Last week, we briefly mentioned boss monsters. We said we'd explain more next week - this week. We weren't merely interested in boss monsters for gameplay reasons. Our primary reason was performance. We have been building bigger and bigger colonies in our test worlds and we've noticed that colonies with 500+ colonists start to lag. It's worst during the nights, when hundreds of monsters spawn. Obviously, one 10,000HP monster causes less lag than hundred 100HP monsters, so this solution could help fix the problem. During the weekend, our programmer has worked on the NPC lag. Optimizing is his hobby :) We've been using a default Unity character system that was designed to be used for main characters. You might have a couple or even a dozen main characters, but it was never intended to be used for hundreds or even thousands of NPCs. The default system allows multiple animations to be combined dynamically. It's a powerful tool, but we barely used it. We did suffer the performance cost though. So we've created a new system. We still use the same character system, but instead of creating the animations in real-time, they're now baked while the game launches. Nearby, NPC animations will be rendered with 60 frames per second. But at 50m+ distance, they're rendered at 20FPS and animations at 100m+ distance are rendered at 5FPS. There are barely any noticeable drawbacks to this new system, and the performance gain is huge. A testworld with 10,000 colonists went from 10FPS to 40FPS. A world with ~650 colonists went from 40-55FPS to 120-160FPS. We've continued to work on the diggers as well. We fixed a long list of minor issues, for example:

• Diggers bring gathered blocks to crates now
• Digger jobs can't be stacked on top of each other anymore
• They won't remove "true" bedrock anymore, the lowest layer of the world
• They show the icon of the block/item they receive now, instead of the icon of the block they're removing. "Oreblocks" had no icon, ores do have an icon.
• Similar to players, there are now differences between "block breaking" times. It takes longer to remove stone&ores than to remove dirt&sand.
• Diggers can only be placed next to construction areas

Next week, we'll start working on builders!
Tower Defense We've worked on this game for years without realizing that the combat in Colony Survival is pretty much a Tower Defense game. We made some jokes about it a couple of months ago, but we fully realized it only a couple of days ago. And if Colony Survival is a Tower Defense game, it better be a great Tower Defense game ːsteamhappyː On one hand, we want to add more guards, inspired by common mechanics in Tower Defense games. We're thinking about for example guards with poison missiles, freeze missiles and guards with area-of-effect attacks. On the other hand, we want to do the same with the monsters. Swarm monsters and boss monsters. Monsters that spawn more monsters when killed. Monsters with physical and magical armor that can be more effectively countered by certain guards. Monsters with regenerating health, which can be stopped with a poison missile. Perhaps even monsters that fire missiles themselves. We've always wanted to add exploration and multiple colonies to Colony Survival, but we found it hard to think of a valid purpose for the extra colonies. We weren't fully satisfied with the burghers idea. But we believe adding some common Tower Defense mechanics will also give players a better reason to explore. For example, the ingredients necessary for freeze missiles will have to be gathered in the Arctic, while poison plants can only be grown in the tropics. We're very excited about the idea, and we'd love to have your feedback! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2018-02-23 14:05:44 CET ] [ Original post ]