Ape Apps

Greetings all! I have been busy the last few weeks with family, Thanksgiving, and getting my catalog of old apps updated for the Holiday season, but now I have returned to "active duty" and have begun work on the long awaited My Colony v1.0.0 update!

This update is going to be significant, and I expect a lot of potential bugs and craziness on the Web client, so please be aware of that.

I will be posting updates in the forum as I add new things so you all know what is coming, but the first new feature I started working on today is Regional level terrain generation, with support for templates.

I will explain, and please note that the feature is not done yet and some things remain broken, particularly with the automatic terrain generation.

Starting in v1.0, when you create a new Region, if it is of the type that has a River tile, you will be asked if you want to use automatic terrain generation, or import a template. If you choose Automatic, the game will generate rivers as normal, but on a regional scale, so that the rivers in one city actually line up to the next. This is still broken at the moment, so be patient.

The (in my opinion) cooler part, is the template option, and this is mostly working right now, although there is still some glitches to be found. That said, you can now import a 250x250px black and white image to use as a template for your regional water system. Here is a test template I created:


When you load this template into the game, it treats the white areas as land, and the black as water (or lava/ether/etc). So when you start filling out your regional cities, you get something like this:


It's not working perfectly yet, but you get the idea. I still need to get it so that you can see the rivers BEFORE you actually start one of the sub cities, but that is a work in progress.

So yeah, the first item on the agenda is the new Regional waterway system and templating. Once I am done with that, I will let you all know here in the forum what the next item on the agenda is!

And just be aware, the development cycle on v1.0.0 is going to be a lot slower than normal because I plan on packing this one with goodies, so stay tuned for more!

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

The first major change, which actually inadvertently started a domino effect of changes to the engine, was a total rewrite of the way the game saves files. As most of you know, when My Colony first came out there was no such thing as Regions, and so the concept wasn't even considered during game saving. Once Regions came out, many of the engine mechanics had to change to accommodate having multiple game objects processing at the same time (the individual city you are playing, the region itself, and the minor updates to the surrounding region files).

With all of these changes happening to different game objects at the same time, the game saving function remained the same as before. I sort of duct taped a solution together which worked pretty good for the most part. For instance, I had never personally run into any major issues with saving a Regions game. However, there were always reports of problems with saving in Regions, particularly with Resources and Technology levels not saving. This is unique to Regions, as it shares a single Resource and Technology pool among many different game files.

In addition to Regions, the structure of the game itself has changed considerably over the last three years, and over time, layers upon layers of different ideas have been cobbled together in the code creating a mess of sorts. To resolve all of this, I decided to completely change the manner in which game data is saved to the system. The new method allows making saves to multiple game objects at a time, instead of just the currently active game object. For example, prior to this update, when you were playing a region, the overall Region file did not save until you chose "Exit to Region" from the game menu. With this new update, you no longer have to Exit to Region for all regional data to be saved.

This is all well and good, but I didn't anticipate, or rather appreciate, just how many parts of the code were tied into the previous game saving functions. This lack of preparation on my part led to a major issue in the pre-release code on Ape Web Apps where saving a regional city would cause all colonists to lose their jobs and become homeless. Which is not good. It was like doing a fire-drill with each save, except after the fire-drill, the colony would never recover. So that was fun, and working through that led me on a breadcrumb trail that resulted in little changes and fixes all throughout the engine.

As if that wasn't enough though, I also decided to make major changes to the way virtual colonists work. Virtual Colonists are the "colonists" in your colony when your population exceeds 2000. These colonists do not actually exist, but the game instead uses statistics to simulate their education, housing, entertainment, and industrial output. With today's changes, the accuracy of this simulation should be greatly increased, especially in regards to education, which was barely simulated before.

On top of those significant engine changes, I also decided to completely rewrite the way colonists find jobs! I know, too many big changes for one update. There were so many changes here that I could write a whole article about it, but to avoid putting you to sleep, I will give the general overview. With this latest update, the game now keeps track of a "now hiring" list, sort of like a classified advertisement page. Whenever a business has an open job, it adds a now hiring record containing the x:y location of the job, the IQ requirement, pay, etc. Whenever a colonist doesn't have a job, the game takes the now hiring list, and sorts it for that colonist based on location from their house, how it matches their IQ, how it pays, etc. They then start at the top of the list and apply for the jobs. If the job is within a certain range of their house (40 tiles I think) and they meet the requirements, they will take the job. If they don't find one, they will lower their standards a bit. If they still don't find one, they will enroll in school. If they don't find a school to enroll in, they will be mad and complain about lack of education.

This change actually works pretty good, but there is a computational penalty when sorting the job openings. When only a handful of colonists are looking for jobs, it's no big deal. But if you conduct a fire-drill and the entire colony looks for work at once, you might experience a lag in the game of several seconds or more. I will need to look into a fix for this at some point soon.

Ok, so that addresses the bulk of the engine changes I made. There are some other little things here and there that you might notice, as I actually changed so much that I can't remember it all. But since there were so many changes, I would expect to see bugs as a result. Please let me know in the forum what you find!

Let's move on to non-engine related changes. First off, on the main Region city selection screen, the game now shows the name of the city on the overall map.

I will probably add a toggle to turn this on/off, I just did not get to it this time. This is mainly for mobile/touch players, since they don't have a mouse and therefore do not see the mouse-hover popup box that Desktop players see on this screen, making it hard to tell which colony is which.

Next up, I have consolidated most of the Commonwealth management settings into the main Commonwealth section of the statistics screen, so you no longer have to dig through the Policy menu to find everything.

If you look closely at the above, you will probably also notice the next thing I added. That's right, you can now finally change your Commonwealth Tax Rate! This has been requested since Commonwealths first came out, and I apologize for not adding it sooner, but it's there now. I have also capped the Commonwealth Payroll Assistance at 500%, since some of the levels on the server were insane.

Moving on, I have added a new feature called Layout Templates. This is mainly for Regions, but you can now save a "Template" of your current map and export it to the file system to share with other players. When you activate a template on your map, you see a ghosted image of the template buildings overlayed on your colony (you can turn the image on/off) that you can use as a guide for building. This is mainly for players who have designed certain build layouts and want to share the layout with others. I imagine it would work best on an empty regional map with no resources. You can find the template options on the bottom of the General Statistics screen.

There is a new engine setting that allows you to turn Gamepad input on or off. It has always been turned on from the beginning, but there was a concern that if you were playing another game on your desktop while My Colony was open, My Colony would be processing the gamepad inputs from the other game. If you find yourself in this situation, you can now turn off gamepad input completely from the Engine Settings screen.

There have been some minor changes to Colonist processing. Entertainment facilities now increase energy and happiness at a faster rate. In addition, colonist happiness will also slightly increase when they are at home. I have also increased the starting colonist IQ range to make them a bit smarter by default (will not impact current colonists, only new arrivals). And finally, I have further increased the rate that colonists age, since I still think it's too slow.

And last but not least, there were a couple of changes to existing buildings. The Mass Driver trade capacity has lifted from 100 to 300, and the basic Greenhouse now has a slightly faster production rate and a higher storage capacity.

So anyway, for me this was one of those updates that was pretty large, but for the general players of the game, it should seem like a pretty small patch. Hopefully nothing major has been broken, but continue to let me know what bugs you find. I should note that on the Android and Windows clients, there is a new "Send Feedback" button on the My Colony sidebar that will allow you to send a message or bug report directly to my Inbox, and I will add this to the Desktop, Web, and iOS versions at some point too. A lot of times people leave bug reports in the app store comments, and those are easy for me to miss.

That's all for today;s update though, let me know what you find, stay tuned for more, and thanks for playing My Colony!

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

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

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

Game Data

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

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

Regions

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


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


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


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

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


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

Simulation Changes

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Colonist Lifecycle

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


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

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

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

Random Changes and Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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


There is now a new Medical build category.

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

The Brood Training Center now provides some education.

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

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

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

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

Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.

New Content

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

What's Next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's just a list of "Quality of Life" changes that I feel would make a great addition to the game, and make certain things a little less tedious.

Multi-Select Buildings
I myself and other people have often found it a bit tedious having to go and manually change each slider for every building we build whenever we don't want said buildings to for example have any workers.
Would it be possible to add an apply to all buildings of this type button? Or some mechanic that behaves similar?

Cancel GBT Contracts (Thanks to @WildAbbee for bringing this up)
I myself often accidentally sell certain things or make a mistake in the amount I wish to sell. It would be pretty nice if we could have the ability to take down our contracts.

Template Changes
The ability to save maps as templates and load them into other maps to remember where everything goes is an amazing feature. However I think it need a bit of changes to make it a bit more useful. I would be nice if there was and opacity slider that way all the none built buildings don't mesh together as at times it can be pretty difficult for any buildings to stand out. Another thing I would recommend, but would very likely lead to a whole copy and pasting maps idea would be an auto build template option. Where if you have sufficient resources to build everything on the template, then it would do so. (This also could end up being a tech tree where you have to research this in order to enable it)
There is also a bug with templates where after viewing it for a while, the template can become off-centered leading to the user not building things in the correct position.

Deport Children policy not working
An issue a lot of people have is children, which is understandable to a certain point like when you end up at times having more children than workers. However this is easily dealt with once you get the Hall of Congress. This is a good time to talk about the current bug that is causing the Hall of Congress's deport all children policy to not work.
@Shadowdoom286 Posted this recently and I would also like to shine some light into this idea as I too feel it would be pretty useful quick data.
"Small suggestions: when hovering over the population number in addition to showing capacity and jobs it should show children, working age, and retired populations."

Revamp of Embassies
Embassies definitely need a bit more of a reason to have them I feel. Something that we have on the NOZ discord, is a channel where you can setup trades with other players, for example lets say I want to set up a deal with someone where once a week, I received 500 ether from someone as I am unable to steadily produce ether yet I need it, and in turn I give them a resource they need.
Would it be possible to allow embassies you set up with people act as a sort of automated trade system so long as both people have the necessary resources to send and both people agree on the deal?
This would work with the same menu as gifting players, you would select a resource you would like to give, and then another menu would popup asking what you would like to receive and how much. Upon player one confirming their wants, then player two (whoever they are attempting to set up the embassy with) will get a mail inbox telling them what is being asked to be traded. From there they can either confirm or deny. And of course if they want to further speak on the matter there is always global chat.
Even if it wouldn't be this exact mechanic, I do feel some sort of things should be put in place to provide players with more of a reason to attain embassies


Comment's down below on your ideas on these ideas are greatly encouraged!

I think it's a good idea. The templates should be fairly simple to implement if all it is doing is storing what you sent everyone in a single package or record. But it may conflict with the gifting limits of each tier of consulate and capital buildings. Let's say that you had a teir 6 capital and you sent 5 million ore to all colonies and saved a template of that package. But what if when using the bulldoze mode you accidentally destroy the capital and then decide to build a tier 1 capital(due to deficient resources). So now you go back to the template that you used before and try and send another 5 million to your colonies. However, a tier one capital doesn't allow for 5 million of the same resources to be sent to each colony in one transaction, so now you have a conflict. I guess bast could fix that conflict by having the capital itself store the templates and having the templates deleted when the capital is destroyed.

Here is a list of quirks I noticed

1) Build and harvest
Rover moves to and fro instead of next nearest build order. Example 2 rows of trees A-X, rover sits on R road.

ABCDEFGH
IJKLMNOP
RRRRRRRR
QRSTUVWX

Rover will IJK then swing around to build ABC then move back to continue to build LMN etc. Rover should build along the road as it is the nearest I-P and alternate Q-X and only swing to H-A when at the end. This seems like an inefficient way to build things. Seems rover is following the build place order instead of nearest available build when we mass build by placing I-P, A-H then Q-X.

Harvest problem seem to select inaccessable resource as shown in the pic below. As a result vehicle seem to stall and not move. This could be related to most of reported problem vehicle is not responding. This is the only sample that can prove the problem in the algorithm as others dont show the vehicle path.



Also, rovers will not return to its parking spot if it is on harvest duty and there is still one mine available but inaccessible. Example, you build regolith mine and after finishing harvesting, it will stay stuck on the last mine position and show harvesting while there is a mine out there surrounded by trees. There should be detection if it cannot complete the task it goes back to its parking position.

2) Rover build detection problem
Rover sits on or move into a build square and wont move to avoid building being build and getting stuck.

On large or extra large map, rover seems to have a limit to detection. If rover is on west end, it wont respond to build orders on east end. You either have to manually move it or put down some build orders within its detection range for it to start building before moving to the east end. Common problem if you build crystals on extreme edge of map and then set it to another end of the map.

3) Population resources data mismatch with statistics
I noticed resources data is instantaneous and statistics has a lag time to show accurate details. Population resource can show 0 unemployment but if you check after a few mins it can show 50 unemployed. Putting down more building that requires workers sometimes bring this number down sometimes it doesnt maybe due to range of available workers.

4) Unemployed workers
In the housing you can have unemployed workers but the stat shows it is working somewhere else. Is the system capturing these people as tax paying, employed workers? Hopefully this is just a graphical error. This is evident is large housing like subterranean

5) Where is blue large residential complex?

6) Tourism
On certain maps, tourist seem to come easily with a few space port, some you can have lots of space port and tourist numbers dont move. What are the factors that influence this numbers apart from the number of space port you have.

7) Upgrading and program installation
Why does the program need to access system files? This is the only game I have that flags off my antivirus about system files changes. Is this necessary? Noticed the game will launch 2-3 system processes apart from the main game process.

8) Upgrading building not worth it
Currently upgrading any building do not give you back the sell values. For eg upgrading a tall brickhouse to quantum I am supposed to get back 2000 bricks back but it doesnt. As a result, lots of micromanaging to sell and then rebuilt.

9) Deactivated building
They are showing 0 workers but system seem to be locking the original population from filling jobs elsewhere. I usually plan my population to my jobs numbers. I realise I need to sell these deactivated building for the game to normalise my job numbers meaning if the buildings are still there, my jobs will not be completely filled. It might be the discrepancy is cause by retired workers

10) Undocumented changes
Noticed that 0.48 introduced a 250 civic for zolarg mining building. I started on v0.46 and noticed the changes when I started another zolarg colony on 0.48. Also noticed that there are unexplained food crashes when the game is idled when prod is way much more than consumption. Seems like there is some anti idling measures in place? Something capturing clicks per hour? v0.49 allows multiple command posts to be build but it does not increase civics. Is this intentional? Not to sure abt higher command as gained independence late

11) Stalled workers/rovers
If we manually move workers to build something, workers/rovers will move to the build site and clicking else where will cause the workers to move to the clicked location before returning to the build site. Only way to prevent this is to click on any building and use dismiss (esc) to end move command.

12) Selling items in Space Elevator, Mass Elevator etc
If you click on selling food quickly before the menu has time to refresh somehow you end up selecting all vehicles and need to exit multiple menus opened as a result

13) Building multiple consulates
Atm if you have lvl 5 consulate, lvl-1-4 shows up as a buildable building. You can chain build lvl 4 consulates and then upgrade them to 5 to give civics a boost. Same for the other lvls. Dont think this is an intended feature

So, i have a colony on my phone, which runs on android and everything on it works.
I created a colony on it, played it for a bit and it now has almost 1000 people.
Thing is, my phone isn't happy with it so i want to move my colony to another platform.

I exported my save with the helios file manager and copied it from my phone to my pc.
Issue is, the web version and the native version both say the save is corrupted when i try to load it.
I've tried exporting it multiple times, didn't work on either platform.
Thing is, the save does import fine on my phone so i'm not sure what's the issue.

The versions are the same (0.52.0) so it's not a version mismatch.

I mean it's just export save, copy, import save on another platform, or does it not work like that?

Is it possible to put a rebuild toggle on depleteable buildings such as mines(off by default of course), were it would drop a new build template once the mine is used up.
It would certainly make working with the micromines a lot less painful, they take a lot of micromanaging to have a decent supply of regolith coming in.
And if we can get it on the crystalline and trees too(only from the planted parent not the grown ones), they would act as permanent reseeders once a field has been cleared.

I would like to propose an option to send a gift to all colonies at once, so its easier to distribute ressource among the members of a commonwealth. Another idea is, to be able to save a "template" of what you sent so you can always click on that "package" and send the same ressources in the same amount again to somebody.

The raw .svg files have never all been available.

In one post the dev explained that the files are compressed as part of the game distribution. In that way they are not included in the installation. You can export compressed .png files using the mod creation tool. This is part of the paid version of the game. When I start to redraw a texture this is where I start.

Some template files are posted here: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=866

Other .svg files can be found in the Game Ideas, Suggestions, and Feedback forum but you'll just have to dig.

This don't have a poll so I made a thread that does have one. You should add your template idea on that thread its called commonwealth gifting. You should also vote Lol.

Hi there,

Personally I really hate inefficiency and there for I've been struggling to build the most efficient setup, However I feel like I've come to a point where I can say I actually found the way!

You don't want your conolists to walk great lengths towards work, yet don't have too many roads.

Looking at the posts already made on the forum I'm in love with the arcology setup and used that as a base template, I have yet to do the math on the best population to work ratio but so far all is looking good.

The 'Arcology setup' is a great start and my favorite way of building. However the 8x8 squares do not offer the most efficient way of building. By using rectangles of 8x21 this efficiency is increased. 1x1 2x2 and 2x3 setups.


Please forgive me for mismatching the blocks in the picture.

I personally built my latest city by handeling horizontal roads in repeated blocks of 8 4 8 and (depending on building sizes) vertical blocks of 8 4 8 for housing and essentials and then blocks of 21 / 16 for different size buildings.



Building with 3x4 and 4x3 however are somewhat less efficient in this setup. By simply building them in blocks of 3x2 and 2x2. Buildings that have larger sizes could be placed at the edges as separation of the buildings that do not need workers.

Maby a picture would make more sense then all I've been saying..





I know I'm missing some details in this post, note that it has to be worked out some more :) anyways pictures said enough I belive

I'm doing something right now, 98% approval, buildings are producing, and my colonists savings us roughly $166 each and rising steadily enough to keep them working and happy. I'm literally achieving this while about 3k are jobless because my buildings aren't completely upgraded yet so the extra housing overshadows that rn but it doesn't seem to matter much. I'm sectioning off each resource with its own central-ish housing and entertainment completely perfected to the job/home ratio while attempting as much efficiency as possible and looking as clean and organized as possible. I was planning to upload a template for others to build off from and maybe post their own"versions" because it's a method that will work in any faction, on any planet, for any resource and is very modular.

@sirdrewdude do you mean the template files, or for the upcoming online regions?

Template files @bastecklein

With the new version, 0.86.0.

I tested a template from Xarb which I activated in serveral other cities and it got saved on the thumbnail :



I was able to reproduce entering Niveugel :

I've made more progress on it today. Here is an auto-generated Earthlike region.


You never really know what you're going to get.

The game now automatically builds preview images for tiles which do not have a city on them. This is a somewhat expensive process though, and so the tile preview generation is staggered out, which makes rendering an entire map take a couple of minutes. The game is still playable though, while the tiles are being generated.

Here is another template I made:


Which turns into this:


A fine looking place to call home, if you ask me!

Here is a video overview of some new Region stuff coming to v1.0.0.


The video demonstrates both automatic and template river/water generation, improved switching between regional maps, and the new ability to move bots from one region city to another. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more v1.0.0 new stuff!

I have just put the finishing touches on Antiquitas v1.26.0, and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This is a major update which rolls up all features and bug fixes from the My Colony engine contained in MC patches v0.96.0, v0.97.0, v0.98.0, v0.99.0, v1.0.0, v1.1.0, and v1.2.0. Now, if you've followed My Colony, you know that there have been some major changes contained in those releases, and they are now hitting Antiquitas, so let's go over everything that's new!

The popular unit grouping feature is now available in Antiquitas! Now when you select a group of similar units, you can "stack" them into one single unit, combining their abilities into one. This provides much faster build times, and also improves game performance.


Certain buildings can now be moved. If a building does not also function as a resource drop-off point for your harvesting servants, you can now click on the 'move' button to place it in a different location. This comes in handy if you accidentally built something in the wrong place, or you just want to rearrange things as your city grows.


On the Gallia map (the only map that contains a river), rivers in Region games are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of generated at the individual map level. This gives a greater since of continuity for Regional players, and it just looks nicer. You can have the game automatically generate the rivers, or you can supply your own template from an image file.

Also in Regions, you can now move servants between region maps. To do this, simply walk a servant unit to the edge of a map, and he will move over to the adjacent map. You can also now click on the border area around a region city and the game will ask you if you want to switch to that city, letting you move between regional areas without first having to back out to the region overview screen.


The largest change comes in the way that the simulation is handled behind the scenes. As with My Colony, Antiquitas now runs on a statistical based system, rather than trying to simulate the lives of each individual citizen. This change greatly improves the performance of the game, but does come with some changes you need to be aware of.

Each residential building in the game now has internal rating statistics that you will need to maximize in order to run an efficient city.


You can see a detailed explanation on how this works in this post, but essentially you will need to make sure that each residential structure has adequate Medical, Educational, and Entertainment access, in order to keep your citizens happy and productive.

In order to help with these changes, several structures in the game have been buffed in this update. The Medical and Education ratings of the Taberna Medica, House of the Sun-Nu, and Druid Healer Hut have been increased. The Education ratings of the Grammaticus, Scholae Magister, Scholae Rethor, House of the Scribe, School of the Scribes, Druid Healer Hut, Druid Ring, and Druid Assembly have all been increased. Finally, the Shrine of Jupiter, Shrine of Bastet, and Bard Stand now offer a minor medical rating boost. With these changes, most existing cities, if well designed, should not have to make many changes in order to "just work" with the latest update.

You will now have to deal with the birth, death, and aging of your population. There is a new Age Distribution chart in the statistics window to let you see how old your citizens are.


You will now need to provide additional housing for minors and retired citizens, who are not a part of the labor force.

In order to help you manage these changes and micro-manage your city production and output, there are two new slider options added to the stats screen for individual buildings, the Production Priority and Employment Capacity sliders.


Using these new sliders, you can prioritize buildings, making them fill up with workers before other structures. You can also put a cap on the amount of workers each building has, so that a building that requires a large number of workers does not suck up all of your available workforce. Using these sliders, you can tweak your city's industrial output to your liking.

There were a ton of engine changes in this update, but I am hoping that the transition is smooth. These changes have been in My Colony for a little while now, and I think a majority of the kinks have now been worked out. So that's all for today, I hope you enjoy the update, and stay tuned for more improvements to come!

just some of the stuff I've made recently

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

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

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

Let me know what you think of these!

Building is such a grind. I've covered half my region map with cities of similar grid structure by hand and I'm getting burnt out. Been dreaming of just placing grid roads. There really needs to be an auto build template by default. The only thing that sets me apart from other big players is that they are fine with spending many hours JUST placing buildings. Scaling really hits a hard limit on how fast you can place buildings.

I love this building template.

How do I make texture mods? I don't see the "create texture mod" button on Mac (downloaded from the App Store) or PC (downloaded from Microsoft Store or directly from Ape Market) so I tried making a test mct file manually by encoding my image with base64 and using another mct as a template, but the game crashes every time I try to import it. How can I solve this? I don't mind making the mct manually if I have to, as I have plenty of json experience, but I'd like to know what's causing all of the crashing. I've attached the sample here.

aDOS Player is a new front end games launcher for playing retro DOS games on any device that supports Progressive Web App (PWA) technologies. Built on top of the js-dos library, aDOS Player utilizes *.jsdos bundles to make launching and playing retro DOS games a breeze. And on top of the standard .jsdos bundle file supported by the default js-dos implementation, aDOS Player supports a few custom enhanced bundle features that allow the player to show things like game box art, information, genre and more. This post will detail how you can create your own .jsdos bundle files so that you can play any of your old DOS games in the aDOS Player application.


The first thing you are going to need to do is install the aDOS Player PWA on your system. This can be done using a Chromium based browser (Chrome, Edge, etc). To show the install prompt, navigate to the PWA using the link below, click on the Settings gear icon, and the top option should be Get the App. Clicking on that will begin the quick install process. Installing will allow local folder read access so that aDOS Player can read and manage your game library, and also file association to *.jsdos files, so you can launch into a DOS game by simply clicking on it's bundle from your computer.

https://adosplayer.com/

Next you will need some *.jsdos bundle files to get started. aDOS Player will work fine with any existing *.jsdos file you may have or find online, but you can also create your own fairly easily. A .jsdos file is simply a .zip file with a different file extension and some extra information. I am going to go over the basics here, or you can read the technical document from the js-dos developers here.

First, if you just want to quickly put together a playable bundle and do not care about the extended aDOS Player features such as box art, you can simply go to the dos.zone Game Studio tool and it will create a bundle for you automatically. I plan to eventually have similar functionality built right into aDOS Player, but have not gotten around to it yet as of this writing.

To roll your own, you need to create a .zip file that contains your DOS game as well as a folder named .jsdos with a dosbox.conf file, and a jsdos.json file. Additionally, you can put the boxart.png file in this folder, as well as three screenshot files (screen1.png, screen2.png, screen3.png).

For a demonstration of how this looks, download the following .jsdos file of the game Sim Ant. Change the file extension to .zip and look at it's contents on your computer.


You can actually use the above file as a template for packaging your own games. You can also package your game using the before mentioned dos.zone Game Studio game studio tool, download it, change the extension to .zip, add your box art, change it back to .jsdos, and you are good to go.

As mentioned before, you can also add meta data to your .jsdos bundle that can be read by the aDOS launcher. Open up the .jsdos/jsdos.json file. On top of it's standard entries, you can add a new property to the root JSON object called "adosplayer" with the following options:

"adosplayer": {

	  "title": "game name",

	  "desc": "game description",

	  "year": 1992,

	  "publisher": "software company",

	  "genre": "arcade",

	  "id": "282fc6b0-3f7b-4fc2-8522-253c2ad6f071"

  }

All fields are optional. The "id" field is just a random GUID that you can generate anywhere, but should be unique to any other .jsdos bundle. It is not required and the player will create one automatically internally if it is not there, but it is going to be used for future cloud save syncing, so it is good to have a unique one for each bundle.

Anyway, over time I will be packing some of the most popular DOS games into aDOS Player enhanced bundles, and will be adding a function in-app to be able to browse and download the bundles automatically. In the mean time, feel free to attempt packaging your own and let me know what issues you find or requests you have. To get you started, here are the jsdos bundles for both SimAnt and Wolfenstein 3D that you can so ahead and play using aDOS Player right now.


Enjoy!

#adosplayer