Ape Apps

If anybody was looking for a massive My Colony 2 update this month, I've got you covered! v0.34.0 is dropping now on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher and is packed with goodies that you will not want to miss, so let's take a look at what is new!


The first change you might notice is that the title screen has been reworked, matching the layout from the title screen of Terra Nova 4X. This is a fairly minor change at the moment, but as MC2 had been using the generic Web App Core title screen, I was limited on what I could potentially add to it in the future, so now I will be able to make some changes and improvements going forward.

I also did quite a bit of work on Player Mode in this update, which had been completely borked until now. There is now a new HUD/UI for the mode, complete with health bar, radar, current location stats and more!


There remains a ton of work to be done on Player Mode. Right now there are still glitches and the controls are a bit wonky, but it is functional if you want to give it a test. My Colony 2 is eventually going to contain an entire sub-game based on Player Mode, but for now it's still fun to just walk around your colony and check things out.

There are new options on the Statistics screen for server operators in this release, and the first one is actually quite important.


You can now toggle your server's Private/Public status on the World statistics, which was a long requested feature. You can also toggle on/off the My Colony Online feature (which gives access to online trading through the GBT, among other things). However, and this is important, worlds created before MC2 v0.29.0 will all be in offline mode until activated on the World screen! This is because the MC Online flag in the save file was ignored until this update, and it defaulted to Offline before v0.29.0. Now that the flag is no longer ignored, worlds with the old default will be set to offline.

So the first time you load up your world in v0.34.0 (or higher), you must go into the Statistics screen and turn My Colony Online back on, if you want to use the GBT. You do not have to worry about losing resources or anything like switching between online/offline in the original My Colony. MC2 takes care of this by blocking all connections from modded games.

In addition to the above, server managers can now set the maximum number of online connections allowed in their game. You could previously set this using a chat text command, but now it's just a lot easier to do it from the UI.


Moving on, I have tried to make some interface changes to make My Colony 2 easier to play on mobile devices. The 3D nature of the game makes placing structures more difficult than it was on the original version of My Colony, but I think some changes in this update will help.


Firstly (as seen above), the ground grid lines are now turned on by default on touchscreen devices, allowing you to more easily see where you are placing structures. If you do not like this setting, it can be turned on/off in the Engine Settings menu under the Interface section, but on touch I think it makes a significant different in making the game more playable.

Next, I have tried to make it so that, no matter what orientation you have the camera rotated, placing a new structure will always originate from the top-left tile corner of the tiles to be occupied. On a touch screen there is no "hover" like with mouse input, so it's hard to tell where the building is going to be placed, and a lot of times with the camera rotated, you would have no idea where the building was going to show up once you tapped the screen, so now it should be fairly consistent no matter how you are rotated or zoomed. This was actually more difficult to implement then it might seem, since what tile constitutes the top-left corner is sort of subjective, especially depending on how far the camera is rotated in one way or another. At what angle is the cutoff where top-left becomes top-right, etc? Anyway, after hours of fiddling with the angle cutoffs, I think I have it to where it "feels" good, but you can play with it on mobile and let me know.

Moving right along, I have expanded the building stats that appear when you click on a structure's stats icon. You can now view the production/consumption ratings of Money, Civics and Research. There is still more expansion to be done on building stats, but this change alone makes a pretty big difference, IMO.


Now let's move on to new content, as there is a lot in this update. This release includes 22 new structures, two new techs to unlock, and one new unit. Among the new content in this release are 3D model contributions from @rahtdrgn @therealchromedino @GeneralWadaling and @spamdude so please be sure to show them appreciation for their great works!

Since there are so many new structures, I am just going to list them all out, and then comment on a few of them afterwards. A lot of the structures in this release are of the "Advanced" variety, needed upgrades to existing buildings.

• Advanced Robotics Factory
• Ether Reactor (art by rahtdrgn)
• Ancient Alien Gold Synthesis Lab (art by therealchromedino)
• Star Gate
• Advanced Microchip Factory (art by GeneralWadaling)
• Advanced Plastic Factory
• Underground Drop Room (art by spamdude)
• Spice Drilling Operation (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Oil Tank (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab (art by spamdude)
• Quantum Offshore Drill
• Advanced Vocational Training Center
• Spice Den
• Galactic Trade Authority Office
• Ether Crystal Reactor
• Plaza Mosaic Tile
• Investment Bank
• Advanced Helium 3 Extractor
• Black and White Checkered Pavement
• Street Sign

First I want to discuss the new Interdimensional Transportation tech which unlocks the new Star Gate, because this is going to tie in big with a Player Mode feature in the future.


Basically, the Star Gates are going to allow characters in Player Mode to seamlessly travel between worlds/servers. Ultimately, the area around your Star Gate will be the first thing a player sees when they enter your world from that perspective, so you may want to include things like informational signs about your world, and you may want to leave some space to build specific Player Mode related structures that will be available in the future. You may also wish to have at least one security turret nearby, as you never know what is going to be coming through the Star Gate. The Star Gates will also allow fast travel of players/colonists/units between distant settlements both on and off world.

The Star Gates are going to be a critical component of the Player Mode. I wanted to get them in the game sooner rather than later, because the My Colony Online database is keeping track of every star gate in the "universe," and I need to get that database built up before I can enable the fast travel and other features.

Moving along, an old favorite from the original My Colony has returned, as the Bank can now be upgraded to the Investment Bank!


You can start bringing in some pretty good money for your settlement with the Investment Bank, but it's not actually the best money maker in this release. That honor goes to the new Spice Den!


The Spice Den is a brick structure repurposed from an old food production model that GeneralWadaling had made a couple of years ago, and as long as you are able to keep it running with Spice, you will make some nice profits, as the rich and famous in your settlement will pay top dollar to get their Spice fix in a safe and discrete way. Obviously if you are not on the Spice World you will need to procure your Spice from the GBT, so you might want to stock up whenever it becomes available, as I suspect this is not the only Spice related structure we will be seeing added to non-Spice worlds.

Note that the Spice Den is the first structure in the game that actually has a negative Security rating, so you may need to offset that with an extra security headquarters.

Now, you have heard of the noble Extraterrestrial Builder, but what about his equally noble cousin, the Extraterrestrial Sea Rover?


The old offshore drill got a Quantum Offshore Drill upgrade in this release, so it needed a new boat to build it. Not only is this new version of the offshore drill faster, but it also brings up Alien Artifacts! This was badly needed I think, since artifacts are fairly rare on the desert world, and you just can't dig much at all on the water world, so these new Quantum Offshore Drills will come in handy.

Speaking of badly needed, you can now easily generate Helium 3 on any world with the new Advanced Helium 3 Extractor. You will need Regolith to operate it, but that shouldn't be a problem once you construct the new Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab.

So what happens when you want to conduct big trades on the GBT but you don't want to build hundreds of Trading Depots? That's where the new Galactic Trade Authority Office comes into play!


This is another decent money making structure, but it also greatly increases your gift/trade capacity (I forgot the number, but it's big).

A lot of the buildings that needed upgrades got them in this release. We now have the Advanced Robotics Factory, the Advanced Microchip Factory, the Advanced Plastic Factory, Advanced Vocational Training Center, and the Underground Drop Room (upgrade to the Storage Yard), just to name a few.


In addition, the Spice World now has the new Spice Drilling Operation, which is basically an Ore Fracking Operation for Spice. There are also the new Advanced and Quantum Spice Silos for superior Spice storage.

There is also the Quantum Oil Tank upgrade, for storing larger amounts of Oil.

Finally, all of these new structures will require a great deal of power. That is where the brand new Ether Crystal Reactor comes into play!


You will need a continuous source of both Ether and Crystalline to run this thing, so you may need to watch the GBT for deals. If you can afford it though, the Ether Crystal Reactor will provide you with a 55,000 power rating, far eclipsing the current Integrated Nuclear Reactor.

At the end of the day, there was a ton of work put into this update, so I hope you all enjoy it! There is a lot more excitement for My Colony 2 on the horizon. My goal is to have, by the end of this year, full gamepad/tv support, full VR support, music, sounds, a Steam release, and to have enough content and features to overtake the playability of the original My Colony. So stay tuned for more large updates like this one, because this size of release is going to be the norm, not the exception!

Thank you again for playing My Colony 2 and remember, build up your parameter defenses, because @poumm is out there, lol!


Just kidding, poumm. You're ok!

#mycolony2

November is here and with it comes My Colony 2 v0.43.0, the Community Content Dump Update^TM! What does that entail? Let's find out!


Before looking at the new content, there are a couple of minor engine and other miscellaneous changes here as well. I have fixed a bug where the sell object button was not working. I also fixed a bug where the infantry units were super tiny.

Four existing structures received new artwork in this update. The Spice Den ( @therealchromedino ), the Ancient Alien Gold Synthesis ( @therealchromedino ), the regular Gold Synthesis Lab ( @GeneralWadaling ) and the Ore Refinery ( @GeneralWadaling ).

The Forest World now has 15 new tree models provided by @rahtdrgn . In addition, the Sports Stadium is now also buildable on the Forest World map.


Also thanks to @therealchromedino , we have a new military unit in this update, the Battle Droid! This is a more expensive version of the existing infantry unit, with the same firepower but a higher armor rating and it does not cost any population to build. It also builds from the War Factory instead of the Barracks.

Settlements can now be upgraded to levels 6 and 7 in this update. I am thinking that Level 7 will be one of the requirements for declaring independence and founding a Nation.

The Political Theater research tech is now available to unlock as well.

In addition to the above, this update contains 26 new structures. I will list them out below, along with the user who provided the artwork for each.

New Structures

• Column of Dominion ( @spamdude )
• Column of Leadership ( @spamdude )
• Column of Protection ( @spamdude )
• Column of Artistry ( @spamdude )
• Column of Welcome ( @spamdude )
• Column of Power ( @spamdude )
• Column of Perfection ( @spamdude )
• Column of Truth ( @spamdude )
• Burning Individual Statue ( @spamdude )
• Blue Brick Road ( @therealchromedino )
• Jewelry Store ( @RekEm1999 )
• Basic Family Shelter ( @Architecture1134 )
• Hall of Congress ( @GeneralWadaling )
• Restaurant ( @RekEm1999 )
• Uranium Synthesis Lab ( @therealchromedino )
• Mart ( @spamdude )
• Convenience Store ( @spamdude )
• Dealership ( @spamdude )
• Mixed-Use Office Block ( @spamdude )
• Spice Store ( @therealchromedino )
• Spice Spa ( @therealchromedino )
• Retro Arcade ( @SPARKY0303 )
• Dark Solar Road ( @OilChan )
• Diamond Solar Road ( @OilChan )
• Oil Burner Station ( @OilChan )
• Oil Fracking Operation ( @OilChan )

If you enjoy the new content please be sure to thank the above artists for their contributions to the game!


That is all for this update. With all of the new structures added, it may well be that some things need rebalancing, so play around with the new stuff and let me know what you think. There is still a ton of work to do on My Colony 2 and there is no way I am going to get it onto Steam before the end of the year as I had hoped, but that is ok! We will just keep plugging away at it and it will just keep getting better as the months go on!

Thanks for playing everyone, and stay tuned for more.

https://mycolony2.com/

#mycolony2

Great as always @GeneralWadaling , you have been a tremendous help!

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

Today I am doing another "weekly" version bump for My Colony 2, incrementing the release to v0.9.0. This release cleans a few things up, adds a few things, and lays the groundwork for some sheer epicness that will be on the way very soon. Let's take a look!

In terms of content, I have added the Small Food Silo to the game, for storing food of course.


I have also added @GeneralWadaling 's great Advanced Ore Refinery model into the game.

There have been a lot of fixes and improvements to the settlement resource sharing through Logistics Centers. There were some bugs in the prior release, and they should be ironed out now.

You can now generate Money and Research! I don't have a Gold Mint in the game yet, but I do have a research center, which now functions and produces research. Obviously this means that tech tree capabilities are soon on the way. And if anybody is interested in creating a gold-mint type structure model, I wouldn't be opposed....

Recently, @eSandvich asked about adding linear story type capabilities into the engine. I have thought about this, and am starting to work on a new system that will not only allow for that, but will also handle the in-game tutorial mechanism, as well as other neat things. This is a new event triggers/scripting system, something which was nowhere to be seen in My Colony 1, but could potentially lead to some very interesting scenarios and mods for MC2. I will explain how it works below.

First, if you look in the Game Editor, you will now see that many objects have the ability to set engine flags once they are constructed. The game engine will keep track of flags both for the overall server, and also for the individual player. Flags can be set by various means, but the most obvious ones are by either building something, or joining a game. You will also be able to set a flag by discovering a terrain object.

Next I will be adding Triggers. Triggers are events that are activated by certain conditions, primarily flags. When a player action sets a flag, triggers that were waiting on that flag will activate. When a trigger event activates, it will then call a Script.

A Script will be a set of one or more actions that will take place once an event is triggered. There will be a whole set of actions that can be added to a script, and they will be executed one after the other, in the order specified in the script. The actions can be things like play a certain text message or sound, give the player a reward or a unit, wait for a certain amount of time, set a flag, or do other things. The scripting engine could also accept user inputs. For instance, you could request that the player click on a location on the map, and those coordinates are passed to the next action on the script, which may cause a shuttle to land at that location and deposit colonists.

Anyway, for the base game, the scripting system is going to be primarily used for implementing the in-game tutorial and for possibly implementing the Points of Interest terrains concept that GeneralWadaling came up with a while ago. But I think that the system can ultimately lead to some pretty amazing mod capabilities as well, allowing for the creation of story-driven or objective based games.

Finally, in the Game Editor you will notice that the Civilization object now has a setting for whether or not it is player controllable. I will let you speculate on what upcoming feature is implied by that.

So that's all for this update. MC2 development is going to be ramping up pretty fast now, as I want to put a playable beta on the Google Play store by the end of next month. So keep the feedback coming, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#mycolony2 #colonywars #voxelpaint

Oh boy! Today I am publishing the v0.19.0 patch for My Colony 2 which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This is by far the biggest update to My Colony 2 yet, featuring significant changes both under and... above(?) the hood. Given the scope of the changes, I would expect some issues to crop up, so please file those bug reports here in the forum. In the mean time, lets take a look at what's new in this release!


The first and biggest change to the game is the addition of the new Mod Shop, which you can access from the title screen if you are a Premium user and signed in using an Ape Apps Account. You can consider the Mod Shop to be very beta at this point, and there is still a lot of work to do. I do not yet have auto updating working for mods, and I still need to build out detailed Mod pages that let you leave feedback to the Mod developer. I also suspect that Total Conversion type mods might not work as planned from the Mod Shop yet, but the basic framework is now there and operational at least.


Mods can now be activated and deactivated from the Play Game menu. If you download a mod from the Mod Shop and want to add it to your game, click on the Settings gear icon next to your saved game, and select "Manage Mods" to add and remove mods to your file. If the Manage Mods option does not show up, then play your save, save it, and try again, because the option will not show for older saves that are not using the latest file format.


The next update is going to involve cleaning up, improving and fixing things wrong with the Mod Shop, so please let me know about all Mod Shop related issues that you discover, because I really think that the Mod Shop has the potential to be a great game changer for My Colony 2 going forward, unlocking access to way more content than could ever be added to the game by a single developer.

On the subject of mods, this update includes a complete and total rewrite to the way in which mods are saved and loaded, and there is a strong potential that Modded games created before v0.19.0 may now be broken, so if that is the case for you, then I apologize. Sadly, the massive changes were necessary though. I suspect that Total Conversion mods might currently be broken, although I have not verified that as of yet.

There is a big change that Mod authors need to be aware of in this update as well. If you mod makes changes to the Metadata object in the game, there is a new Game Identifier field. Saved game files are now associated to this identifier, and unless your mod is a Total Conversion mod, it's Meta object should have the same Game Identifier id as the base My Colony 2 game. Otherwise, save files using your Mod will no longer show up in the saved game list. So if you have a mod that makes changes to the Meta object, and it's not a Total Conversion, make sure it uses the same Game Identifier as the base game ( which is: a999fe76-ff1c-5935-e365-755089ba8982 ). Likewise, if you are making a Total Conversion mod, your mod should NOT use the base game identifier.

This update also introduces a significant rewrite to the way games are saved and loaded. It turns out, that if you were signed in using an Ape Apps Account, almost all of your saved games have been synced to the Ape Apps Cloud since the first release of My Colony 2. You may therefore see a bunch of old saves in your game listing the first time you load up v0.19.0 that you might not have known still existed. You should now be able to delete those old saves, and they will also be removed from the cloud. The game was actually loading all of this old saved data each time it opened, so if you delete old games that are no longer being used, your My Colony 2 startup times should be greatly improved.

Moving on, the internal game server has also undergone a massive overhaul, removing all web browser specific functions and logic from the code. This was done so that I could create a command line based dedicated server application, which had previously not been possible since some of the code in the game server itself could only be run in a web browser context. This change will not be very noticeable to the end user, but was a pretty big effort on my part, and will enable the creation of a separate dedicated server application, which will allow 24/7 cloud based My Colony 2 servers in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

Next up, units in the game can now be scaled. Modders will see the new scaling option in the Unit editor. This change also applies to colonists, which are now scaled to a more realistic size for the first time ever in My Colony history! And speaking of colonists, worlds that theoretically have a breathable atmosphere will now be able to use My Tokens characters as colonists models, which can now be seen on the Water World and the Desert World, giving a nice variety to the game.


And speaking of Colonists, you can now take control of them and walk around your settlement! Click on a colonist to enter the new Player mode, to get up close and personal to your base. There isn't much to this feature yet, but in my opinion it comes with huge potential, especially for modders to create totally different types of games on the back of the My Colony 2 engine. Try it out, let me know what you think, and throw out some suggestions of ways this cool new mode can be expanded!


You may notice that the graphics in My Colony 2 are a bit "cleaner" than they were prior to v0.19.0. I didn't even realize it until working on this update, but the anti-aliasing engine was completely broken in Scroll3d. Anyway, it works now and you should be able to notice a subtle difference in the visuals of the game.

I have started to add more detailed building-level statistics to the game. Now when you select a building, there is a stats button that you can click on to expand additional information about the structure, including items like workers and production levels. More will be coming to this expanded interface in the future.


Speaking of statistics, both the World and Settlement level statistics screen have been updated. And there are now settlement level penalties for not having enough Food, Medical, Entertainment, Security, and Education. Settlements now also have a separate "Overall Health" stat, not to be confused with the Medical stat. The Medical tells you what your settlement's medical coverage is, but the Overall Health also takes into effect things like food/water shortages, homelessness, etc. When the overall health gets to low, people will now start to die, so make sure to stay on top of that. You also now have an approval rating for each settlement, which is derived from all statistical factors.

Staying on the topic of statistics, the GDP calculation has now been fixed, as it was previously borked and often showing negative numbers. If you have an already existing colony, it will take a few cycles for your GDP to fix itself, as the game does not go back in time and fix the historical numbers that were calculated using the old, broken calculation.

Moving on, Gifting has now been added to the game! Gifting is done from settlement to settlement, and your gift capacity is determined by the number of Trading Depots you have in your settlement. To gift, make sure your camera is in a settlement that you want to gift from. Then open statistics, and choose the settlement you wish to gift to. After that, the process is fairly straightforward. This should be a big help to multiplayer games.


I have begun expanding the Encyclopedia to include information on Units and Game Contributors. There isn't much there on those sections yet, although I did add an in-game way to send a donation of Ape Coins to the various game contributors who have helped make My Colony 2 what it is today, if you wish to say "thank you" for their efforts.

Some of the existing structures have been modified in this release. The Greenhouse Park will now slowly generate trace amounts of Wood, making Wood available to all map types now. The Warehouse storage capacities have been expanded. The Expansion Barge can no longer be built at the Watercraft Station (there is a new larger water construction yard now for the barge). The Internet Relay Booth now generates a small amount of Research, giving a research head start before players are able to build the Small Research Lab. The output of the Ore Fraking Operation and the Gold Synthesis lab have been increased. The existing Landing Field has been replaced by the smaller Landing Pad, using updated models provided by @GeneralWadaling . I think there were more changes too, but I don't recall them all at the moment.

There are some new Ancient ruins to be found on the Abandoned World, which you will see if you scroll around the map, remnants of a time when the Ancients once controlled the galaxy. There are even some "H Blocks" inspired from the ruins of Pumapunku!


Let's move on to the new content added to the game. Model contributors for this release (besides myself, of course) I believe include @GeneralWadaling , @DoYouHaveAnyOats , and @spamdude . If there are others and I forgot to mention you, then I'm sorry! It's not personal! 😳

Firstly, the new technologies of Advanced Chemical Synthesis, Low Gravity Oil Production, and Advanced Charcoal Production have been added to the game. With these additions bring two new resources into the fold, which are Oil and Plastic (as you might have guessed).

Many of the new structures in this update directly benefit the Water World, although all planet types are benefited to some degree. The new Micro Nursery allows you to get more Trees early game, before you are able to move off of your initial island. That is complimented by the Gold Extractor, which is a slow but easy way to get Gold in the game early on, which was also traditionally difficult on the Water World. Once you advance, there is a new Tree Farm for producing trees at a faster rate, without needing to continually expand and harvest. The new Construction Quay is a larger off-shore ship yard for building larger sea craft, and the new Small Offshore Drill will allow you to extract different minerals, including Oil, from the bottom of the sea. On the Military side of things, there is a new Patrol Boat which is basically like a water based version of the current Infantry unit.


The Landing Field has been moved further down the tech tree, and is replaced by the smaller early game Landing Pad. There is a new Wood Grower for generating more wood, an Oil Tank for storing Oil, and a Synthetic Oil Lab for creating Oil out of Food. Once you have Oil, you can convert it into Plastic using the new Plastic Factory. You can also get a small amount of Plastic from the new Recycling Center.

I think that is all of the new content, although I might have missed something. Looking forward though, now that we have Oil and Plastic in the game, it might be time to introduce Robotics in to the mix, and start going down that branch of the tech tree, so stay tuned for all of that.

At the end of the day, there were so many under the hood changes to this update, that something is bound to be broken. Please be on the lookout and let me know what issues you find. I have been working on this update for the better part of two months, so it is entire possible that I started working on a mechanic weeks ago, and forgot to finish it up. All in all though, I think this is a fair update to the game, and I hope you guys like it!

My Colony 2 v0.19.0 is available now on the Web, Launcher, and Windows Store, and will hopefully be hitting Google Play and the App Store within the next few days, depending on app store review times (even Android requires review now too). So stay tuned for that, let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more in the weeks and months ahead!

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

#mycolony2

Just in time for the weekend (if you are using the PWA at least), the My Colony 2 v0.23.0 update is now available, bringing a lot of goodies that I hope think you are going to love. So what's new in this release? Let's take a look!


To begin with, continuing work from the last two releases of My Colony 2, more structure voxel models have been separated from the data files, further reducing initial game load times, particularly on mobile devices. This should especially help on lower memory devices, as some were crashing from the sheer size of the overall MC2 data file during initial load.

Next up, as I mentioned in another thread, all My Colony 2 game statistics are now being automatically logged to the Coloniae service that @Sobeirannovaocc is maintaining. The My Colony 2 implementation of Coloniae is still in development, but you can find it at the following URL to track it's progression. Check it out, see if you can find your own world statistics, and be sure to give Sobe your feedback!

https://dev.coloniae.space/

In addition, all new colonies in MC2 are now being automatically added to the mc2global Universe, as outlined in this thread. This will be the default global universe for all new MC2 games, and if you want to join it with your existing colony, simply click on the thread I just posted for instructions.

Next up, commenters in the various app stores have long been requesting that MC2 contain some sort of hints or tutorials such as those found in the original My Colony. So I have started to add helpful dialogs to the game at various points.


More exciting than the tutorials though, are the manner in which they have been implemented. Some time ago, there was a request for some scripting capabilities to be added to MC2 that creators could use for different types of mods. I started implementing it by adding some flag properties to units, structures, worlds, and civs, but then forgot about it, until @Luker124 recently reminded me that they would be helpful for a mod he is planning. As a result, you will now see a new Scripting section in the Game Editor.


I will make a more detailed post on scripting at some point, but it basically works like this. Certain entities (units, structures mainly, but also civs and worlds) can set either a Player Flag or a Global Flag when they are built/come into the game. A Player Flag pertains to the player who triggered the event, and a Global Flag pertains to the entire server. When a flag is triggered, the engine looks through all of the available scripts, and then will run any script that is triggered by the trigger flag.

The engine remembers which players have used which flag, so they can only be triggered once, unless a script gives a "clear flag" command. You can see the currently available script actions in the screenshot above. A script may contain one or more actions, and can call subsequent scripts by setting flags itself.

I plan to use this new flag/script feature to implement something suggested by @GeneralWadaling some months ago, whereby you could discover interesting terrains which would then unlock things. My thinking is that you could discover alien artifacts/tech that would then unlock certain structures that were not available otherwise through the tech tree.

The possibilities are vast though, so it will be interesting to see what modders come up with. The scripting framework is still in its infancy, so try it out and let me know what additions or improvements you would like to see. I foresee eventually being able to make a wide variety of different types of mods with this feature, not even limited to colony builder games.

Next up we come to a new addition that everybody has been asking for since MC2 was first made public, and I am talking about the return of the Bulldozer!


There is now a new toolbar above the build options sidebar. Currently it only has a bulldozer, but that will probably be expanded at some point. As in MC1, the bulldozer mode will turn your interface red so that you do not forget you are in a destructive mode. Unlike MC1, bulldozing a structure will now actually sell it instead of just destroy, so that it is actually more like a quick-sell option than anything else.

Besides just structures, Roads can now finally be removed too, using the bulldozer. This has been one of the top requests for a long time, and now it is a reality. This actually required a pretty substantial rewrite to how roads work, which I outlined in another thread a few weeks ago. But the work is done and the feature is here now. In the coming updates, I plan on also allowing roads to be built pretty much anywhere, not just within the confines of your own settlement, allowing vast highways to be buily across your world!

Moving on, the engine will now enforce structures that have a Settlement Level requirement (currently, only a handful of structures do). You will see this when viewing structure costs on the sidebar. Settlements are leveled up using Civics, and you can level up your settlement by selecting it from the Statistics window.

Now on to new content, as three new Techs have been added in this update: Low Atmospheric Zoology, Advanced Security and Advanced Robotics! Along with the techs, we have two additional resources added to the mix, Cloth and Robots.

Of course, there are new structures here too. The Fish Hatchery is back from MC1, allowing you to breed fish for food. The Outhouse is here, which I think was something of a gag model that GeneralWadaling sent me, but I turned it into an early game sanitation (medical) facility that you can build early on, before you can afford an infirmary. Next we have the Synthetic Textile Lab for creating cloth, and the Robotics Factory for making robots. There is a decorative United Earth Flag that takes on the color of your settlement, and the Storage Yard is a new upgrade to the Raw Materials Depot, allowing you to store way more raw materials than you previously could. Finally, the new War Factory will allow you to build this updates' new military unit, the Main Battle Tank!


All in all, there is a lot here in this update, and I hope you guys like it! So check it out, as it should be hitting all platforms over the coming days, and if you don't want to wait, fire up the web app now at the following URL. Until then, thanks for playing, and have a good weekend!

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

#mycolony2

Huge changes are coming to My Colony 2 and this update lays the groundwork for a bunch of them. So let's just dive right in and see what is new with My Colony 2 v0.39.0, available now!


Right off the bat, there is a glitch where if you have sky textures enabled, it's always "night time." So no need to report that one, lol.

Moving on, the first thing you are certain to notice is that the games title screen has been completely revamped.


So first off, thank you to @GeneralWadaling for all of the game world models. This change to the title screen goes pretty far beyond a mere fresh coat of paint though, and actually required pretty far reaching changes under the hood. In fact, I had to end up completely rewriting most of the games' networking/multiplayer code from scratch, which ended up consuming a majority of the time I had planned to spend working on this release. Let's get into why.

I mentioned at the beginning that big changes are coming soon to My Colony 2, and these changes center around a far tighter integration to the My Colony 2 online server. Starting with v0.39.0, players are now immediately signed into and communicating with the MC2 online servers as soon as the initial loading screen clears, and in effect you are actually behind-the-scenes in-game even when you are only on the title screen.

Why is this necessary? You have maybe seen the Player Mode icon in My Colony 2 in the past, but this feature is about to be expanded in a huge way. I have mentioned before adding the ability for Player Mode characters to travel between worlds via Star Gates, but I have decided to "dream bigger" and instead go all out on this feature.

Traveling between worlds I quickly realized was going to require a tighter integration with the MC2 servers. The way MC2 worked before was that your game reconnected to the global lobby every time you loaded or joined a server. Unfortunately, this model does not work too well if you need to instantly jump from one world to another. So, I started trying to tweak the current code in order to permit the things I wanted to do, and eventually one thing led to another, and I basically ended up rewriting most of the games networking code from scratch.

Moving back into the cloud and onto the MC2 server, we are now going to be assigning global coordinates to every world, sort of how is done in the original My Colony, and soon instead of building individual My Colony 2 worlds, we are going to be building out the entire My Colony Universe! Virtually, of course.

For anyone who has played My Starship, this is where things will soon be getting interesting. The title screen is going to be morphing basically into sort of a mix between the game My Starship, and the old Galaxy Map from MC1. Since the title screen is now rendered using another Scroll3d engine instance, you will eventually be seeing all of the MC2 online worlds in their actual global coordinates, right from the title screen. When you click on the next/previous buttons, it is going to "fly" the camera between your different worlds. Note that this does not happen right now, because nothing has coordinates yet. But it is coming soon.

How is that like My Starship? Well, when you click on the (+) button on the title screen, you will see an option to create a new Player Mode Character (not yet functional).


Unlike creating a local/offline character, this is going to let you choose one of your skins from My Tokens, and then choose your initial star ship! Luckily General Wadaling had previously provided a ton of star ship models so there should be several to choose from. You will then be able to fly your star ship around the online galaxy map, right from the title screen, and choose which world you want your player to land at.

There are a lot of possibilities here, and I will leave that open for another discussion. But who knows what kinds of things you can discover out in space, beyond just other players' planets.

This new online galactic map + player mode + star ships is the primary focus of the next update, so that is the next thing I am working on. Suggestions for that implementation are very welcome. Some plans off the top of my head involve allowing players to eventually build star ships that can be controlled on the global map and used to run trade routes, or even blockades of other planets. I think the space realm will need to be more a turn based nature VS realtime (for performance reasons) but we will see. I think of it as a giant global chess board.

Next let's take a look in-game. In the Statistics window, the Nations tab that has been sitting there doing nothing from the beginning of time has been renamed to just Nation, and now it does something.


Here you will see an overview of all of your colonies and settlements in the entire MC2 universe. The title of the page will read The Colonies of your username however there is also logic in the game to make it read The Nation of your username, however that is a discussion for another day. For now I will simply say that on the MC2 server, all colonies are now labeled as being sub-colonies of United Earth.

For MC2 online, I am considering all of a players' settlements to be "united" under a single governing structure, owned by you, the player. Eventually, diplomacy (alliances, trade agreements, and even war) is going to be handled on a global basis. So for example, if a user, we will use Poumm as an example, decides to declare war on you, they are then automatically declaring war on all of your settlements as well as any other players you have formed an alliance with. And this situation will carry over into the global "space" realm as well.

Let's talk a bit about Player Mode next, because it has had a total physics rewrite, in preparation for next update's online player mode overhaul. You can now walk across bridges and onto tiles occupied by structures, and even onto structures themselves if the change in elevation is not too high. In theory a structure could be designed with a stairway all the way to the top to allow players to climb up onto roofs. I plan to add jumping and mounting vehicles in the next update as well.

Next, if you look in the Game Editor, the discerning eye may notice four new properties for Structures related to Goods:


Goods are another new feature coming soon that will have a huge impact on gameplay. There is a new item on the title screen called the Goods Editor (which does not function yet). Basically, the concept here is that players will be able to build generic factories and stores to produce and sell goods of their choosing. Factories will have production "slots" determining how many different goods they can produce, and a rate, determining how fast they make said goods. Likewise, stores will be able to sell X number of different goods at a rate of X.

So what are these Goods and where do they come from? Well that is the cool part, that Goods editor will allow players to design the Goods themselves. Basically, players can provide a model (a 3d one using Voxel Paint, or a 2d one using Pixel Paint which will be auto-converted into 3d). You can choose what materials are needed to build the Good, and you will be able to assign different properties to the good (based on the input materials). These goods will be auto-sold in stores for profit, and player mode characters will also be able to visit stores on different planets and purchase these goods directly, equipping them and using them in-game.

If the whole thing sounds complicated, that's because it is, and that is why it doesn't work yet. But it is the next thing I am implementing after the Player Mode revamp.

Moving on to some minor changes, the Wooden Bridge has had the texture update to fill in the gaps in the wooden slats, because the new Player Mode physics were allowing the player to fall to his death otherwise. Also, @GeneralWadaling has provided updated models for the Outpost and Mobile Outpost.

The general theme for all of these changes is to make the entire universe around MC2 feel more connected and alive. The goal is to transform the game into something of a city building MMO with strategy, business management, and RPG elements all baked in. Seems pretty ambitious, but it's actually not very far off from being available. Small pieces of groundwork have been laid down for months now, and we are getting close to the point where it's going to happen. Once it's all done, then I think the game will be ready for the big Steam release.

So how can you help? One thing that will be need soon are generic shops and generic factories for the new Goods system. I know there are already a couple out there, but it would be nice to have different "tiers," small cheap ones that have limited production, and mass factories for later in the game. Mom and pop shops and mega marts. We will need it all.

Ideas on how to implement the player mode stuff would be good too. I am thinking maybe having a base no-frills shuttle craft that everyone starts with and gets for free, and then if players want better ships, they will have to be constructed by Ship Yards built in the colonies. Which means we will need a ship yard. I think in MC2, Star Ships should be vastly more expensive VS MC1, and instead of being a resource that you stockpile, it should be an actual unit that can be piloted, sold to players, and positioned on the galactic map in strategic formations.

So there is a lot to be excited about, and this fall is definitely going to the season of MC2 glory. So thanks to everyone who played, keep the suggestions coming, and stay tuned for more!

And yeah, I seriously changed a ton of code in this update, so please let me know everything I borked.

#mycolony2

sounds good @GeneralWadaling

Thanks for the tutorial @GeneralWadaling , I have just submitted an update to My Tokens for Windows, Android, and iPhone which should fix the issues people are experiencing.

@GeneralWadaling That's some really, really nice art. Thanks!

@Ansom By endgame I mean you've unlocked every tech and there isn't really much else to do except grow your colony. Right now, this is pretty hard. Yes, research converter helps, but you can't just build a ton of research converters and supply your whole colony with that. And it'd be nice if there was a specific building to produce each resource. Having maps of converters is sort of ... inelegant.

@GeneralWadaling bc all they do all day is play with toys!

Luker124 said:@GeneralWadaling bc all they do all day is play with toys!

😂Adults plays toys
(wait that sounds familier, is it the adult daycare?)

First, see https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=32941 as that idea from @GeneralWadaling kinda plays into this idea. And this will introduce even more ideas for it. Also, this uses ideas from my past posts and some comments in them. In fact, most of these are new, but some are quiet old(ish). But enjoy, because I may or may not get stumped and call on other people to help and improve on this, because i do not have the patients to sit down and type for long periods of time.

Particle Accelerator Through the Advancement of Qubits, we are able to harness the amount of computing ability to make Nuero-Oxide, a dense material that can be fused into Steel to make extremely durable metal alloys.
Nuero-Oxide, (NXE) is a material that is able to rival tirtanium in its durability, but not cost. Made by fusing particles and steel, this highly impacted material bends easy and allows for the creation or GIANT structures.

Particle Compiler eats up Qubits, but spits out Software like it's the machines last day on this planet.

Particle Encoder Porvides extra storage for Qubits and Nuero-Oxide, while taking in Antium,Cash, and robots.

Particle DecompresserBreaks down the particles to create(somehow) basic elements at a slow and steady pace.

And about heres where I ran into the WALL. The main question I ask myself is this: Do we NEED this? And to most of these, the answer is yes. But I also have a ton of ideas that dont fit anywhere else, and they have nothing to do with the stuff above. So these are the non-sense stuff, and enjoy.

Pablo's Pizza Palace Uses food to make pizza, a delicious dish that will also make sushi from fish, giving fish a new dish.(Rhymes!)

Advanced Helium 3 Genrator This generator works at 1/2 speed of the Regolith Extraction Inc, so you get more helium-3 but it doesn't drain your regolith reserves.

Wood,Inc sells and buys wood from (not real) colonys, and makes you a large gap of wood from it.

The End The end of the game, when you research the last tech. You unlock (if in region) the ability to make 1 medium city say "The End". It would be a cool way to flex on smaller colonys.

The TunnelFats and easy way to import colonists at the cost of electricity.

Swim up Bar Its a swim up bar that colinist over 21 can go to and drink with their friends.

Large Elementary Schoolteaches same range of intelligence as the small elementary school, but just holds more students.(Do this for medium elementary and all learning areas.

So that's about to wrap this thing up for now. This is probably only the first part, so (maybe?) Expect another, but not for a while. I've got a tight schedule, so be BOLO, and I will see yall later.

This is going to be a build off of my other post here;https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33012 so you should grand read that first. But here goes with terraforming and biomes.( Also I was asked to make this and I wanted to but I was just sidetracked, so thx @GeneralWadaling)

Biomes: So heres what I'm thinking. We add different biomes such as hot, cold, and humid for all races, and some of them have certain resources. All the biomes will be on one map, and they will all have different resources based on climate. As in the colder climates have tons of ice, ocean climates have loads of wood and water, hot climates have a lot of oil and crystals, humid climates hold tons of ore and wood, and so on. I think Implimenting this would make haveing diffrent areas for your citys would be kinda necessary to get different resources.

Terraforming could be game breaking, but I think if you want to survive in a hard insectiod or Alpha Draconian colony you will need this. This makes it so that you can change lava tiles into normal tiles for tons of resources and ice tiles into water tiles.

That's going to be it for now, but you should expect another one to be coming out fairly soon and definitely after an update. Thx for reading, and cya later.

@bastecklein

Using the region filesystem, adding a new area (like the starship game map), the "outside", with moons, comets, asteroid, meteorites. Pretty much clicking on a new icon, player will have a new over region map, all black, need to be explored (like colony war), with many thing accessible only after the site is reached by a starship.


This new area should be accessible through new structures, maybe on 2 or 3 level, with trade limit.

Base level: classic rocket launcher, base trade limit

Medium level: something like the starport, with a decent trade limit

high level: an insane structure, with insane starship storage, and insane trade limit (like 10B), like DS9.


The starship are need it for travel to the new zone, moving colonists (the only way to import worker) and for travel back to home the resources, because all new map don't have classic storage (they can't use the shared material in region map, the player need to ship colonist and material for build structure), each map should have a personal storage.

For the resourses, should be like a classic rover harvesting a rock. In this case the rover are the starship, and until are returning home, the player don't have the resources.


New map idea:
we can recycling most of the map, asteroid, ice planet (for comet), ecc

Bonus resources:
this is an other focal point, depending on the map, different zone should have different bonus material, like a zone with +500% uranium production, and other with 200% triantanium, or +1000% diamonds (yes, is a real thing).


For other structure idea, better talk to @GeneralWadaling, several space idea are very nice.

GeneralWadaling said:

MizarAlcor said:You can import the crystalline from Stargate instead, then research the Crystalline Synthesis, and build the Crystalbot to start spawning the Synthetic Crystalline.

LIS humans however, outside from Ice World, can not build any bots to spawn Synthetic Crystalline, as they can not build the Crystalbots.

Humm actually GBT (Galactic board of trade) is the easiest access to it, if you play online colony :D

Yes, but the only problem is if you want to play offline, honestly i feel like needing crystalline to be able to make crystalline is a bit ridiculous (playing as offline UE), make it something with maybe 500 Alien artifacts or maybe even what is produced via center of aritificial learning, acient alien instructions, but just something other than crystalline please

GeneralWadaling said:Fed Warehouse
(For the events and that sort of stuff.)
(And trades, of caz.)

Sounds good, but where would you put the warehouse?

username said:

GeneralWadaling said:Fed Warehouse
(For the events and that sort of stuff.)
(And trades, of caz.)

Sounds good, but where would you put the warehouse?

I refer it as a federation function rather than a building.

@bastecklein
With regards to the way you implement the health, entertainment and the work distance for the colonist how will you be able to give a detailed description to how its done?
Currently I don't think anyone has any idea the correct ratios of entertainment to keep the colonists happy whilst also maximising production.

I had a chat with sobe and generalwadaling a while ago about how you could do this and it would act like the utilities. You could implement this on the area basis and for all of the factors effecting approval rating.

So for the education of colonists you'd have the different jobs requiring different iQ and the schools providing different iQ points.
For example the research converters require 100 workers and currently requiring 150 iQ. Each iQ requirement could require a certain amount of education points and the schools could provide a certain number of points as well. So say the 150 iQ job requires 7 points each this would make a research converter require 700 iQ points for the workers. To balance this out the transcendent academy could provide 500,000 points which can support approximately 700 converters.

You could apply a similar system to each of the categories that effect approval rating but to get a good approval rating you'd need an excess in all areas. If there isn't enough points for a specific factor then you can choose the largest quantity of people that would not be served by the lack of points in that area.


Let me know what you think!
I can do a thorough separate post going through my idea if you'd prefer me to do that?

lol @GeneralWadaling

I could make it so that if a post gets so many "thumbs down" it automatically gets put into moderation.

GeneralWadaling said:https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=36147

Now that all that is cleared up and I can go on without feeling like I stole his stuff, here we go!

New Laws(?):Here are some new laws that will be enacted on your colony to help with your trying time in this expansive universe.

Act Of Steel: This allows you almost total control of your colony, over even the specific amount of sleep your people get. For the micro-manager only.

Loose-leaf: The person who trusts their colony to run itself. Dosent manage much but allows you to freely build about with little to no opposition. For the relaxed gamer.

Basic Regulations: Its just how it sounds. Not relaxed, but not extreme either. Sounds a bit boring, eh? Well dont be worried. Most colonists get free reign over their day, exept for the mandatory 15 hours of work. Theres that.

Here is the end to my long rant for tonight, unless I get some more I ideas. Thx for reading, and stay tuned!

GeneralWadaling thank you for your work. It is evidently plan devised with a lot of work. I saute to you!

Saying all that I, complete newbie, would rather ask for not developing United Earth as an evil empire. It may have been in the past - and forcing League of Independent States to secede if I understand lore correctly - but I like to think that those times are over, as they are a closed period in U.E. history. You see, Restoria, L.I.S. in its nucleus, just agreed to pledge allegiance to the Commonwealth of Bait, of rather U.E. ancestry ;)

Thanks @GeneralWadaling !

My first app release was on June 13 2010 - Mr. Body for Android (a Clue scorecard app)! I was playing the game Clue with some friends and we ran out of paper scorecards, so the next day I made an app for it, and that was that!

Thanks, @GeneralWadaling I do still have a ways to go, but I think this game will be a fun one. I have added a max 2 units per tile now, and have added a couple of wonders (along with a ton of new techs). The wonders now show up on the main overview map when built, although for some reason they are showing up where I expect them to, but I'll get it eventually!

I picked a 2 unit per tile limit to allow for building new units on a city that already has a unit stationed there. It also allows for escorting a builder or settler unit.

The interface needs work for tiles with multiple units/city+unit which I will work on shortly.

Keep the ideas coming! I love civ so I only hope my little game can offer a fraction of the entertainment, lol!

@KlingonDragon It does not yet do anything on any map, I'm still working on it.

@GeneralWadaling The idea is to have bus stations also expand the distance colonists will go to work within a city, I am just implementing the cross region part first. If I try to do too much at once I will never get any of it done, as many people here well know!

Today I am putting the final touches on My Colony v1.5.0 which should be going out to all platforms soon. This release is more of a quality of life and engine improvement update, which are generally my least favorite to work on because they take forever to get done and at the end it doesn't look like you've really accomplished anything. This is as opposed to a content update where I just spend a day drawing 10 new buildings and then everybody thinks I made a huge update!

Still though, there was important work needing to be done to the My Colony engine, and it received quite a bit. I have been promising Mass Transit for a while now, and I started working on it for this release, although it ended up being just a little more complicated than it was when I was mapping it out in my head. I have implemented a small part of it in this update to see how it works in the wild, and if it doesn't screw everything up it will be greatly expanded in the updates ahead. Don't worry, if it does screw something up, from my testing, the screw up will be in the favor of the player, but I will talk about Mass Transit more a bit later. First let's take a look at what's been added since the last release!

First of all, @Sobeirannovaocc a while ago had provided me with an initial batch of Chinese language translations for the game that I have finally added in, which I believe were worked on by @GeneralWadaling and perhaps others (maybe one of them will elaborate in the comments who all provided the work), and I know a lot of people are going to be grateful to have these new translations in the game. So a big thank you to everybody who worked on the Chinese translations for this release!

If you play on a desktop class device using a mouse, the Display Mode popup has been replaced by a smaller context menu, which I felt was more appropriate on a desktop device.


Likewise, right-clicking on an option in the build sidebar now gives you a new "Bookmark" option, which allows you to add your favorite buildings to a new Bookmarks list, which will appear as an option in your build categories dropdown. This way you can create your own custom list of buildings that you like best. Bookmarks are saved on a per-city basis.


I know there is an issue , recently reiterated to me by @Electrogamer1943 , where iPhones can not bring up the long-press context menus in the game, due to their 3D Force Touch gesture. I put in a little code that might mitigate the issue, but at the time of this writing I did not have an iPhone on hand to test it out yet, so I give it a 50/50 chance of being fixed. If it's not, I will just have to switch to a double-tap style gesture for iPhones.

Moving right along. Ever since Regions were created, there has been an issue where people can not back up Region save files, since behind the scenes a Region is broken out into multiple save files, and the existing backup utility would only export the regional overview map, making it impossible to backup a region on most devices. This issue has now been addressed, and I have now added two new ways to backup your game files in this update.

The first new method is in the Game Statistics screen, down in the Game Data tab. You will see a new "Backup Copy" option at the bottom which will export a backup of your save file to your computer or device. If you are in a region, you must do this from the Region Overview map. Once you have your backup, you can re-import it into the game from the Game Data menu on the title screen.

Now if you are playing on a tablet or desktop, there is another new interface for managing your game data. When you click on Load Colony at the title screen, you will be presented with the new Load Colony window.


From this window, you can manage all of your saved files, see detailed information about each, conduct backups and delete old games. You also have hyperlink access to your colony's websites on both my-colony.com and on Coloniae. Keep in mind that the extended information for your save files will not show up until you have opened them at least once using v1.5.0 or newer.

Next up, the Auto Trade feature has been completely reworked in this release, and is no longer directly tied to the Galactic Board of Trade. Auto Trade now conducts resource Imports and Exports, at the prices you would normally get from buildings like the Galactic Freight or the Star Gate. While on the surface this does make it a worse deal as the Import/Export features come with massive fees and penalties, for many resources it will actually be better for the player, as a large percentage of the Auto Trade contracts on the GBT had previously gone unsold.

This will also go a long way towards cleaning up the GBT, since it has become so loaded with Auto Trade contracts set in unusual quantities, that it was difficult to find anything real.

Switching Auto Trade to the Import/Export facility did bring another change though, in the form of Global Resource Pools on the My Colony server. This facility is largely invisible to the player, but does have an impact on the overall resource price. Whenever a resource is exported in the game, the quantity is added to the Global Resource Pool on the server. Likewise, an import reduces the quantity of the global pool. The server watches the levels of these new global pools and uses that information to calculate the demand of various resources, and can make pricing adjustments accordingly. The server also has the ability to purchase contracts on the GBT if a resource pool is empty, although to prevent gaming of the system it will not purchase any contracts that are not priced in a range that the server sees as reasonable.

The new trading system might potentially have a large impact on the GBT and on pricing in general (hopefully a positive impact) so I will be monitoring it over the coming days/weeks to see what tweaks are needed. This new system can largely be tweaked from the server, so any fix should be able to be implemented without requiring a game update.

To go along with this change, the Import/Export feature has been added directly to the GBT, and as long as you have a GBT building you can now import and export resources at maximum quantity from one centralized location.


Now let's talk a bit more about Mass Transit. The ultimate goal is to have transit capabilities within a city and across a region. For this update, I have started with the Regional transit first, as it has the larger implication to the game engine and requires the most work.

For this first release of the feature, Human colonies get a new structure called the Regional Busing Authority, which is unlocked with the new Public Transportation technology. As of this update, you can build this structure on a non-region game, but it won't really do anything. On a region game though, each bus stop adds to your city's regional transit capacity (in this case, each stop adds 250). This capacity allows your citizens to travel between neighboring cities on the regional map for work. So if you have a transit capacity of 250 in your city, it means that 250 citizens can work in a different city, and also 250 citizens can work in your city from a neighboring city. Note that it is 250 both ways in separate pools, so the total citizens moving back and forth can be 500.

When the game decided what jobs are going to be filled, they all go to local residents first, the same as it has always worked. However, when jobs are left unfilled, for whatever reason, the game looks at which neighboring cities have unemployed workers available. If unemployed workers are available, the jobs will fill up from those available workers, up to the point that your transit capacity is used up, provided there are bus stops in range of your worksites. Likewise, if you have unemployed workers, they will look at the jobs available in neighboring cities and fill them up to the point that your outgoing transit capacity is used up, provided there are bus stops in range of their houses.

Right now the bus stop range is super high, so I think one bus stop pretty much covers any small or medium sized map, which is all you have in a region. I don't expect it to stay like that though, so bus stops should ideally be placed throughout the city.

The Economy tab on the Game Statistics window will give you some idea of what is going on with your mass transit. Under the number of total unemployed, you will now see a Remote Workers stat, which tells you how many of your people are working in neighboring cities. Likewise, in the pie graph below, the number of filled jobs is now broken down into Local Workers and Foreign Commuters, telling you how many of your jobs are being filled by workers from neighboring cities.


There is still a lot of work to be done on the Mass Transit, but it actually has pretty big implications for the way Region games are played, as it is now possible to separate out your housing from your industry. It still needs to be refined, and I need to add the ability for colonists to actually migrate from one city to the next, and that is coming soon.

To go along with Mass Transit, I have added the capability for buildings to add non-player Decorative Units to the game. You can see this when you build a bus stop, you will now see small bus rovers driving around your town.


These units do not actually do anything, they just serve to make your city look more alive. I plan on adding other kinds of decorative units soon, such as police cars and ambulances.

So that about wraps it up for this release. The next update will continue to build out the Mass Transit, bringing it to other races and making it work within a city itself. Beyond that, I also need to do a complete overhaul of Multiplayer Regions, which are barely functional at the moment. This is the next item on the list after I finish Mass Transit.

Thank you all for playing the game, keep the suggestions coming, and let me know what issues you find in this release!

First of all- I'd like to credit @GeneralWadaling, bc I think he had this idea in the first place. But anyway, heres the idea.

Worker Unions. As of right now, there isnt much of an impact if you set your colonist paycheck too low. So heres what I'm thinking: Unions that "fight" for higher pay! Now the way these unions "fight" for higher pay could be debated, but I'm thinking loads of strikes would force immediate compliance. Also: I'm thinking that maybe the pay check should scale with GDP. Like in real life, you would systematically need to change the pay of your colonists to keep up with your growth? I'm not sure if this would be a good idea, but it's worth a try.

That's all, so cya.
@Luker124

Wow thank you for this, @GeneralWadaling !

GeneralWadaling said:Hey, that leads to a new idea - WHY NOT WE CAN PRODUCE PRE-GROUPED UNITS.

It's a double edged blade...

On one hand it would be freakin' awesome because it would cut down on building time by A TON

On the other hand, i see it as an OP option because i could have 100k bots built by 5 factories in a matter of minutes. Then again, i see no harm in that...but i'm sure there's a middle ground

Pre-stacked builds should take more time though, but overall YES i'm totally in for the idea

@GeneralWadaling , you have a way of looking at this game that is beyond belief ! The things you write and describe sometimes leave me speechless. You should work in city planning or something similar it real life :)

At least write a fantasy novel man. You've got the juice for it for sure

GeneralWadaling said:One question, if the building is a voxel model, do 1 tile in MC2 = 10×10 voxels?

I would like to have a reference of how large the canvas should be, so can have some properly scaled voxel building models. :p

Yes, if we went with the Voxel model, that was actually my exact thought. 10x10 in Voxel Paint would represent 1 in-game tile in MC2. Nice easy round number.

The canvas size in Voxel Paint would need to be set accordingly, to some multiple of 10, as the loader would center the model based on the 0,0 position in the grid, which is always in the middle of the Voxel Paint grid.

I had thought about that too @GeneralWadaling and here were my ideas. I think sloped roads are going to absolutely be necessary, but to me sloped buildings to not make any sense. In that case, I think the simple solution is to allow for a "backfill" construction option where you can just level out the terrain with crushed regolith or something, before building a structure.

New buildings would be unlocked by both tech and resources, just the same as in classic MC, minus the rover requirement.

Here is an example of a loader I threw together that takes a Voxel Paint file and compiles it into a single 3d mesh that can be placed on a Scroll3d grid. I used the lander I drew and the refinery from @GeneralWadaling to demonstrate, as well as a simple tower object I threw together to test heights and placements.

https://www.apewebapps.com/vpp-loader-test/beta/

As for altering/custom colors, My Colony classic uses Fuchsia color for this, hex #ff00cc
I suppose this same principle could be applied to MC2.