Ape Apps

Hello everyone! Today I will be publishing My Colony v1.7.0 to all platforms. This is a somewhat minor(ish) update, but includes some bug fixes that needed to go out sooner rather than later as they were impacting one of my servers somewhat substantially and causing issues not only for My Colony, but other games as well. There are some changes here and there that you will notice though, so let's take a peek at what's new in this release!

Firstly, I have completely removed the option for synchronous path finding, and now all path finding operations take place in the off-thread asynchronous routine. For whatever reason, the synchronous pathfinding was causing rovers and colonists to jump around the map and walk in strange directions, and I didn't want to waste a bunch of time figuring out. I decided that since most of the problems with the off-thread pathfinder have already been solved long ago and it has been the default setting for months, I would just make it official and remove the synchronous pathfinder from the game completely. I don't expect and negative issues from this, but if you find something then let me know!

Colonists will start protesting again in this update if your approval gets low enough. The mechanics and levels are similar to what they were before, except now the protests start more gradually and a little earlier on. You will notice the protestors outside of your capitol building if you have colonist rendering enabled.

Similar to the transit bus that was added in v1.5, there are now two new decorative units that you will see driving around your colony, the Ambulance and the Squad Car. These come from the hospitals and security stations, respectively. As of now their movements are random like the bus, but I thought it would be neat eventually to have at least the squad cars primarily drive around high-crime areas, as sort of a quick way to see where problems are without digging into stats. I also thought it would be neat to have the squad cars arrive at protests, and maybe have some building damage and fires caused by the protests, but I need to make a fire department before I can do any of that...

Insectoids now get to join their human and reptilian "friends" in the cross-regional mass transit game with their new Subterranean Transit Node. It works just like the bus station for Humans and it allows Insectoids to live and work in different regional cities.

Multiplayer regions have been completely dead in the game, and they should now be working again to a level that they were before. I think I might work on a complete upgrade and overhaul of the Multiplayer Region feature over the coming updates, so if you have big ideas and suggestions for this feature, then now is probably the time, because they are probably going to be next on the agenda.

Finally, I introduced two new share URI formats that the My Colony client can read and launch from. You can now easily share your charter code by creating a link like this: web+mycolony://join_sjlK2GZ9 (where sjlK2GZ9 is your charter), or a multiplayer region like this: web+mycolony://joinmp_u9rRFvyR (again, where u9rRFvyR is the charter). When someone clicks the link, the My Colony app should start and launch right into the join charter flow. Haven't tested it completely yet, but I'm pretty sure it works...

Anyway, that's all for today. Updates will be going out within the next few days here so be on the lookout, thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!