#myempire
Posts and pages on Ape Apps tagged with <strong>#myempire</strong>
I have just updated My Empire to v1.3.0, which should be rolling out to all platforms over the next few days. This update makes some minor improvements to the user interface, and fixes the bugs that were reported through the Ape Market console. Read on for more details!
Most of the pop-up build menus have been moved to full-height slide-out menus, as shown in the screenshot above. This looks a little better in my view but, more importantly, works a lot better on mobile devices, where the previous pop-up versions of the menus only allowed a single build option to be shown on the screen at once without scrolling.
More importantly, the iOS Edition of the game now properly supports the "notch" in iPhones. Before there were ugly white borders around the entire game, but it now fills the entire screen and applies proper padding to UI elements so that they are not covered in the notch. This should also work right in notched Android devices, although I did not have one of those available to me for testing, so let me know if you see an issue.
On the desktop, you can now change the camera mode with the right-click mouse button, so that dragging with the left-mouse down will do a camera pan, and dragging with the right-mouse down will do a camera rotate. Give it a try, you will see what I mean.
Finally, all Scroll3d engine updates and fixes from the latest builds of My Colony 2 have been applied to My Empire.
So anyway, that is all for today's My Empire update! If you want to download My Empire yourself, it is available on most platforms (including Steam), and you can find all download links here:
https://apps.ape-apps.com/my-empire/
Thank you for playing My Empire!
#myempire #mycolony2
Most of the pop-up build menus have been moved to full-height slide-out menus, as shown in the screenshot above. This looks a little better in my view but, more importantly, works a lot better on mobile devices, where the previous pop-up versions of the menus only allowed a single build option to be shown on the screen at once without scrolling.
More importantly, the iOS Edition of the game now properly supports the "notch" in iPhones. Before there were ugly white borders around the entire game, but it now fills the entire screen and applies proper padding to UI elements so that they are not covered in the notch. This should also work right in notched Android devices, although I did not have one of those available to me for testing, so let me know if you see an issue.
On the desktop, you can now change the camera mode with the right-click mouse button, so that dragging with the left-mouse down will do a camera pan, and dragging with the right-mouse down will do a camera rotate. Give it a try, you will see what I mean.
Finally, all Scroll3d engine updates and fixes from the latest builds of My Colony 2 have been applied to My Empire.
So anyway, that is all for today's My Empire update! If you want to download My Empire yourself, it is available on most platforms (including Steam), and you can find all download links here:
https://apps.ape-apps.com/my-empire/
Thank you for playing My Empire!
#myempire #mycolony2
Today I am finalizing v1.7.0 of Voxel Paint which is a fairly considerable update with several new tools and features being added into the program. Let's take a look at what's new!
First off, Voxel Paint now has, not one, but four pen tools available, accessable by either right-clicking on the pen tool icon, or selecting the pen tool again when you are already using one of the pens (for mobile access). Doing so will give you this new context menu where you can select which pen tool you are interested in using:
The Add Voxel tool is the same that it's always pen, the regular pen.
The new Fill Add Voxel tool accepts two clicks and will then fill in every cube in-between the first and second click. For instance, if you click on the top left corner of the painting and then the bottom left, you will get this:
Certainly a lot faster than single clicking on each individual tile!
The Paint Voxel tool is used for painting over, or changing the color of already existing voxels, handy for adding texture to a model or simply making changings without having to erase and redraw parts of your model.
Finally, the new Paint Emissive tool is used for quickly setting a group of voxels as emissive. You use it by "drawing" over them as with the Paint Voxel tool. It also allows mobile users to set voxels as emissive, as they couldn't before.
In order to keep all of the new tools straight, there is a new readout area on the bottom-right of the screen next to the coordinate readout that lets you know which tool you are currently using.
Aside from the new pens, there are a couple of more tools you will find in this release. Under the Image menu, there is a new Hollow Image wizard. This tool will go through your model and automatically remove all cubes that are not visible from the outside. This is a handy feature if you've just created a bunch of new voxels using the Fill Add Voxel tool and want to remove the excess in the center. Hollowing an image can greatly reduce your .vpp file size, as well as rendering performance.
When you first load up Voxel Paint, the default file size has been changed from 20x20 to 16x16. I made this change because the two games that currently use .vpp models, My Empire and My Colony 2, both use 16x16 models by default, as does the Voxel Playground utility. It only makes sense for Voxel Paint to conform to that default. I have also adjusted the maximum zoom out range, so you can zoom out on your models more than you could previously.
Finally, Voxel Paint now has a new file export mode called Precompile Model, which performs a majority of the operations that the My Empire or My Colony 2 game engines normally do before adding the model into the game, and saves that data into the actual .vpp file. The precompile export can take a minute or so depending on your device and will increase the file size by a factor of 2 or 3 (or more). The benefit is that it will reduce the time that one of the above mentioned games (or the Voxel Playground once it's updated) takes to load your model by 99%, which is good. If you are just working on small models or making personal artwork and do not care about rendering in My Colony 2, then you probably do not need to do a precompile export. On the other hand, if you are interested in My Colony 2 modding or creating Voxel Playground scenes, the precompile export is probably the way to go.
Anyway, the v1.7.0 update is live now on the Web and on the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting all other platforms over the course of the week. I hope you enjoy the changes, please leave feedback so that I can continue to improve the app, and stay tuned for more Voxel Paint updates!
#voxelpaint #mycolony2 #voxelplayground #myempire
First off, Voxel Paint now has, not one, but four pen tools available, accessable by either right-clicking on the pen tool icon, or selecting the pen tool again when you are already using one of the pens (for mobile access). Doing so will give you this new context menu where you can select which pen tool you are interested in using:
The Add Voxel tool is the same that it's always pen, the regular pen.
The new Fill Add Voxel tool accepts two clicks and will then fill in every cube in-between the first and second click. For instance, if you click on the top left corner of the painting and then the bottom left, you will get this:
Certainly a lot faster than single clicking on each individual tile!
The Paint Voxel tool is used for painting over, or changing the color of already existing voxels, handy for adding texture to a model or simply making changings without having to erase and redraw parts of your model.
Finally, the new Paint Emissive tool is used for quickly setting a group of voxels as emissive. You use it by "drawing" over them as with the Paint Voxel tool. It also allows mobile users to set voxels as emissive, as they couldn't before.
In order to keep all of the new tools straight, there is a new readout area on the bottom-right of the screen next to the coordinate readout that lets you know which tool you are currently using.
Aside from the new pens, there are a couple of more tools you will find in this release. Under the Image menu, there is a new Hollow Image wizard. This tool will go through your model and automatically remove all cubes that are not visible from the outside. This is a handy feature if you've just created a bunch of new voxels using the Fill Add Voxel tool and want to remove the excess in the center. Hollowing an image can greatly reduce your .vpp file size, as well as rendering performance.
When you first load up Voxel Paint, the default file size has been changed from 20x20 to 16x16. I made this change because the two games that currently use .vpp models, My Empire and My Colony 2, both use 16x16 models by default, as does the Voxel Playground utility. It only makes sense for Voxel Paint to conform to that default. I have also adjusted the maximum zoom out range, so you can zoom out on your models more than you could previously.
Finally, Voxel Paint now has a new file export mode called Precompile Model, which performs a majority of the operations that the My Empire or My Colony 2 game engines normally do before adding the model into the game, and saves that data into the actual .vpp file. The precompile export can take a minute or so depending on your device and will increase the file size by a factor of 2 or 3 (or more). The benefit is that it will reduce the time that one of the above mentioned games (or the Voxel Playground once it's updated) takes to load your model by 99%, which is good. If you are just working on small models or making personal artwork and do not care about rendering in My Colony 2, then you probably do not need to do a precompile export. On the other hand, if you are interested in My Colony 2 modding or creating Voxel Playground scenes, the precompile export is probably the way to go.
Anyway, the v1.7.0 update is live now on the Web and on the Ape Apps Launcher and should be hitting all other platforms over the course of the week. I hope you enjoy the changes, please leave feedback so that I can continue to improve the app, and stay tuned for more Voxel Paint updates!
#voxelpaint #mycolony2 #voxelplayground #myempire
My Empire has just been updated to v1.2.0 which should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This update addresses several bugs, updates it's codebase to the latest Ape Apps shared libraries (scroll3d/vpploader/adl/etc), and adds the following features:
My Empire is available on all platforms, and you can find download links from the Ape Market at the following URL:
https://market.ape-apps.com/my-empire.html
#myempire
- There is now a Camera Mode button where you can switch between pan and rotate, to get a full 360 degree view of your battlefield.
- Cities can now choose to produce just Gold or Research instead of a unit of building. This helps in later games when you have built all available buildings and do not wish to keep pumping out unnecessary units.
- Native My Empire binary is now available for Apple M1 based Macs.
My Empire is available on all platforms, and you can find download links from the Ape Market at the following URL:
https://market.ape-apps.com/my-empire.html
#myempire
I had originally planned on making My Empire one of my final games to use the Scroll2d engine, but as I started working on naval units for the game (the trireme specifically), it was starting to get annoying and cumbersome to draw all of the angles I needed for the units using Inkscape. I figured that, since I still had a ton of artwork to do for the game, I would instead take a few days to convert My Empire over to the in-development Scroll3d engine. So now, instead of being the last game to use Scroll2d, My Empire will become the first game to use the new Scroll3d engine!
Here is how the game originally looked using Scroll2d:
And here is what I have thus far using Scroll3d:
As you can see, I have attempted to match the original look as closely as possible, but there is still a lot of work to do. As of now the game no longer is able to render units (which is sort of a big deal), so the game is no longer easily playable. I expect to have units working again in a day or so here. The updates here should help to add some neat capabilities to the Scroll3d engine that will be useful in other titles as well. For instance, instead of drawing specific images for the roads and rivers in the game, I am going to adding code to Scroll3d so that road and river textures can be created automatically at runtime, which should greatly reduce development time on both this project and future ones. Already for this project, I have added text and line rendering to the engine. I also don't really like my blocky mountain models, so I'm going to try to find a better solution for that.
Anyway, for those of you who had been playing the beta of My Empire (linked below), it's going to be slightly unplayable for the next day or two, but after that I expect it to be back up in working order. So stay tuned for more My Empire related news and updates! My goal is to have this game completely done by the end of the summer, so that I can get it submitted to all app stores and Steam. Hope you enjoy!
https://www.apewebapps.com/my-empire/beta/
#myempire
Here is how the game originally looked using Scroll2d:
And here is what I have thus far using Scroll3d:
As you can see, I have attempted to match the original look as closely as possible, but there is still a lot of work to do. As of now the game no longer is able to render units (which is sort of a big deal), so the game is no longer easily playable. I expect to have units working again in a day or so here. The updates here should help to add some neat capabilities to the Scroll3d engine that will be useful in other titles as well. For instance, instead of drawing specific images for the roads and rivers in the game, I am going to adding code to Scroll3d so that road and river textures can be created automatically at runtime, which should greatly reduce development time on both this project and future ones. Already for this project, I have added text and line rendering to the engine. I also don't really like my blocky mountain models, so I'm going to try to find a better solution for that.
Anyway, for those of you who had been playing the beta of My Empire (linked below), it's going to be slightly unplayable for the next day or two, but after that I expect it to be back up in working order. So stay tuned for more My Empire related news and updates! My goal is to have this game completely done by the end of the summer, so that I can get it submitted to all app stores and Steam. Hope you enjoy!
https://www.apewebapps.com/my-empire/beta/
#myempire
