Ape Apps

Hello everyone, I have just finished up work on My Colony v0.69.0, and it will be going out to all devices shortly.

My Colony v0.69.0 is yet another engine stability and bug fix release. In the last changelog, I talked about how My Colony has been basically blacklisted on Google Play due to having a high number of crashes. To combat this, I made several changes to the Android version of the game, including limiting map sizes, removing ads, removing the Galactic Emperor rewards, etc.

Amazingly, these changes had absolutely zero impact on the crash rate of the game. So most of them have been reversed in this update. My Colony v0.69.0 also rolls up two Antiquitas updates worth of engine patches, including a new Engine setting which allows users to disable the multi-threaded path finding engine.

For those who have been playing a long time, way back in v0.40.0, I moved all path finding operations to a separate worker thread in order to improve performance, and at the time it made a pretty big improvement. The only downfall to this was that it cost more RAM usage in order to work, because the games collision map had to be cloned and copied over to the worker thread in order for the pathfinder to be able to use it, since a Javascript object can not be accessed across two different threads. On PCs with a lot of RAM or on smaller maps, this was not such a big deal. On Android though, which restricts RAM available to each app far more than other platforms, it is possibly problematic, particularly on larger maps.

With this change, multi-threaded path finding is now turned off by default on Android only. I am testing to see if this has any impact on the crash rate. The new engine setting option is found at the very bottom of the Engine Settings list if you want to test the difference between the two path finding methods on different platforms. I suspect this might also help the issues some people have when they order a bot to go build something, and it just sits there. I am thinking the path resolution instructions were somehow getting lost in the cross-thread communications. We will see.

In my testing, turning off the multi-threading does not significantly lower performance. Back when I initially implemented the multi-threaded feature, the game calculated every path for every rover and colonist on the map. I have since made changes to where all paths are simulated, unless the unit starting or ending position is within the players viewport, as there was no reason so show an accurate path of a colonist walking from his house to his job if the player is not even going to see it happening.

There were several more bug fixes added that were carried over from the two most recent Antiquitas updates, but the path finding change was the major one, and represented a somewhat significant change in the underlying code, allowing the game to now support either single or multi-threaded operation.

Hopefully some of these changes do something to help the crash rate. My Colony has a crash rate on Android of around 7%. Oddly, Antiquitas, which runs on the exact same code base, has a crash rate of under 1%. Even more strange is the fact that Antiquitas features background music and higher resolution graphics, leading to more RAM consumption over My Colony, yet there are almost no crashes. Also strange is how I get virtually no support emails or forum posts from actual people about My Colony just force closing on Android, yet it is apparently happening to nearly 10% of users.

Regardless, the ongoing issues on Google Play have basically killed My Colony from a business standpoint. The following snippet from My Colony's weekly usage chart shows the exact point Google blacklisted the game on the Play Store:

Ignore the huge drop at the end, as that represents this week which is only half way through. The game has basically leveled off because that is the usage on Web, Desktop, Windows 10, and iPhone. There are essentially no new downloads coming from Android devices at this point, which as you can tell by the chart, amounted to about half of the My Colony userbase.

Here you can see the last 6 months worth of downloads from Google Play:

So anyway, that is where My Colony currently stands on Android. I have not added any new content this time, as I am trying to focus my time on getting the crashes resolved, if there is indeed any way to resolve them. And even if they are resolved, there is no guarantee that Google would ever un-blacklist the game anyway, so there is that.

Regardless though, there is another small change I added to the game this release. It has always bothered me that the regular textile mill was animated, by the synthetic textile mill was not. So I added animation to it!

So that's all for today. Similar to the v0.68.x series of updates, My Colony on Android will probably receive several more updates than the other platforms. It saw a 0.68.1, 0.68.2, 0.68.3, and a 0.68.4 update, and the same may happen with the release. Just trying to get it fixed. Even if the game never returns to profitability, I at least can hopefully get the engine fixed up so that it works properly for the next game.

Thanks for playing, much more to come!