Ape Apps

This page is the one-stop guide to everything you need to know about Ape Chat. Ape Chat is a free standalone chat service from Ape Apps. It is available in your web browser, it is embedded into many Ape Apps games (such as My Colony), it is included in the Ape Apps Launcher, and is even embedded into the footer of this website. All of these applications and services are linked to the same Ape Chat server behind the scenes. The service allows for virtually unlimited free public chat rooms, private group chats, and even group voice chat. With this guide, you will learn all of the tricks and capabilities of the service. This guide will be updated as changes and improvements to the service are implemented.

Account Authentication
Ape Chat is tied to your Ape Apps Account, and if you do not have one, you will need to get one in order to log into the service. Your Ape Apps Account is the same account used for this website and for games such as My Colony. If you do not have one, you can sign up for free at https://accounts.ape-apps.com.

Channels
Ape Chat is organized by Channels. A channel is essentially it's own separate chat room. There are a few default channels already created, and you can also easily create your own. Channels fall into three categories - Public, Private, and Voice.

Global Channels
A Global chat channel is a basic channel that anybody can join. Examples include the general Ape Apps Chat, or the My Colony global chat. Anybody can create a global channel, and they are moderated by the developer ( @bastecklein ) and global moderator ( @cry8wolf9 ). With only a few exceptions (allowed by the developer only), Global channels are text only.

Private Channels
A Private channel can only be joined by invitation. Anybody may create a private channel, and when a user creates a new private channel, they are automatically assigned as a moderator for that channel. Private channel moderators may then invite other users to join the channel. Keep in mind that the developer and global moderators also have access to all private channels.

Voice Channels
A Voice channel retains all of the capabilities of a regular text channel, but also supports peer-to-peer voice communications. The voice chat runs in a decentralized mesh network, where each peer connects to each other without having to go through the server. This reduces server load, but it can also restrict the size of the voice chat, particularly on slow clients. For this reason, users are only allowed to enable voice chat on private channels that they are the moderator of.

Creating or Joining a Channel
Both creating and joining a chat channel are done in the same way, using the /join command. For instance, if you wanted to join the cows channel, you would type the following into the chat box:

/join cows

If the channel already exists, you will join the existing channel. Otherwise, the new cows channel will be automatically created. Channel names do not support spaces.

Creating a new private channel is similar. Suppose you wanted to create the new cows channel as private channel. The command would look like this:

/join %cows

The % symbol tells the server to create the channel in private mode. So the actual channel name would still just be cows, as the % sign only tells the server how to create the channel, and it is then discarded. If the channel already exists, nothing special will happen. If it doesn't, the new private channel cows will be created, and you will be the moderator.

If you want to leave a channel and remove it from your channel listing, you can do so with the /leave command.

/leave cows

Sharing a Channel
It is easy to share a link to your channel with others. Suppose, as in the example above, we created the cows channel. You can send anybody a direct link to your chat channel using the following URL scheme:
https://chat.ape-apps.com/?channel=cows

Simply change the word cows to whatever the name of your channel is. Even easier, you can create an automatic launcher for your chatroom here on the Ape Apps forum using the chat BBCode tag. So entering this...

[chat]cows[/chat]

...would create a chat application launcher button like this:

#cows


Private Channel Administration
Continuing the example above with our new theoretical cows private channel. Suppose you are the moderator of cows. Here are some options you can do to administer your new private channel.

Inviting Users
The command to invite a user to your private channel is /invite username to channelname. For example, to invite user nezkeys to the cows channel, you would enter the following:

/invite nezkeys to cows

In the above example, the cows channel will be then be added to nezkey's channel listing. If he is currently online, he will also get a notice that he has been added to the channel.

Channel Name
You can give your channel a display name, which can contain uppercase letters and spaces, using the /setname command. A display name makes it easier to identify a channel in a user's channel listing, and just looks nicer than the plain channel hashtag name. Suppose we wanted to call our cows channel Cow Chat. We would do this:

/setname cows Cow Chat

Technically the channel name is still cows, and to join, users would still need to type /join cows, but in the channel listing, it will now be refereed to as Cow Chat. You can use this function to give users a clearer understanding of what the channel is all about.

Enabling Voicechat
Converting your private channel into a voice-enabled channel can be easily done using the /envoice command. Below, we turn our Cow Chat channel into a fully featured voice-enabled room.

/envoice cows

Client Management
You can print an in-chat listing of commands that are available to you using the /help command.

/help

You can also use /? which does the same thing.

Ape Chat supports both a light and a dark theme mode, and you can use the /theme command to pick between the two.

/theme dark

/theme light

You can also set the default color of your messages using the /color command. The color command accepts hex color code values. For example, red is defined as #ff0000. For example:

/color #ff0000

The above example will make your text red. You can also clear out your color customization and return to the client theme default using /color null. In addition, you can set your message text color on a per-message basis using standard BBCode markup.

User Management
At times you may wish to send a private message to a particular user. You can accomplish this using the @ command. For example, suppose you want to send a private message to nezkeys. You would do so like this:

@nezkeys How are you?

Note that the message will only be delivered if the target user is currently online. If they are not, you are better off sending them a private message through the forum.

Ignoring and Muting
You have the ability to either ignore or mute a user. When you ignore somebody, their messages will be completely hidden from you, including their voice stream. When you mute them, only their voice stream will be disabled, so you will still be able to read their text messages. These actions are taken with the /ignore and /mute commands.

/ignore nezkeys

/mute nezkeys

Similarly, you can undo the above actions with the /unignore and /unmute commands.

/unignore nezkeys

/unmute nezkeys

Lastly, you can completely clear out your ignore and mute lists using the all parameter.

/unignore all

/unmute all

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


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

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

https://github.com/spessasus/SpessaSynth

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

How does it work?

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

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

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

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

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

I am in the process of implementing cross platform/cross game friends lists and private messaging using the Ape Apps Account system. This messaging platform will eventually replace the in-game private messages in titles like My Colony, allowing you to compose/respond to private messages from outside of the game.

So I am looking for opinions on how this should tie in with the current "Conversations" function on the forum. Unlike private messaging, Conversations is more like a private forum thread set up with permissions for any number of users to participate in, whereas the private messaging will be more like a basic e-mail type system, with a single message sent to one (or several) users. Private messaging will be cross app/cross platform, where as the forum conversations are just for this website.

Do you think that the forum should support both systems, only the current conversations, or ditch the current conversations and only have the new Private Messaging system? My personal opinion is to lean towards having both, as the website is a good portal to be able to access your messaging across all games, but there might also be occasions where you want to have a conversation with multiple users. But I'm just wondering what everyone else's opinion is on the matter.

Ape Chat now supports private, invite-only invite channels. To create a new private channel, you open the Ape Chat desktop interface ( https://chat.ape-apps.com ), and on the "add channel" input box, you type in your new channel name with a % sign in front of it, like so:

Note that the % sign is only used to tell the server that you are creating a private channel. Afterwards, the sign is not used in the channel name.

If the channel does not already exist, it will be created in private invite-only mode, with you as the channel moderator. Note that other than myself and @cry8wolf9 who are global chat moderators, only private channels can have an individual moderator.

Once you have created a channel, you can invite users with the command:

/invite [username] to [channelname]

In addition, if the user you want to invite is in the username listing in another channel, you can right-click on their name and select "Invite to Channel' to invite them they easy way.

Once somebody is added to your private channel, they will gain the ability to invite other users as well.

The moderator of the private channel will soon (but not quite yet) be able to add additional moderators, set the display name and description for the channel, add an icon to the channel, set channel member ranks, kick/ban people from their channel, etc. Keep in mind that the global moderators can access any private channel without invitation.

This is one of the new features I am getting ready for the upcoming Ape Chat stand alone mobile app, which I plan to release to at least Android, and hopefully iOS, within the week here.

Enjoy, and let me know what other chat suggestions you have!

Ape Chat has just been updated to v2.3.0, and this update brings a ton of improvements, including bug fixes and exciting/long overdue new features. Let's take a look!


To get started, Ape Chat now finally supports push notifications. Prior to this update, you could get a notification if the Ape Chat window was minimized and you got a private message, but what if you didn't have Ape Chat open? Well now when you open the Ape Chat application (https://chat.ape-apps.com/) you will get a pop up notice asking if you want to enable push notifications (if you say no, you can show the popup again by finding it in the main slide-out menu). Once you activate push notifications for your client, you will get a notification whenever another user sends you a private message through Ape Chat.

This feature isn't just for private messages though. Now if you right-click on one of your channels on the left sidebar, you will see a new Subscribe option.


Subscribing to a channel will allow you to get notified when new chat messages are posted to that channel, even if Ape Chat is closed. If you grow tired of being notified, you can unsubscribe in the same manner.

The Push Notification options will only be available if your device/browser supports the Web Push API, which as of this writing is pretty much everything except for browsers on iOS (which will supposedly be coming soon).

Speaking of mobile devices though, one of the biggest issues with Ape Chat has finally been rectified with the all new mobile interface.

Running Ape Chat on mobile will now give you a bottom toolbar, finally allowing you to access the Chanels and Users listings, which were previously unavailable on mobile. This new interface upgrade now makes Ape Chat fully usable from a mobile device.

In addition, the PWA/Add to Homescreen support for Ape Chat has been greatly improved, on both Desktop and Mobile. Installing Ape Chat as a PWA on Desktop (you should see an install icon in the address bar on supported browsers) gives you a clean user interface, making Ape Chat look and feel like a native app on your device. On mobile, the installed PWA interface (on iOS, you have to do the "Add to Homescreen" feature) now detects devices that have a Notch (like most modern phones do) and updates the layout to work around the notch cutouts.

Other than the new feature additions, a whole host of bugs have been corrected in this release, including a lot of the bugs that would cause the chat server itself to crash and restart (thus filling the chat roll with "Server Disconnected, will try again soon" messages). And speaking of the "Server Disconnected" message, it no longer prints a message to your standard chat roll, but will now just give a small notice at the bottom of your screen, which will go away once the server connects again.

All in all, today's Ape Chat update is probably the most significant one in the last two years. If you use any of the Ape Chat channels, or want to be notified when new chats are posted in the My Colony or Ape Apps forum channel, consider installing the Ape Chat PWA or adding Ape Chat to your Homescreen, and enabling Push Notifications. It's a great way to keep up on what is happening in chat, and also finally makes the private messaging feature in Ape Chat useful!

Ape Chat can be used on all platforms right from the web browser at the link below. The Website/PWA is now far superior to any of the older "stand alone" Ape Chat clients released to the various app stores, and should now be considered the primary/definitive version of the service.

https://chat.ape-apps.com

#apechat

I decided to put a few things here in this one post, since I don't want to make a bunch of posts on a site that severely hurts my eyes because of how very white it is on a screen at night.

Sending Messages
Currently the game's message system sucks, badly. 120 characters, and it doesn't even show a counter of how many characters you have left, it just fails to send message and you have to type it all out all over again....

We need to be able to send longer messages than this. I don't know if this is just non-premium accounts, but there's no indication that premium users can send longer messages. Messages in this game need to be detailed so we can cooperate better with each other. I'd say, up the non-premium message length to 200 characters, and give premium users a message length of 2000 characters.

I think of myself as the diplomatic type, and I type a lot and in highly detailed messages. I can't do this with a message limit so small even a text message app would be ashamed.

Not to mention, I think messages should go to accounts, rather than colonies. But thats up to you, it would be nice to have colony messages and account messages for users with accounts. So they don't even have to load a colony to see and reply to a message. Perhaps it shows "Colony has 2 messages" when you are about to load some colony. Account messages would be nice because then you can talk to someone regardless of deleting a colony or not to start over.

Trade
Trade right now sucks, and isn't possible really. All you have is the ability to send gifts of 2500 of something max.

I'd like the ability to send actual trade offers, either targeted trade offers to a specific person, or open trade offers that players with a structure of some kind can access by loading a list of available trades.

E.G. I want to send an offer to a specific person, trading 1000 steel to get 200 wood.
Or perhaps I want to send an open offer, trading 1500 steel to get 350 wood.

Perhaps this can be another premium lock area too, where free accounts max at 1 active trade at a time, premium accounts max at 10. Free accounts can trade out a max of 3000 of anything and receive a max of 3000 limiting their trade offers to 3k of anything in and out. Premium accounts getting 250,000.

Aiding other colonies
Wouldn't it be nice if you could gain a bonus from sending aid? When a colony is rioting you can click "send $200 worth of aid", but you don't get anything out of it. Perhaps you should get tax breaks, or happier people, or some such.

It would also be nice to be able to specify how much aid to send, rather than just click a button to send $200 of aid when you got $200,000. Aid packages would be nice too, allowing you to design your own aid packages, so you can click a "send aid package 2" to someone, and you had set aid package 2, to be {$2000, 2000 food, 2000 water, 1000 steel, 1000 ore}. I'd say allow users to specify up to 3 aid package types.

Colony ships could be an aid method too, sending some number of your population over to the other colony. A humanitarian ship full of volunteers who go to the colony you sent it to and work for that person, and either choose to stay, or leave, and they can leave by going to the map edge and appear back in your colony with "name returned to the colony" message instead of "joined colony" messages, either by walking in by map edge or appearing at your landing pads during next arrival.

So a couple of days ago the state of the Ape Apps website was briefly being discussed, and I mentioned the idea of merging the forum section of the website into Ape Chat and just having all discussions take place in there. I have since given it a little thought, and I believe I have come up with the solution that I am ultimately going to implement, and that is what I want to discuss here.

Some time (probably) this year, I am going to be retiring the forums here on ape-apps.com, the official Discord server and even Ape Chat, and I will be sort of merging all three of them into a new/resurrected Discussions app.

Since most people here have joined during the My Colony "era" of Ape Apps, many may not remember the "Discussions" era, but it was my original app business success story, basically the thing that let me quit my "real" job and go full time with app development. I am going to give a quick history here of the Discussions app, and then talk about why that is the direction I am going to be going in and what it's going to look like.

Back in 2010, one of my very first apps was called Super Bored, which was an extremely basic communications app where people could post text and eventually pictures onto a single threaded chat board. The app started to gain a following, so I decided to copy/past the code and release another simple forum app called World of Warcraft Discussion. That one became even more popular, so I followed it up with Star Craft Discussion, Halo Discussion, Call of Duty Discussion, Body Building Discussion, and several others. The next thing I knew, all of these "Discussion" apps were getting a pretty active following, but it was sort of a pain to maintain all of them, so since they were all running on the same server anyway, I decided to merge them all into one giant forum app that was simply called Discussions.

Discussions was pretty active, up until Google removed it from the Play store (back then it was still called the Android Market) due to copyright complaints from Activision over the Call of Duty section and CoD images being visible in some of the screenshots. I tried to appeal, but not only was I rejected, they actually followed up by nuking my entire developer account because of the other video game themed Discussion apps I had (Halo, WoW, etc).

Anyway, the community lived on for a while, but with out the apps being on the market place anymore, it slowly faded away. There is still a remnant of it on a Discord channel, and part of it slit off into the RP Forums forum community. But eventually my interests moved on to making games and business applications and I never really put a serious effort into bringing back Discussions. There is still a remnant of Discussions that you can see as the first category here in the forums section of the website.

So fast forward to now, where I have Ape Chat, which is now embedded into both of the My Colony games. I have found it to be extremely handy to be able to communicate with the game players without having to actually have the game running, and my plan was to start implementing Ape Chat into most of my applications. But then we run into the situation where Ape Apps now has the chat, the forums, and also now the Discord channel for discussions. To my thinking, why do we need to have three different places, when everything could just be together in the same app?

So this is my plan for the new Discussions app, a merging of the Ape Chat, Forums, and Discord server into one unified place. Now I am not going to be using the old Discussions code or anything, and really beyond the name of the app, it's not going to have much to do with the old Discussions. But in my opinion, the name "Ape Chat" does not make sense for an app that allows more than chat. And plus I already own several domains related to Discussions that have been sitting collecting dust in my account for years now.

So what will the new Discussions be like?

I have a lot of plans, but here is what I am thinking right now. When I originally created Ape Chat, I designed it to be like an IRC server, and a lot of its limitations come from that initial design decision. It works pretty well for just plain chat, but when you want to start adding advanced stuff, it shows its limitations.

First of all, as compared to Ape Chat, the front end and the server are going to be completely disconnected, and in fact, the new Discussions client will allow people to spin up their own servers on their own hardware and run their own private Discussions community with their own rules and setup. Of course, the app will come pre-loaded with the official Ape Apps server.

Within each server there can be any number of channels. I don't know if channel is a good word for it or not, we can come up with something else, but they will also be able to be grouped by topic. So for example, there can now be a My Colony group, with several channels related to My Colony.

There will be multiple types of channels as well. The regular chat channel, which is how Ape Chat is now. There will be threaded channels for a more forum-like setup. There will be voice channels and video chat channels.

There will also be a private messaging system that will be replacing both the "Mail" and "Conversations" features here on ape-apps.com. Private messaging will be one-on-one between two users, or users will be able to create their own private channels like they can now in Ape Chat and do whatever they want. For one-on-one private messaging channels, I plan to support both voice and video, as well as direct P2P file transfers.

What will happen to the forums here?

They will be archived for a while and eventually taken down. The code behind the forums is a mess that has been layered upon more mess over the years, and I will be glad to be done with it. Plus I am tired of fighting constant spam. Users will be encouraged to migrate to the new Discussions platform.

The rest of the site is going to be redone from scratch, and will be more of a static information and marketing site for my stuff, but I will still maintain "What's New" type posts and updates, as well as an RSS feed that people can subscribe to. Actually, the new Discussions app will probably read that RSS feed as well.

What will happen to the Discord server?

It will ultimately be shut down once the new service is ready. I don't really think it will be needed anymore, and plus I really don't like Discord. You may look at the features from the new Discussions and ask "why not just use Discord instead?" The reason is that I cannot embed Discord into my apps, and not only will I be able to do that with Discussions, I will be able to do it in a completely custom way that lets the service have app specific features.

What will happen to Ape Chat?

Discussions is basically the next version of Ape Chat with a re-branding. It will simply redirect to the new domain, and all of the in-game implementations of Ape Chat will be migrated over to Discussions.

Conclusion

This is probably going to happen some time this summer. If you have suggestions on what the new service can look like, you can feel free to leave them here. I think it's going to be a lot better than the current Ape Chat, and it will be nice to only have to go to one place for communications!

Also fun fact, Discussions has an id of 1 on the Ape Market internal database, it's the first app I ever added to the Ape Market (actually, the whole reason I created the Ape Market was to host Discussions after Google took it down).

I don't see this posted anywhere, so I'm posting it as a possible bug.

A detailed description of your issue:

Messages require multiple entries to delete, if you do anything besides read the message.

Steps to replicate the issue you are having.

Open message to read it. Click 'send message'. Send the message. Hit Delete -- nothing happens. Hit 'Nevermind'. Go back into the message. Hit 'Delete'. Message deletes.

The platform for your game

Win10

Version of My Colony (this can be found on the title screen)

.43, .44

Standalone version 64bit, current 1.11.0 (but i got this error other times in older versions).


Some time, after a "back to menu" this error come out. After i need to close/reopen (and login, nickname and pass) or logout/login.

When it happens, i lose any progress in a 1-5min windows time (the other day 49.6 millions starships go puff).


I only find the error in the standalone version, the version from ape apps launcher seems immune.

The error log have only this, 3906 times:


v1.11.0 1608049703183 frame-script.js: 7219 Uncaught TypeError: message.indexOf is not a function
v1.11.0 1608049728458 frame-script.js: 7219 Uncaught TypeError: message.indexOf is not a function
v1.11.0 1608049779058 frame-script.js: 7219 Uncaught TypeError: message.indexOf is not a function
v1.11.0 1608049804242 frame-script.js: 7219 Uncaught TypeError: message.indexOf is not a function
v1.11.0 1608049824011 frame-script.js: 7219 Uncaught TypeError: message.indexOf is not a function
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I have just released v2.6.0 of Ape Chat, which should now be hitting all platforms (including embedded instances, such as the My Colony in-game chat, and the chat here in the forum).


The main changes in this release are the revamp of the UI for individual chat posts (the "box" around them has been removed, padding altered, font size changes, etc), and the ability to now react to chat messages! To do a reaction, you simply right-click (long press on Android) on a chat message, and you will have the option to add a reaction.


User avatars on chat posts will now always show their profile picture. Before, it was rendering their default My Tokens character if they had one, but to me I thought this looked a bit out of place, so I removed that feature.

There were also some new server and developer related features added that nobody but me will notice, so I will not bother logging them here. And of course, multiple big fixes have been implemented in this update.

The future of Ape Chat

I have a lot of features planned for Ape Chat, which I will be implementing whenever I get around to them, but I am also open to suggestions from the community.

In the long-term I want to move away from the Discord server and have everything Ape Apps related going through Ape Chat. This is more of a security thing, you never know what Discord (or any third-party service) is going to end up doing in the future, so it's nice to be able to have control of the user support system myself. That might be a little ways off, since Ape Chat still needs a few more features before I am ready to make that switch.

I plan to replace the private messaging system here on ape-apps.com with the Ape Chat based private messages, so that all user-to-user messaging for Ape Apps is contained in the same place.

I also plan on replacing the My Colony 2 in-game chat with an Ape Chat channel, just like how MC1 and Antiquitas currently work.

When a user creates a new channel on Ape Chat, they are automatically made the moderator of that channel, but there aren't many customization options right now for channel owners. I plan on adding new ways for channel owners to customize and differentiate their channels, and am open to suggestions on this front as well.

Speaking on channels, I plan on adding in in-app directory of all public channels on the server.

Finally, I plan on adding direct peer-to-peer file transfers inside direct private messaging windows. You will be able to drag a file from your desktop into the private chat window and it will open a direct socket between you and the other user (bypassing the Ape Chat server) for fast file transferring.

Those are my immediate ideas for Ape Chat. Let me know what others you have, and stay tuned for more!

#apechat

https://chat.ape-apps.com

I couple of months ago, I mentioned that my long term plan is to replace both Ape Chat and the Ape Apps Discord channel with a resurrected Discussions app, and with the recent crash of the Ape Chat server, I have decided to begin work on this transition, which is now available for testing!




The new Discussions beta is located at https://discussions.social/?beta=1 and is still in the very early stages. On the back end, it runs off of the same server as Ape Chat and uses the same database, so the two apps will be interoperable during the transition, which should make things smoother (and prevent the breaking of any of the in-game chat features).That said, Discussions does include some new features to the chat engine which are not supported by Ape Chat, which may cause some strange rendering issues and confusion when viewing newer posts in the older Ape Chat interface.

For example, one of the new features in Discussions is threaded conversations, or the ability for a chat channel to be designated as a "forum" style.


I eventually want to move a lot of the support forum off of the Ape Apps website and into Discussions, which is why the threaded forum view for channels is necessary. I believe this will help against the constant spam I am always fighting here on the website, since Discussions will require an account for access which will greatly reduce the usefulness of ChatGPT spam that the forum has been plagued with lately.

Another new feature found in the new Discussions beta is chat channel grouping:


Chat channels can now be grouped by topic and given a sort order, which should help clean things up quite a bit.

In addition to channel groups, Discussions has the ability to connect to multiple servers as well, not just the current chat.ape-apps.com server. Once I am ready to release the full Discussions app and shut down the old Ape Chat front end, I am going to clean up the server code and release it as a stand alone package, for anyone who wishes to run their own private Discussions server.

Channel creators have new customization options for their chat channels as well. If you create a new private chat channel (done by prefixing a new channel name with a % sign), you become the moderator of that channel with the ability to add/invite users yourself. This also gives you the ability to customize the channel, from the display name, welcome message, and channel icon.


I am also planning on implementing a custom join link/url that can be used for inviting users to private channels, so that the channel admin does not have to manually invite users to the channel.

There is still quite a bit of work to do on Discussions and I don't plan to make the full transition until later this year, so this is still very much in the preview stage. I still don't have things like private messaging or notifications ported over yet, and some things are a bit wonky. But feel free to try out the new client and give feedback on how it can be improved. I think that when it's done it will be a lot better than the current Ape Chat!

https://discussions.social/?beta=1

#discussions

I do not think the private charter function has been removed from the game, as I had one of my colonies charter's set to private before all of the menu changes and from what I can tell it is still private( since nobody has joined it). That makes me think that the option to change the privacy of a charter code has not been removed, but has simply been left out of the menu for now.

cry8wolf9 said:

bastecklein said:Good point, @misteddawn I will make it so that only 'public' colonies show up on the site for other users.

Could we maybe have the option of setting everything to private? That way if you are independent but don't want child colonies you can set everything to private

Bast is actually saying that if you set a colony as private, then no one else can see those colonies and therefore can't try joining any of your colonies. I prefer to have all of mine private so no one would see any of my colonies by default.

I have just put the finishing touches on the v0.75.0 update to My Colony, and will begin pushing it out to all platforms tomorrow (Thursday) morning, possibly even tonight if I get time. This is a huge update in terms of "under the hood" changes, and so there is a lot to cover here. It also marks the beginning of a series of "online" focused updates which will be taking place between now and the end of the year.

Now that My Colony has arrived on Steam (which you can find here), I have decided to shift focus a bit more away from the mobile side of things, towards the Desktop and online side of things. My Colony has always played better on the Desktop, but since the majority of users were on mobile, a lot of the design of the game had to be made with that reality in mind. As some of you already know, a few months ago, Google Play blacklisted My Colony from their store search results, cratering the mobile downloads of the game by over 90%. As a result, the My Colony user base has transformed from over 90% mobile users, to now almost 50/50 with Desktop users, spread out between my website, the Ape Apps Launcher, Windows 10, Chrome OS, Facebook Games, and now Steam. And even though the crash ratings on Google Play are back down under 2% and the downloads have picked back up slightly, it is still nowhere near where it once was. On top of that, the experience did open my eyes as to how Google Play operates, and demonstrated the risk involved with being tied so heavily to one platform. On Desktop, things are spread fairly evenly between the distribution networks (too early to tell on Steam yet), so there is a little bit of safety that comes with that situation. Plus, as I said, the game is just 10 times better on Desktop anyway.

So, just to be clear, I am not abandoning Android and iOS, and those platforms will continue to receive all of the latest updates. I am just not going to be focused on mobile first, and some features may not work on mobile platforms, as you will soon see below.

But enough of the intro, you are here to see what is new in this version, and there is quite a bit. So let's take a look!

First I want to go through some of the bugs that were addressed in this release, as one of them has a pretty large impact on later-stage Human colonies. So during this update, I discovered a mistake in the code that was majorly"nerfing" building consumption and production when the building had a very low "tick" phase. The two prime examples where the Ancient Alien Condenser and the Atmosphere Scrubber, but it would also impact buildings with tons of employees, like the Investment Bank.

Essentially, if the production/consumption tick phase was lower than that of the overall simulation's building tick phase, a bunch of update cycles for that building would get skipped, causing it to produce or consume resources at a far slower rate than it was supposed to. As far as I can tell, this issue has been baked into the game for ages, and when adding new content, I have just set the stats in a way to compensate for it, not even realizing it was there. As soon as I fixed the glitch though, the impact on Atmosphere was immediately apparent.

Ancient Alien Condensers and the Atmosphere Scrubber immediately went into "beast mode", chewing through millions of atmosphere in a matter of minutes. This brought my Atmosphere down to zero, causing all of the condensers in the colony to shut down, since they were out of "fuel". This led to an immediate water shortage which was difficult to get on top of, since I could not generate new atmosphere fast enough to keep up with the consumption of the condensers. I eventually just had to import a ton of water from the Star Gate.

Anyway, to address this, I slightly nerfed the stats on the Condenser, and introduced a new upgraded Large Atmosphere Generator to assist in rebuilding Atmosphere. I kept the Scrubbers running in beast mode though, I figured at their new consumption level, one Atmosphere Scrubber can take care of a pretty good sized colony.

So be aware of this new change, and modify your colony accordingly. I already know the bug reports section will be full of "I updated and now all of my Water is gone" reports, so just be aware of what is happening. It is not exactly a bug, but the result of the fix of a bug.

The next fix is related to Creative Mode in Region games. Basically, it didn't work before, and now it should.

Speaking of Regions, there was a glitch where Resource decay would be greatly amplified on Region maps. This has been corrected. I have also implemented several changes which I hope address the issue people have on Regions where tech/resources are lost. I cannot reproduce this issue on my own, so I hope the fix works. I know you will make me aware if it doesn't though!

Next, a lot of changes were made to the server this update. I am getting ready to add in-game moderators to My Colony, which I had hoped to have ready by now, but the server needed so many changes to accommodate for it, that I just didn't get to it. Just know that it is coming soon though.

The first big change comes with authenticated API calls. Aside from the public API's, you basically need to be logged in to your Ape Apps account to do anything on the server now. This requirement seems like a no brainer, but you have to realize that the My Colony server predates the Ape Apps Account server, and there were originally no account requirements at all.

Due to this change, the tie between your Ape Apps Account, your online colony, and the website is now pretty solid. If you happen to get banned from Ape Apps for some unrelated reason, your colony is pretty much inaccessible too, and you will need to send me an email convincing me why you should be able to get back in.

All colony resources are now stored on the server as well. They have actually been stored on the server for some time, but the server would never override the resources saved to your game file. Now it will. The server now keeps a timestamp and checksum synchronized to your online game saves, so that it can detect if you have decided to go back and restore a backup game file. This is to help detect different forms of cheating that are out there, and while restoring a backup does not flag you as a cheater, it is logged and will be available for review by the soon-to-be-announced in-game moderators.

Next up, in-game private messaging has been moved from the my-colony.com servers to the main ape-apps.com servers. As a result, you can now view and reply to your in-game private messages from right here on ape-apps.com. They will also soon be available on my-colony.com. Currently, they don't render very well on the website, but I will be making it all look pretty shortly. In-game it doesn't look much different from before, but in theory the message size limit is gone, although the game still doesn't let you write more characters. The website does though. In the coming updates though, the entire in-game messaging interface will be rewritten to take advantage of the new features available by using ape-apps.com messaging.

The next big change in the game, which I have mentioned already in another thread and some may not be pleased with, is the complete rewrite of how colonial GDP is calculated. In short, it is now an actual GDP calculation, instead of just the sum of all of your resources. So now instead of measuring just how rich you are, which anybody can attain by simply getting a big gift from another colony or from the Galactic Emperor, it is now a measure of the current productive output of all of your buildings, tax collections, and resource collections. In this way, your GDP only grows if your industrial output is growing. If you are maxed out with full storage, then your GDP will be stagnant. I might adjust it next update to have GBT profits figured into the calculation as well, since it is technically a sale of goods. I haven't decided yet.

The game tracks your GDP over time, and will give you both quarterly and annual prints. It takes about two hours of game time to collect enough data to get a full GDP reading, so be aware of that. In your stats, the large GDP number is your current quarterly rate, and the smaller number is the annual rate. One game "year" is roughly equivalent to one real life hour. The quarterly and annual growth percentages also factor GBT price inflation into their calculations, so that large fluctuations in GBT prices do not throw the GDP growth values way off. In addition, the game ai now has "economic analysts" who will try to guess what your GDP growth rate should be every quarter, based on the trends of the last year, and will let you know each quarter if you were on target or below estimates. It's sort of like watching CNBC.

I might start adding other fun little news items to the GBT price ticker on the bottom of the screen too.

Next, there is a new feature that I hope people are able to have some fun with. I have added the ability in-game to stream a live feed of your game play onto your colony website at my-colony.com. On supported platforms, there will now be a "Streaming" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. When you click on it, it will start up your live feed and turn Red, letting you know that it is on.

It also uses your microphone (if available and you give it permission) so that people watching your stream can hear your amazing voice-over commentary. Also when you turn on streaming, the in-game chat channel and the chat channel on your my-colony.com colony site are synchronized, so that you can text-chat directly with those viewing your feed. You will also get a notification in-game when somebody starts watching your live feed.

The in-game streaming works if you are playing on Chrome, Android, Native Client/Steam. It does not currently work on iOS or Windows 10 (Store) edition of the game. I am not sure about Facebook Game Center, as I did not test it.

Moving on, I have decided to merge the in-game popup Commonwealth and Diplomacy windows into the main Statistics window, so that everything is in one place. In-game private messaging will also be moving to this window soon, and eventually, a revamped in-game encyclopedia will be in there as well. I just think it's better to have all of the options in one tidy place.

You may have also noticed a new "Federation" option at the bottom. Federations are headed in-game to My Colony. I have been promising them for a year and a half now, and since I decided to focus on online play for the next couple of months, Federations went ahead and made the cut.

Creating or joining a Federation requires "government level 7", which is game-engine speak for "you need to build the Hall of Congress." This is pretty much the most expensive building in the game, and before now it hasn't really done anything for you. Now it unlocks Federations. Because of this requirement, only United Earth and LIS can make or join Federations, but Reptilians and Zolarg will be getting their own equivalent buildings in 0.76.0.

The only thing you can do with Federations right now is either make one, or join one. Making one is expensive, and joining one is free. However, when you choose to join a Federation, current federation members receive a ballot in their Federation screen and must vote to approve your membership.

Balloting works like this. When a new measure is put up, it will expire in three days. At the end of three days, the yays and nays are counted, and the winner is determined. However, if a measure receives yays (or nays) from over 50% of current Federation members before the three days are up, the vote is also ended.

The balloting system only works for admitting members right now, but it is going to be greatly expanded. Unlike Commonwealths, Federations are an "alliance of equals", with each independent member state getting 1 vote. One colony will be the president, voted on by the other members. The President will be able to put new initiatives up to a vote, and only the president can put a new initiative up, unless that initiative is a vote of no-confidence in the President, which could be needed if the current president goes inactive.

Federations are going to be able to do things that regular colonies cannot do and, for those who wish to enable it, there is going to be an optional PVP element coming for Federations making use of Star Ships. I am not talking about attacking peoples bases or anything, but you might be able to send your fleet to blockade a planet, disrupt communications, etc. I am welcome to ideas on it, but this element will be 100% optional, and you can only do the PVP mode with Federation members who have enabled it. I want people to still be able to play a 100% peaceful mode if they wish.

The Federations are in the early stages, but there will be new Federation stuff with each update, so feel free to start one up and start accepting members, so you are ready for when the fun stuff goes live.

So those are the primary new things in this update, I am sure there are others, but I don't remember off the top of my head. Now I just want to give a quick update on what is coming next.

As I mentioned, Federations are going to be fleshed out over the next few updates. In addition, both Federations and non-federation planets will be able to establish Trade Routes using their Star Ships, and the Colonial Map from the my-colony.com website is going to be accessible in-game soon to aid in this. There are also new interactions coming for Embassies, some of which will only be available to PVP Federations. To support this, both Zolarg and Reptilians are getting new giant 'Hall of Congress' type building soon, as well as Star Ship production.

There are also going to be further changes made to the My Colony website to accommodate all of the new stuff. Federations will each have their own page, and unlike Commonwealths, there will be a few customization options for a Federation page. If you haven't looked at the My Colony website recently, check it out, I've been adding things here and there over the last few weeks: https://www.my-colony.com/

Finally, in-game moderators are on the way. I have several applications, and will be contacting people with offers as soon as the server is ready for them. There is still a bit of server work I need to do to accommodate what I want to do with moderation, but I think when it's all implemented, it will make the online experience a lot better for everybody.

So that is all for this update. This one took me longer than normal to put together, and I have to spend the next few days catching up on other projects, but I should start v0.76.0 mid next-week. Until then, enjoy the update, and it should be hitting all platforms within the coming days!

Screen says:

Build version number (clicking have no effect)

Greed (player and/or colony name) clicking leads to eternal sync wait with no proper error message (error message should have shown after a while)

New colony (clicking brings menu, I can't start online games, I don't want an offline game)

Load colony ("there are no saved games")



Workarounds attempted:

1- logout-reboot-restart game-login.

2-Create new account. Same results as before.

3- After manual backup (of colony lost to the workers can't go into buldings to work, fire drills/education no help), delete all old savegames(there were 4 savegames, I suspected together they take too much space and the game stalls WITHOUT A PROPER ERROR MESSAGE). Same results as before.

4- Create an offline game (which I am not interested in), make it online. Save. Exit. The colony will not load again (load bar stuck at "doing cleanup").

I am using the freshly reinstalled win64 version under windows 8.1 with a fast computer. I was highly aggravated by the installer putting "facebook gameroom" without permission on my PC, but I have not removed it in case it was necessary for the game to work (do tell if I can remove it, as it's actively sending packets to facebook.com even with my colony closed and facebook gameroom never clicked, and I pay per data with my ISP so it's a pain).



IMPORTANT: once the bug is fixed, have a proper error message for when it doesn't work so players don't lose their time trying things for an hour or two (or try the wrong thing) when the game could have notified them "the server is down, please try later" or some other useful error message.

Or is THIS a private message?

So I know you can gift with diplomacy. But what about sales? Is there a way to create private sales diredtly to another colony?

I have over 20 colonies (each specialized) and enough resources that I clear the GBT every night (for fair prices). But thinking about a private shipping company theme. You order, I deliver.

Currently I have no idea on how to invite a fellow player into a private Multiplayer Region, And I could use all the help I could get on figuring this out.

Some fellow online federation members and I, would love how to get a little testing server for our idea coming up on the topic regarding MP Region, But Whats a Multiplayer Region when you can't invite others into it, as said by Bast, you could invite others into a Private MP Region, as well we don't want random players joining because it's public to the community.

I would be grateful for an answer very soon, as we would like to get cranking on this idea we have in mind ASAP. 🙂

Thanks @itsLiseczeq

@Ansom I can add an underground layer no, no problem.

I am considering making a major change to the concept of a game file in MC2. Instead of the current region/city model, I am considering doing infinite (or at least way larger) sized procedurally generated planets, sort of like a world is generated in Minecraft. The map would be loaded in "chunks" like in Minecraft and so the engine would only actively process the chunks that are near currently have active players. Other areas of the map might process in the background on a less frequent interval.

In this way, it would be easy (well, easier) to have multiple players on the same map in real-time.

For performance, all game processing will be done in a separate worker script, the way it is currently handled in Epic Adventure, Colony Wars, and My Empire. Those games all separate out the client/server code, which makes implementation of real-time multiplayer a lot easier.

My thought is that players could create a local game file. Others could join their game if they choose to and start their own settlement somewhere on the planet. If somebody else has a settlement on another players local game file, the server player would have to be online for everyone to play. Each player would have their own resource pool, although that might be customizable on a per-game basis.

Players would also be able to download the server code and install it on their own box, running their own private server if they wanted to. In theory a single privately run server could host multiple planets as well, with trade networks between them, just depends on how powerful the server is. A private server hosted on a powerful PC or cloud hosting service should be able to handle quite a few players at once. The operator would be able to set custom parameters for the universe and assign other operators.

I have been thinking of ways to decentralize the multiplayer experience in MC2, so there is no single point of failure as there is in MC1. It would also lower my costs, and private server operators could take care of administration in their own servers. I think designing it this way from the start will allow for a pretty robust multiplayer experience.

Of course, you can always just play offline too, or in your own household via LAN. But I do like the idea of scrapping the region/city concept and replacing it with an entire planet concept, that just keeps loading new chunks as you scroll through the world. To me it is more realistic. And a single planet can now have multiple biomes, different resources in different parts of the world that you will have to build trade/transit networks to utilize.

Anyway, I have a lot of plans for MC2. It's not just going to be MC1 with 3d graphics. There are a lot of things I have wanted to implement that would have been too hard to just nail on to the existing game engine.

If you've ever played My Colony 2 and popped open the Statistics window, you may have noticed this mysterious section:


So what is "soon" and what is "universe?" Well soon is v0.21.0, and Universe is the new, more decentralized way that different worlds can interact with each other in My Colony 2.

The original My Colony had a centralized multiplayer server, but Multiplayer was limited to chat and online trades. My Colony 2 features real time online multiplayer, but is limited to players playing on the same world. Universes allow individual worlds (aka servers) to expand by connecting to each other, extending in-game chat, resource trades, and other features across servers.

This is a decentralized approach, and not every game will be in the same Universe. Anybody can create a new Universe, and anyone can join an existing Universe, provided they have the credentials.

To create or join a Universe, all you will need to do is go to the Universe tab on the Statistics window and enter a public key and private passcode. The key and passcode can be anything you want, you can make them up out of thin air. The passcode is optional. You will then be connected to any online servers who are using the same key and passcode combination. That's it. You can share your key and passcode with anyone you want, or just keep it private between friends.

In addition to the public and private keys, there is a third key that is hidden from the player, but is built from a hash of all of the game data objects in your MC2 install (aka mods), ensuring that only games using the same game data files will be a part of the same Universe (imagine the problems if games with different data items could conduct trades).

There will be no public directory of Universe keys, so the only way to give out your Universe information is to do it yourself. Of course, if you are wanting to build a large and inclusive Universe, you can post the information publicly on the forum or elsewhere, but that is up to you.

Universe will be the headline feature for the upcoming v0.21.0 release, and there will be more information as development progresses, but if you have any questions/ideas/suggestions for this new feature, you can reply to this thread.

My Colony 2 v0.21.0 is now available on the Web, Windows and the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting Android and iOS over the coming days. This update fixes a couple of bugs introduced in the last release and makes some pretty big changes that could alter the course of how you play MC2 over the coming months, so let's jump in and take a look!

The first big change in this update is a new feature called Universe, which will allow you to "join" your game to other players' games to create a sort of peer-to-peer network of global My Colony 2 servers.


To join or create a Universe, you simply open the Statistics window on your colony, and enter a public and (optionally) a private key. Every online game using the same Public/Private key combination (and the same game version/mods) will be automatically joined into the same Universe network.

At this time, there is no default or "official" MC2 Universe, and the feature is 100% opt-in. If the community ends up creating/pushing/rallying behind a common Universe, that's great. It can also be used to set up a private Universe between you and your friends/family.

So what does a Universe get you? As of this release, it simply unlocks a global Chat similar to what is available on My Colony 1, but this is going to expand pretty quick once this update is released and I can see if the underlying connection is actually working right. Universe is going to enable interplanetary trade/governments/war, etc., so eventually having a large Universe community with a lot of players will be beneficial. So stay tuned and keep an eye on this feature, because it's going to get exciting over the next few updates!

Beyond the Universe feature, a big change is being made to game saving. Right now (prior to this update), all MC2 game data was saved to a single large library file that synced to the Ape Apps Cloud (for signed-in players). This was causing issues with both slow loading times, and data corruption when multiple instances of MC2 were open at once. This is being completely changed in this release. Starting now, game data is no longer saved to the overall player library file, and Cloud Sync is disabled by default for all colonies. It can be turned back on (if wanted) in the World section of the Statistics window.

The next big feature in v0.21.0 is the new Stat Reporting functionality. If you've used Coloniae with My Colony 1, then you know what the general idea is here. With My Colony 2 though, Stat Reporting is a bit more decentralized, and open to any developer who wishes to take advantage of it.

Stat Reporting can be accessed/enabled in the World tab of the Statistics window.


In order to use it, you simply input one or more (separated by commas) stat reporting endpoint URL's, and the game will take care of the rest. If you are a developer and would like to build your own Stat Reporting endpoint, you can see this thread which should contain all of the information you need to get started.

The final big change in v0.21.0 is engine support for separating .vpp model data out of the individual game data objects in order to (hopefully) allow for faster initial game loading times. Right now My Colony 2 is starting to take an awful long time to load on mobile devices, and if this new functionality works as I hope it should, then My Colony v0.22.0 (the next release) should see a drastic improvement in mobile load times. The new model loading scheme is currently being tested out on the Tree Farm, Galactic Stock Exchange, and the Uranium Enrichment Facility, so please keep an eye on those three structures, and let me know if you notice any issues/problems with how they are loaded and rendered. If everything is fine, then I will be moving all larger game data objects over to the new loading scheme in the next release.

So other than a few bug fixes that are not worth mentioning in the release notes, that is about it for v0.21.0. Please test out the new features and let me know what works, doesn't work, what needs improved, etc.! There's going to be a lot of exciting new features coming over the next few updates, so stay tuned for more, thanks for playing, and I hope you enjoy the update!

#mycolony2

Starting with MC2 v0.23.0, all new colonies will default to the following Universe. This change will not impact existing colonies, so if you want to join the new "global" default Universe, you simply need to put in this setting:

Public Key: mc2global
Private Key:

(Private key is blank, there is no private key)

coeville said:i sent message to u guys
about resources

You have to message me in game by message or via discord. I can't as easily match person to colony via posts in the forum. Please message, not chat function.

I have an online region on an abandon world and I'm trying to send messages to friend's colonies so they can send me stuff that I need. But the issue is that when I put in their charter, then the message and hit send it acts like it sent a message but doesn't say the message is sent. We then proceed to wait for up to an hour or so while trying several more times to send messages. When my friends send messages I get them, but when I try to send a message back it does the same thing it did when I tried before. Can someone help?

A few months ago, I eased up a bit on the anti-cheating countermeasures for online play, in order to avoid false-positive detections. Since then I have seen a noticeable increase in cheating, either through resource manipulation using memory related hacks, modified game files, or actual modded game data. There are also hacks allowing unlocking the full game without the purchase of premium. The cheating has not gone unnoticed as the logging for cheating has been kept in place, but I have been hesitant to crack down again as there is always the false positive risk.

That said though, I feel it is getting bad enough again that a re-crack-down may be warranted. In detected modified game files alone, there are now on average over 400 instances detected per-day, which previously would have resulted in an auto-ban. There are about 100 detected daily instances of people manipulating memory fields during game play to alter resource levels. The list goes on.

In v0.75.0, all anti-cheat measures are going to be re-enabled in the game, along with the addition of a couple of others I have been working on to combat modded game data files. Positive detections are going to result in an immediate account suspension from online play while the colony is placed into a review queue. If the colony was found to be cheating, the Ape Apps Account will be suspended from the My Colony server for good. I do not care if the account has previously purchased premium. They can still enjoy the full game and cheat to their hearts content in offline mode.

I am also going to be adding an in-game reporting system where players can easily report other colonies suspected of cheating, GBT manipulations, or abusive private messaging.

To help sift through everything, I will be opening several in-game moderator positions. Moderators will have the ability to review all reports in-game and take temporary measures, such as suspending an account for a set amount of time. They will also have the ability to take down non-legit trades from the GBT. They will also be able to issue warnings to users if necessary. They will not be able to ban anybody from the server entirely or permanently lock out a colony though, that will have to go through me to make the final judgement.

If you are interested in being an in-game moderator for My Colony, send me a private message on the forum and let me know, and maybe give me a little info on why you should be chosen. I am only going to pick a couple of moderators at first, so it is not personal if you are not chosen. I will add or remove as needed based on how it goes with the first couple.

Anyway, that is what is going on. Ideally I do not want to have to do any of this, but the online aspect of the game makes it necessary. I think it is especially needed with the upcoming Steam release, as the Desktop editions of the game are more easily hacked than the mobile variants. So this post is just a heads up, and if you want to try to be a mod for the game, let me know!

I have just released a new feature update to the Ape Apps Launcher which should now be available for download. This release brings in a few new features which will be further fleshed out in the months ahead. Let's take a look.

The first thing you will notice is that the positioning and lineup of the icons at the top-right of the window have changed a bit. The current layout looks like this:

From left to right, the first button brings you back to the normal "all apps" view that the launcher normally starts out in. The next button brings you to the settings screen. The third button opens up the new integrated Ape Chat window, the fourth button brings you to the new revamped inbox. To the right of that you will see the achievements you have unlocked on your Ape Apps account. To the right of that, you will see your default Token (from the My Tokens app, if you have set one), and finally your signed-in username.

As alluded to before, the Ape Chat service is now built right in to the launcher, and opens in it's own window. Opening chat this way will let you connect to all the channels you have participated in, including your commonwealth channels for My Colony. If the chat window is open but minimized, you will receive system notifications when you get new private messages or when a new message is posted in one of your connected chat channels. This is a handy way to know when somebody in your My Colony commonwealth is asking for something in chat, without even having the game loaded. A lot more features are going to be coming to Ape Chat in the coming months, so stay tuned for more on that!

The next new feature is the revamped mail icon. Before, I just showed you a little popup with all of the Conversations that you were a part of on the Ape Apps website (this website). Now it no longer shows Conversations, but the newer Inbox messages. It also shows private messages you have got in games that use the messaging feature, such as My Colony. The messages are also opened right from within the app now. Right now you can only read the messages, but I plan on adding full mailbox controls, including replies, deleting, composing, and implementing the "Sent Messages" folder.

The next new feature pertains only to Windows and Linux users. Now when you click on the window X button to close the launcher, it will minimize to the system tray instead of quitting completely.

You can still quit the launcher completely by simply right-clicking on the tray icon and selecting Exit. This is for people who keep the app open at all times for the auto-updating features, but don't like to have the launcher icon open in there taskbar the whole time.

On top of these changes, this update rolls up a whole host of bugs that had been identified since the last release and adds a new option to the Settings screen to turn off chat notifications.

Over the next several months, more improvements will be coming to the launcher. The inbox and mail management will be fully implemented. Clicking on the achievements will bring up a list of all of the games you have played, their high scores, and other information. I might have a way to close the chat window to the system tray as well. Also, right now when you click on your username you just get a sign out option. This will be changing to open up a new account management page similar to the options you get at accounts.ape-apps.com, so you can manager your entire Ape Apps account right from within the launcher instead of having to go to a separate website.

Finally, there is another change coming not just to the launcher, but to my apps on all platforms. With the coming full release of Colony Wars and other multiplayer games I am currently working on such as Epic Adventure and Death 3D (as well as Multiplayer Regions in My Colony), I think it is time to get Friends Lists added to the Ape Apps Account system so that you can easily see when other people are playing the games that you have. This will be coming to Ape Apps across the board, but will be fully baked into the launcher as well.

So anyway, that is it for today's Ape Apps Launcher update. I really hadn't made a ton of changes to it lately beyond simple bug fixes, so I thought I would post an update today on what is new, and what is coming down the pipe. Enjoy, and if you don't have the launcher yet, get it from the Ape Market here:

https://market.ape-apps.com/ape-apps-launcher.html

I have to report some serious issues with windows10 store version.

1. Whenever i click on a message, i my whole screen turns black for a few milliseconds.
Steps to reproduce:
-Recieve a message
-click on it
->screen turns black first time
-click on the message
->screen turns black second time
Expected result: You should be able to click on nevermind to go back to the game
Actual result: it takes a minute or more to click on nevermind and if you do this, the screen turns black another time, even if the app isnt fullscreen


2. It isnt possible to make a backup
Steps to reproduce:
-go to main menu -> game data -> backup game file
-try to click on one of the save games
Expected result: You can choose the one you want to see and backup it
Actual result: The app stops working, nothing can be done.
Need to close app wia task manage.
one thing that might be necessary: one of your game file needs more then 15 characters.

3. Saving takes hours. My main has nearly 3m population and veeery many buidlings, the sub i play has 1,5m and a small amount of buildings, not more then 10k

It takes 15m to save this fricking colony, my main saves in 4 minutes and a few seconds.

That was it!

Would be cool if the little chat bubble on the bottom of the screen, where you and members of your charter can chat to each other, had a counter on it, for each unread by you message. Kind of like messenger, if you have an unread message, a counter appairs, and grows, until you read the messages.

So, for example, I'm offline, and my memebers of my LIS charter: Soviet Union Empire, where chatting... when i get online, the chat bubble will have a number on it, depending on how many messages are on there since the last time that I've clicked on the chat bubble. Also a good way to see if others in your charter are trying to chat with you...

bastecklein said:

raptorjesus said:unfornunatly you havn't fix the save server issue, lot of us can't get their save back because it says "unable to connect to server"
happen to me as well, pretty frustrating because I can't play anymore on my big colony

Can you give more information on this? Are you playing in browser/phone/desktop etc? Are you by chance using an ad blocker that could be interfering with the server connection?

I am playing on desktop, yes I use a adblocker but I play on the application, not the browser
the exact message is "unable to connect to my colony server. game in online mode need internet connection"
I have internet connection, and this message shows for every colony, even the one that are saved offline
and even the mcb save shows the same message

@Invincible I found out why your website was not updating. Your "Commonwealth Message" that shows to new players is longer than 100 characters.

I don't know why the game was letting you pick a message longer than 100, but that is the database max length, and your long message was stopping the query.

I'm playing on ios, and did the latest update this morning. I just turned my offline game into an online one and then lost access to it within a minute so not sure how to get the charter code for it now. I had tried using the GBT to get some resources back after losing it all but kept getting the message that no contracts were available, then I couldn't access the chat, and now I can't even load my colony. I can't load my game or create a new online game, all it says is that I need an internet connection but I have one.


Edit: I can now load my game sometimes, and was able to get my charter code. The times I can load I get a message in the chat that connection to the server failed. I can see resources offered in the GBT until I try to click on one of the offers then it seems the connection issue starts.

My Colony 2 v0.23.0 introduced the new Flag/Scripting system. This is being implemented primarily to support the in-game tutorial dialogs, but also contains features which will allow it to go well beyond this. This thread gives a basic overview of the system and how mod creators can use it in their own project.

As you might have guessed, the system is comprised of two base components, Flags and Scripts, with each script containing a collection of Actions that the engine can perform. When the player does something to trigger a flag, the engine will look through all of its scripts to determine if one or more of them are triggered by the flag. If it finds any available scripts, it will then run through their actions in sequential order.

Player and Global Flags

There are two types of flags, Player and Global. Player flags apply only to the player who activated them, so that any script they trigger will only impact them. This also means that the flag can be triggered by each player. Global flags apply to the entire game world and can only be triggered once, so that the first player who triggers a global flag will activate it for all. A player flag can only be triggered once per player, and a global flag can only be triggered once per world. The exception to these is if a Clear Flag action is triggered in a script.

A sample use case for a player flag is an in-game tutorial message. Suppose the player builds a refinery and you want to show a message about the refinery once it's built. You wouldn't want that message to show up to everybody, so a player flag here would be appropriate.

A sample use case for a global flag could be a scenario where the first player who builds a specific building gets to unlock a free tech, but only the first person to do so gets it.

Setting Flags

There are currently four main ways to set game flags, although more may be added in the future.

Flags can be set when a player joins the world. There are two places you can set these flags. First is in the World object in the game editor. Any flag specified here will automatically play when the player joins, no matter what their civilization is. You can also set this flag in the Civilization object. Here the flags will be triggered when the player joins the world, if they are using the specified civilization.

Next flags an be set when a new unit is created, and these flags are specified in the Unit object in the game editor. These will also be triggered with any free units the player starts out with at the beginning of the game, so they can also double as a "player joins world" flag.

Moving on, flags can be set when a new structure is built. As you might have guessed, these can be set in the Structure object in the game editor.

Finally, flags can also be set within script actions themselves. Allowing you to chain scripts by having one script call another through flag setting.

Creating Scripts

The scripts section in the game editor is where you create your different scripts and specify their actions. Scripts are made up of three parts, a Reference Name (which is just used to identify the script in the game editor so you don't get them confused), a Trigger Flag (which is the flag used to start the script) and an Actions List.

The Actions List is where all of the... action is. A script can contain how every many actions you deem necessary, and the script will play each action in order, one after the other. There are a handful of action types to choose from, ranging from playing messages to setting/clearing flags to giving things to players, and so on. All of the actions are fairly self explanatory in the game editor.

The Future

I think that the Flags and Scripting feature has a lot of potential for the future of MC2 and its related mods, and I am open to suggestions on how to improve this system going forward. More trigger events and more action types are absolutely on the table, so if you are developing a mod using this system, please let me know here on the forums what you would like to see added.

I was thinking that it might be helpful, along with Flags and Scripts, to also add Variables to the mix, both player and global. So a script could set a name or number to a variable and call on that later on. There could then perhaps be conditional actions, based on those variables. That is just one thought, really the possibilities are endless!

So there it is, that is what is in the scripting system so far. Let me know what you think, what questions you have, and what improvements can be made. This system will only get better and more advanced as time goes on!

I am an idiot. I accidentally reported my own message. Please disregard that.

Official Message for the Citizens of United Earth

Citizens of United Earth,

In the vast expanse of the galaxy, we stand as the vanguard of human civilization. Our journey from the blue planet that birthed us to the far reaches of the cosmos is a testament to our resilience, our innovation, and our unyielding spirit. But now, more than ever, our very existence is threatened by a sinister force – the Alpha Draconians.

These alien oppressors, these enemies of freedom, have cast a dark shadow across the stars. They seek to enslave us, to extinguish the light of human progress and replace it with their brutal tyranny. But we, the people of United Earth, will not bow. We will not break. We will rise to meet this challenge with the full might of our unified resolve.

The Alpha Draconians are a plague upon the galaxy. Their only aim is conquest and subjugation, their only language is violence and oppression. They are the antithesis of everything we hold dear. While they spread fear and destruction, we stand as the bastion of hope and liberty. Our mission is clear: to defend our homes, to protect our way of life, and to ensure that the torch of human dignity burns brighter than ever before.

Every man, woman, and child of United Earth is a soldier in this grand campaign. Our scientists and engineers, our brave soldiers and steadfast citizens, all contribute to the cause. We have built an interstellar society on the foundations of freedom, democracy, and progress. These are the pillars that support our great civilization, and these are what the Alpha Draconians seek to destroy.

The time has come to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to these ideals. We must mobilize our forces, harness our collective strength, and strike back against this existential threat. The Alpha Draconians believe they can intimidate us with their sheer might, but they underestimate the power of a united humanity.

Our technological prowess is unmatched. From the advanced weaponry wielded by our valiant soldiers to the cutting-edge spacecraft that patrol our skies, we possess the tools necessary to turn the tide of this conflict. Our research and development teams are tirelessly working to ensure that our forces are equipped with the most formidable arsenal the galaxy has ever seen. The Alpha Draconians may have their claws and fangs, but we have the ingenuity and determination to overcome them.

But our strength is not solely measured by our technological advancements. It is our unity, our shared purpose, that truly sets us apart. The citizens of United Earth stand shoulder to shoulder, bound by a common goal: to safeguard our future. We are not just fighting for survival; we are fighting for a future where every human can live in peace and prosperity. A future where our children can explore the stars without fear of tyranny.

The Alpha Draconians thrive on division and fear. They believe that by sowing chaos and destruction, they can break our spirit. But they are gravely mistaken. Our resolve is unbreakable. Every act of aggression they commit only strengthens our determination. Every atrocity they perpetrate only fuels our fire. We will not falter; we will not retreat. We will fight them on every front, in every corner of the galaxy, until they are driven back into the shadows from which they emerged.

Our message to the Alpha Draconians is simple: your reign of terror ends now. We, the united people of Earth, will not rest until every last trace of your oppression is eradicated. We will hunt you down, we will dismantle your war machines, and we will liberate every world you have tainted with your presence.

To the citizens of United Earth, I say this: the path ahead will not be easy. Sacrifices will be required, and challenges will be numerous. But together, we will overcome. Together, we will prevail. Let our actions be a testament to our unyielding spirit. Let our victories be a beacon of hope for all who yearn for freedom. Let our unity be the force that shatters the chains of oppression.

Stand tall, citizens of United Earth. Stand proud. For we are not just fighting for our survival; we are fighting for the future of humanity. And in this just cause, we shall not fail.

For United Earth, for liberty, for the future of the galaxy. Thank you.