Ape Apps

I recently got a request from a Pixel Paint user for a way to embed the Pixel Paint application into their web project with some extra UI customization features, so I have added a few things and thought I would share it with anyone who might want to do something similar.


Starting with Pixel Paint v2.9.0, you can now embed the web app version of Pixel Paint into any html based project using a standard iframe tag and a handful of URL parameters which can be used to customize the user experience.

For the most basic implementation, you should append the emb=1 URL parameter to the base Pixel Paint URL. This will disable the Ape Apps Account related stuff as well as some features that do not work properly in a cross origin iframe. So a basic URL would look like this: https://pixelpaint.online/?emb=1 and you could use it on your website with something like this:

<iframe src="https://pixelpaint.online/?emb=1"></iframe>

You would then use css to adjust the width/height of your iframe, and I would suggest a good starting point is an iframe size of 480x520 and then you can go from there based on your needs.

From there, Pixel Paint currently supports the following list of URL parameters. If you are interested in this feature and would like to see other customization parameters added, feel free to reply to this post and I will see what can be done.
Here is a sample URL of many of the URL parameters in use:

https://pixelpaint.online/?emb=1&size=24&fr=1&inv=1&sy=1&sx=1&ico=0&vpp=0&print=0&mdm=1&zoom=0.65&labels=1&stats=1&ps=9,16,24

So those are all of the options currently available for Pixel Paint embedded mode. If there are other use cases you can think of for the app or other URL customization parameters you would like to see, just let me know and I will keep this thread updated with the latest information!

https://pixelpaint.online/

#pixelpaint

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


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

https://voxelpaint.online/

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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

#voxelpaint

Today I am finalizing v1.7.0 of Voxel Paint which is a fairly considerable update with several new tools and features being added into the program. Let's take a look at what's new!

First off, Voxel Paint now has, not one, but four pen tools available, accessable by either right-clicking on the pen tool icon, or selecting the pen tool again when you are already using one of the pens (for mobile access). Doing so will give you this new context menu where you can select which pen tool you are interested in using:


The Add Voxel tool is the same that it's always pen, the regular pen.

The new Fill Add Voxel tool accepts two clicks and will then fill in every cube in-between the first and second click. For instance, if you click on the top left corner of the painting and then the bottom left, you will get this:


Certainly a lot faster than single clicking on each individual tile!

The Paint Voxel tool is used for painting over, or changing the color of already existing voxels, handy for adding texture to a model or simply making changings without having to erase and redraw parts of your model.

Finally, the new Paint Emissive tool is used for quickly setting a group of voxels as emissive. You use it by "drawing" over them as with the Paint Voxel tool. It also allows mobile users to set voxels as emissive, as they couldn't before.

In order to keep all of the new tools straight, there is a new readout area on the bottom-right of the screen next to the coordinate readout that lets you know which tool you are currently using.

Aside from the new pens, there are a couple of more tools you will find in this release. Under the Image menu, there is a new Hollow Image wizard. This tool will go through your model and automatically remove all cubes that are not visible from the outside. This is a handy feature if you've just created a bunch of new voxels using the Fill Add Voxel tool and want to remove the excess in the center. Hollowing an image can greatly reduce your .vpp file size, as well as rendering performance.

When you first load up Voxel Paint, the default file size has been changed from 20x20 to 16x16. I made this change because the two games that currently use .vpp models, My Empire and My Colony 2, both use 16x16 models by default, as does the Voxel Playground utility. It only makes sense for Voxel Paint to conform to that default. I have also adjusted the maximum zoom out range, so you can zoom out on your models more than you could previously.

Finally, Voxel Paint now has a new file export mode called Precompile Model, which performs a majority of the operations that the My Empire or My Colony 2 game engines normally do before adding the model into the game, and saves that data into the actual .vpp file. The precompile export can take a minute or so depending on your device and will increase the file size by a factor of 2 or 3 (or more). The benefit is that it will reduce the time that one of the above mentioned games (or the Voxel Playground once it's updated) takes to load your model by 99%, which is good. If you are just working on small models or making personal artwork and do not care about rendering in My Colony 2, then you probably do not need to do a precompile export. On the other hand, if you are interested in My Colony 2 modding or creating Voxel Playground scenes, the precompile export is probably the way to go.

Anyway, the v1.7.0 update is live now on the Web and on the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting all other platforms over the course of the week. I hope you enjoy the changes, please leave feedback so that I can continue to improve the app, and stay tuned for more Voxel Paint updates!

#voxelpaint #mycolony2 #voxelplayground #myempire

This morning I have released the 2.5.0 update for Voxel Paint, which includes a new bi-directional integration with Ape Chat. This feature is new for both apps and will be expanded and improved in the months ahead, but let's take a look at what it does right now!


Now when you click on the toolbar's top-right settings icon, you will see two new options (only available if you are signed in with an Ape Apps Account), Voxel Paint Chat and Set Chat Channel. If you click on Voxel Paint Chat, it will open the new embedded Ape Chat sidebar that will be familiar to players of My Colony and My Colony 2. The Set Chat Channel option lets you customize which Ape Chat channel is used by the app (the default is #voxelpaint, but you can use anything you want, like #mc2-voxeling for instance).

While the Ape Chat sidebar is open, two brand new features are unlocked that tie directly to chat. First, if you click on the toolbar camera icon which is normally used to save a .png of your model, you will now get a new dropdown menu with a Post to Chat option. This will still take a .png of your model as before, but instead of exporting to your device, it will post it directly into whatever Ape Chat channel you are currently signed in to.

Similar to posting .png images, the folder menu contains a new Post to Chat export option, which does the same thing, except it uploads the full model instead of a render. The render can then be viewed, manipulated and downloaded by users in the Ape Chat client.

These features are early and there are still some issues, particularly on the Ape Chat side. For example, currently the Download button in the in-chat renderer seems to be showing a plain text version of your model instead of actually downloading it. The header above the model is not formatted well for the slide-out chat side. It also messes with mouse wheel scrolling. So if you notice any of the aforementioned issues, you do not need to report them, as I already am aware!

Moving forward, I plan to expand this further. For instance, in the model renderer in the slide-out chat frame, I want to have a button that lets you instantly import the model you are looking at into your Voxel Paint workspace. That way if multiple people are in the chat, you can sort of collaborate on something. Someone could make a part of the model, post it, you could click on the import button and it would paste it in selected, and you can move it to where you need it to be.

Over the next day or two, these features will also be making their way to Pixel Paint. I probably will not make a new post about them since they will work largely in the same way that they do in Voxel Paint, but keep a look out for them in the coming days.

That is it for this update to Voxel Paint. I plan to improve the integration on both the Voxel Paint and Ape Chat side of things, so if you have ideas on how to make it even cooler, let me know!

https://voxelpaint.online/

#voxelpaint #pixelpaint

#MyColony2 #VoxelPaint #VoxelModel #CommunityContents #MagicaVoxel #Scroll3D

HELLO GUYS!

Some months ago, inside the secret lab in the deep mountains.... Wait, wrong script.
Just a few monthes ago, our dev @bastecklein got hands onto creating a (sort of) next generation engine for upcoming games of Ape Apps. With some computer magic and pretty much hard efforts, the brand new engine Scroll3D was born, a new engine comes with elevation in terms of dimensions, from 2D to 3D.

The detailed story about creation of Scroll3D can be found in this post.

The currently under development My Colony 2 (MC2) is created using Scroll3D engine. So how it would look like? Here are some demonstrations from the recent in game footage.



Currently, the Scroll3D engine is capable of the followings, compared to the older Scroll2D engine:

• More realistic light rendering.
• Light emitting objects!
• A better representation of height and elevation.
• Diagonal movement of objects.
• 3 dimensional details for objects.

You can see the 3D models are very blocky in shape. This style is called Voxel, which every model are built up block by block. In other words, you can say it is low pixel graphics but it is in 3D.
The reason bastecklein adopted this style is because voxel models are generally easy to make. This is a good thing for people who would like to contribute to the graphical designs of game objects in game development, or create mods for the games - that is also one of the major features of My Colony 2.

Games using Scroll3D engine, including My Colony 2, use .vpp files for object graphics in the game. So how you can create the voxel models?

Bastecklein has also created another app for creating voxel models in .vpp format - Voxel Paint.
This is a dedicated app for creating .vpp models for any Ape Apps games using Scroll3D engine. A simple and easy-to-use app, it allows you to create simple, small voxel models. More importantly, it is available on many platforms, from your desktop computer to your mobile devices.
You can try out the app a bit on the embed window above.

Voxel Paint can work in conjunction with another popular, totally free open source software that is also for creating voxel models, MagicaVoxel. MagicaVoxel, compared to Voxel Paint, has more convenient and advanced tools that can help making of voxel models easier, especially when you're trying to create larger models that would take days to make on Voxel Paint. However, it is so far only available on PC devices.
This is their official website where you will find the latest download version, and their Github page: https://ephtracy.github.io/
Models created using MagicaVoxel is in format of .vox, this format cannot be used in My Colony 2, it requires conversion in Voxel Paint using the Import .vox file function and then save it as usable .vpp files.
This is a screenshot of the user interface.


At this moment, the standard unit of a tile in Scroll3D engine is 16×16 voxels. Hence, when you're creating voxel models, please set canvas size/base area parameters as multiples of 16 (16×16, 32×32, 48×48, etc.) for proper designs.


Any voxel models in .vpp format you have created can be submitted on the Ape Apps forums, which upon submission of the post/comment the .vpp model preview can be rendered.


Just a few hours before this post, My Colony 2 reached v0.2.0 with a few basic gameplay features implemented successfully. It is far from completion, and some buildings need better models. However, there is also plentiful of space for adding shiny new good stuff and refining the current details, this is where bastecklein will need more cool thoughts, amazing ideas and fine suggestions from us. Of course, better or new voxel models!

As always:
You can help by EXPANDING IT.

I have begun designing the upcoming Scroll3d engine, which is a WebGL based replacement for my current Scroll2d game engine that powers My Colony, Antiquitas, My Land, My Starship, Epic Adventure, Gone Rogue, Hell and Back, Colony Wars, My Empire, etc. Scroll3d is my "next generation" rendering engine that will be powering My Colony 2 along with my next batch of games and graphical applications over the coming years, so it is a long term project.

I am designing Scroll3d to be similar API-wise to Scroll2d, the primary difference being that it adds a Z axis to the current X/Y axis. But I wanted the mouse/touch/gamepad interactions to work in a similar way to Scroll2d, because the current engine is fairly easy to navigate at this point.

To that end, I have created the first app and tech demo for the new Scroll3d engine, Voxel Paint, which you can check out at Ape Web Apps here: https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/

Voxel Paint is just a simple 3d drawing app, nothing special. But I needed something to start putting the basics into the new engine. Voxel Paint demonstrates that the engine now has X, Y, and Z axis. I also have most of the usual mouse and touch interactions working, including panning and zoom, utilizing both mouse wheel and touch pinch-to-zoom. Scroll3d also adds an additional interaction which is Rotate.

Anyway, you can check out the beginnings of the new engine by giving Voxel Paint a try. There is still a lot to do on the engine of course, but you can start to see the basics taking shape.

While working on Voxel Paint, I began to consider writing a WebGL loader that would take Voxel Paint save files and turn them into geometries that can be used in games, support for which would be baked right into Scroll3d. Using this, if I wanted to give MC2 a pixelated look, it would be easy for players/modders to just whip out a custom voxel model and import it into the game. Anyway, I would have to see how it looks first though, I might not like the pixelated look.

Today I am putting the final touches on v1.6.0 of Voxel Paint, which should be hitting all available platforms in the coming days. This update adds support for new "emissive" voxels, which will be needed for setting up structure lighting on the upcoming My Colony 2.

To use the new feature, you can now right-click on an individual voxel to access a new popup menu. When you turn on emissive for a voxel, you get new options for Glow Radius and Glow Intensity. These properties will determine how My Colony 2 (and other products) will ultimately render the lighting. There is currently no way to set this up on a touch screen device though.


In the View dropdown menu, there is a new Scene Light Color setting which you can use to adjust the lighting in your scene, which is handy for testing out your emissive voxels. The scene lighting data is not saved to the actual .vpp model, but it is used when taking a render of your model. For example, I added a couple of lights to one of @GeneralWadaling 's MC2 models and turned down the lighting in order to test the feature:

Keep in mind that when creating models for My Colony 2, the voxel Glow Radius property is specified in voxels, whereas 16 voxels = 1 tile in the MC2 engine. Also, when you are setting scene brightness in the game, the light intensity level is roughly based on the color itself. For instance, a scene color of white (#ffffff) is like a room with the light turned on, where as a scene color of black (#000000) is basically the same as a white light with the intensity turned down to zero (hope that makes sense).

Some time ago, I believe @Sobeirannovaocc or perhaps someone else requested the ability to be able to pass raw .vpp data into Voxel Paint as an external parameter, and have the app render the file (as opposed to passing in a stored .vpp file url). This functionality is now present in Voxel Paint v1.6.0, and is used like this:

Parameter = emd={(json data here)}
You then base64 encode the above and pass it in as the parameter.

For example, suppose your VPP data looked like this:

{"author":"bastecklein","size":6,"id":"bd8e637f-b5b4-6b59-b663-5363fdd820a0","voxels":[{"x":0,"y":0,"z":0,"c":"#f44336"},{"x":-1,"y":0,"z":0,"c":"#f44336"},{"x":0,"y":-1,"z":0,"c":"#2196F3"},{"x":-1,"y":-1,"z":0,"c":"#2196F3"}],"precompile":{}}

You would convert that object into a string and put emd= in front of it:

emd={"author":"bastecklein","size":6,"id":"bd8e637f-b5b4-6b59-b663-5363fdd820a0","voxels":[{"x":0,"y":0,"z":0,"c":"#f44336"},{"x":-1,"y":0,"z":0,"c":"#f44336"},{"x":0,"y":-1,"z":0,"c":"#2196F3"},{"x":-1,"y":-1,"z":0,"c":"#2196F3"}],"precompile":{}}

You then base64 encode that entire string:

ZW1kPXsiYXV0aG9yIjoiYmFzdGVja2xlaW4iLCJzaXplIjo2LCJpZCI6ImJkOGU2MzdmLWI1YjQtNmI1OS1iNjYzLTUzNjNmZGQ4MjBhMCIsInZveGVscyI6W3sieCI6MCwieSI6MCwieiI6MCwiYyI6IiNmNDQzMzYifSx7IngiOi0xLCJ5IjowLCJ6IjowLCJjIjoiI2Y0NDMzNiJ9LHsieCI6MCwieSI6LTEsInoiOjAsImMiOiIjMjE5NkYzIn0seyJ4IjotMSwieSI6LTEsInoiOjAsImMiOiIjMjE5NkYzIn1dLCJwcmVjb21waWxlIjp7fX0=

And you can finally build your iFrame URL like this:

https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/launch/-AABLKTB-ZW1kPXsiYXV0aG9yIjoiYmFzdGVja2xlaW4iLCJzaXplIjo2LCJpZCI6ImJkOGU2MzdmLWI1YjQtNmI1OS1iNjYzLTUzNjNmZGQ4MjBhMCIsInZveGVscyI6W3sieCI6MCwieSI6MCwieiI6MCwiYyI6IiNmNDQzMzYifSx7IngiOi0xLCJ5IjowLCJ6IjowLCJjIjoiI2Y0NDMzNiJ9LHsieCI6MCwieSI6LTEsInoiOjAsImMiOiIjMjE5NkYzIn0seyJ4IjotMSwieSI6LTEsInoiOjAsImMiOiIjMjE5NkYzIn1dLCJwcmVjb21waWxlIjp7fX0=/embedded.html

Click here to test it out, you should get something like this:
The -AABLKTB- part of the URL above is optional, but it does remove the app toolbar, which you will want to do if you are hosting this in an iFrame and are trying to render a sample of the vpp data.

I do not know if browsers will place a limit on how large of a parameter one can pass in as an iFrame URL, but the few vpp files I have tried haven't had an issue, so your mileage may vary.

Finally, I have removed the camera rotation limit that stopped you from looking at the bottom side of a model, so you can now rotate the camera completely to the undersize of the scene.

The next step is to get the lights to actually show up in-game, so that is what I will be working on next. I need to make updates to the VPP Loader script to handle the new lights and emissive voxels, after which I will first implement the changes into the Voxel Playground application for testing.

In terms of My Colony 2, I think that buildings should be limited to between 0 and 1 lights. Above I posted a picture of one of Wadaling's structures with 8 active lights on it, and it does look cool, but that scenario would actually be a complete disaster for this type of game. Since My Colony 2 maps are all designed by the player, it is not possible to pre-compute light maps like would be done in a traditional 3d game. For this reason, I think that MC2 lighting should be limited to specific lighting structures, like the street lamp in MC1.

That said, a structure that has an emissive tile with a Glow Radius of 0 will not actually create a light in the MC2 engine. It will instead make that individual voxel unaffected by environment lighting. meaning the scene could be night time, but that voxel would still shine bright as day:


That said, I think it should still be used sparingly, as juts letting objects react to the general environment will probably generally work out alright.

So that is all for this Voxel Paint update. My next steps are to update the .vpp loader and to get the lighting engine working in the Voxel Playground app. I will post updates on the forum when those tasks are done. Beyond that, we will be ready to have a fully functional night time mode in My Colony 2. Exciting!

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


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

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

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

#voxelpaint

My Colony 2 has just been updated to v0.33.0 on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting other platforms over the weekend. There are some changes and some goodies packed into this release, so let's take a look at what is new!


To start off, base defenses have now arrived in My Colony 2 with the addition of the Pillbox and the Security Wall Pillbox (Pillbox texture by @GeneralWadaling )! Over the last few weeks, a certain user on MC2 online (whose name shall go unmentioned) has been rampaging through several dedicated servers with unprovoked attacks on settlements whose users have been offline. This highlighted the need for some updates to the game that should help address this problem, and one of those changes are the new base defensive structures that you can now construct around your settlement.

In addition, there have been cost increases to the military units in the game (the Infantry, Main Battle Tank and Patrol Boat). All three military units now require Money to build. As money is slower to come by at the beginning of the game, it should put a halt on being able to join a server and just spam thousands of infantry units right off the bat. In addition though, Infantry units now each cost you 1 population to build, so every time you build an infantry unit, your settlement population will go down by one (since he was drafted into service). This should likewise put a cap to mass infantry spamming, as you now actually need both the economy and the population to back an army up.


Some additional server admin settings have been added to the Statistics window. Now server admins can set a user account blacklist, so that if there is a user out there known for greifing servers, you can pre-ban him or her before they have a chance to trash your server. You can also set a Message of the Day that players will see when they sign in to your server.


I have also expanded the game Credits section (found in the Encyclopedia). When you select a username in the credits, you will now see more detailed information on all of the items they have contributed to the game.


I have also added a new engine setting, which you can find under the Tweaks section. You can now toggle on and off a grid that will be drawn over the ground tiles, which may make placing structures easier on a touch screen device. It looks like this when activated:


New content has arrived in this update as well, starting with the Low Gravity Masonry tech, which brings with it the long await Brick Factory and the regular and Yellow Brick Roads (brick texture provided by @SPARKY0303 )!

The Brick Roads utilize a new feature which you will find in the game editor, allowing you to use a Pixel Paint file (*.ppp from https://pixelpaint.online/, the 2D cousin to Voxel Paint) as a road texture. For best results, use a 16x16 Pixel Paint file. I should mention that the game editor also now lets you export packaged Voxel Paint models (which you previously could not do).

@spamdude provided a model for a new Ether Sanitation Plant in this update, converting Ether into Water and Uranium. Thanks to @therealchromedino we get two new Alien tech structures too, the Alien Enrichment Facility and the Ancient Alien Ore Refinery!

There are also two new Sugar production plants available in this update, the Integrated Sugar Lab (model by @SPARKY0303 ) and the Sugar Factory (model by @therealchromedino ). The First is a simple upgrade to the existing Sugar Extraction Lab. The second is a large facility that makes large amounts of Sugar, and also produces a bit of Helium-3 as a production byproduct, since we always need more He3 production.

Finally for new content, some of you in the forums and on the Discord know that I have been talking about adding a Star Gate to MC2. I know some people disagree since I said that MC2 is more of a prequel to MC1, but to me that is all irrelevant, since in both games you start out with no tech and you do research to advance into further ages, so timeline in this type of game is largely irrelevant. But that is neither here nor there, because before I can add the Star Gate from MC1, I need the tech to back it up, so in this update, I have added two additional techs, Artificial Intelligence and Transcendence! The AI tech is pretty easily obtainable and allows you to build the new Center for Artificial Learning.


This is a building that I wanted to make about twice as tall as it is, but my Voxel Paint was lagging out while I was making it, so it is what it is. Maybe I will revisit the model later, but it is fine for the time being.

Transcendence is a super expensive tech in MC1, and the same applies in MC2. Right now nothing happens when you research it, but major props for the first player who gets it. It costs 750m research, and maybe one of the larger worlds already has that, but I added the tech in the game to prepare the way for things to come :-)

Finally, I added a Regolith Synthesis Lab to the game, since we already have labs for Gold and Ore, and you need Regolith to build Helium-3 storage tanks, so it made sense.

In addition to the new stuff though, I have also buffed the existing Gold Extractor and the Gold Synthesis Lab. In addition, I also fixed a bug where building upgrades were not working properly. There were some other bugs I fixed as well, but I forgot what they were. But at least they are fixed!

I think that is all for this update, maybe there is more that you will find in there as well! Over the next few weeks I will be finishing up a new My Colony Universe game called Terra Nova 4X but after that I will be back to more exciting My Colony 2 content, so thanks to all who are playing and contributing to the game, and stay tuned for more to come!

#mycolony2

Today I am releasing the total rewrite of Epic Adventure to all available platforms. Under the hood, Epic Adventure v3.0 is basically an entire different game. What I did was write a new game engine from scratch, designed to go hand in hand with Pixel Paint based graphics (the way My Colony 2 was designed around Voxel Paint), and then I remade Epic Adventure using the new engine. This is just the first step in an "epic" new chapter for Epic Adventure though, so let's get into it!


Putting the actual Epic Adventure game aside for just a second, my ultimate goal with this new engine (called simply the "Adventure Engine") was to create an easy to develop for pixel art based engine that can be primarily be used for both scripted and procedurally generated RPG type games. I designed it to be generic enough to where multiple types of games can be created on it. For instance, I plan to use it also for my next generation of Roguelike games (ie Gone Rogue/Hell and Back), and I also want to do a scripted RPG taking place in the My Colony Universe where you have a ship and travel to different worlds throughout the story (I am thinking of calling that Colony Quest or something similar, sort of like a 2d pixel art Starfield type game in the MC Universe).

All that is for another day though, today I want to talk about the changes to Epic Adventure in this new release, and what is coming soon to the game in the months ahead.

First for the bad news. Because the game is a complete rewrite, all existing save games are gone. Sadly there was no way around this, as the old game format is not even relevant anymore to the new engine. It had to be done though in order to move the game forward, and I think most people will agree that it was worth it as the game now progresses.


Epic Adventure is now the first game to utilize the new Tiny Pixel Token class of token character from the My Tokens app, which has been around for a while now but is now finally getting some utilization.

Game controls have been altered a bit from the previous releases, but I think most players should be able to adapt fairly quickly. On mobile, the game now utilizes two virtual thumbsticks for movement, with the left stick controlling player movement and the right controlling focus direction. The game now has full gamepad support as well. On a desktop device, the controls are a little more similar to how they used to be, except for now you can move your character with keyboard input, using either WASD keys, the regular arrow keys, or the num pad.

The game now has support for chests, allowing you to store a lot more inventory than you could before. The engine also supports finding hidden chests out in the environment that can contain loot, even things you can't craft yourself, but you will not find any until the next update (since I don't have any biomes programmed in that contain them yet).

Epic Adventure now also included enemies! Yes the game did have chickens before (and still does), but they did not really attack you or fight back. Now when you adventure into the caves, you will come across evil spiders who will attack you on sight. The spiders aren't all that powerful, but don't get too complacent because in the coming updates, there will be a lot more than just spiders to contend with...

The long requested feature of Water has arrived in this release, but stay tuned because it is going to be expanded on more later...

For this initial release of the new engine, my primary goal was to code in all of the features needed to bring in every item/terrain/biome/mechanic found in the original Epic Adventure game so that nothing was missing in the update, and I do think that I was able to get there (let me know if I forgot something). The next step though is to start going far beyond what was ever available in the original game, which I am going to talk about in just a moment here.

First though, one think I want to point out is that I forgot to implement the inventory filtering mechanic in this update. You will be able to see in the inventory window what you will eventually be able to do, I just do not have it working yet (but will soon).


The great thing about the new Epic Adventure engine is how easy it is to create content for, both in terms of code and graphics. Because of this, the game is going to now be expanding fairly rapidly, and of course I will always take player feedback and suggestions into account as I build out the game. I do have some of my own ideas though, so this is what I plan on adding to Epic Adventure in the next few releases:

Dungeons
This is probably the next thing on the list, because I have always wanted to have dungeons available to explore in Epic Adventure. These will of course be randomly generated by the game, so that no two dungeons are ever the same, and you will be able to find both loot and monsters in the dungeons that are not available anywhere else. Dungeons will also have the possibility of spawning a nice boss fight for you on the bottom floor.

Towns/NPCs
Along with Dungeons, a good adventure game needs to have towns, good save areas you can travel to in order to rest, pawn off your loot, and get quests. I will talk more about towns and NPCs later, but I will say that I am working on a system of "factions" where different NPCs are part of different factions, and how much they like you will be impacted by that. You will also be able to join different factions, which will impact how your game progresses. I am thinking along the lines of the guilds and whatnot in the Elder Scrolls games.

Travel/Mounts/Boats
There needs to be a way to get around faster in the game, especially as you need to start questing between towns. I am thinking of several mechanics to handle this. First, I think each town will have a sort of fast travel agency, where you can pay gold (which means gold is also on the way) to travel from town to town. I also want to add the ability to ride horses, or to build a boat so that I can introduce full ocean biomes that you can sail across.

Armor, Magic, Projectiles
To help players on their adventures, we are going to need to have better weapons, armor to wear, projectiles to shoot, and magic spells. I plan on adding all of that and more...

Massive Content Expansion
With every update from here on, there will be new content, biomes, items, terrains, mobs, etc. I am probably also going to start introducing some items that require Premium in order to craft, since the game is free with no ads in it, I do need to find some way to make a bit of money on it. But for real, the game is so easy to code content for, you can expect a lot to be coming very soon.


At the end of the day, this is a new beginning for Epic Adventure, and I think the game will now finally be able to reach a potential that it was not able to attain before. Since the engine is still in it's infancy, please let me know what bugs and issues you find, and how I can improve the interface and controls. Also let me know what new content you want to see added, as it will be coming on a fairly regular basis now.

Thank you to those who have played the game in it's original form though, and I am so sorry for nuking all of your save games. But I promise that I will make the game worth the changes in the weeks and months ahead!

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

#epicadventure #pixelpaint #mytokens

Voxel Paint has just been updated to v1.8.0 with a few shiny new features for your enjoyment. For starters, My Tokens have now invaded Voxel Paint!


If you are signed into Voxel Paint with your Ape Apps Account and you have some My Tokens characters saved to your account as well, they will now be available to import into your paintings from the Insert menu. The latest version of My Tokens also lets you just export .vpp files directly, but this is a shortcut method.

Next up, your projects can now be exported as .obj files. This is cool for several reasons, one of which is that the .obj format is common in 3D printing, meaning you could probably print your Voxel Paint creations to a 3D printer. I don't personally have one to test this out with, but I was able to open an exported .obj in an alternate application, so I know that the files I am generating are standard.

Finally, the default camera mode has switched from Rotate to Pan. I have also made it so that using the right-mouse button will trigger the camera mode opposite to the primary selected mode (like in My Colony 2). What this means, is that you can click/drag using the left mouse button to pan, and using the right mouse button to rotate. You can also toggle the mode from the toolbar and the opposite will be true. If that sounds confusing, just try it out yourself and you will see that it is not confusing at all.

Anyway, that is all for today's Voxel Paint update. If any of you happen to have a 3D printer and end up printing out a Voxel Paint creation, post it in the forum because I'd love to see how it comes out (or if it just fails)!

#voxelpaint #mytokens

Hello guys!

My Colony 2 (MC2) is currently under development which will utilize the brand new 3D engine.
In other word:
MY COLONY INTO 3D!
notes: It is a different game, not a direct successor of the current My Colony.


About the new 3D engine and Voxel Models
The first practical 3D engine utilisation was first tested in another game by @bastecklein, My Empire.
You'll found the models and textures in the new 3D engine looks quite blocky which the blockyness (...?) can be compared to Minecraft. The style is called Voxel.
One of the reasons for Bastecklein adopting voxel models is that it is easier for players to build their own model brick by brick, instead of entering hundreds of parameters to produce a single model.

This is a footage of My Empire. Looks promising, right?


MC2 and Voxel Models
One of the innovative change of MC2 over MC1 is the game supports more possibilities of modding, allowing players to customize their game from resources to buildings, from their attributes to their in-game appearance.
The render for colonists, rovers and buildings will also be voxel models - You can even use your own!

A demonstration of how the game could look like. Not an in-game render.


How to make your own voxel model
Bastecklein has also prepared an app dedicated for creating voxel models for new 3D games, including MC2, and their modding features:Voxel Paint.
Easy to use, it is accessible to anybody at different platforms, from your mobile to PC and laptops, either the web version or you can download the app if you wish to edit them offline.
Currently it is just a simple app, there are lots of rooms for improvement. If you think of something that can make Voxel Paint better, don't forget to drop your idea in the official Voxel Paint forum!


Hopefully you'll find this post helpful!

Today I am releasing Voxel Paint v1.9.0, which is available now on the web and the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting all other platforms over the coming days. This is a significant release "under the hood," as many core components of the application have been changed or entirely rewritten. This update also includes all Scroll3D engine updates from the latest builds of My Colony 2, new features, new keyboard shortcuts, tons of bug fixes, and a critical change that all users will need to be aware of. So let's take a look!


Let's start off with some new features that can be toggled on individual voxels now, including a Metallic effect, a Smoke Emitter effect, and one that has been requested from the very beginning, Voxel Opacity (transparency level)!


Now in the editor, you will notice that on semi-transparent voxels, you can see the edges of each cube, somewhat making the effect less cool. Rest assured that when these models are compiled, exported, and placed into games or the Voxel Playground app, large sheets of "glass" will look as they should. To correct it at runtime in the editor is too expensive of an operation.

The new per-voxel features are also available as "paint" features, which you can access by right-clicking or double-selecting the pen tool.

There is a critical change in this release that you will need to be aware of. Moving voxels outside of the paint area is now destructive! Models must now be built within the confines of the grid.

The Keyboard Shortcuts have been expanded, which you can see in detail on this thread, but I wanted to point out the new numpad functionality. Now when you have voxels selected, you can move them around freely using the keyboard numpad, and change their elevation using the numpad + and - keys. Pressing the numpad "enter" will finalize the move. This gives far greater control then trying to move voxels using the mouse or touch.

There are a ton of bug fixes in this release. You should notice that voxel moving and general manipulation is generally less "janky" than it was before. There is also a revamp on the rendering side, where voxels that are completely hidden (such as, inside of a giant cube) are no longer rendered, which greatly increases the performance of the application.

So that is about it for this update, but I hope you guys like it! My Colony 2, the Voxel Playground, and other apps that use .VPP models will have to be updated before they support all of the new visual effects, but that will be coming soon. I will be updating Voxel Playground next, and I will post a thread when it's released so you can test out all of the new cool looking effects on your models. Until then, let me know what issues you find, and what you would like to see added next!

#voxelpaint #voxelplayground #mycolony2

Here is a collection on concepts that I am leaning towards for My Colony 2 as of today (20200624). This is all subject to change and I can be convinced by the community of anything, so keep the suggestions and feedback coming. This is going to be a super long post featuring all of my thoughts on MC2 thus far. Feel free to criticize anything and everything here. My feelings will not be hurt and nothing is set in stone. This is a starting point for community discussion to help make MC2 the best game it can be!

Relationship to My Colony 1
MC2 is an entire new game, not an upgrade to the original, or a version 2.0. It may use completely different concepts. It will not be tied in to the same server. Game files will not transfer over, as MC2 will probably have completely different buildings/tech tree, etc.

This does not mean that MC1 will be going away. I will continue to support the original and the server indefinitely. I realize that a lot of people like the style of game that MC1 is and do not want anything to change, so the original is staying where it is. It may continue to receive new content as well as bug fixes, but I do not plan on any further changes to the gameplay mechanics or core engine going forward.

That said, as long as MC1 remains popular and people keep playing it and paying for it, I will keep the game going.

Business Model/Monetizing
This is the least fun part of development, but a necessary one in order to make creating a game feasible. The business model for MC1 was tacked on as an afterthought, and reflecting back I do not like the concept of certain structures and units being premium.

None of this is set in stone, but here are my initial thoughts on the business model. My Colony 2 will be a straight paid app on all app stores, with everything unlocked at the base price, no in-app purchases. No advertising anywhere. The exception is on Ape Web Apps and the Ape Market, where it will be free, everything unlocked, but with no access to multiplayer or custom content. Maybe only one map type available.

Current My Colony 1 is basically already like this on Desktop, with the mobile client being free with additional IAP, so this change just makes the mobile version match up with what is already on desktop.

Now, I do anticipate the dissatisfaction of Android players not having the free version in the Play Store. However, Android support for Progressive Web Apps is sufficiently advanced now that you can just install the Web version to your homescreen like an app and it's hardly any different. Same with iOS. And MC1 will still be available for free like it always has been.

No free version on the mobile app stores will likely mean less players, and I understand this. But I like the idea of just buying a game and having the whole thing, not worrying about IAP's and not having any advertising.

Client/Server Structure
The biggest change to MC2 is it's design from the ground up as a multiplayer game. This does not mean that you cannot play single player, but it is being designed specifically for multiplayer.

MC1 has limited multiplayer, which basically consists of chat and trading/gifting resources. You can play together on a multiplayer region, but all you are really doing is sharing atmosphere and seeing thumbnails of other players' colonies. Not really very multiplayery (is that a word?). The MC1 multiplayer is also global and centralized, meaning everything has to go through the global My Colony server.

My Colony 2 multiplayer will be decentralized, meaning no global server that everybody plays on. Why am I doing this, because it seems like a downgrade? Look at every game out there with real global multiplayer, not just chat and trading. That takes massive infrastructure, and you pay for it with either a monthly subscription or endless IAP's. That's the only way it's really possible, and I don't think anybody wants that if you really stop and think it through.

The only realistic way to add real multiplayer to the game without investing in a massive infrastructure and charging big money for the game is to decentralize it. And since I am not Blizzard and do not want to spend my whole life maintaining MC2 servers, I am adopting a decentralized approach.

What does this mean? My Colony 2 will actually be designed as two separate applications in one, the client and the server.

The game client will be fairly light weight. It's job is to receive data from the server application and render it to the screen, and pass instructions as to what the player wants to do onto the server. That's pretty much it, and it should be fairly performant. Even though the game is moving to 3d, I still expect it to perform better than MC1, simply because 3d hardware rendering performs better than 2d software rendering.

The game server is much more interesting and is where all of the game mechanics take place, but since the server does not have to worry about handling the UI or making drawing calls, it actually has a bit more overhead to work with than on MC1. The two most expensive operations in MC1 are the rendering and the pathfinding. In MC2, the server is eliminating the rendering, and I also want to greatly reduce the pathfinding, leaving more headroom for actual fun stuff, like game mechanics simulation.

So in MC2, the game relationship is between client(s) and server. Whenever you create a new game in MC2, you are creating a new server, and then connecting to it with a client. The server is saved and retained between plays, where the client only exists while it is in use, and is not saved. So the point I just want to get across is that the client is really not that important, the server is.

The server and client code are both included in the My Colony 2 game. You will have the option of starting a regular game or creating a dedicated server. When you start a regular game, you are spinning up both a client and server and creating a 1-1 connection between the two right on your device. You can also make your game joinable by friends or others on your local network for multiplayer.

You can also create a dedicated server. When you create a MC2 dedicated server, you will be presented with a special server GUI that allows you to be in full control of the game. The server will continue to process game data as long as it is running, even if no players/clients are connected. A dedicated server will be able to establish custom game rules and parameters, and have mods installed that will be transferred to any client who connects. You will be able to make a dedicated server open to the public, or by invite only, or by specifying a list of accounts who are able to join. It's up to the server. A dedicated server will be able to moderate it's players however they want, the server can adjust resource levels, ban players for cheating, or anything. It's all up to the server owner.

The game data is saved only on the server, and the server owner will be responsible for making backups. I expect game files to be a lot bigger than MC1, so I am not going to be implementing Cloud Sync, which is known to cause corruption on larger files anyway. The ability to export and backup data will be built right into the game as usual.

Because of the way it's designed, even if you only want to play single player, it still may be desirable to set up a private dedicated server. For instance, you could run a private MC2 dedicated server on your powerful home PC that is always on/connected to the internet. Then you can connect to your server from your tablet/phone/laptop/another window on your computer, wherever you are, and your game is always there waiting for you, and all of the processing is being done on the more powerful computer.

The Game World/Game Files
In MC1, the game world is divided into cities and regions, and each city is a separate game file. In MC2, there are no cities and regions, there are planets.

This is something I am aping from Minecraft. A planet is like a regular city file in MC1, except is extends out in every direction to infinity, so you do not have to worry about running out of space for your city. A planet can have multiple cities and multiple players building cities at the same time.

Planets will be procedurally generated, and new areas will be generated in real-time as needed. Each planet type will have different biomes like in Minecraft, so that different environments and different resources are available in different parts on the planet.

This system means that you will have to build up trade networks with other cities or make additional settlement outposts across the planet in order to bring more resource types back to your colony. In MC1, practically every resource in the game is available with a square mile of your lander. This doesn't really make sense. In MC2 you will have to go out and find resources, and then build up a network for bringing them back into your city.

Technically, the MC2 world is still a big 2d grid like in MC1, but each tile does have an elevation, a z-index, for varied terrain elevations. Different resources might be found at different elevations and in different biomes. You will also be able to adjust the terrain in-game, like building up dirt to level out construction areas. There will be flat areas good for building, low canyons, and hilly or mountainous areas.

Also like in Minecraft, the terrain is generated on the fly and only transferred to the client in "chunks" as needed. So your client will only contain the data for the area that you are currently looking at, and the immediate surrounding areas. As you scroll around the map, areas you are no longer looking at will be disposed from memory as new areas are loaded from the server.

Construction / Resource Gathering and Rovers
I would really like to get rid of Rovers completely and simulate everything. It's not that I hate rovers, they are so helpful and adorable. The issue is with the pathfinding. Just driving rovers around the map takes up a huge percentage of the MC1 processing time, for what is essentially a visual effect.

Pathfinding is both CPU and memory intensive on anything larger than a medium sized MC1 map, and in MC2 the map sizes are being expanded infinitely larger. It's not just as simple as "only path finding around a certain area from the rover." Before you can even calculate pathfinding operations, you first have to generate a pathfinding map and load it into memory. The maps will be more expensive than in MC1 owing to the introduction of terrain elevation, as there will now be cliffs to work around. Each time a new structure is placed the pathfinding map needs to be recalculated. With the game being multiplayer, this will have to be taking place on a larger scale. It is one of the features holding MC1 back, due to all of the CPU time that must be dedicated to solving rover paths.

The issue of course, is that everybody likes rovers. Even I like rovers. Would the game be less fun without them? I don't know. If you could just turn off Rover Rendering in the engine settings and you didn't even see them, but everything continued to operate as normal, would it make a difference to the game, or would it matter? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't.

Everything a Rover does can be simulated for a fraction of the CPU and memory cost.

This is the largest part of MC2 that I don't have an answer to. I can't just remove rovers because that would be a blow to the fans of MC1. I also cringe thinking of all of the months wasted on optimizing path finding and the 1 star complaints about performance, all relating to a path finding feature in what is essentially a city building game.

There are options.

I could always just keep rovers in the game as they are and just keep working around the processing issues that come with it. In a single player game or a server with only a few active players at once, it probably wouldn't be a very big hit.

I have also considered just simulating rovers, sort of like colonists are just simulated in MC1. For example, you don't even have to build your own rovers. But when you place a new construction order, little rovers drive up onto the construction site and build your building anyway. These rovers do not exist on the server, but you see them building on the client. Same way for moving resources around. On the server it is just simulated, but on the client, you see a rover driving around doing all of the work. This would still require path finding, but each client would be doing their own path finding on the visual rover effect, and the player could turn it off if it became a performance issue.

If the client could just visually simulate things like rovers, colonists, police cars, busses, etc, they would all still be there visually making your city look alive, but the server wouldn't even have to worry about them.

Maybe there are other options too that I am not thinking of? All feedback on Rovers is welcome. I want the game to be performant, but I also don't want to go against the fans, so please let me know what you think either way.

Graphics
MC1 is a software rendered game using the HTML5 canvas element, arranging .png and .svg tile images onto a 2d isometric grid. Most of the graphics processing is done by the main CPU and not the graphics card, so graphics performance is largely defined by how good your processor is. This is why the game runs a lot better on desktop vs mobile, or even on iPhone vs android, and iPhone processors tend to be a bit better.

The problems is that the CPU also has to process the game, so trying to do everything at once gets expensive, especially on mobile devices.

My Colony 2 is moving to WebGL for graphics processing, which is a javascript based implementation of OpenGL that handles rendering on the GPU. This should lead to far better performance on most devices.

My original idea was to use Blender for all of the games building models. The graphics were going to be awesome. But when I dug into Blender and started working with it, I remembered how I am not actually a graphics designer, and it was going to take me forever to make all of the models for this game.

My other idea was to make blocky pixelated type graphics using my own Voxel Paint application (https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/). This means lower quality visuals but much higher output and probably better rendering performance as well. It's also so easy to use that anybody could make their own MC2 models, my wife even offering to help design structures for the game (she is a big Minecraft fan).

At the end of the day, My Colony 1 was never known for high quality graphics, but I thought that with MC2 I could really make it look great. After putzing around with Blender though, I have to acknowledge my own personal limitations. Basically, I can either spend months learning how to make great 3d models in Blender, or I can spend months working on the game code. I know which one I'd rather do. So I am probably going to go with the pixelated look, simply because it is something that I can actually do myself within a realistic timeframe, and it will also go well with the next point I'm about to explain, which is modding.

I know some people will not like a pixelated looking game. This is one of those areas where I have to say "tough," unless somebody is willing so supply me with hundreds of 3d models free of charge, which is what it is going to take in order to do this properly.

Modding
Customization is going to be huge in MC2 compared to the original. Given the global online multiplayer in MC1, custom content could not realistically be allowed in the game. The decentralized nature of MC2 changes everything though, and modding and customization, as well as all of the tools needed to make it happen, are going to be baked right into the client.

In MC2, the basic "unit" of the game is the building. Everything is going to be pretty much based on buildings, and their relationship to each other. This is basically how MC1 works as well, so this is nothing new. What is going to be knew is My Colony 2's build in Building Editor.

I am going to be creating MC2 using the games' bulit-in editor, and so the same editor I use to make the game is going to be available to all players.

Each building in the game is going to be stored as a building file, and the base game will ship with all of its standard building files, which will be loaded at runtime. This differs from MC1 where all building data is stored in a single JSON file that is shipped with the game, which cannot be easily edited.

A building file will contain three parts.

The first is the JSON formatted definition data, with information about the name of the building, what it does, what it generates, etc. All of the properties that a building can have will be stored in that data.

The second part is the model information, which will essentially be an embedded Voxel Paint file.

The third part is a small (maybe like 64x64 pixel) thumbnail or icon representing the building, which will show up on the construction sidebar and various places throughout the UI.

The three above parts are all packaged into a single file which can be added to the game client, posted online for easy sharing, or what have you. A dedicated server can include custom building files that will automatically be distributed to clients when they join the game. Each building file will have a unique UUID and version information, so if a client already has the same version of a building file that a server does, it will not need to re-transfer the data upon connection.

This system is actually a very powerful change over the original My Colony, and unlocks essentially limitless possibilities for the game. This also makes it a lot easier for the community to participate in development of the game. A creator who makes a great building idea can distribute it online where it is tested out and balanced by the community. If it works in practice and everyone likes it, the file can be included in the base game.

If you want to host a crazy dedicated server with a bunch of custom buildings that totally change the game, you can do so.

I have no idea what kind of buildings people will dream up, but including the content creation tools right into the base game will be huge, I hope. And I plan on making the process as easy as I possibly can, so that anybody can create a building. Using Voxel Paint, if you have an idea and the ability to build a house in Minecraft, you should be able to make it a reality. And being able to make something and then instantly import it into your game makes it simple to test out concepts and balance them right there on your own device.

It's possibly that nobody will care about modding or making buildings, but it still doesn't hurt to add the tools right into the game. If nothing else, it will still make it easier for me to create new content for updates, versus having to go through and edit JSON data manually.

However, it's also possible that everybody will be making custom content and the game takes off in crazy directions that we never even imagined!

It could even be possible to allow mod creators to somehow sell their mods in-game and get paid in real money, maybe through PayPal or something. That is a thought for another day though, and not a current actual plan.

Conclusion
These are my current thoughts on MC2 as of this day. Like I said, nothing is set in stone yet and everything is subject to change. I wanted to put everything out there so that the community knows what page I am on and where I am headed, and has time to stop me if I am about to drive over a cliff.

Remember that I am open to all feedback, so if you have ideas, please don't just be quite about it, or don't just complain about them in a Discord chat somewhere, because I probably will not see them. Part of being a game developer is getting hate e-mail on a regular basis on why my games suck, so believe me that your being critical of the above ideas will not hurt my feelings, and will be nothing new to me.

The whole purpose of doing all of this beforehand is to get real feedback from the community so that MC2 can go in a direction that we all like and we will all have fun playing. Once I start getting into the code, it gets harder and harder to make changes, so if there is something you don't like, now is the time to mention it. Think of all of the things I could not effectively implement in MC1 because they would require massive time-consuming changes to the entire engine. So getting ideas in right now is how we avoid that.

Like MC1, I'm trying to make something fun that I myself want to play, not a game that is going to just nickel and dime players with constant ads and IAPs so I can sit on a yacht somewhere. I think the new decentralized play model will allow the game to outlast the original. Basically, if I get in a wreck and die, the MC1 server will be forever down within a few weeks. With MC2, once players can make their own servers and create their own content right from within the game, what happens to me becomes more irrelevant, which is the way it should be.

Anyway, if you got this far, then thanks for reading my small novel. Please give some thoughts to where you want to see the game go, or discuss it with other players and really think about all of the concepts I laid out here. I want to start working on the game soon, maybe as early as mid-next month. I plan to start with the world-generating engine and the in-game building creation tools first, so people can start testing that out and seeing what it is like to make their own content.

So between now and then, if any of the above ideas are way off the mark, I need to know now. So think about it, let me know, and thanks for helping me create the follow-up to My Colony. I think it's going to be fun!

Since Voxel Paint is already getting some good early traction in the app stores and it will also be used as a modding tool for the upcoming My Colony 2, I have decided to put together a small Voxel Paint section on the forum so that I have a place to document various features of the application, including tips and hidden tricks.

If you have any questions about the app or feature suggestions, use this forum!

And if you want to download Voxel Paint, you can find links to all platforms at the Ape Market:
https://market.ape-apps.com/voxel-paint.html

Today I am releasing Voxel Paint v1.5.0, which should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. There are a handful of changes in this release, so let's take a look at what is new!

Firstly, I have made some improvements to transforms/moving selected and grouped voxels, which was pretty buggy before. I mean, it's still probably a bit buggy, but it is better now!

All of the menu/toolbar items have been reorganized and rearranged to better fit in with recent changes to the Web App Core host. Menu item icons have been changed as well. The help menu also now contains in-app links to the Keyboard Shortcuts guide and a download link for the three.js Loader for .vpp files (which is used by games such as My Empire and My Colony 2 to load .vpp files into usable models for 3d scenes using three.js).

There is a new Insert menu that allows you to embed objects into your current painting. More objects will be coming soon, I was really wanting to test this out with today's release. The two items thus far are 'VPP Model' and 'Sphere.' VPP Model option lets you combine an existing VPP file into your current project. The imported data will be assigned as a single group which you can move and place as needed. The Sphere option will let you create a 3d voxel sphere with the specified radius and place it in your drawing. The sphere will take on whichever color is currently selected.


Speaking of the color selector, it has new options now. If you right-click on the color picker tool (long press on mobile), you will have options to add the current color to your favorites (or remove if it's already in favorites), or to change the currently grouped voxels into the selected color (if you have multiple voxels selected). This differs from the flood fill tool, as it will recolor all selected voxels, not just those of a similar color.

There is going to be another update to the app next month some time that will add more shape import options. I will also be adding an "Illuminated Voxel" option which will only really pertain to the upcoming My Colony 2 and the upcoming Voxel Playground applications. This will make a voxel unaffected by world lighting conditions, but since Voxel Paint does not currently include any special rendering effects itself, it will only be a useful function if you are making models for the above mentioned applications.

Speaking of Voxel Playground , it is a new web app I am working on to replace the previous VPP Loader Test application, which was never meant to be released to begin with, and was more or less a simple test bed to get the graphics rendering working correctly for My Empire.

Voxel Playground is not much more than VPP Loader Test at the moment, but all future development is going to be going into Voxel Playground, and VPP Loader Test will be discontinued soon, so if you were using VPP Loader Test, then please update your links:

https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-playground/beta/

When I get the time to work on it, Voxel Playground is going to be a pretty cool application for making voxel artwork. It is going to let you fully customize your scenes, auto-generate terrain to your own specifications (or just have a flat plane), specify your own sky and lighting parameters, add your own lights, set animation frames, and more. I was actually going to be building it up so that I can use it to render a nice intro video for My Colony 2, so there is absolutely a lot of neat things coming soon to Voxel Playground, so keep an eye on it.

Anyway, that is all for this update. I know Voxel Paint hadn't been updated since July, but now that I am getting full swing into My Colony 2 development, Voxel Paint is going to need more regular updates to keep up with the requirements of the new game, so keep the suggestions and bug reports coming, and stay tuned for more!

testing for embedding a pixel paint file

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#mycolony2

Today I am updating Voxel Paint to v1.3.0 with some minor fixes and new features in store.

Firstly, based on a comment I saw in Discord, I have added the ability to import .vox files created with the MagicaVoxel application.

Voxel Paint now has an x:y:z coordinate readout at the bottom right of the screen.

Finally, the bucket fill tool now has a "fill with noise" option. If you hold down on the Shift key while using the bucket fill tool, the color of the area you are filling will have a random noise filter applied to it as well.


That's it for this Voxel Paint update, which should be hitting all platforms in the coming days. More capabilities and goodies to come!

Voxel Paint has just been updated to v1.10.0, and the update should be hitting all platforms in the coming days. This update fixes a handful of reported bugs, including an annoying one where embedded .vpp files would not render properly in the forum.

It also adds a new orientation cube to the corner of the screen, to help let you know which direction your model is facing (the bright blue color will always be considered front/forward by Scroll3d engine games). You can also click on any of the orientation cube faces to reorient the camera in the desired position.


The update is live now on Ape Web Apps, the Ape Apps Launcher, and on Windows 10, and should be hitting Android and iOS in the coming days. Enjoy!

https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/

#voxelpaint

Ottoich said:LOL. your red regoltih compressor was just changing all white pixel to red. Where's the difficulty?

It's more complicated than that though because if you just try to colorize the whole image, the ore and the conveyor belts will change to that same color. I had to make lasso selections around the white portions and colorize them separately from rest of the image. Then I had to go back and recolor the pixles on the edges so that the new color would blend in and not more white-ish pixels were left. That took a long while, and don't even get me started on the water extractor, I had to go in and recolor everything pixel by pixel.

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

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

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

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

Hello guys!

Very recently Bast released an app called Voxel Paint. Try this on https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/!

Generally it is awesome, but here are my further suggestions.

• Shifting the model
  Just in case you have placed the model in a wrong way, you can adjust the model placement using the shifting function.
• Drag-&-Fill tool
  Just a simple tool for filling the gaps in an easier way.
• Curser tool
  If you don't want accidentally editing your models...
• Rotate
  Model facing a wrong direction? No worries! This will fix 'em!

Hopefully these tools will be helpful.
Thanks for reading!

While working on My Colony 2, I used one of @GeneralWadaling 's .vpp models of a large shuttle landing pad which was a 7x7 tile model (112x112 in Voxel Paint). Importing the model into My Colony 2 on my computer (no slouch, a Ryzen 9 3900x) took almost an entire minute, in which time the game was frozen.

Obviously this is not going to work in a production game, so an alternative had to be found. If you look at the current beta of voxel paint, (v1.7.0 beta: https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/beta/, I have added a new option to precompile your model while exporting, found in the File menu. Precompiling calculates all of the models geometry data beforehand, compresses it, and stores it into the .vpp file. This process takes a minute, and greatly increases the size of the model (the above mentioned landing pad went from 450kb to 1.4mb), however for larger models, the size tradeoff might be worth the compile time.

After using the precompiled model in the game, the time required for My Colony 2 to render the landing pad went from almost a minute down to almost instantly.

I am still working on the precompiling information, for instance it currently does not work with the model color-replacement engine, but for large models, it will make sense to compile the data beforehand. On smaller models, I would recommend not compiling them and letting the game engine do it at runtime, since it gives the engine more control over the how the model is rendered. But for large complete items, precompiling will be the only way.

The size tradeoff is a big deal though, especially in My Colony 2, where clients download customized data directly from the server.

As I noted last week, I will now be providing weekly version bumps to the My Colony 2 development builds so that users on either the Ape Apps Launcher or those who have installed My Colony 2 on their device as a Progressive Web App are able to receive the latest updates without having to uninstall/reinstall the application. As such, today marks another version update, to v0.3.0.


If you've been playing and force-updating the game throughout the week, then you probably already know what all of the changes are. If not, I will just touch on some of the larger items here.

Firstly, it is now possible to create/distribute/use 3rd party mods, right from within My Colony 2. If interested or you want to see an example of the capabilities, head over to this thread where I talk about the feature and provide a download for a small mod that I made in under 10 minutes that completely transforms the game using assets from My Empire. The takeaway is that pretty much everything in My Colony 2 is user-moddable (is that a word?).

All current planet types are now at least somewhat playable, although some changes to the different worlds are to be expected in the coming weeks. As it stands though, you should be able to at least start a base on each available world. Currently, the Lunar map provides the highest absolute number of building options.

The engine can now utilize .vpp models that are precompiled using the current beta release of Voxel Paint. I detailed the process over in this thread, but the new precompiling feature allowed me to reduce the loading time of one of @GeneralWadaling large .vpp models from almost a minute down to under a second. I plan to release v1.7.0 of Voxel Paint later this week, which will include the new precompiling feature.

This release includes a handful of French translations provided by @Sobeirannovaocc and @Freedmoon which represents the first test of the games translation functions. I haven't tested it myself, but if your device language is set to French, then by all means give it a try and see if it works!

When I first bumped the version to v0.2.0, there is a fair bit of lag related to Rover movement in multiplayer games. This lag has now been reduced significantly. In my testing it is almost unnoticeable in a game with 5 players and a fair amount of rovers active. That said, I do have a fiber internet connection, so please give multiplayer a try and let me know how the lag is on your connections.

A few more structures and units have been added to the game, and there are obviously a lot more to add. I saw that @itsLiseczeq has gotten into the model creation game as well, which I am happy to see. Anybody who wants to try their hand at creating 3d models for the game is absolutely welcome to do so! In fact, if anybody could put together a good looking Microchip Factory, I would be extremely happy.....

Anyway, thank you to everyone who has given feedback and content to the game, as well as those of you who have helped test. Several people have joined my testing games over the past week and have left valuable feedback, so thank you to all, let me know how the game is going for you, and stay tuned for a whole lot more to come!

It's no secret that My Colony 2 takes a while to start up on some Android and iOS devices. What is the deal?

The primary reason for the long load times is that My Colony 2 has to load all of the game data objects into memory, and as of v0.20.0 there are now over 200 of them. What makes it slow and take a long time is that each game data object has it's own *.vpp (voxel paint) file embedded in it.

This was not a big deal at first, but once I introduced precompiled .vpp files in order to speed up load times, the size of the data objects really exploded, and so did the loading times. It's now getting to a point where it is becoming difficult to add new content to the game, because the load times are already beyond what I would consider to be acceptable.

With the forthcoming v0.21.0 update, I am making an attempt to address this issue.

I have added support for removing the .vpp data from pre-packaged MC2 data files, and then lazy loading the .vpp models once they are actually needed during gameplay. This in theory should dramatically speed up the time it takes for My Colony 2 to initially start (if I go through and do it to all of the objects in the game), but there are some drawbacks.

Firstly, if I do this change to the entire game, the size of the Android .apk download will probably increase by 8x or more. This is because MC2 data files are compressed, whereas Voxel Paint files are not. You could just say "why not compress all of the voxel paint files," but that would defeat the entire purpose of this change, because now you will have the extra loading time of decompressing all of these individual files.

Now maybe this isn't a big deal? Do people care how big an .apk is when they are getting a new app? I don't know the answer to that, but it's an issue.

Secondly, it will probably introduce a slight delay in the time it takes for a structure to appear once built, since the model will not be already loaded into memory as it is now. Testing will need to be done on real-world devices to see how much of an issue this is.

Lastly, mods will not be able to take advantage of the separated system, as a modder obviously can't inject .vpp models into the core MC2 package.

So anyway, in the v0.21.0 update, I will be testing this change on the three largest data objects in the game, the Galactic Stock Exchange, the Tree Farm and the Uranium Enrichment Facility, and we will evaluate how it goes from there!

Voxel Playground, the companion app to Voxel Paint that you can use to stage and test your .vpp creations, has been moved to a new domain (https://playground.voxelpaint.online/) and revamped with a new interface overhaul and new features, with several more features to come in the not-too-distant future! Let's take a look at what is new with Voxel Playground.


The most obvious change is the URL move off of Ape Web Apps and on to the new voxelpaint.online domain, which will soon be hosting the core Voxel Paint app as well. I think that long term this change will be better for both products, and it more accurately highlights how they are a part of the same overall package.

Voxel Playground is now completely installable as a PWA, and doing so will allow the app to become a file handler for the new Voxel Playground Project (*.vpg) file type. Since there is now a file type and file association, that obviously points to the next feature of the app, which is that you can now save and load your projects.

Importing content is now super easy in Voxel Playground. You can either click on the (+) icon on the left sidebar, or you can simply drag/drop your voxel files right into the Voxel Playground window. Voxel Playground supports .vpp, .vox and image files.

The next new feature to Voxel Playground is scenes. The Scenes button is to the right of the File menu icon on the top toolbar. A project can now contain multiple scenes that all share from the same asset pool. You can rename, delete and even clone scenes. This makes it easier to create a larger project full of scenes that share the same general theme.

The last new feature is the new Video Recorder! In addition to the regular camera tool that was already included with Voxel Playground, you can now record a video of your scene and export it to your filesystem. This is a cool feature to play with right now, but it will be even cooler in the future.

Coming Soon

I mentioned that there is more to come in the future for Voxel Playground. As you may know, My Colony 2 will be coming to Steam later this year, and one of the requirements for Steam distribution is to have one or more promo videos for your game. I have a cool idea for a My Colony 2 trailer that begins with a small cinematic scene before showing off some gameplay footage, and Voxel Playground is the tool that I am building up in order to be able to make that video.

To that end, the next updates are going to add some key features that will be necessary to make cool voxel based short films. First, you need to be able to edit the terrain, both color/texture and elevation, so Voxel Playground will be getting a proper terrain editor. Next, there needs to be some basic scripting tools for animating your voxel objects. You also need to be able to edit/manipulate objects after they have been placed in a scene. Also, Voxel Playground should play all of the effects that you can add to Voxel Models in Voxel Paint (such as the smoke effect, etc).

So that is what is new and what is coming soon to Voxel Playground. It has been bumped up a bit on the priority list so that I can get that promo video made for MC2 in time for steam, but with the changes coming due to that, it should be a really need tool for creating neat little independent voxel based videos. So check it out, let me know what you thing, give suggestions if you have anything you want to see added, and stay tuned for more!

https://playground.voxelpaint.online/

#voxelplayground

My Colony 2 is in the middle of a major overhaul to both it's logic and rendering engines. This update brings many changes that have been suggested by the community, so let's take a look at what is here and what is soon to come.


From a technical standpoint, My Colony 2 v0.40.0 (the previous release) and v0.41.0 (this release) are not even the same game. What started as a suggestion from @spamdude to process foreground settlement logic the same way background settlements are processed basically transformed into a complete rewrite of the game's server code. There is now almost no similarity in the way the game is processed compared to previous releases.

Everything in My Colony 2 is now simulated based on structure statistics, the only exception being unit/resource harvesting. This was actually going to be the original design for My Colony 2, but when I was soliciting community feedback at the beginning, there was a strong preference to have 100% accurate production stats with visible structure output bars, so the idea was scrapped (I was also going to simulate resource harvesting but that was also not a popular idea). With settlements and worlds now getting larger and larger though, I think it became apparent to many that the simulated model was best, and the game engine has now been rewritten accordingly.

This update is all about game performance, and the logic thread of the game should now be able to handle games that are several orders of magnitude larger than the largest colonies currently in existence. It is possible that some things might currently be broken or might not be working the way they were. Honestly I changed so many things this update that it would be quite easy for something to have slipped through the cracks, so please let me know in this thread or elsewhere in the forum what I may have missed. In general though, expect game performance to be much improved in this update.

Since I was already working on performance, I have been wanting to make a change to the Scroll3D engine for some time related to 3d model instancing. Basically, instead of creating a new 3d model for each structure in the game, you create one "instance" of the model which is reused/redrawn by the GPU multiple times. If you would like to see an example on how this can impact performance, please see the following WebGL example that the new code was inspired by: https://threejs.org/examples/?q=instan#webgl_instancing_performance

The reason I could not easily do this, is because 3d models using regular materials could not have both the regular face colors and the glowing "emissive" face colors without using two separate 3d models. Ultimately what I had to do was write my own custom 3d model shader material for Voxel Paint files, which now allows for regular, emissive, and metallic faces in one single model.

Lightmaps and Metallic maps are now baked right into the 3d model geometries when they are compiled in Voxel Paint. If models do not have this infomation baked in, they will need to be recompiled by the engine at run time. I already went through and recompiled most of the models in the game (especially the larger ones) so I don't think it will be much of a problem for MC2, and Voxel Paint will now automatically do this for all .vpp files going forward. This data actually makes precompiled .vpp files slightly larger, but it's not by much and I think it is worth it.

Using the new model light and metallic maps does incur a slight performance cost, as there is more shader processing that needs to be done on the models. For this reason, I have introduced two new engine settings for turning on/off voxel emissive and metallic properties. If you are on a mobile or do not have much of a GPU on your system, you can try turning them both off and seeing if it helps.


This update also removes the Depth of Field effect (Bokeh effect) from the game, the effect that would blur out the background. I might bring this back in the future, but it just wasn't focusing correctly and I did not have time to properly debug it.

So those are the main engine changes in this update. It might not seem like a ton, but it's basically all I have been working on for the past several weeks. TBH there is probably more that needs done too (please let me know), but I can't keep grinding on this update for MC2 while all of my other projects slip behind schedule, so further changes will need to wait.

There are some minor content related changes as well. Firstly, the Tree Farm and the Palm Sapling are now buildable on the Forest World, which was an accidental oversight on my part. In addition, the Spice Den can now be built on the Spice World again.

3D model art has been updated for the following structures: Barracks, Construction Yard, City Hall, Golden Shelter and Spice Drilling Operation.

Finally, two new structures from @spamdude have been added to the game, the Crystalline Trap and the Crystallizer Array, both Ice World exclusives.

I know there are now quite a few Voxel Art submissions waiting to be added to the game in the backlog. I hope to be able to get to all of these in the next update, and if I don't have to end up rewriting the whole game again then my plan is to work on those for 0.42.0. There are also changes that need to be made to the GBT to address spamming and other issues, and those are also on the list.

Hopefully the next update will not be so technically intensive and I can go back to adding fun stuff, but that will depend on how many bugs these changes introduced, so please let me know what issues you find in this release, thanks for playing mc2 and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

Voxel Paint v2.4.0 is now available with a couple of handy QOL features on board, so let's take a look at what is new!


For starters, I have added the new color-only flood select function. Now if you are on the voxel selection tool and then click on a voxel while holding down the alt key, it will select all adjacent voxels of the same color. This is helpful for making things like windows in MC2 models, because you can also use the Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut to make all selected voxels emissive.

I have also added a function to flip selected voxels. When you have made a multi voxel selection, you can press the F key to flip everything. If you hold down on shift too, you can flip voxels in another direction.

I have also fixed an issue where exporting a .obj model was not working.

I realized that I have not updated the keyboard shortcuts thread in a long time, and things have been added over the last couple of years that are not documented, so I will be updating that thread shortly. I also will be posting the latest version of the .vpp loader for three.js script, as it is very much out of date too.

Anyway, let me know what issues you find, and thanks for using Voxel Paint!

https://voxelpaint.online/

#voxelpaint

Been wanting to Make some pixel art in my colony, but I feel the current palette is lacking. I don't have any specific requests for any colors, as I feel more options of color would be more useful for having more freedom and choice.

Best Regards
-Oil

I saw your reply in the feed, but can't see it in the forum, this is on a pixel tablet and a pixel 7. I play on both devices. Latest updates and Android 14

I've uninstalled and reinstalled, still small.

I hope everyone is having a good week! Today I am releasing My Colony 2 v0.36.0 and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This update cleans up a couple of things, adds a couple of things, and fixed some things. So let's take a look at all of the things...


The My Colony 2 engine now supports a second level of user color customization on buildings, besides the random splashes of settlement color found in some places. Voxel models can now specify a second replace color, allowing the user to fully customize the color of their structures. This is currently enabled on the Bunkbed Shelter, Large Living Quarters and Extra Large Living Quarters, and also the brand new Decorative Tile. The "paint job" can be done by clicking on a structure, and you will see a new color wheel option if the structure supports user defined coloring.


Custom colored structures could be a great way to give your settlement character, define districts, or just liven things up a bit. This release is sort of a test of the feature, and it will be certainly expanded to more buildings in the future. If you are a voxel model creator, you can specify areas of a building that can be custom-colored by using the cyan hex code #00ffff.

More statistics have been added to the building mini-stats popup window, which now shows capacity and utilization graphs for medical, education, entertainment and security, similar to what was available in MC1.


Moving along, the My Colony 2 Online stats window has been updated with a new listing for Settlement rankings, now showing the top 30 online settlements listed by population. I plan on adding more to this soon. You will also (at some point) be able to click on both worlds and settlements to get a detailed breakdown screen of each, and I may end up using this screen for future diplomacy related options.


Ok, now for the potentially controversial update, I have added the ability to instant-purchase any structure using Ape Coins instead of paying with resources. I realize that this is somewhat of a pay-to-win, but the truth is that since MC2 lacks the advertising found in most games, I need a way to generate more revenue for the game, that is just the sad truth of it. Let me explain more about it though.

I think I have set the Ape Coin prices high enough that it should deter just rushing through the game, unless someone really wants to pay a lot. I suspect it only to be used in one-off scenarios when someone really does not want to wait to build something, or at the very beginning of the game when prices are low anyway.

The way it works is that the Ape Coin price is calculated at run time based on the GBT value of all of the resources needed to construct the building, with a minimum price of 10 Ape Coins. Since resource prices scale up a lot on the higher end, a player would have to pay serious money in order to build the later game structures, which is why I do not think this system will be abused much later game, which I believe cuts down on the "pay-to-win" aspect of it.

The reality is that nobody is going to pay $15 to purchase an investment bank, or if they do, they sure aren't going to be using this function to spam a bunch of investment banks. So this price calculation being what it is, I think it will safely protect online stats from pay to win abuse. It also cannot be used to purchase buildings that are above your settlement level.

To build a structure using Ape Coins, you just click on the Ape Coin button instead of the green checkmark button on the new construction bottom bar. There is a confirmation dialog, so you are not going to accidentally spend coins.


One more thing to note, if you purchase a building with Ape Coins and then accidentally place it somewhere where it cannot built, like a blocked space, the building goes into a queue on the server, and you can then build it again without clicking on the Ape Coins option. There is no UI to tell you this yet, but the game will actually let you place the building, even though it says you do not have enough resources.

Finally before moving on to new content, I added structure defensive stats to the Encyclopedia window, which now shows Attack Power, Range and Rate of Fire.


I have not forgotten about the poor encyclopedia, it just has not been on the top of the priorities list.

Ok, let's go to new content now. There are three new techs added this time, Mass Data Management, Colonial Bureaucracy and Extremely Deep Excavation!

Mass Data Management is used for the new Alien Uplink Station upgrade (model by @SPARKY0303 ), while Colonial Bureaucracy gives us the new Department of Advanced Fish Mating Studies (model by @spamdude ), which is basically just a big worthless (but pretty) government jobs farm. The new Museum ( @spamdude ) is a nice entertainment/education combo structure, and the new Decorative Tile is basically a blank slate that you can choose your own color for. Could be used to do pixel art on the grounds of your settlement.

Next up, @therealchromedino provides us with the new Bunker of Last Resort. This is a good structure to place somewhere in the center of your settlement, as it can be used to rebuild in the event that you are on a sever and your settlement gets raided by an enemy army.


The Bunker provides storage for basic building materials, minor housing, utility generation, can construct Builder Bots, has an attack rating slightly better than a pillbox, and an extreme amount of hit points. It is not indestructible, and a tank army would still be able to take it down, but it is a good insurance policy, and every major settlement should have at least one or two of these in the event of an emergency.

The big new structure in this update is the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility by @spamdude and to be honest, I could not afford to build it on the colony I was doing my game testing with, so it is possible that it will need to be tweaked a bit in the next update, just let me know in the comments what you all thing. It is an across the board stat improvement over the current Advanced Drilling Platform, and also provides Crystalline which the original one did not.

Ok so I think that is all of the major stuff in this update. For the next update (v0.37.0) I plan on adding Diamonds as a Lunar World exclusive resource, that will be obtained by excavating. There will also be new units/structures associated with the diamond trade. I think I am also going to have the "Online" version of the Player Mode at least somewhat functional for next update, possibly including the star gate travel between worlds (right now there are only 9 active Star Gates in the MC2 universe). So let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, thank you to all who contributed artwork for this update, and stay tuned for more to come!

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

#mycolony2

I forgot to add the Pixel Paint Texture, so I went and did that.

Updated on 2024-03-02 to document the csv and em URL parameters.

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