments!

Model