Ape Apps

Today I have released the 0.44.0 update to My Colony to all platforms. This update is another mixture of bug fixes and content updates, including the all new concept of waste management. Here are the details, with commentary to follow.

My Colony v0.44.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Resource: Trash
• New Structures: Microincinerator, Incinerator, Small Trash Pit, Landfill, Small Recycling Center, Medium Recycling Center, Conference Hall, Advanced Medical Research Center, Unholy Brew Pit
• New Premium Content: Blue Residential Tower

Changes

• Warehouses (of all sizes) now store Crystalline.
• Canceling building construction mid-way now returns all resources back to the player.
• New Galactic Emperor one-time windfall profits tax for online colonies.

Notes
I will discuss some of the additions and changes in a bit, but first I wanted to briefly mention some of the bug fixes that have been introduced. So I think that everybody knows the rover path-finding has been an issue for the last few updates, and it may well still be an issue now, but I think I have finally gotten it reduced to a manageable level. Please still issue bug reports on it though, because this one is a real pain.

I saw in the logs that most of the path finding errors were related to the path finding worker thread running out of memory. Several changes were made to address this. First, the engine's collision map is now only updated when new structures are either added or removed, whereas before it was being updated on a regular interval.

In addition, now when a rover (or colonist) decides to move from tile A to tile B, instead of going through the normal path finding routine, it will first check if both the starting and ending points are currently visible to the player. If the answer is no, then instead of going through full path finding, the game will just quickly check if there are any obstacles blocking the units path. If the path seems clear, the unit will become invisible for a simulated amount of time based on the distance between the two points, and then reappear at the destination. If its not obvious that the path is clear, the regular path finding will be used. Commonly used paths are now also saved and reused by rovers instead of going back to the path finder. For instance, if you are harvesting Clay, the game remembers the path from the clay mine to the warehouse and will keep reusing it until an obstacle appears in the way.

These changes greatly reduce the number of times the engine has to call up the path finder thread, providing both performance improvements and memory usage reductions.

I have also added a cap on how much immigration and colony statistics data that your game file will retain. Before it was unlimited, which could lead to large save files with colonies that have been operating for a long time. This change should reduce file sizes a bit, along with compression and save times.

There were also bug fixes added that related to lottery, taxation, and the amount of money the game assigned to new colonists. A glitch had arisen where there would be colonists walking around with trillions of dollars in their wallets. A change has been made to where this will no longer happen for new colonists, but if you have existing ultra-rich colonists, they will still be ultra rich.

Now on to the addition of Trash. Human residential structures now generate Trash, and it is up to the user to manage it. Right now there are no negative side effects, so colonies have a change to get on top of the situation. This will be changing soon though. Trash buildup will soon impact the health of the colonists, based on a ratio of trash per colonist. The threshold will be fairly low on trash too, although don't ask me what it is yet, as I will figure out the balancing at the time of implementation.

In a similar way, excess atmosphere will start causing colonist health issues. Once atmosphere surpasses the 15 million mark, colonists will begin getting sick. Unlike trash, the effect is much more subtle, so if you are worried about balancing trash vs atmosphere, I would advise that trash is the larger concern by far. Again, the exact numbers are unknown still, but I will figure out the balancing during implementation.

There were other changes and fixes in there which I don't remember off of the top of my head.

Moving on, I want to talk about what is coming next for My Colony. I already mentioned the changes related to Trash and Atmosphere. I planned on adding a lot more Zolarg this time, but I didn't get around to it. Next time I plan to implement most of the suggestions for Zolarg as found in this thread by @IIIStrife: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=800

Also, for Premium players, I will be adding a new Creative Mode (offline only). It will basically just be a sandbox mode where everything is free and unlocked, and you can just build whatever you want.

So anyway, that's all I've got for now. Enjoy the update, report the bugs, and have fun!