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Hello everyone, I have another My Colony update ready for you today, v0.96.0. This update is somewhat minor, but during last weeks major content update, I had inadvertently removed the Fish Hatchery from the game, which in turn caused a whole bunch of problems, including the build menu not working for Advanced Builder Bots on mobile. Not good!

So today's update brings back the Fish Hatchery, but sadly if your Fish Hatchery disappeared in the last update, you will have to re-build it again 👿. Sorry!

There are a couple of other small additions today. Now, if you click on somebody's username from the slide-out chat window, it will open up their My Colony profile (before it only worked if you clicked on their message in the notification area).

I have also added an in-game friends list. Now when you are looking at a user's profile window, there will be a new "Add Friends" button up in the corner. This button is used to both add a new friend, or accept a pending friend request.

There is a new section on the Statistics window for friends now. This will show all of your confirmed friends and incoming friends requests, and will show you if your friends are online or offline. Clicking on a friend will bring up all of their colonies.

Keep in mind that the friends list is for all of Ape Apps, not just My Colony, although My Colony is the first game to implement the feature. I plan on expanding it to other Ape Apps things as well though, from games to the website to the chat program.

So that is really it for today. I am sorry that the update is smaller this time, but I had to get that Fish Hatchery bug fixed because it was causing major problems on mobile! The update should be hitting all devices within the coming days, so be on the lookout. Also keep in mind that if you are using the Ape Apps Launcher, the update requires an update to the Launcher which should also be coming later today.

That's it for now, stay tuned for more and thanks for playing!

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

I am in the process of adding a Friends List system to Ape Apps accounts that will allow you to easily see when your friends are online playing games like My Colony, or to invite them to a match in games like Death 3d. You can start testing the ability to add friends right now by using the Ape Chat desktop interface from your web browser (go to https://chat.ape-apps.com ) and right clicking on somebody's name in the user listing and selecting Add to Friends.

The only way they can accept right now is if they also right click on your name and select Add to Friends, but within the next couple of days this website will also have a list of your pending requests on your profile page and will allow you to accept or decline.

Friend management will soon be embedded into online games like My Colony also. For example, when you start a new colony, you will be able to pull up a list of your friends' charter codes. Or you can get notified when a friend is starting a new Colony Wars game lobby.

So anyway, it should be a cool new feature, and I will keep looking for neat ways to incorporate it into my various games!

Today I am putting the finishing touches on and releasing the v1.21.0 update to the original My Colony! Since interest in the original My Colony remains high, I am putting it back on the front burner, and we will discuss that more in a bit. Until then, let's take a look at what is new!


First off, and as every Ancient Astronaut Theorist knows, the Ancients were experts at brick making, and now their secrets have finally been unlocked with the introduction of the new Ancient Alien Brick Factory! A couple of these should easily take care of most or all of your colony's brick needs.

There have been requests to beef up the transportation capabilities between regional cities, so there is now a new upgrade to the Regional Bussing Authority called the Deluxe Bussing Authority! There is nothing earth-shattering here, but it does have a vastly higher bussing capacity than the current structure, which should come as a big help for many Regional players.

The last update introduced a new tech called Advanced Simulation Theory, and this update brings a long-awaited upgrade to the I.T. Studio Complex called the Simulated Software Studio! Here, virtual people, created by software, are in turn used to produce even more software. It seems unholy, but one building full of these sims can output about as much software as 50 buildings full of human workers. The A.I. is taking over!

Next up, a new late game technology has been added called Simulated Fabrication. Basically magic, this tech allows simulated people to create real things. How does it work? Who cares? Because it unlocks the shiny new Simulated Nanite Factory!


Here we have Nanite production on steroids. I don't know what the math is, but one of these things is roughly equivalent to 600 regular Nanite Factories, so it's a big deal. It might seem OP right now, but you can assume that some larger scale Nanite consumption is coming in the not-too-distant future...

There have been a couple of minor changes as well, based on user feedback. The Bulldozer behavior has been changed. Now instead of destroying buildings, it sells them, so it's basically a quick-sell toggle. Additionally, I have made all Encyclopedia entries alphabetically sorted so it's easier to actually find things.

I know there have been a lot more suggestions/requests lately, so if I did not get to yours yet then don't worry. I am reviving My Colony back to full-time production, so it will be updated a whole lot more in the weeks and months ahead (along side My Colony 2 and Colony Wars, but more on those later 🤐).

This brings me to the future of My Colony. Based on comments here, the in-game feedback and on the app stores, it's clear that people want me to continue working on and expanding the original My Colony. I am fine with doing so, but there is also the reality that it is an almost seven(!) year old game, and since it's not really a pay-to-win type In App Purchase festival, it's big income generating days have largely come and gone. So to be worth my time to keep pouring time into the original My Colony at the expense of other projects, I need to find a way to be able to make it generate a return.

So I was considering ways to do this that would not be annoying or disruptive. There are a lot of new ad formats available on mobile now, but I really didn't want to flood My Colony with annoying pop ups like every other mobile game. Then just this morning, a friend of mine told me he had spent some money buying collectors items in the game World of Tanks, and it gave me an idea for My Colony.

What if, on occasion, I made available "special edition" or limited time only releases of certain buildings, such as holiday themed variants of current buildings, that people who wanted them could buy with Ape Coins? So for instance, there could be the "Halloween 2022 Themed Investment Bank" (or anything really) that you could only buy during a two or three week period, then it's gone for good (gone for sale, if you buy it then you always have it on your account).

So anyway, people who like to collect things could get all these extra buildings. Even tough they wouldn't necessarily provide a leg up on the game, they would let you make your colony look a lot cooler, and also satisfy the collection itch. Most importantly, it would help support the continued development of this "oldy but goldy" game.

That is all just an idea though, I have not decided one way or another. I might just add that to MC2 instead.

Anyway, there is a lot more to come, not just for MC1, but for the entire My Colony Universe. I plan to get another MC2 update in this month, and I've got some really cool things headed to Colony Wars, such as Super Weapons. So stay tuned, because there is a lot of exciting My Colony goodness headed your way!

I hope everybody is having a good week! Today after several weeks of work, I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony v1.0.0 which will be heading out to all platforms over the coming days, just in time for the holidays! There is not a lot of new content in this update, and pretty much nothing that I had originally planned to add to it is here, but that is ok! What you get instead is almost a total re-write of the underlying simulation engine, which I think will improve performance on most devices, greatly reduce save-file sizes (and save corruption instances), and greatly expand the possibilities for new features in the coming updates. With all of that said, let's take a look at what has changed. This will probably be a longer write-up than most, so sit tight!

First of all, I really wish I had more time to work on this update, as I do not consider it to be complete by any stretch of the means. Sadly though, because of the time of year I had to push the update now, otherwise I would not be able to release until sometime in January. For one reason, I have a lot of family stuff coming up for the holidays. Also, the various app stores do not process submissions during this time of year (so that their employees can have some holiday time off), particularly iPhone, so I have to get the update in now before the release window closes. So I want to apologize to everybody for the lack of new content and incomplete nature of this update, given what I had promised previously. I hope you are not too mad at me, especially since it has been about a month since the last update! I did put a ton of hours into this one though, and I think (hope!) in the long run the game will end up being a lot better for it.

Since these patch notes are longer than normal, I will split them up into sections.

Game Data

First I want to talk about some game file changes. Since the format of the game has evolved a bit since the first release of My Colony in 2016, there have been a lot of properties and settings added over the months and years that are no longer applicable today. I have done a little bit of cleanup and reorganizing of the game data in this release, and if you have an older, larger colony, the first time you open it in v1.0.0 it might take a little longer to load as this cleanup procedure takes place on your game data, possible up to a minute or more. This is normal. Afterwards, the disk size of your game data should be a lot smaller, which should be great for all versions of the game, as save file corruptions are sometimes a problem on various platforms. It should also make cloud sync a whole lot faster and more reliable. I believe it will also help with issues where web browsers like Chrome delete My Colony saves to keep the game under the browser's storage quota. Just for an example, the save file for my main colony which has around 270k population is now only about 600kb, which is a massive reduction from before.

I am working on a way to export an entire region game (and all of it's sub colonies) into one single backup file. I had meant to have this feature ready to go for this update, but simply ran out of time. Be aware that it is coming soon though. The new file size reduction is one of the reasons why I am able to implement this feature properly!

Regions

There is a large change to how Regions are generated now, when playing on a map type that features a river terrain, such as Earthlike, Abandoned World, and Lava World. The River formations are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of on a map-by-map basis, giving the entire region a more continuous look and feel. So now when you start a new region on one of these map types, it will have to generate the river template, which may take a minute on slower devices. It is a one-time thing though, so I think the time trade-off is worth it.


In addition to automatic region generation, you can now also include a template file that the game will use to create your region. The template parser works best when using a 250x250 black and white image, but it will accept any image file you have. For example, consider the following template file:


When applied to a Lava World region, will create the following regional map:


These new region generating and templating features can make for some very interesting regional maps!

Once you are inside of a region map, you will notice some additional changes. There is now a 1 tile green border surrounding regional cities. If you mouse-over this border, you will see the name of the adjacent city in the region and if you click on it, it will ask you if you want to switch over to that city, without having to back out to the overall regional map first.


In addition, you can now order a rover or other unit to drive onto that green border area, and the unit will be transferred to the adjacent city. Players have wanted this feature since regions first came out, and it basically works just as you would expect it to.

Simulation Changes

This is where the changes start getting big, but I have tried to implement them in a way that will hopefully be unnoticeable to most players. For v1.0.0, I have rewritten the core simulation engine from scratch, moving it from an individual colonist based simulation, to more of a macro simulation using buildings as the core point of focus for the game. This change was mainly done for performance and scale. When I had originally created the game, I did not really expect colonies with more than a few hundred colonists at most. My original inspiration for the colonist part of the game was a title I found on Steam called Spacebase DF-9, which sadly got abandoned by it's creators. But in that vain, each colonist had it's own stats, it's own bank account, it's own mood, name, health, happiness level, job, house etc. With a few hundred colonists, this works out pretty good. With 100,000 or even 1,000,000, this becomes a CPU and memory nightmare.

Over the years I have done various tweaks and hacks to try to get around this design issue, but it's never worked out perfectly. At the end of the day, there was no way to get around the fact that the way that the game was originally envisioned and designed was simply no longer compatible with the way that the game had eventually turned out. My Colony has become, at it's core, a city simulator game based in outer space. It does feature things that you will not find in a traditional city simulator game, but at the end of the day, this is what it has basically morphed in to. So I have made changes to the game to better reflect this reality.

The individual colonist, as he has existed in prior versions of the game, no longer exists. He has been replaced by statistics. The game now operates on a system based on the residential structure and it's proximity to available amenities, such as entertainment, medical, educational, and work. This is now reflected by clicking on a building and looking at it's stats screen.


Where a colonist decided to live is based on the overall value rating of the residential property. Where a colonist decides to work is based on the location of the job site in relation to occupied residential buildings. Therefore, maintaining full productive capacity requires balancing all of the desirability factors for your residential buildings and keeping your job sites in range to those buildings.

It may sound complicated, but it's really not. In general, a colony that was well designed and balanced before this update should still work without too many issues. I have tried to design this in a way that would be as minimally disruptive to existing colonies as possible.

The largest potential issue people will see is in regards to medical care. Simply put, before medical care was barely required, and now it is absolutely required. If your colony lacks medical facilities, people will die. If you start seeing people die every month for no reason, make sure that you have enough medical clinics!

This new simulation engine has changed the way approval rating is calculated. It is now a function of the overall value of every residential structure, weighted by the number of colonists living in that structure. Overall colony approval rating will impact production in this way: if overall approval falls below 30%, you will start to see riots, which will in turn decrease the number of people who go to work. To make the transition to v1.0.0 easier, I have disabled rioting for this release, to give players time to balance their colonies. It will be activated in v1.1.0 though, so you should not ignore it.

In a way, it is sad to make this change, as I've always liked having the ability to select a colonist and see where they live, how happy the are, give them money, etc. These options are now gone from the game, along with certain policy items that were related to individual colonists. That said, the change has reduced the memory consumption of the game significantly, and will also allow the game to grow in ways never before possible, so I think that overall it will be a good thing, and I hope people are not too disappointed by it!

Colonist Lifecycle

Colonists now age properly in this update, and they will also have babies. You now need to balance your colony in a way that can support children and elderly, who are unable to work. Before you could just have a 1:1 ratio of population to jobs, now you cannot. A new section has been added to the population stat screen that lets you see the current age distribution of your colonists.


Colonists will work between the ages of 16 and 70 and they will have kids between the ages of 16 and 40. After the age of 50, they have a chance to die of natural causes, and that chance is higher or lower based on the health rating of your colony.

This has been the hardest part of the game to balance in this update, and will probably take several updates to get it right. You do not want the birth rate to be too high at the beginning of the game, because it is hard to take care of babies when you are just starting out. However, you do not want it to be too low later on, because you need enough new workers to support the aging population.

As I said, this will probably take some time to get right. It will be a bit more difficult for large existing colonies, because before this update, almost all colonists were aged between 20-35 years old. If you have a large existing population, all of these people will probably be retiring around the same time. To ease these issues, I have added new deportation policies to the game, with the options to deport all elderly and children.

Random Changes and Improvements

The Stats screen now has two new sections, Utilities and Game Data, both of which were going to be a lot cooler than they are now, but I ran out of time. Keep an eye on these, because they will be getting better in the future.

On the main construction sidebar, you can now right-click on a building to quick-jump to the encyclopedia article for that structure. In addition, mouse-hovering over a building now shows a bit more information, such as the entertainment/medical/educational capacities of the structure.

For vehicle construction buildings like the Small Vehicle Factory, you can now mouse-over them when they have multiple units queues up to see exactly which types of units are currently in the queue.

On regional maps, the day/night cycle is now synchronized across the entire region. Before now, one city could be daytime, and the city right next to it could be night.

Tourism has been revamped, much in the way the rest of the simulation has. You will now probably make a lot more money on tourism than you had previously.

The Overview statistics window now displays the total number of real-life hours you have played the game (since v0.91.0, as it was not tracked before then), as well as the amount of game-time that your colony has been around.


There is now a new Medical build category.

When a colony under embargo starts paying taxes again, they now regain their "motherland relations" at a faster rate.

The Brood Training Center now provides some education.

Increased the number of students for the Transcendent Academy, Mound of Scholars, and Internet Relay Booth.

Increased medical capacity of the Bloodletting Station, Healing Pods, and First Aid Station.

Increased the guest capacity of the Large Park, Paste Treatment Spa, Torture Booth, Live Autopsy Slab, Suppertime Arena, and Internet Relay Booth.

Added slight Entertainment and Education boost to the Real News Station.

Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.

New Content

New Unit: Ether Rover
New Structures: Ether Storage, Integrated Medical Clinic, Small Hospital, University, Ant Paste Rejuvenation Clinic

What's Next?

There is still much to be done. I would have preferred to just work on this update for three months and add everything I want to it, but I did want to give everybody something to play over the holidays. My immediate plan for My Colony v1.1.0 is to add the #1 most requested feature since the game originally came out, Mass Transit. I already have the entire system mapped out in my head and I think it's going to work well, and will function within a single city and even across region. This means you will also be able to have houses in one region map where people work in the adjacent region map. So this is what will be coming in v1.1.0, unless there are major issues with this update, in which case it will be v1.2.0.

After that, I want to implement crime and security, which will be the focus of the next update. Crime is already factored into the land value rating of all buildings, so a lot of the work is already done. I just need to do the work to finish it off. If I had more time, Mass Transit and Crime would have been done in this release, since I have already started implementing both "under the hood."

Finally, I promised online competition and leaderboards for this update, and I just didn't get to them. I have not forgotten about it though, but I am pushing it out until after Mass Transit and Crime, as I have already sort of started on Mass Transit and Crime, and I think people will probably get more out of those two features anyway. So I am tentatively scheduling the online competition update for v1.3 or v1.4.

Beyond those, that is all I have planned in the near future for major gameplay changing updates. After that it will be back to the regular bug-fix and content update grinds. I do still need to flesh out the other civs a bit more. At some point I want to add AI controlled factions, as I want to add a new map type that is already inhabited by a primitive species and you will either have to coexist with them or exterminate them. But that is a little bit further down the line.

So that's all for v1.0.0. It should be hitting all devices over the coming days, so be on the lookout. Let me know in the forum what issues and requests you have. There are literally a ton of engine changes to this update and so I do expect problems, but with your help I will get them all ironed out over the coming updates.

This happens to be the 100th major update to My Colony, and I want to thank everybody who has been with me over the years, helping me create this amazing game that we all love! I never could have imagined when I first started on it in 2016 what it would have eventually morphed into. A lot of the greatness in the game comes directly from suggestions I have gotten from you guys, so thank you to everybody who has supported the game over the years, and stay tuned for a lot more to come in the future!

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

I want to game with my friend, i make a new colony ONLINE and my question is, how my friend join in the game?😃

Join the Trade Federation Commonwealth

---

Hello,

Would you be able to add a notification to say when a play as wants to join a federation?

Could you get it to show up the same way friend requests, trades and messages show up? It's just currently we need to go into the federation tab to check and most of don't check too often

Let me know what you think!

Valhalla is always open for those who show great promise and will not give up! I am accepting all requests for annexation and have a public access commonwealth, so long as you join into our discord channel, which opens a whole world of possibilities for you.

I am able to send gifts to all those who ask and am still growing my supply chain.

Join Valhalla to get a great opportunity at furthering yourself in one of the greatest communities to grace us!

Accepting all annexation requests!
Accepting all embassies!

Discord: https://discord.gg/fr7sHpt

Charter code: k5Th6sZP

https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=3632

this is something similar. I have like 15 annex requests who aren't working (invalid code, already independent) and 5 embassy requests with invalid codes.

So I've just put the finishing touches on My Colony v0.79.0 and it should be hitting all platforms within the next few days. I had initially planned a great content update for this release, but I have been getting a lot of requests in email and in the app store comments to stop adding content and work on engine improvements instead, so that is what I did for today. There are a few new things in this release, so lets take a look!

As with every update, all of the hard syntax bugs reported through the app store error consoles have been addressed. In addition, I think I finally have the duplicate Federation balloting issue resolved.

I have also made a handful of improvements to the rendering engine. You will particularly notice that on a Water World map, there are no longer "waves" where the water tiles were not lining up properly when you zoom out.

I have also corrected a long standing rendering issue where some of the edge tiles would either a) not show up at all, or b) flicker on and off continually. Other small rendering improvements were made, but are not worth a write-up. Performance should be slightly improved as well.

I noticed (and corrected) an issue where colony resource stats were not being synced at all to the server if you were playing a sub-city to a Region game. This was not a major issue if you saved/quit your region game completely back to the title, but for users who didn't, it would result in lost resources the next time they started their region and it pulled their saved resource levels from the server. This is now resolved, and hopefully it helps the issues some people have with their regional resources not saving right.

Next up, I added a new feature which should hopefully help with debugging all of those odd issues that are reported by only 1 or 2 people and are almost impossible to reproduce and debug on demand. Since back when I tied online games to your Ape Apps Account, I have been unable to access and debug other players save files when they are having an issue. To get around this, I have added a new 'Offline Copy' option to the bottom of the stats screen.

This creates an exact clone of your game, except offline (and with a different file name). You can then export this cloned copy and send it to me if you have an issue you want me to look at. It is also handy if you want to test out some big changes to your online colony before actually committing them to your main save file. If you make a clone of a sub-region file, it becomes its own stand-alone map, it does not duplicate the whole region.

I have had several requests to add vehicle build counts to the construction side bar. Here they are.

Also, I did get one new structure added to this build, the Research Converter.

This is a late game Human structure for burning off your excess Research and converting it into raw materials. Might still need some balance tweaking, you can let me know what you think. It's basically like a Black Market Bazaar on steroids, and it also consumes Research.

Finally, this release includes the first batch of Russian language translations, there are just about 300 translated strings in total, but it covers most of the common ones. Russian is by far the most requested translation for the game, as Russia is the #2 market for My Colony in the Play Store outside of the U.S. More translations will be forthcoming.

That wraps it up for this update. Keep your eye on the app marketplaces over the next few days for the release to hit your platform, and stay tuned for a lot more My Colony goodness to come!

H3110 guys!


Have yo ever think about something that, when we have occupied every space we can use on the planet, where we can seek for? And search for even more resources?
This time, we are going somewhere above the sky -
The Space.👨‍🚀
I am not kidding. Of cause this is the age of space colonization, but I think something is missing - Interaction with the outer space, and more space industries. This time we will develop into the space, and face the infinite possibilities of, and from the outer worlds.

There are
SEVEN NEW SYSTEMS I’ll introduce in the upcoming series of my posts:

• Random Colony Events - Once you have built an consulate you have to deal with the matters not just with the commonwealth but also the outside world. There can be interstellar guests, great people, and famous merchants, or disasters, pirates, and more.
• Security & Crimes - Accompanied with the random events, as PIRATES!!! may attack your colony you have to get yourself well prepared. Also, this is the new thing that contributes to governance. A low security level leads to crime outbreaks.
• Orbital Construction - Yep, we are going into the space and build our epic orbital stations, huge starships, or even a Death Star (just kiddin)!
• Outer Space Missions - Train your astronauts, prepare your starships, and begin exploring the outer space and search for good stuff!
• The Great Artifacts - Want to have some epic things that you can show them to the entire galaxy? Collect the great artifacts! Besides they will be put into the showroom, it reveals new technology and buildings, as well bring your colony unique buffs!
• The Grand Tournaments & Races - The evil Galactic Emperor wanted to have a series of galaxy-wide tournaments and events for long, so as to encourage the colonies to compete each other, in non-violence manner. In these events, you may earn resources as awards, and the most importantly, the new reputation resource that is required to build the epic wonders and ultimate functional buildings! (bast has his plan already :p)
• Requests and Orders - So when there is no Grand Races, how you can earn a minor amount of reputation is through finishing the Requests made by NPCs and special visitors from Random Events. (bast has his plan already :p)
• Galactic Diplomacy - Accompanies with Random Events and Quests, this allows other colonies to be one part of diplomacy... (similar thing is introduced in space missions)

And also, numerous buildings and new technologies...


It might be a largest series of ideas I have ever had... But if you want to express further ideas and improvements towards this, welcome for it!

Inviting:
@Ansom
@Westy266
@Invincible
@Luker124
@bastecklein
@cry8wolf9
@Sobeirannovaocc
@Neotheone
@KamikaziYT
For discussion!


Links of the posts here:

• Volume 1 - The Space Industries (Basic stuff)!
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33561
  Finished!
• Volume 2 - Random Events!
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33608
  Finished!
• Volume 3 - Security and Crimes MKII!
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33783
  Finished!
• Volume 4 - Outer Space Exploration!
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33899
  Finished!
• Volume 5 - Quests and Orders!
  Bast has his plans, however... I have a post regarding this.
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=34008
  Now under work!
• Volume 6 - The Great Artifacts!
  https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=34215
  Finished!
  
  And more will come soon! Stay tuned for the updates!

Beginning with My Colony 2 v0.21.0, the game has a built-in stat reporting service that developers are free to take advantage of if they wish. This thread will stay updated as features are added and changes made to how stat reporting works.

MC2 players can easily opt in to a third party stat reporting service by opening the Statistics window of their game. The World section will provide an input box where players can enter a URL (or comma separated series of URL) endpoint for game stat collection.


Once set, the endpoints selected by the user will periodically receive JSON encoded game statistics via HTTP post. It is up to the endpoint maintainer to ensure that their URL can receive cross origin HTTP requests. Endpoints can be built with whatever technology the maintainer wishes.

To help get you started with developing a stat reporting endpoint, here are some code samples in both PHP and Python:

PHP: /viewpage.php?p=43258#p43308
Python: /viewpage.php?p=43258#p43308

The base JSON data that will be sent to the endpoint via HTTP post looks like this:

{

event: "eventCode",

sid: "server-uuid",

ses: "session-uuid",

cli: "client-uuid",

gid: "game-uuid",

aun: "ape apps username",

data: {}

}

Every post will be formatted as above and contain those seven fields, event, sid, ses, cli, gid, aun and data, data generally being an object containing further data. The data object will differ depending on the event code. The rest of the fields are as follows:

field	info
event	current possible event codes: serverConnected, serverDisconnected, statReport
sid	server id: a unique id for the current world (aka, save game). The server ID is also visible to the player as seen in the screenshot above, meaning an endpoint operator could theoretically use it as an authentication key if they wanted to.
ses	session id: every time the user opens MC2, they are assigned a new session id. can be used to track how many unique times the player has opened the game
cli	client id: assigned the first time a player opens MC2 on a device and is retained. can be used to help identify multiple worlds from the same player
gid	game identifier: For stock My Colony 2, the game identifier will always be a999fe76-ff1c-5935-e365-755089ba8982 If a total conversion mod author knows what he/she is doing, their mod should have a different identifier from the base game (this can be set in the Metadata section of the game editor). This can be used to organize data based on mod (or to easily support future games based on the MC2 engine), but it does require that the mod author properly changed the game identifier on their mod.
aun	ape apps username: if the player is signed in and authenticated with their Ape Apps Account, this field will be set with their username.

Every post sent to the logging endpoint will contain the above fields, so you should be able to count on them when designing endpoint logic.

The data field will be different (or even blank) depending on the event code associated with the request. Below is a reference for the data currently sent with each endpoint. You may bookmark this page for reference, as it will be updated when new data points are added.

Event: serverConnected

field	info
gameData	This is a hashed checksum of all of the game data objects loaded for the current world. This will be the exact same hash for all players playing the same version of stock My Colony 2, and will be different when mods/addons are activated. This is useful if you are developing rankings/leaderboards and want to verify that all users are playing on an even field.
worldTypeId	This is the uuid for the game data object associated with the current world (eg Red Planet, Water World, etc).
worldTypeName	The readable name for the current world type above, as set in the game data object (not translated).
worldName	The name of this world (the save game, not the planet type). ex Strange New World, or whatever the player chose.
gameVersion	The host version of My Colony 2 that this session is on (ex v0.21.0)
created	Timestamp of server first creation
hostOS	What operating system this session is running under (ex windows, android, ios, etc)
gameSession	Differing from the top level ses session id, the gameSession id is unique every time the game file is loaded. Can be used to link stats from connection to disconnection.
universe	the universe code this world is connected to

Event: serverDisconnected

field	info
gameSession	Differing from the top level ses session id, the gameSession id is unique every time the game file is loaded. Can be used to link stats from connection to disconnection.

Event: statReport

field	info
bannedPlayers	Total number of players currently banned from this game.
exploredChunks	How many chunks have been generated (aka "explored") on this world.
players	Objects containing extended information for each player in the game (detailed in below table)
settledChunks	Number of chunks that contain player built structures
settlements	Objects containing extended information for each settlement in the game (detailed in below table)
totalGDP	quick reference containing the sum of all settlement GDPs in world
totalMoney	quick reference containing the sum of all player money balances in world
totalPlayers	quick reference containing the sum of all players in world
totalPlaytime	total time in minutes that this server has had at least 1 player connected and playing
totalPopulation	quick reference containing the sum of all settlement populations in world
utilities	Objects containing total utility output and consumption in world

Object: statReport.players

field	info
admin	boolean, is this player an admin
civ	data object id for the civilization this player is playing as
color	player color hex code
id	server assigned unique player id
joined	timestamp for when player first joined server
level	player's level
mod	boolean, is this player a moderator
money	players current balance of money
playTime	how many minutes this player has been connected and active
research	how much research the player currently has
username	if signed in to Ape Apps Account, this is their username. Otherwise, null

This post will continue to be updated and maintained as changes are features are added to the reporting function. Please use this thread for questions/comments/suggestions/requests, etc.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have begun rewriting the Epic Adventure game from scratch, converting it to Pixel Paint graphics and greatly improving the ease of adding new content and feature set.


The original Epic Adventure code was my first attempt at multiplayer gameplay, and I made a lot of noob coding decisions that sort of put development of the game at a stand still. It was basically a convoluted mess and there was no easy way to move the project forward, so it pretty much sat idle for years.

Recently though, and pretty much out of nowhere, the game suddenly became popular on the Windows Store to where it has become one of my top played games, and a lot of requests for updates and feature improvements have started to come in via the in-app "Submit Feedback" function. Most of the requests were basically non-starters with the way the code originally worked, so I had the choice to either ignore the feedback and the recent growth of the game, or to basically start over from scratch, so I choose option 2.

The Epic Adventure rewrite (which will be Epic Adventure v3.0 once released) is build off of my new aptly titled "Adventure Game Engine" and incorporates many of the coding lessons I learned during the development of My Colony 2. The engine has been made generic enough that it will also be usable for other types of games in the future, namely Roguelike and scripted RPG type games. It can do procedurally generated worlds (such as how Epic Adventure will continue to work) or is can run off of prebuilt maps and scripts. It now supports not only click and touch controls, but also keyboard and gamepad input.

Game chunks are now loaded on the fly and in a continuous/infinite manner like in My Colony 2, and terrain features and textures can be automatically generated by the engine at run time, so that biome definitions only really need to specify colors (other customizations are possible though). The engine now supports Water, which was a top request for the current Epic Adventure game, but the water can also be given a custom color and made to be dangerous (lava?).


This new rewrite will be available to play as soon as it is able to do everything that the current version of Epic Adventure can, since I can't release an update with less features than the previous version! That basically means I need to finish creating all of the tools/items/craftable things and get them all working the same as before.

After that though, future updates and releases are going to be extremely easy to do with the way the game works now. So besides greatly expanding the current lineup of things you can craft and build, here are some of the near term plans for additions to the game:

Towns
Random towns will be generated on the overworld including NPCs that can run shops and give you basic automatically generated quests.

Dungeons
Similar to towns, dungeons will appear on the overworld, but they will be mainly a single structure with a stairway leading down to the real dungeon area, which will be multiple levels and probably have something cool at the bottom of the floor. Town NPC's will be able to give quests that involve exploring or clearing out nearby dungeons.

Vehicles
You will be able to craft and then get in and control vehicles. I am mainly thinking of boats for the water to start out with, but I also think a minecart that can run on tracks you build would be a neat addition.

Dedicated Servers
I am adding in a dedicated server mode just like in MC2, so that persistent Epic Adventure worlds can be running 24/7 that anyone can join and partake in.

I expect the initial release of this Epic Adventure rewrite to be out in a couple of weeks, and then I will start expanding it out based on feedback. I think that this new version of Epic Adventure is going to be a lot more fun than the current iteration, and I look forward to seeing what people think when I publish the update, so stay tuned!

#epicadventure

I have just published v1.3.6 of the Ape Apps Launcher which you can download now. This update is required for users of EZ Database and EZ Register, and also includes some goodies for everybody!

Firstly, you can now access your friends list from the main launcher screen. If you click on the new friends icon on the top title bar, you will be presented with the new friends list popup:


In addition, now when you click on a friends username in the friends list window or in the Ape Chat window, you will be taken to the new profile screen where you can see more information about your friend and see their achievements. You can also look at your own profile to see your own achievement details.


If you keep the friends list window open, you will see notices when your friends come online as well.

The update is live right now in the Ape Market, so get it from the auto-updater or download is manually today!

https://market.ape-apps.com/edit_app.php?app=381

Hello commanders.

Hopefully I can provide some ideas for Colony Wars Campaign!

Prologue
You are a commander in Terra Nova, newly promoted as lieutenant at the outbreak of the civil war by Harold Franklin, the colonel of the colony.
Right after a short promotion process in such emergency, a LIS commander named Jackins D. Jones raid into the commander office you just receive promotion.
Harold pulled out his pistol and pointed it at Jackins, at the same time Jackins have his assault rifle pointed at Harold's chest.
You pulled out your pistol, originally pointed at Jackins and ready to pull the trigger.
But Jackins begin persuading you to join them - ‘Do you think killing more innocent people for the Union will make this corrupt world even better?’
At this moment, you begin hesitating.
‘You won't betray the Union, right?’ Harold, trying to pull you back.

At this moment, you choose the faction you wish to play.

If you choose United Earth, you'll save Harold by shooting at Jackins' arm, forcing Jackins to retreat, Harold will bring you to communications room to receive orders from Marshal Bradley R. Johnson.
If you choose LIS, you'll shoot Harold's leg, and leaving with Jackins. Jackins will bring you to the hideout, joining the resistance leader Beuford P. Tots.

United Earth

• Emergency Retreat
  

  Congrats for the promotion commander, but we don't have the time to celebrate. An unknown resistance launched unexpected attack on our Space Marines dispatchment on this planet in a sudden, at this rate we'll lose all our men within hours. Here is your first task, defend the starport and evacuate all remaining Space Marines force as possible. We're counting on you!
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Defend the starport for 5 minutes. The starport must not fall!
  • At least 3 full transport shuttles must be evacuated. (12 Space Marines)
• Red Rocks and Red Blood
  

  Thanks for saving the Space Marines from Terra Nova, the soldiers are paying high respect to you. But as you see, the Resistance declared war on us. They call themselves Independent State. Though this is ridiculous, they are posing problems. Chaos begin stirring up the colonies around Terra Nova. More importantly, I am sending you to Crimson Rock, where our prototype weapon archives center lies. Our coordination officer Yoshihara will tell you more details.
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  

  I have heard of your story in Terra Nova, it's a amazing work. Okay, here's the details. Garrisons reported strong Resistance activities in Crimson Rock. The archives center is relatively safe in suburban, here we need you to establish defense around the lab before the enemy notice the facility. Don't let the Resistance touch any documents, since these confidential weapon blueprints here will help us in the future battles. Eliminate the Resistance forces once you think the facility is secured. Good luck! Commander!
  -Yoshihara Minoru

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Establish a base near the Archives Center.
  • The Archives Center must not fall!
  • Eliminate all LIS forces.
• There are Crowbars in My Woods
  

  Hey, Commander. Nice to see you again. It's a honour to be praised as a hero in Terra Nova and get promoted as Captain… isn't it? Marshal is too busy to manage every battlegrounds, so now you are under my command again. Remember, always, remain, respect, to, your, officer.
  I need you in the jungles of Janiss-5. Resistance saboteurs broke into prison facility that I am responsible for, released some dangerous political prisoners. My force will lock the area down much as possible, while you'll search for these troublemakers soon as possible before they sneak away from us again.
  If you fail, both of our military career will be screwed up. Understand?
  (Silence)
  What are you waiting for? Go!
  -Harold Franklin

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Find all the Saboteurs and prisoners before the countdown strikes zero.
• Who is the Traitor
  

  Good job, my commander. You have fulfilled your responsibility, as you should be. Just do one more thing for me, I'll consider submitting another promotion request for you.
  I have a rival, Ronnie. This man always gets into my way, ruining my good plans in battles. I am suspecting this bastard turned to the Resistance. Find evidence of his betrayal, and more importantly, destroy him!
  -Harold Franklin

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Find Ronnie's base and infiltrate his radar.
  • Destroy the real traitor.
• Operation ‘Kaiser’
  

  (Inspecting documents) …… I can't believe Harold betrayed the Union. The Resistance bribed him. I'm glad you are wise enough to identify who is friend or foe. You have proved your capabilities again, for this, you're promoted to Colonel.
  -Marshal R. Johnson

  
  

  (Incoming transmission)
  Marshal, our prototype weapons developed from blueprints in Crimson Rock proved effective against Resistance forces. Ronnie's forces just retrieved Fort-35 from the hands of our enemies using them.
  -Yoshihara Minoru

  
  

  Fantastic! Thanks to your blueprints, now we can plan a counterstrike on these troublesome Resistance forces. Speaking of that, now you're one part of Operation ‘Kaiser’. And you gotta take a important part of the operation. You'll lead one of our newly built tech forces to take Emper System back from our enemies. Make a wise use of them!
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Capture the Fort Command. Do not destroy it.
  • Destroy all LIS bases and forces.
• Dangerous Encounter
  

  (Video records)
  Do you see that? Is that a human sized ant… Wait, it has a gun!? Everybody find a cover!
  (Goes static after the soldier being shot by a gun)
  -A poor soldier, who encountered unknown being

  
  

  That's all available records of recent alien encounter incidents. Well, kind of... Unbelievable. Something that should only happen in manga stories now take place in reality.
  -Yoshihara Minoru

  
  

  It is likely Insectoids... But where did they come from?
  Oh, commander. Sorry for not noticing you are already here!
  I appreciate your great work in Operation ‘Kaiser’, you have made remarkable contribution to the Union. The General Assembly quickly agreed to promote you to General ranks. It is a big honour!
  I bet you'll be a great Marshal better than me, in a future not so far away! (Thumbs up)
  As you see, while we are having a hard time with the Resistance, there are aliens crawling on our flanks, with intension unknown. We need you to collect more information about those aliens. For this dangerous mission, you'll have one of our best Space Marines of the Union, Sarge. I'm very sure you will cooperate with him very well.
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Keep Sarge alive.
  • Find and infiltrate the alien base.
  You need some Insecticides?
  

  Seriously, the Zolarg Empire of Insectoids allied up with the Resistance? THAT Zolarg Empire we just heard of its establishment recently?
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  

  Yes, Marshal. And they sent a message to warn us - ‘Stop your action against the liberty warriors, or we'll officially declare war on you.
  -United Earth Diplomat

  
  

  Now everything just get complicated... And they call that not yet declaring war on us?
  Commander, you have just come at the right time. The Insectoids are standing on the enemies' side. Our flanks are in danger. There is one location you have to keep Insectoids away, Urano-6. We also have our strategic uranium mine here, we cannot lose this place to either Insectoids or the Resistance. Defeat the Insectoids there before they can further disrupt our battles with the Resistance. I'll send you a dispatchment of Hazard Squad to aid your mission.

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Destroy all Zolarg bases and forces.
• Interstellar Missile Crisis
  

  There is an emergency situation here, Commander. The Resistance developed their own warp-speed interstellar missiles while we got distracted by Zolarg's forces. The intel satellites just detected missile bases on New Bavaria. Wonder how far can the missiles reach? They can fly straight to the Solar System! Homeworld of the glorious human civilization will be under threat! Mobilise your forces now, you need to destroy their missile arsenal before they have launched any single one - each missiles carries a disaster warhead!
  -Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Destroy all missile silos before the timer strikes zero.
• The Last Siege
  

  That was close, commander. But you have just saved the General Assembly from a deadly disaster. The General Assembly is pleased.
  Now the tide of war turns to our side. The missiles of Resistance can no longer threaten any of our strategic locations, while the diplomats managed to make Zolarg signed a ceasefire treaty with us, now we can at least push the Resistance back to where they can't do much harm to us.
  Here is task for you, commander. Probably the last task. We plan to destroy the Resistance's stronghold on Basilisk-55. Once this stronghold has reduced to rubbles, we'll have a strategic victory. Our first space strike batteries will be ready for devastating fire support.
  - Marshal Bradley R. Johnson

  
  Mission objectives
  
  • Destroy all LIS base and forces.
• Aftermath
  LIS succeeded to break away from United Earth, marked the victory of them.
  Despite LIS' success, United Earth still achieved a tactical victory, pushing LIS to the barren ends that they can no longer threaten the great Union... At least for a while.
  Marshal Bradley represented United Earth to sign a peace treaty to end the civil war.
  However, the General Assembly is dissatisfied with the outcome. After the peacemaking meeting, Bradley resigned under the pressure of General Assembly, but recommended the General Assembly let you to be the next Marshal of United Earth.
  The General Assembly agreed to promote you to Marshal of United Earth.
  Zolarg Empire also withdrawn their forces as the announcement of end of war, returned to their homelands. The first interstellar alien civilization known to humans, but worries regarding this dangerous guest had spread across the public - would this Insectoid empire be another threat to the great Union?
  Anyways, you are now known as a war hero across United Earth, who had saved the Union from being disintegrated by LIS uprising. A bright future awaits... Maybe.

Later I'll update the post for LIS campaigns.

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#mycolony

Epic Adventure has just been updated to v3.5.0 and this release brings the often requested and long awaited day/night cycle into the game!


One complete day in-game is roughly 20 minutes long, with about 13 minutes of that being daylight (I tried to keep this similar to Minecraft). To go along with the new day/night cycle, you can now craft Torches and place them around your world to help you see.

Underground areas (caves, etc) are always dark now, so you will need to bring torches along in order to see things properly. In the next update I plan to introduce beds so that you can sleep through the night, which will also require me to add sheep and a way to get wool to make the bed soft.

In addition to the day/night cycle and the standard bug fixes and improvements, this update also adds a new players screen where you can see all players who have signed on to the world/server. If a player also has an Ape Apps Account, you can now send them a friend request.


Anyway, that is all for this update. Please let me know what you would like to see added next, and stay tuned for more!

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

#epicadventure

Edit: v0.81.0: I'm not going to make a new post for this, but I am now pushing out patch v0.81.0 that fixes an issue where the build options menu for vehicles would not appear. Sorry for the issues!

Today I am pushing out the v0.80.0 release of My Colony, and it should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. As I mentioned in the last update, I have been getting a lot of requests to slow down on content updates until some of the bugs and issues in the game are ironed out, and so that is what I plan to do over the next few updates, before I dive into the big Federations expansion which will probably leave the game broken again 😳 Just kidding (hopefully)! Anyway, let's see what is new with this release of My Colony.

Firstly, I have nerfed the Research Converter a bit, as it was slightly overpowered. It might still be overpowered, but it's a little better now. It now consumes more money and research, costs more to build, and produces at a little slower rate.

Next up, the little popup window on the construction options sidebar will now display how much housing a building provides, which was a request I was in the suggestions forum:

Moving on, many people have asked me to change the file names for region subcities, which were previously named with a timestamp, making it hard to tell what they were. So going forward, new regional subcities will be named like this: [region-name]-[subcity-name].mcz, making it a bit easier to tell what they are. This does not impact current cities though.

I have made it easier to share a saved file that is tied to an Ape Apps Account. You might recall that in the last update, I added the option to make an offline copy of a colony so you can share it with others. This has now been expanded a bit, to where if somebody gives you a colony file that is NOT a copy but is tied to their account, the game will automatically make it an offline-only non-account copy when another user tries to import the file into their game.

Next, the often requested 'Leave Federation' option has been implemented. It is fairly straightforward, you will see the new Leave Federation button on the Federations screen.

On all platforms, the Achievements window has been updated. It now shows achievement point values and total progress. Newly unlocked achievements are now also synced to your Ape Apps Account when you are logged in, keeping your achievement progress up to date across platforms. I might add more achievements to the game in the coming updates, so let me know what types of achievements you are interested in!

Next up, I have added a new policy to the Policies menu that allows you to block new tourists from coming to the colony, just like you can currently block immigration. The new option requires government level 3 or higher.

There were also a ton of bug fixes and improvements in this update, and I will just discuss a few of the larger ones. First, I think I have finally solved the issue where incinerators (and similar buildings) would shut down forever if you ever ran out of trash. You can let me know if you are still having the problem, but I think it's fixed.

Next, there was a huge issue involving how virtual colonists were organized and processed that, in large colonies, could potentially cause freezes and hangups of several minutes on regular intervals. The issue has been corrected in that it will not happen anymore on new colonies, but on existing colonies, the engine will slowly sort itself out. Slowly is the key word though, as a colony with over a million population would require more than a day of idle time to get sorted out. The slowness was required to let the colonists sort themselves out without completely killing the economy of the colony. If you want it to go faster, you will have to just kill off all of your colonists and let your population regrow. Most colonies are impacted by the issue, but the real problems are not apparent until populations are in the millions, so most people should be fine just letting the fix sort itself out behind the scenes.

Several optimizations have been made in regards to tourism. Tourism had the potential to really kill the performance of a colony, especially on large map sizes. The game was designed to place new tourists into 'simulated' mode so that they find entertainment without using the pathfinder, after you had so many tourists. However, this function was written when tourists only showed up a few at a time, so it was able to keep up. With the introduction of the Space Ports, tourists were able to show up way faster than the game could keep up with, and you would run into a situation where the pathfinder could not keep up and would cause memory consumption to keep growing and growing.

The engine is now much more aggressive at simulating tourists than it was before. Also, if a tourist does not find a tourist destination within a 60 tile radius of their arrival spot, they will now just leave instead of making the engine keep searching for a destination in a larger and larger radius. There are further optimizations planned for tourism in the coming updates, but if you have a large map with 10k or more tourists, consider using the new policy to block tourists from coming to the colony, which will let them slowly dwindle down as they run out of money. I do not think these tourism issues have much of an impact on small and medium sized maps, but on maps where people have done the Annex policy several times, it can really kill the game.

I have set up a small My Colony online merchandise store with a few things that I will probably expand on over the coming months, whenever an idea pops in my head. There are a few Lander items and a United Earth 'Make Earth Great Again' mug. I am drinking coffee out of the lander mug as we speak, and it really improves the taste of the coffee. 😜 Feel free to check it out and leave suggestions on items you would like to see:
https://teespring.com/stores/my-colony-store

Next, after literally years, I have posted a new episode of the My Colony Podcast. Feel free to check it out, and let me know if you would like to see me bring the My Colony Podcast back from the dead. If I limit it to shorter 10 minute(ish) episodes, it wont be too much or a burden to do.
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=2655

Finally, I just want to let everybody know that after years of talking about it, I have finally begun full scale work on Colony Wars, the multiplayer RTS game taking place in the My Colony universe! I plan (hope) for a release to all platforms this spring (steam included), with the first public beta coming to the Ape Apps Launcher later this month, so stay tuned, and check out the new Colony Wars forum for info:
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=28669

That's all for today's update. Should be hitting all platforms over the weekend, so keep a lookout. Let me know what issues you find, as I will be going hard after bugs and performance over the next few updates. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

The time has come for yet another My Colony update, the v0.99.0 patch, aka the Reptilian Content patch! This is a very special release, as it is the very last beta version of My Colony! It's going to be sad to see beta go, but there is a lot in store for you guys with this update. Because of some of the core changes, this update is going to take several days to push out to all platforms, with Web coming today. I actually can't even push it out to the Ape Apps Launcher yet, as the Launcher will require an update itself before this patch should go live, so please stick with me as the v0.99.0 roll-out will be a bit slower than most releases. So what's new in this patch? Let's go over it right now!

This is at it's core a Reptilian update, but there is a ton of other stuff thrown in as well. First off, and the reason for the delayed rollout, is I have taken the game-streaming option out of the core My Colony code, and transferred it to the "Web App Core" wrapper, which is the in-house wrapper I created to be able to port my games to all platforms easily. This changes the behavior by streaming your gameplay straight to your profile on the Ape Apps website, instead of to my-colony.com. I will be updating my-colony.com shortly though that will embed the stream in the same place it used to be, so for the most part it should still look the same.


I made this change for long-term planning, so that I can add streaming capabilities to my other games. The stream viewer on ape-apps.com is improved from what was available on the My Colony website. It now shows how many people are watching and lets you record the stream. It has other capabilities as well that aren't worth mentioning here, but will be implemented in other games in the future. To access your livestream page, go to your profile here on Ape Apps and click on the little video camera button on the left sidebar.

To go along with this change, the in-game streaming interface has been updated, with a new livestream control bar now appearing when you have streaming turned on.


This bar shows you how many people are watching the stream, and lets you turn either microphone or webcam on or off (previously, webcam wasn't even supported). Streaming is currently supported on Chrome, the new version of Edge, on the Desktop version, the Ape Apps Launcher, and on Android. I can't get it working right yet on iOS or Windows Store.

Moving on. Last update was the big Zolarg release, but I had accidentally forgot to make the dazzling hot-pink Etherbug buildable. This is now fixed, and you can now create the Etherbug on your Zolarg maps. Sorry about that!

A lot of people had complained about the massive gold cost on the Zolarg Unholy Pit and Unholy Tower of Stuff. I have reduced theses costs in this update to make them more reasonable. In addition, these two structures have gained storage capabilities for Charcoal, Oil, and Software.

In addition, the Zolarg Customs Processing building can now import and export Diamonds and Software.

I have made a small change to the in-game encyclopedia. Before, under each category (buildings, vehicles, etc) it said Everything you need to know... Now, it shows the number of items that are in each category (number of buildings, vehicles, etc).

I have loosened the building requirements for the Reptilian Brewmasters Den, as it was too difficult to build at the beginning, and is an essential building. I removed Helium-3 and Crystalline from the build requirements. In addition, the building now uses Ant Paste during production, instead of Helium 3.

The Powered Materials Silo has gained Software Storage, and also now acts as a drop-off point for Diamond harvesting.

I don't know if anybody had noticed, but I had inadvertently allowed Ether importing from the Reptilian Medium Range Star Gate. This has been removed. In exchange, this structure can now export Fish and Salt Water.

Speaking of Fish and Salt Water, they have both been added to the Galactic Board of Trade, and will eventually be used in other non-Water World processes. They are the two map-specific resources for the Water World.

While we are on the subject of resources, a brand new one was added to the game this update, Cobalt. Cobalt is a super-rare, because 1) it's only available on the dreaded Lava World, and 2) it only appears after a volcanic eruption.


Why Cobalt? Well, originally Obsidian was going to be the map-exclusive resource for Lava World, but I forgot and ended up adding it to everything, so that wasn't going to work. So now we have Cobalt. It's all good. Anyway, right now only the Reptilians can harvest it, but other civs will be able to after v1.0. It will be coming to the GBT on the next update as well, and will be used for new super-high-end structures on all civs. Being tied to the Lava World, I suspect it will command a pretty good price on the GBT once trading opens up.

Moving on. Since probably v0.1.0 of My Colony way back in 2016, people have been requesting to be able to move buildings once built. I haven't counted, but it's probably the top request in the game, or a close second to Mass Transit. I understand why it's been wanted. Most My Colony players are on Android, and most mobile builder games allow you to move structures. Of course, most mobile builder games are also IAP filled "diamond" (or gems or special coins) festivals that nickel and dime players by making buildings take 5 days to build unless you pay real money. My Colony isn't like that, and I never thought a move building option was realistic enough for the game, but nonetheless people still request it all the time, so for this update, I have now added an option to move buildings, with caveats.


You can now move any structure in the game, unless it is a harvest drop-off location or has it's own move function, like the Lander, Queen/Mound, or the deployed Construction Mech.

I do want to give people the option to configure and organize their base as they see fit, and I understand that as a colony grows from a small settlement to a major city, you might want to rethink the way you placed buildings at the beginning, so that is why I am allowing the move option. The reason I do not allow it on harvest drop-off spots though, should be obvious. I'm not going to let players just, for example, keep moving their Ore Refinery right next to the Ore every time a deposit is dried up. That would be lame.

Next, I have made an interface change to the mobile version of the game. Now when you are building a structure on mobile, you get the same (well, a minified) "new construction" bar that desktop players have.


This makes it easy to see what you are building will cost, and to flip structures before placing them.

So now let's talk about the meat of the update, the new Reptilian content. There are two new vehicles, the Diamond Extractor and the Cobalt Extractor (I think you can figure out what each does), and 19 new buildings, which I will list below and then talk about some of them in detail afterwards.

• Galactic Star Gate
• Radiated Crystal Farm
• Advanced Materials Silo
• Subterranean Slum
• Raw Fish Diner
• Deep Sea Drilling Platform
• Coral Radiator
• Offshore Slum
• Dracarus Mint
• Turbo Microreactor
• Diamond Cobalt Microreactor
• Basic Crystal Furnace
• Suppertime Arena
• Primitive Robotics Lab
• Advanced Chip Transporter
• Automated Software Node
• Antanium Radiator
• Ultra High Frequency Node
• Near-Infinite Materials Silo

My core of thinking with this update was to make the Reptilians more playable, or rather enjoyable to play, and reduce the sheer idling time required to play a Reptilian colony. Starting with Reptilians was so slow before, that a new colony would have to idle for hours just to get anywhere, which isn't really feasible on mobile. So a lot of this content is geared towards early to early-mid game, but there are a few later-stage items as well. Structures like the Basic Crystal Furnace, the Coral Radiator, and the Dracarus Mint should help speed along early-game a bit.

Reptilians also get a couple of new housing units, both slums (of course). The Subterranean Slum is a high-density building for all maps, and the Offshore Slum is a way to gain more space on the traditionally space-limited Water World islands.


I added a couple of new Tourism related structures for Reptilians, in the form of the new Raw Fish Diner and the Audrey II inspired Suppertime Arena, where Reptilians and tourists alike can watch an evil plant eat Insectoids.


There are new much-needed upgrades to Reptilian Storage, Power generation, increased import/export capacity, Microchip production, Software production, and Bandwidth generation. Reptilians also gain the ability to build robots with the new Primitive Robotics Lab, and the ability to build Triantanium with the Antanium Radiator.

All in all, this is a fairly large update that adds some nice QOL improvements to the game, and adds much needed content and improvements to the Reptilian race (a bit for Zolarg too).

Now, to talk a bit about the future. If you missed it, I published a new episode of the My Colony Podcast last night about the coming end of beta for My Colony. v0.99.0 is in fact the 99th feature release of My Colony (which was originally published on May 16, 2016), which will make the next update the 100th feature update of My Colony, in which it will finally be bumped up to v1.0.0.

Now to me it's just a number, but since 100 of anything is generally seen as special, I think something special should happen for the next update to the game. To help kick off the v1.0.0 release, I would like to do another classic episode of the My Colony Podcast with a community group voice chat, the way the old episodes were done a couple of years ago. I would like to host the episode on one of the federation Discord channels, possibly the NOZ channel if they will allow it, and have anybody and everybody from the community be able to participate if they want to. We will just be talking about the growth and changes of the game over the last few years and bumping suggestions and ideas off of each other for the coming updates. You can also ask me anything you want about My Colony or otherwise. I think it will be a fun episode for everybody, and I hope a lot of people participate. I just need to nail down a location, time, date, and re-figure out how to record the thing. So be looking out for more information about that.

As for the update itself, I plan on adding something of an online leader-board to the game, featuring multiple in-game challenges and awards that people can participate in if they choose to. It will be optional, so you can still play as normal without doing the leader-boards, but the purpose is to have something to do in the game after you have a million people in your colony and all buildings unlocked, but it's also going to be set up in a tiered way so that new players can also participate. I still have some things to work out with it, and so you have some time to make suggestions in the forum if you want your ideas implemented!

As for a timeframe, the next release is going to take longer than normal. I go over the reasons in the latest podcast, but basically we have Thanksgiving in the U.S. coming up soon with holiday travels, and I also need to take some time away from My Colony to get work done on my other projects before the holiday season, since December is the biggest month of the year for the app business, and with my schedule I am going to be pressed for time to get much work done later in this month. So I would shoot for early-mid December for the v1.0.0 release, although there might be a couple of platform-specific bug patches between now and then, should the need arise.

Further out, v1.1.0 and v1.2.0 will probably be performance tweak related updates, since I am getting a lot of requests for those, particularly on the Android side of things, so I will have to try to see if I can squeeze more juice out of the engine. So they will still have new content, but not like 10-20+ new items like the last few updates have had. After that, I want to add crime and law enforcement to the game, and even further out, I want to add the ability to have a map with an AI controlled faction, as I want to add a new map type that is inhabited with primitive ewok-type creatures that you have to either coexist with or... something else. So stay tuned for that...

Anyway, that's all for v0.99.0. I hope you guys enjoyed it, let me know if you did (or didn't)! Like I said at the beginning, the roll-out will take several days here, but it's live and final on the Web now. Launcher will probably be next, then Steam, then Android, then Windows, and lastly iOS. I expect to have it published to all stores by Wednesday, so stay tuned!

My Colony 2 v0.20.0 is out now on Web, Windows, and the Ape Apps Launcher, and should be hitting Android and iOS sometime later this week. I don't have any new structures in this release, and instead focused on cleaning up some of the issues from v0.19.0, and started laying the groundwork for future greatness! So what's new? Let's take a look!

To start off, many of the video settings in the Engine Settings menu no longer require an app restart in order to take effect. Realtime Shadows, Antialiasing, and DOF effect can now all be toggled on/off while in-game. I am working on making it so that all engine settings can be toggled on and off while the game is running, so stay tuned for that.

I started adding initial gamepad support to the game. Right now the gamepad only controls the camera and the Player Mode controls, but eventually I intend to have the game 100% playable with the controller. This will allow be to publish the game to Android/Fire TV devices, as well as the new Steam Deck device for when I finally port the game over to Steam.

The top-right toolbar has been expanded, and I might have to start adding UI toggle switches to let players turn more items on/off as they see fit.


The new buttons (starting at the left) are the Player Mode toggle, and the VR Mode toggle, both of which I will expand on in a bit. The VR Mode button will only appear on the Windows 10 or the Web version of the game, and will only be there if you have supporting hardware (like Google Cardboard viewer on an Android phone, or Windows Mixed Reality headset, or if you are playing the game on an Oculus stand-alone device).

You will also notice on the bottom-right mini toolbar next to the Clear Chat button is a new microphone button:


My Colony 2 now comes with built-in voice chat support. This is not a global voice chat, just a group chat for the people online in the current world. This was added as a way to communicate in the new VR Mode, but also works in all modes of play for players who just want to talk to each-other instead of type. The icon will turn green if your microphone is active, and red if your microphone is muted. Click on the microphone icon to mute/unmute. You will also see an indication that tells you which player is talking while they are speaking.

In v0.19.0, I added a rudimentary "Player Mode" that allowed you to click on a colonist and walk around the city from their point of view. This feature has been expanded in this release, and will continue to be expanded as time goes on. In v0.20.0, you no longer have to try clicking on a tiny colonist, there is a new Player Mode icon on the top toolbar. The first time you click on the Player Mode toggle, you will be asked to place your token. Now instead of assuming the body of an existing colonist, you actually join the world as yourself. You can pick any starting location you want, but after your token is places, you will have to physically walk to wherever you want to go.

Right now your token just looks like a standard colonists, except whose space suit is matched to your player color in-server. I plan to allow players to also customize their guy buy picking one of their Tokens from the My Tokens app.

Your Player Mode player location and movements are now synced to the server, and all players can see each other's guys walking around the world. In the coming updates, each player will have a personal inventory attached to their Player Mode character, as well as stats, equipment, etc, and Player Mode characters will be able to interact with each other, and maybe even do joint quests, depending on how far I take this. I also think it will be cool to let Player Mode characters enter vehicles, whether land, sea or air vehicles, and travel around the world in that manner.

Eventually there can be a whole Player Mode game within a game associated to MC2, but I also want the modding tools to have the ability to create a game that is 100% based on the Player Mode, so there is going to be a lot more coming to this feature in the coming updates. As always, suggestions are welcome!

Somewhat related to Player Mode, a new Virtual Reality Mode has been added to the game! This one is an even earlier and more experimental state than Player Mode, but players with supporting hardware can test it out today and leave feedback.


Eventually, the entire My Colony 2 game, both regular build mode and Player Mode, will be 100% playable from both the Gamepad and the VR interface. Right now it's basically a tech demo, although Player Mode in VR is pretty much equivalent to the non-VR player mode at this time.

To test out VR Mode today, you will need some hardware. The cheapest way to get into it is to get a Google Cardboard viewer, or one of the many Android VR headsets that are cheaply available on Amazon (you would need the Google Cardboard app installed as well). You will also have to use the PWA version of My Colony 2 (https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/) as it does not work on the installed .apk. Playing on Android will also require you to have a bluetooth gamepad paired to your phone.

You can also try it from a stand alone VR Headset like the Oculus (meta) Quest 2. Just fire up the headset browser and navigate to the My Colony 2 web app. You will not need an extra controller on the Oculus, as the devices controllers work just fine.

There is nothing you can do in the standard build mode while in VR except scroll around, so you are best off switching your game into Player Mode before activating VR (as you can't do it while in VR yet). Once in VR Player Mode though, you can walk around the entire world as your Player Mode character. Even though you can't do anything yet, it's a pretty cool experience. With multiple players in a game with VR Player Mode and microphones activated, it can be a cool VR social experience. Especially in the future, if you can group up and go on a quest.

Keep in mind that more computing horsepower is required for VR Mode. On the Quest 2, I had to turn all engine settings down before starting up the game, as the Water World map in VR completely lagged my headset out, which was kind of disorienting. So if you are going to try VR Mode, please turn down graphics settings before entering the game!

If you have a VR Headset or Cardboard type viewer, give it a try and let me know! I think there is a lot of future potential for VR Mode in MC2.

Moving on, there are a few quality of life improvements in this update. Now when you click on the scrolling resources counter, it will switch to a static, non-scrolling list like in MC1.


I have also implemented one of the most long-standing feature requests to the game (besides pavement bulldozing), building progress bars!


Progress Bars were actually a lot harder than they seem like they should be, since MC2 is rendered in 3D unlike MC1, each resource bar has to be an object in the 3D world. To save performance, there is only 1 resource bar object that gets reused as you mouse around the world, and a new texture is redrawn with every tick update.

There are some modding improvements too. Mod Shop downloads are now checked for updates automatically on game launch and are automatically kept updated in the background. Also, support for Total Conversion mods has been unbroken, and these types of mods should be working again, both through manual import and from the Mod Shop.

So these are the major changes in this update. There is also a laundry list of bug fixes that I will not bore you with.

The next update will have to focus on content again since I did a non-content update this time. Moving ahead, I am going to expand Gamepad support to cover the full game, and get full building mode working in the VR mode. I also want to add new play experiences to the Player Mode, so if you have suggestions, feel free to let me know. Other than that, thank you for playing the game, let me know what you want to see next, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

Was sitting there in Church today and during the sermon I was thinking of the code for My Colony, and I had an idea to add another gameplay mode of Multiplayer Regions. In my mind, it would be a slightly larger map than the current region file, and all of the high-level region data would be stored on the server, including the little thumbnail images that represent the individual city files. However, you could invite your friends to join your region, and they could pick a plot on the map and start building their own cities.

Instead of shared resources across the region like on current region maps, only atmosphere would be shared, although there would be a new regional warehouse type building where players can manually store resources that are shared across the region.

Also, instead of the whole region being one big city, it would be broken up into 'areas', like metropolitan areas, where each one of those would have a charter code/online presence as opposed to the region as a whole.

For example, if you start a city on the region at coordinate 20:20 (x:y), and you own no other cities touching that city, it would be chartered as a new colony on the server. If you then started another city right next to it as 20:21, it would be "linked" to the first city and they would become a metropolitan area with shared resources. However, if your friend started a new city in that region across the map at location 8:10 or something, then that would trigger the formation of a new "area" with a new charter code and its own resource pool.

My thought for this was that regions are so big anyway, the likelihood of a player filling one by himself is not very high. However a group of players could probably do it.

Anyway, that is kind of an idea I had, it's nothing solid right now, but I have (at least in theory) worked out a lot of the code needed and issues in my head, lol. I mainly wanted to throw this here and see if there is any feedback on it, to see if it is a feature anybody would actually be interested in, before spending time to implement it. I actually think that compared to a lot of things, it would be a pretty easy one to implement, since a lot of the work on Regions is already completed, it would be a similar experience except there are other parts on the map that are being filled out by other people. The only main difference to the player is the joint atmosphere, and the addition of the joint regional warehouse. You wouldn't really be able to load up other players' maps and play them, you would just see them on the main regional overview.

Let me know what you think of the concept, and if it is worth exploring further!

This post is a collection of a lot of ideas and features I think need to be added. Some of these have been requested by other people but I am putting it all in a big collection and explaining how it would work together. I will be working on this post for a few days so expect to see edits adding new ideas. I will make the textures, with help from a friend, if this post becomes popular enough. Considering the amount of ideas here, this will take a while. I understand all this could be an unrealistic amount of additions but I am doing my best to make it reuse all of the existing code to the fullest. Thank you for still reading, a lot of people would have left by now!.

Please tell me what you think of all my ideas!

The first part of my ideas is a new planet type: Geyser World. I already made a post on it but I will go more in depth here:
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE):
-Lunar Rover
-Rover
Starting Rovers(UE)
-Lunar Rover
-Rover
Non-Buildable Buildings:
Small Water Pump
Small Solar Panel
Starting Atmosphere: 10 million
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Ore deposits(around 7)
Regolith deposits(around 5)
Steam Vents(around 10)
Rock Fissures(around 20)


New Resources (items):
-Boiling Water: Looks a lot like water
-Mineral Water: Looks like water but with little spots in it.

New Vehicles:
-Heat Resistant Waterbot: Collects boiling water from boiling water deposits.
Cost: ore: 100 steel: 2 wheel: 6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base.

-Treated Waterbot:
-Heat Resistant Waterbot: Collects mineral water from mineral water deposits.
Cost: ore: 1000 steel: 20 wheel: 6
Tech Required:Basic Mineral Resistance.

New Tech:
-Basic Mineral Resistance:
Cost: 20 steel
Prerequisites: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Unlocks: Tiny Mineral Extractor

-Mineral Resistance:
Cost: 25 research
Prerequisites: Basic Mineral Resistance
Unlocks: Small Mineral Extractor

-Thermodynamics:
Cost: 500 research
Prerequisites: Geyser World Base, Human Base, Mineral Resistance
Unlocks: Thermoelectric Generator, Advanced Water Condenser

New Resource tiles:
-Steam Vent(1x1): Just a tile that exists. Looks like a crack in the ground, has a puff of steam coming out. Counts as another kind of terrain, kind of like salt water or lava. Damages rovers and buildings nearby, similar to lava. Will not spread. Contains no resources.
-Rock Fissure(1x1): Just a tile that exists. Looks like a crack in the ground with obsidian inside Counts as another kind of terrain, kind of like salt water or lava. Damages rovers and buildings nearby, similar to lava. Will not spread. Contains no resources.

New Buildings:
-Water Condenser(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Used:2
Resource Production: Twice as much water as small water pump.
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost:500 ore, 20 steel, 1 gold
Built By: Builder Bot
Upgrades to: Advanced Water Condenser

-Tiny Thermoelectric Generator(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Generated: 2
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost: 200 ore, 200 regolith
Upgrades to: thermoelectric generator

-Thermoelectric Generator(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Generated: 5
Tech Required: Thermodynamics
Build Cost: 2000 ore, 250 steel, 5 gold

-Advanced Water Condenser(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Used:5
Resource Production: Six times as much water as small water pump.
Tech Required: Thermodynamics, Advanced Construction
Build Cost:5000 ore, 200 steel, 100 gold, 50 aluminum
Built By: Advanced Builder Bot

-Tiny Water Conditioner(1x1): Built on normal terrain.
Power Used:2
Resource Production: Turns boiling water into water, same amount as the water produced by a small water pump
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost:500 ore, 20 steel
Built By: Builder Bot

-Small Water Conditioner(1x1): Built on normal terrain.
Power Used:5
Resource Production: Turns boiling water into water, same amount as six small water pumps
Tech Required: Thermodynamics, Advanced Construction
Build Cost:2500 ore, 50 steel, 10 gold, 2 aluminum
Built By: Advanced Builder Bot

-Tiny Mineral Extractor:
Power Used:5
Workers:1
Resource Production:Turns mineral water into a very small amount of gold.

-Small Mineral Extractor:
Power Used:5
Workers:1
Resource Production:Turns mineral water into a very small amount of gold.

The second part of my ideas is another new planet type: Soaring Cliffs. It is a similar idea to the water world but will play differently. It goes great with the avian race idea below.
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE):
-Rover
-forest rover
Starting Rovers(UE)
-Rover
-forest rover
Buildable Workers at Start(Zolarg):all
Non-Buildable Buildings: none
Starting Atmosphere:5 million
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Ore deposits(around 5)
Fir Trees(a lot, similar to forest world)
Cliff Face(replaces large drops that are adjacent to land)
Large Drop(generated similar to water on the water world)

New Resources (items):
-Krypton Gas: Think Helium-3 but its Krypton

New Tech:
-Rare Animal Zoology:
Cost: 20000 research
Prerequisites: low atmospheric zoology, 5 mil atmosphere

New Buildings:
-Mountain Goat Pen(2x2):
Build Cost:200 wood, 20 ore
Built By: Forest Rover, Greenbot.
Resource Production: Wool 10/Minute
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, Soaring Cliffs Base OR Rare Animal Zoology, 5 mil atmosphere


-Weaver's House(1x1):
Build Cost:200 wood, 20 ore, 10 wool
Built By: Forest Rover, Greenbot, lumberbot.
Resource Production: Wool 10/Minute
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base 5 mil atmosphere

-Rope Bridge(1x1):Built over water, salt water, ether, gas deposits(see next suggestion) or air.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Rope Bridge NS(1x1):Built over water, salt water, ether, gas deposits(see next suggestion) or air.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Rope Bridge Anchor(1x1):Built on land and cliff faces. Just a decorative road to go along with the rope bridge.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


The third part of my ideas is yet another new planet type: Gas Giant. The Progression would be based around floating helium balloons due to how easy it is to float in a planet with a very dense atmosphere.
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Rover
Starting Rovers(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Rover
Custom Lander(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Lander
Non-Buildable Buildings: none
Starting Atmosphere:500 billion
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Regolith deposits(around 5)
Gas Deposit(contains infinite xenon, covers most of the world. Generates like water in water world but even more frequent.)

New Vehicles:
-Ballon Rover: Works similar to a lunar rover but can fly over buildings.
Cost: ore: 100 helium:20 wheel: 6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base.
Can Build:Tiny helium-3 condenser, helium-3 condenser, helium compactor, regolith compactor, storage tank, suspended storage tank, regolith crusher.


-Ballon Builder Bot: Works like a normal builder bot but can fly over buildings
Cost: ore:100 wheel:6 helium:50
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base

-Small Builder Zeppelin: Works like a normal advanced builder bot but can fly on gas deposits.
Cost: ore:1000 wheel:6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base, advanced small scale construction

-Balloon Lander Airborne: Airborne version of balloon lander. Can land on gas deposits or normal land.


New Resources (items):
-Xenon Gas: Think Helium-3 but its Xenon

New Buildings:
-Balloon Lander(1x1): Can be built on Gas Deposits or on normal land.
Power Produced:2
Housing: 2 colonists
Can Build: Balloon Rover.


-Tiny Helium-3 Condenser:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: Regolith 20
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at a quarter of the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


-Helium-3 Condenser:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: ore 20
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


-Helium Compactor:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: regolith 20 helium-3 20
Resource Production: Turns helium-3 into a small amount of regolith

-Storage Tank(1x1):
Storage: Ore 1000 Regolith 2000 Helium-3 500 food 100 water 100
Build Cost: Ore 100 Helium-3 25

-Suspended Storage Tank(1x1): Built on Gas Deposits
Storage: Ore 1000 Regolith 2000 Helium-3 750 food 100 water 100
Build Cost: Ore 150 Helium-3 100

-Floating Helium-3 Condenser(1x1): Built on Gas Deposits. Looks like a water condenser but white and with a balloon on top.
Power Used:1
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


The fourth part of my ideas is a new race: Avians. These part people part birds have close ties with united earth, and use many similar technologies. Some of the items here are from the soaring cliffs idea listed above gas giants.

Avian Tech:
Low atmospheric zoology and rare animal zoology they can unlock the same way as humans.

New Resources (items):
-Feather: Used to make some flying vehicles.
-Bird Steel: A lightweight yet strong metal used in more advanced flying vehicles.

New Vehicles:
-Avian Rover: Works like a normal rover but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: ore: 5 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: Small solar panel, small vehicle factory, small water pump, greenhouse.


-Avian Forest Rover: Works like a normal forest rover but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: wood: 40 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: Fir Trees, Charcoal Hut, Wood Hut, Goat Pen, Chicken Coop, Water Well


-Avian Builder Bot: Works like a normal builder bot but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: ore: 15 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: everything the builder bot can

-Avian Constructor: Builds some unique avian builds/
Cost: ore: 150 wheel: 8 gold:20 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: everything the builder bot can

Avian Lander Airborne: Airborne version of Avian Lander.


New Buildings:
-Avian Lander(1x1): Similar to the normal UE lander, the lander the Avians start with.
Power Produced:2
Housing: 2 colonists
Can Build: rover, forest rover, Avian rover, avian forest rover.

-Chicken Coop(2x2):
Description: "Avians like Chickens a lot, so they keep them as pets. Many think that avians evolved from chickens, although the more plausible theory is that they actually evolved from a white variant ravens."
Resource Production:Feather 10/minute
Cost: Wood:200 Ore:20
Built By: Forest Rover, Avian Forest rover
Requirements:Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Enclosed Chicken Coop(2x2): An enclosed version of the chicken coop
Resource Production:Feather 10/minute
Cost: Ore:2000, steel 250, gold 100
Built By: Builder Bot, Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base or rare animal zoology, low atmospheric zoology


-Avian Solar Panel(1x1): A version of the normal solar panel that can be placed in the air or on land.
Power Production: 8
Cost: Ore:250, steel 10, feather 10
Built By: Buildr Bot, Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base

-Wind Generator(1x1): A passive generator that must be built in the air.
Power Production: 12
Cost: Ore:250, steel 20,gold 10, feather 20
Built By: Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base


Some WIP textures are below, along with a few pictures of what this would look like in-game:
Soaring Cliffs as Avian Race:

Gas Giant with United Earth:



Textures(WIP):
I'm making a texture pack with the textures if anyone's interested.
Cliff Terrain:

Cliff Face:

Air:


Gas Deposit:

Hi all...
the reference page that some of you already knows has been updated.
https://www.my-colony.com/reference/index.html

Update 0.4.1 (201711113)
-Responsive design for mobiles.
-New top menu instead of side one for large widths.
-Items names on tables are clickable now to open descriptions.
-Tech trees are zoomable now.

Update 0.4.0 (20171031)
-sort the lists of links in alphabetical order.
-new table for storages
-reordered the resources in tables in same order than in game.
-add can import / export informations for buildings
-new lists collected in/imported by/exported by for resources
-retractable sidemenu to allow bigger table/item description area
-sidebar menu hightlights the current page
-added informations about IQ requests/ IQ provide and educate
-new homepage with a little presentation...thanks to Núñez for that text...

Update 0.3.9 (20171020)
-new values per minutes added.
-added ratios beside the link lists "Produced by" and "Consumed by" for resources.
-added storage amounts beside the link list "Stored by" for resources.
-New table with production and consumption values per tick.
-New table with production and consumption values per minute.

Update 0.3.8 (20171017)
-Mainly bug fixes...

Update 0.3.7 (20171016)
-reordered almost all code in seperate modules, to easily implement new features later.
-added in-game description strings.
-added for maps: which civ can play this map & what deposits are present.
-added for races: which civs are available for this race.
-added informations for special buildings (consulate/capitol/embassy/trade depot/comms hub/healing).
-reorganized the different links in item description.

Update 0.3.6 (20171013)
-Modified the calling of game.js thru a new "Easy to update" file. (for Bast Only)
-added provided resource on deposit characteristics.
-fixed the scaling of item icons
-fixed indentifying items function on links
-added planet types (infos: difficulty /starting techs / starting buildings)
-added races (infos: starting techs / narcotics)
-added factions (infos: race / starting colonists / available maps / starting techs / starting building / starting vehicles)

Update 0.3.5 (20171010)
-Fixed a display bug on "Produced by" links for resources.(ex: Antanium)
-Fixed a display bug on "Consumed by" links for resources.(ex: Antanium)
-Fixed glitch when smeltObj exist without Output (appeared in 0.46 with atmosphere scrubber)
-Use now the tiles objects in the game.js to find the good icon for all buildings. (ex: Flower Gardens)
-Added "Deposit" Type with capacity and Spread Rate informations.

Update 0.3.4 (20171006)
-Home is now showing a new "General Table" with all game items.
-Old table kept as "Cost to Build / Unlock Table".
-Added missing resources on the "Cost to Build / Unlock Table".
-Fixed a bug that was preventing Aluminum Cost to be displayed on the "Cost to Build / Unlock Table".
-Added resources in the "General Table".
-Added resource description details (infos: limited storage or not / Base Price / Toxic Rate).
-Added Unskilled occupation information on "Item descriptions".
-Modified enumeration of smelt inputs in case of several items (see Advanced Synthetic Oil Lab)
-Modified enumeration of smelt outputs in case of several items (see Black Bazaar Market)
-Modified enumeration of Utilities to operate in case of several items (see: Alien Enrichment Facility)
-List of buildings that stores the resource on the resource Description.
-List of the vehicles that harvests the resource on the resource Description.
-Links everywhere in all "Items Descriptions" for resources (smelt/store/refine/generate/harvest areas)
-New pages with Tech Trees (clickable pictures that point to the technologies descriptions).
-Fixed a Bug that was preventing to open the " Green House" Description.
-Divided the Vehicle Type into 2 new ones: "Human Vehicle" & "Zolarg Worker".

Please give your feedback and/or ideas for the next updates.

Well, it's late at night as I type this, and I've just put the finishing touches on the v0.93.0 update for My Colony. I'm going to try to get it pushed out to all platforms tonight, but if I end up getting too tired (likely) I will finish the work tomorrow. v0.93.0 is a mix update between content and features, so let's go ahead and take a look at what's new!

First of all, I made some minor interface adjustments on mobile. As some of you may know, I was busy with family most of this week and was unable to use my PC, and I took some time to spin up a new colony on mobile (an iPhone 7). It has literally been forever since I played my own game on mobile, and I noticed some annoyances right off the bat, particularly with the new chat notifications, since in-game chat has started to become a lot more active.

To address this, I moved things around a bit. Now, the build menu icon appears in the bottom right of the screen, above the standard bottom right buttons. The chat notifications are now aligned to the bottom-right corner of the screen, and no longer have a darkened background. Also, their rendering order has been adjusted so that they no longer appear on top of other menus.

In addition, when not using resource "marquee" mode, the top-right resource display no longer has a darkened background, and the text has gotten a bit of extra black border around it to make up for the difference. Also, all of the remaining UI elements with a simi-transparent black background have been adjusted to have the same opacity level, since I thought it looked strange having some UI elements being less transparent and some being more. For the most part, these UI changes are minor, but I think they will make the game a bit more enjoyable on mobile, particularly the issue with the chat notifications covering up important UI dialogs.

Next, I made another change regarding the chat notifications. Previously, clicking on one of the notifications would open up the in-game chat slideout. This is no longer the case. Now when you click on an in-game chat notification, it opens up the brand new User dialog window, showing you all of the online colonies for the Ape Apps user who is chatting.

Clicking on one of their colonies opens up the standard colony info window, allowing you to send gifts and messages. I realized that with so many requests for resources coming in over chat, it was cumbersome to have to go to the communications hub and put in a charter code. Now you can just click on their name and send them some resources.

And speaking of the colony info window, it too has been slightly revamped. It now shows the colony owners username (clicking on it brings up their list of colonies), and the action buttons have been moved to the bottom right corner of the screenshot.

Sorry for picking on you here @Westy266 , but your beautiful colony screenshot just had to make it to the release notes. Oh, and that rectangle in the top-right corner of the screenshot area is the flag of the colony, which leads to the next new feature, colonial flags, along with built-in flag maker.

The Stats screen has a new Flag section, which takes you to the flag maker. I need to clean up the interface a bit, but it's mainly functional. Basically, a flag consists of three primary sections, the overall background color, the "parts" section, and the "logos" section. The background color is pretty self explanatory (I hope).

The "parts" section consists of things like stripes, bars, circles etc, of various shapes, sizes, and positions. You can add as many parts as you want, there is no limit, and you can set different colors for each.

Likewise, the "logos" section lets you add little symbols to the flag. Like parts, you can also add as many logos as you want. You can set their placement, and the slider let's you adjust their size. Most of them allow you to set their color, but some do not. Most of the logos come from in-game UI assets right now.

I plan on expanding the "parts" and "logos" selection in the coming updates, so let me know what kind of things you want to see added, so that you can make the best colonial flag for your awesome colony!

Next up, a couple of important changes have been made to Regions.

• Now, all region colonies should share a common gifting capacity, so that you do not need to build huge capacity buildings in every map.
• Regional natural resource deposits (ore/gold/aluminum/etc) will now actually deplete when the colony is not active

So that second one is pretty important, since it is a departure to the way regions had been working, and some colonies might be built depending on the old behavior. However, the old behavior was obviously flawed, so I think that the adjustment was necessary.

Moving on, I raised the costs a bit on the Tech Office Building. That building is sort of powerful, and I didn't nerf it any, but I did make it slightly more expensive.

Also in this update, I made further changes to how colonists handle Work, Medical, Entertainment, and Protesting. These all have long standing irregularities that aren't so easy to fix, so I hope these new adjustments help.

Finally, I went ahead and added a bit more content as well, mostly more I.T. stuff, but also a couple of other things.

New Techs Added

• Multimedia Infrastructure
• Proxy Servers
• Insectoid Mind Network

New Structures Added

• Ether Tree Farm
• Quantum Nuclear Reactor
• Official News Station
• Imperial Propaganda Office
• Online Black Market Office
• Hacker Camp

It's a little late and I'm a little tired to explain all of the new content, but you can mostly look at the names and see what's going on. You can check out the IT industries ideas Vol.3! thread to see what I was pulling from for the I.T. stuff (and to give you an idea of what is coming next). I also added upgraded structures for the old Nuclear Reactor and the Tree Farm.

So that about wraps it up for this update. I think the pace and scale of updates has been pretty good lately, so I will probably be keeping it like this for a while. There will probably be a few more I.T. related updates, plus a ton of other stuff currently sitting in the suggestions box, so keep the ideas and bug reports flowing!

I hope you enjoy the update, and as always, thanks for playing My Colony!

These are just a few ideas that may be obvious things that bast has already decided he will implement, but hopefully some of these ideas may help. And Before you start blasting me about how bast won't ever put a pvp element into my colony, you should check the updates and announcements page under update 75, since bast includes the possibility of a pvp element with federations.

The ideas below represent an entire concept when applied together. This is how I would implement pvp between federations in my colony, but like all of my other concept ideas, it's mainly here to present new thoughts to the developer on how certain concepts could come together, and I don't expect him to just take this entire concept and put it in the game.

First off, I think that any pvp feature should be optional, just as bast said. But I do think that there should be some risk involved with enabling pvp and joining in federation wars/rivalries. I don't think that the risk should be catastrophic, but being attacked by someone else should come with some major disadvantages.

I think that in order for a rivalry/war between two federations to continue, a certain percentage of the federation should be regularly and actively involved. This way, people have to be actively participating in the rivalry in order for it to continue, so time and effort would need to be put in. While a rivalry is going on, all colonies in those federations are given buffs that increase income and production speeds of certain resources, so a rivalry would be good for business, as it also is in real life.

However, those that chose not to participate in a rivalry will not benefit at all from any benefits that come about by attacking enemy colonies, only active colonies do. This way there will be no freeloaders. I also think that there should be a cooldown timer that forces players to remain pvp active for a while after they've attacked another colony. This way colonies can't attack other colonies and then quickly disable pvp mode to avoid retaliation. However, if you accidentally enable pvp and haven't attacked anyone, you can immediately disable pvp. I also think that each colony should only be able to have one debuff affecting them at a time, but they could have multiple buffs in effect. Any further attempts to double-debuff an enemy would result in the attacker wasting a debuff chance and using resources that they could have used on another target.

Now, here comes a system of buffs and debuffs that I think would fit the pvp feature nicely. With these status effects, each colony could specialize in a certain kind of attack, or take on a certain support role in a rivalry, thus adding a bit of an rpg element to this system, but shouldn't need to get too in depth or complex with it. Below is a system of classes, point systems, and buffs and debuffs that a player can cast on other friendly or enemy colonies. Bear in mind that in order to receive a buff or debuff, you need to be in pvp mode. All buffs and debuffs require certain buildings in order to be unlocked and improved, and the best status effects require more complex buildings.

There would also be four different scores attributed to each colony that tell what kind of contribution that colony makes to the war effort and what their specialty/class is. Each class would be specified by a certain building, and only one of six of these buildings can be constructed at once in a colony. Whichever building is built determines the war class of the colony and what it specializes in. The buildings can be upgraded in tiers, giving more and more unique advantages for each tier, but also becoming more expensive. The classes are as follows:

A vanguard heads straight in and attacks the enemy headlong, splitting their focus between offense and defense. They can be capable attackers and defenders, but would more often than not pose as a distraction to the enemy, spreading their attacks and defenses onto multiple colonies at once with the splitter cast, and protecting themselves with the feedback loop cast. They focus on collecting offense and defense points.

Unique advantages: the vanguard's unique advantages focus on reducing the durations of all debuffs that they are targeted with, reducing buff/debuff cooldowns, increasing the amount of targets that a vanguarde can hit with the splitter cast, and on the highest tier, enabling the vanguard to attack an enemy and "taunt" them, thus forcing them to target the vanguard for their next attack. The taunt can also be used in combination with splitter to affect multiple enemies, forcing them all to wait on each other to take turns attacking the same vanguard before they can target another colony.

An empowerer is good at preparing their allies for an initial attack on an unsuspecting enemy. The buff their allies to strengthen them for the battle to come, and they join the ranks of vanguards in attacking and distracting the enemy. The Empowerer can counter some debuffs with buffs, but it proves to be a very inefficient counterer and can easily be picked out by an assassin if it causes too much bother in the heat of battle. It's best for this class to do all of it's buffs before battle and save the debuffs until the heat of battle. An empowerer will rack up offense and utility points, with relatively few defense points.

Unique advantages: The empowerer's unique abilities focus on buff potency, the amount of targets that splitter can reach, duration reduction to any debuffs that it experiences. And on the highest tier buildings, Empowerers gain a 1 in 5 chance to apply a buff to themselves automatically if they cast that same buff onto an ally without negating a debuff or being negated by a debuff. This allows the Empowerer to easily empower themselves while they are empowering other colonies in preparation for a battle, but doesn't help the empowerer during the heat of battle.

An assassin makes calculated strikes. Their attacks are very potent and can be made even more potent thanks to the charge cast. They are often supported by vanguards that strike before the assassins to get the initial attention from the enemies. They need not worry about protecting themselves in battle because of this. Even if they are attacked, they can retaliate quickly by using the dimensional reflection buff, thus giving their enemy a taste of their own medicine. An assassin can be good at countering buffs with debuffs, but not as effectively as they can attack an unprotected enemy. This class will have mostly offense points, with a little bit of silencer points as well.

Unique advantages: the Assassin's unique advantages focus on debuff potency and cooldown, dimensional mirror cooldown and cost reduction, increased potency and decreased cooldown on a buff affected by the charge cast, and on the highest tier, giving the assassin the ability to attack an enemy with an "evasive" attack, thus forcing the enemy to not be able to retaliate against the assassin for a certain amount of time. The enemy can target other colonies during that time though, just not that particular assassin.

The counterer focuses on offense and defense. They use their casts to negate a buff or debuff. They use the splitter and feedback loop buffs to cast negating buffs and debuffs onto themselves and other allies. The assassin might target a counterer with a potent attack at just the right time, during the counterer's cooldown time, if the counterer becomes a bother to it's enemies. So learning when to take action to help your allies and when let up for a while to lose attention from enemy colonies is a must for this class. The counterer gains equal amounts of defense and silencer points.

Unique advantages:The counterer's unique advantages focus on cooldown and resource cost reduction to all buffs and debuffs, increasing the amount of extra targets that splitter can give you, and on the highest tier, a counterer can "silence" an enemy, preventing them from attacking or defending any target for a duration, if they successfully negate that enemy's debuff or buff. The silence effect has a 1 in 5 chance of happening for each successful counter.

The healer is solely a supporter and defender, defending colonists by negating debuffs with their buffs and using buffs on allies just as utilities to boost their performance. The healer gives potent buffs and defenses to other players and is the pillar that holds up the federation in the war. They can use the charge cast to further increase the potency of a buff, which they would use to further strengthen allies. Assassins will target these the most to slow them down so the enemy will be without support, and counterers can also silence Healers by negating their buffs with debuffs. But healers are really good at empowering all of the other classes, which in turn will retaliate if one of their healers is attacked. The healer focuses on collecting defense and utility points.

Unique advantages: The healer's advantages focus on buff potency and cooldown, increased potency and decreased cooldown effects of the charge buff on all buffs, and on the highest tier, if they successfully counter a debuff with a buff, that buff's cooldown is reduced by 75%, allowing them to deal large amounts of counters in rapid succession as long as their buffs aren't re-countered/negated by an enemy.

The Commando is like an empowerer in that it buffs allies in preparation for battle, but instead of joining in the frontline assault like empowerers, commandos hide under cover of distraction and take out enemy defenses with tactical casts. They are extremely efficient with countering buffs with debuffs, yet they can't defend allies against debuffs. The commando is the hardest class to play as their position on the battlefield is an awkward one. And while they are really good at ripping enemy defenses away and preparing allies for battle, they themselves can't directly attack or defend anyone. Only choose this class if you're experienced with the pvp feature and your federation needs people of this class, otherwise you'll find yourself having a really bad experience with the pvp element.

Unique advantages: The commando looses the ability to buff people that are already affected with a debuff and the ability to debuff an enemy that's not protected by a buff, and debuff potency and duration is set to 0 so that if a commando successfully negates a buff, the debuff doesn't affect the enemy as an attack like it regularly would. This forces the commando into it's role turns debuffs solely into a means of breaking defenses instead of attacking directly. The commando also gets cooldown reduction to all debuffs, buff potency, increased splitter targets, and on the highest tier structure, the commando has a 1 in 5 chance of completely removing a buff or debuff's cooldown after casting it successfully. This means that the commando can hit many more targets than any other class in a period of time, allowing it to somewhat carpet-bomb enemy defenses or empower massive amounts of allies before the battle.

Major Benefits in participating in PVP: As factions war against each other, the colonies contributing to the war effect will share in the spoils of war. In order for Federations to start a war, both Federations must fromt a certain amount of money, and then each week after that start of the war, that same amount of money must be paid by each federation. Each week, a tally would be taken of how many successful attacks and counters were dealt by each federation. Both numbers are added together to get the Federation's battle score, and the federation with the highest score wins all of the money from all participating federations for that week. This can be used in a free-for-all war that includes multple federations as well as just a regular rivalry between two federations, and the war can continue as long as the federations want it to continue, provided they have enough money to put forward. The winning federation is required to split the winnings among it's participating colonies, but how much a percentage of the win that it keeps to itself is optional. Just bear in mind that nobody will participate if there is not a big enough reward.

Debuffs:

Benefits of debuffing enemies: When you debuff an enemy that doesn't currently have any status effects without being negated, you permanently gain a small amount of potency towards the debuff you casted and you get offense points that go to your offense score, which can be seen by other members of your federation. If you successfully negate a buffed enemy with a debuff, you gain silencer points towards your silencer score that other members can see and you permanenty gain a very small percentage chance of not being negated each time you cast a debuff or buff, even if your buff or debuff was countered correctly by a defending enemy(this also applies to buffs/debuffs casted with feedback loop). Finally, if you successfully negated a buff or debuff that negated your original buff/debuff on the same enemy, you will gain 2x silencer points and you get 2x more percentage added to your negation-block chance.

Brownout: Forcefully syphon energy from your enemy to temporarily add to your power capacity. Is negated by the Syphon buff but can negate the repair nanites buff. Casting this debuff successfully without having it negated will permanently add a 2% increase to the caster's power capacity that scales with their power capacity.
Category: Techno-warfare

EMP Blast: Blast your enemy with EMP waves that temporarily damage power producing buildings, causing a complete power blackout. the effects of the emp blast are shorter in duration than the brownout, but cannot be countered by simply increasing power production like brownout could. Negates the Syphon Buff but is negated by the repair nanites buff. Successfully casting this debuff without negation would award the caster with a permanent 2% faster build speed on all power producing buildings.

Plague: Inflict an enemy with a nasty plague that lowers the health of it's colonists over time. By treating the population of that colony like guinea pigs, you gain a boost towards research production. A plague will never kill a colonist directly, the lowest that a plague would bring a colonist would be 5%. This is avoid any colony from dying out because of warfare. Negated by the healing nanites buff but negates the probiotic bursts buff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speed of hospitals and scientific structures.

Famine: Target your enemy's food supply and reduce the amount of food they produce for a time. Negated by the probiotic bursts buff but negates the healing nanites buff since people can't heal without eating food. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a permanent 2% increase in food storage.

World eater: You release a rare silicon-based life form that eats stone and metal into your enemy's colony. The creature quickly reproduces and infests all of the enemy's ore mines, viciously attacking the miners.. The enemy suffers a substantial reduction in production rates from any structure that relies on holes in the ground, including excavation sites, core mines, regolith extraction co.s, fracking plants, etc. The world eaters are trained to build storehouses for the ore they collect and share it with their masters. Successfully casting this debuff without having it negated will permanent multiply the attacker's total storage capacity for raw resources by 1.02, thus adding an extra 2% capacity in relation to the capacity they already have. This scales with resource capacity and applies to all resources that come from the ground, including alien arts, ore, gold, ura, alu, rego,
Category: Geo-warfare

Tectonic disruption: Pummel your enemy with earthquakes that make working in tall buildings extremely hard. The target suffers reduced work productivity depending on how potent your attack is and can't build or destroy any buildings during the duration of the debuff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster 2% faster construction of any structure that classifies as a tall building.
Category: Geo-warfare

Splitter: A very costly and high tech buff that allows you to direct your buffs and debuffs toward two targets at once. In order to successfully target two allies/enemies with a particular status effect, you need to cast splitter on both targets in rapid succession(casts are no more than 5 minutes apart), otherwise the splitter buff/debuff would be wasted on only one target and the caster would have to wait the long cooldown in order to cast it again.
Category: Offensive Warfare

Malicious Sanctioning campaign: you target an enemy with a campaign to invite it's population to immigrate to your colony, thus leaching population away from them. Requires tons of civics to cast and a colony would have to be well established in order to have access to this attack and would need to have tons of space for new colonists. Negated by the repopulate buff but negates the Friendly sanctioning buff. Once a caster's housing space is filled up, the campaign will be ended, thus avoiding any homeless people. Successfully casting this debuff without running out of housing space or being negated will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds on all housing structures.
Category: Political Warfare

Purge: Purge your colony of any overly complacent colonists, forcing them to immigrate to your enemy. These colonists will immigrate to the enemy regardless of whether they have housing room or not. If the enemy doesn't have housing room, the immigrants because homeless and detract from their happiness score. This buff requires a lot of civics and would have a huge cooldown. Successfully casting this debuff would grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds for all tourism structures.
Category: Political warfare

Blockade: Block and enemy's trade via gbt and all import/export/immigration buildings other than the Stargate. is negated by the subspace detour buff but negates the hyperspace transport buff. Requires starships to cast. During the blockade, the prices of all of the import/export stuctures besides your highest tier import/export building(stargate for humans) are reduced by 20% and the rewards gain from the exports are increased by 20%
Category: Economic Warfare

Subspace disruption: Disruption your enemy's Stargate connection, rendering their most advanced immigration and trade building useless. Negates the subspace detour buff but is negated by the hyperspace transport buff. During a disruption, your highest tier import/export building gains a 20% import price reduction and a 20% export reward increase.
Category: Economic Warfare

Buffs:

Benefits of buffing allies: There are good benefits to turning your colony unto a support colony that buffs it's allies. When you successfully negate a debuff, you permanently gain a small amount of resistance to the debuff that you negated, and you get defense points that go to your overall defense score that other members can see. When you cast a buff onto an ally while they aren't affected by any status affects, then you gain points towards your utility score, which other members can see as well, and you gain a potency increase to that buff.

Syphon: You temporarily sacrifice a portion of your power to add to an ally colony's power levels. Designed to negate the brownout debuff as long as the caster has enough extra power to successfully supplement that colony's needs as well as the extra demand for power that the brownout debuff adds. Unfortunately, the emp burst debuff negates this buff.
Category: Techno-warfare

Repair nanites: sends a swarm of nanites to repair any damage in an ally's technology caused by an EMP blast, immidiately negating the debuff. The brownout debuff destroys these nanites as the high electric demand causes electronics to overheat, vaporizing the nanites as they try to fix the damage. One side effect of getting hit with this buff is that they repair damage caused by other means, thereby repairing building infrastructure by a significant percentage.
Category: techno-warfare

Healing nanites: you send a swarm of healing nanites to an ally colony to heal it's occupants. Completely negates the plague debuff, but is negated by the dyson sphere debuff. Hospitals also heal sick colonists faster depending on buff potency.
Category: Bio-warfare

Probiotic bursts: gives an ally colony rapid food production for some time. This buff requires a large amount of food and water to charge, but when casted onto an ally colony, it releases massive clouds of genetically modified probiotics in the atmosphere, which help crops grow fast. negates the dyson sphere debuff, but is negated by the plague debuff.
Category: Bio-warfare

Ultrasonic resonance: Blast your ally with ultrasonic waves that purify the earth of any world eaters. Obviously this counters the world eater debuff. The resonance shakes ores and minerals loose from the rocks for easier collection. This adds a significant boost to production in all buildings that rely on holes in the ground. However, this buff does nothing against the tectonic disruption debuff.
Category: Geo-warfare

Cryonic infusion: calm an ally's planet down with the freezing power of cryo-science. Negates tectonic disruption, but world eaters are impervious to the extreme cold. The severe cold causes blue crystalline to grow on the surface of the planet, no matter what planet it is, and there is a percentage chance for each lava tile on a lava map to instantly turn into obsidian. Both of these benefits depend on buff potency.
Category: Geo-warfare

Repopulate: you sacrifice a portion of your population to save an ally from dying off by repopulating their colony. No resource or tech requirements. Not designed to negate any debuff, but designed to prevent any colony from dying off. This is a very low tier buff, and would be the first buff to be unlocked, so it really shouldn't be possible to kill off an enemy colony to where they can't recover, since they could always get reinforcements from allies. In fact, I could see some colonies specializing in this buff by increasing their population size way beyond their population requirements. Negates the sanctioning campaign debuff but people won't want to move to that colony if it been afflicted by a purge from another colony.
Category: Political Warfare

Friendly Sanctioning campaign: Help your ally by welcoming all of their homeless into your colony. The buff only stops when either the caster runs out of housing or the target runs out of homeless. negates the Purge debuff but is negated by the Malicious sanctioning debuff.
Category: Political Warfare

Subspace detour: Allow your ally to connect to your gbt via their stargate, thus allowing them to make trades. This negates a blockade debuff, but is negated by the subspace disruption debuff. Side effects from this buff include a reduced cost in civics for each gbt transaction and the reduction of cost and increase of reward from importing/exporting from the stargate or highest tier import/export building, depending on buff potency.

Wormhole: You create a wormhole above your planet that links to a wormhole above your allie's planet. Because of this, allies can travel more effectively without the need of a stargate. Negates subspace disruption but is negated by blockade. Has the same effect on gbt as subspace detour, but applies the cost and benefit modifiers to every tier other than the top tier import/export building.

SOS: This buff can only be applied to the colony casting it. It's basically a cry for help. Other allies can see a list of SOS reports for their federation and see the colony being attacked and identify the attacker. Afterward they can proceed to buff their ally in danger, or retaliate against the attacker with a debilitating debuff. There is no requirement or cost to cast this buff, you just have to have a communications device, consulate, or capital.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Feedback loop: Can only be applied to the caster, casting requires large amounts of power and the tech required with be pretty high to unlock this buff. Once this buff is casted, the caster can target themselves once with any buff, essentially being able to defend themselves instead of having to rely on another colony for counters. The feedback loop would come with a large cooldown, so the caster would have to choose wisely on.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Dimensional reflection: Reflect a buff or debuff back onto an enemy or ally, thus negating any effect on the caster completely and immediately. A high tech and a lot of resources required to cast this buff and comes with a long cooldown. This buff doesn't prevent an attack, you have to cast this buff during when you are experiencing a buff or debuff.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Charge: cast this buff before casting another buff or debuff to multiply the potency by 5. This also increases the cooldown of the buff being affected by 5. The most expensive buff in the game and comes with the highest cooldown.

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Now with all of that out of the way, I want to remind everyone that I'm not expecting this whole beast of a concept to be plopped into the game. I hope that bast at least takes a consideration of the concept and uses pieces and parts from it, but I mainly just want to see the game grow to become more popular and hopefully some of my ideas play a part in making that happen. I will be making changes to this post to constantly refine it based on what I learn about what is feasible to do and what bast's plans are, so stay tuned.

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!

v 0.46 took 90% of my money (about $12e+15) and the save issue it's not solved so I had to start a new game and leave my main frozen in a backup.
On my new game I needed some aluminium and went to the trade board LTA just to see other player posting 100al for $1,025,509,719,000,000 (about $1e+15) and it was sold seconds after.

Also the price for 250al on the Black Makrket went form $300k to $9M. The Export prices are really low and the 75% tax makes a gift of everything you try to sell, and waiting for someone to buy your resources on the LTA can take hours and there's always gonna be someone just selling cheaper to sell it fast making the game harder for new colonies.
Maybe the LTA/LTB should work different, perhaps putting the colonies in tiers based on their GDP or tech level to see different offers/requests on the market so players who still have $1e+42 doesn't affect players with $30M.
I know it said "hard" but having no source for al and this insane prices, makes the game impossible to continue. Having uranium and aluminium harvesters is pointless in the LIS asteroid.

I’m not sure of the member you are referring to, but if we knew for sure then he/she would be banned from the FFF as using exploits is against our policy.

Anyways, some of us at the FFF had a meeting to talk about ways that would reduce some of the ongoing GBT issues.

1. Players should not be allowed to go over their current storage limits. This can currently be done by placing a request for resources or by receiving a gift, resulting in a player able to hold millions of something with only 50k of storage. Making it where excess resources from gifts or GBT requests simply filled the current storage and the excess disappears prevent a player from being able to stockpile billions of a resource without the proper capacity.

2. Tying into the issue above, there are certain resources that currently have no storage limit. These include Ore, Gold, Aluminum, and Uranium to name a few. There’s no reason that I can see for any player to need a nearly infinite amount of a resource. Using the warehouse or another storage building to limit this would make more sense.

3. The amount you post for trade cannot exceed your current storage capacity. Meaning you cannot have multiple contracts that add up to 100k of a resource for sale on the GBT if you only have 80k storage space. This would already be minimized if #1 was implemented and holding more than your current storage was not allowed anyways.

4. The storage limit for a certain resource is reduced by the amount of that resource you have listed on the GBT. Once the contract sells, the storage space returns to normal. This way if the contract is not sold and the resources are returned to the player, it does not exceed the storage capacity. Or anything in excess of the storage capacity vanished upon the return of those resource.

5. Possibly tie the GBT to your consulate or capital level, so that only players that are within +/- 1 level of your consulate or capital level can see your trades and vice versa. Allow the max trade amount to increase with these levels as well, so that smaller levels only trade with smaller levels and larger trades stay with the larger levels.

I’m not sure what your current plans are but hopefully these will give you some more ideas on possible solutions to address the issues of players using GBT exploits for personal gain.

Sobeirannovaocc said:https://dev.coloniae.space coming sooooon

We will need to discuss automated stat reporting endpoints, as I want to add the feature into the game for v0.21.0, but it can't work the same was as it did in MC1 and needs to be made a little more generic.

Given the modding capabilities of MC2, it is conceivable that some future mod creator would want their game stats reported to their own server somewhere instead of to coloniae. Also with the potential for so many games to have differing data sets, we will need to make sure to compare "apples to apples" when putting together a database of colony statistics.

I am going to add a new field to the Metadata section of the Game Editor for stat collection endpoint URLs. Multiple URL's will be permitted, separated by commas, and the game will report information by the minute. Reporting will only be done by the Server instance, not by client players connected to the server.

The data will be sent using standard HTTP post, maybe with a custom header to signify that it is coming from the MC2 client. I don't know if maybe it should also have some sort of rudimentary authentication system, like maybe the MC2 client will need to first get an access key of some sort from the reporting end point that can be included with all posts. Clearly with MC2 since anyone can just look at the endpoint URLs in the game editor, it's not going to be totally secure, but we are just collecting raw stats without any secure info. I just don't want people to be able to abuse it and goose their stats somehow, although it could also be made sufficiently complicated to where it's not easy to send bad data anyway. I mean technically someone could send their own MC1 data to Coloniae right now if they wanted to dig into the MC1 source code and look at how it works.

Really it could just be on the endpoint maintainer to see where the request is coming from, and to look at the data and see if it seems legit. All real MC2 requests will either be coming from apewebapps.com or the Android/iOS client, so anything else could be considered a bad request.

Anyway, the posts made to the endpoint, besides for data related to the game world, should also include the Game Identifier uuid string from the Metadata game object so that info from different mods can be segregated, as well as client version, a checksum of all of the gamedata objects so that you can easily tell what data is coming from the same version/client, etc. Perhaps when a world is first loaded, it can also post that same checksum along with a list of all game data items installed, so there can be a reference there too.

Anyway, I want to start testing some basic stat collection with v0.21.0. I am going to set up my own stat collection endpoint for testing, and if you want to make one for Coloniae @Sobeirannovaocc then let me know and I can get an endpoint URL added to the official Metadata game object. You can just create a dummy script there for the time being and develop it later if you want.

Also sobe at some point soon here I am just going to purchase a cloud server instance for Coloniae and give you access to it. My internet connection (and electric utility) has not proven to be good enough to host a production website, lol.

Thank you for the feedback @Luker124 , I will address your suggestions here!

Luker124 said:When creating a structure, rovers will automatically prioritize building the structure over collecting resources.

Yes, I agree to this. I think it does this in some way in MC1 (don't remember for sure).

Luker124 said:Path finding for rovers will prioritize taking pavement over no pavement to their destination.

Also yes. That is how it is supposed to work anyway, I have just not gotten to it yet :-/

Luker124 said:Optional flashing effects for rovers on their voxels(Could be used to signal authority, or to move colonists out of the way in the future) OPTIONAL

Do you mean like a blinking light? That shouldn't be too difficult. Shouldn't...

Luker124 said:A realistic animation for the lander pad, such as a small space ship landing then departing after colonists are offloaded. Changing the "generation" speed of the building would also be essential to this. This would also open the door for custom building animations!

This is basically planned as well. If you look at the data object in the editor for the Landing Pad for example, you will see it has the Lander set as the "Population Delivery Unit," and the Landing Field lists the Shuttlepod. So this too is in the works!

Luker124 said:Why is water a utility but food is not? I suggest either changing water back into a resource or making food a utility too, for organizational sake.

Here I do not agree with you. The reasoning behind this is that, in a real life city, water is a utility, but food is not. For instance, you don't have a food pipe connected to your house that delivers food on demand for a monthly rate (although come to think of it, that would be pretty sweet).

Luker124 said:Pavement places between two buildings sometimes doesn't build, and even when it does, it sometimes just vanishes into thin air. Would make an amazing party trick, but not a good game mechanic.

This is a bug I did not notice until after publishing this update, but pavements that are 1x1 tile cannot be built and do not show up on the map. I think I know why it is happening, but I will have to verify in the code during the next update.

Luker124 said:Individual selection for drop-off points for resource collecting rovers(Preferably some sort of selection on the map, maybe highlight possible places in green)

Not exactly sure what you mean by this :-/

Luker124 said:Voxels can be made into the -y axis, allowing for holes in the voxel models, and realistic depth.

Maybe. This sort of comes back to the terraforming requests, structures will need to be able to override the world seed while the engine is building the 3d geometry for the ground terrain. It's not insurmountable though, as roads already do this (you can see that pavements are slightly depressed into the terrain)

Luker124 said:Some sort of better construction animation, instead of the building emerging from the ground like the undead.

I thought it would be cool originally to have the buildings go up voxel-by-voxel or row-by-row while being built. In practice it ended up being incredibly RAM expensive as a new 3D model needs to be created by the engine for each step of the build phase. This is a similar problem to having animated buildings, each frame of the animation needs to be its own model, although on an animated building, you can get around that by having the building just being made of multiple models, and one rotates or moves independent of the others. Anyway, I probably will not change this any time soon, but it might come about eventually if I make some sort of performance breakthrough on the Scroll3D engine.

Anyway, that you for all of the suggestions and feedback!

Since yesterday got a bug fix/maintenance patch for My Colony 2, and since Dark Matter Pt2 update is not yet ready for prime time, I figured My Colony 1 could get the same treatment, so the new v1.24.0 patch should be hitting all platforms over the next few days. What's new? Let's find out!


Even with the existing Turbo Drones, some of the newer buildings were taking forever and a day to construct. That is where the brand new Ultra Drone comes in! The Ultra Drone requires Dark Matter tech and is basically the build-speed equivalent of 1,500 Turbo Drones, so it's very fast at building. It is also by far the most expensive unit in the game, but just one of these bad boys should take care of all of your mega construction needs (for now at least)!

I made some cosmetic changes to the Diamond Refinery and the Diamond Miner, because they both had L.I.S. flags painted on them, even though they can also be built by United Earth. The L.I.S. logo has been removed.

Speaking of new paint job, the Challenges window was spruced up just a bit. First, Second and Third place now get Gold, Silver and Bronze colors respectively. You can now also click on every colony and federation name to bring up their respective windows.


But you might be saying, "there is no Federation window" and you would be right, until now. I have started building the federation info window, which now shows up when you click on a federation name. It gives basic info and a Request Membership button, making it easier for users to join a federation they are interested in. It is still bare bones, but will be fleshed out more later.


Also, now if a colony is a member of a federation, you will see a new button that links to their Federation window when you are looking at their colony info screen, making requesting federation membership even easier.


In the last update, there was a bug where participating in a challenge from a Region city would cause the city to keep losing resources when the regional output/input was simulated. This has been fixed. I also fixed a bug that was causing builder units to act strangely.

Now for the stuff people will not be as happy about.

Last time I spoke of removing Import/Export completely from online games. Some people liked this, some hated it. For now, I have kept Import in the game with the 99.99% price penalty, and have kept Export in the game and reduced the penalty from 99.99% to just 90%. I might adjust that further later, or may still remove it completely. TBH the extreme penalties have not really caused much of a problem that people were claiming it would.

And now for the change that I think I will get the most rage from on this update, resource decay has been increased dramatically, as in the engine will now try to get your resource level down to your storage capacity within 10 minutes or so (that is not a hard number, that is just roughly how long it takes). I consider being able to have more resources than you have storage for to be an exploit anyway, and now it has been patched, but the patch does give the player sufficient time to use export or post stuff onto the marketplace. Basically, the higher above your storage capacity, the faster your resource will decay, and if you are just a little bit over, it will decay basically at the old decay rate. So if you have, for example, 50 million star ships but can only store 10,000, you will be losing millions per second at the beginning. This is another change geared towards bringing galactic resource values into balance.

Finally, over the next month or so, I am doing a "dark structure" series on the collectable structures window (which you can find by clicking on the "New Content Available" button. These will basically be dark theme colored variants of some of the most popular regular structures, so if you have any requests of structures you would like to see get the dark treatment, let me know!


So anyway, that is all for this update. I know that some tweaks are being made to the rest of the Dark Matter update, so stay tuned for that, and as always let me know what bugs or other issues you find in the game. And until next time, enjoy!

#mycolony

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


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

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

https://github.com/spessasus/SpessaSynth

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

How does it work?

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

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

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

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

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony