Last Saturday, we released 0.6.1.4. It included a very small change to monster pathfinding with major consequences in some worlds. Prior to the update, monsters would search and attack guards, colonists and the player if they were within a 31 block range and the path towards them was shorter than the path to the banner. It makes sense, but causes big issues in situations with very long paths to the banner. If the banner was very very very far away, and guards were within the 31 block range but also required a very very long path to reach them, monsters would constantly be calculating ultra long paths. Apart from causing weird monster behavior, it also caused lots of lag. So we shortened their "search behavior". They'll only attack other targets than the banner if there is a path towards them that is shorter than ~100 blocks. In certain worlds, this causes FPS on the server to go from 0.6 to 50+ frames per second! On Wednesday, we released 0.6.1.5. There was a slight mistake in the code making savegames which was only revealed by specific behaviour from a mod, causing loss of inventory and science. A small hotfix solved that issue. We've also continued work on 0.6.2. We've currently got an internal testbuild with two major changes:

• Monster spawning. The terrain in Colony Survival is generated using a 2D height map. This height map is used in the default version of the game to spawn monsters. The monsters only spawn in places where it's possible to spawn on the standard height determined in the height map, plus or minus three blocks. If the standard terrain has a a height of 65, monsters will only spawn in that place if they can spawn anywhere between 62 and 68. If you build a wall that stops at a height of 70, no monsters will spawn there, even if it's outside of the banner safe zone. In 0.6.2, monsters will spawn anywhere outside of the safe zone, no matter what you've changed or built. We've tested this in older worlds and it does make a significant difference. Monsters will start spawning in new and unexpected locations.
• The new build also fixes the problem described here. In the default version of the game, colonies with long walls and mazes will encounter significantly less monsters than colonies with shorter paths towards their banner. This is pretty unfair and not sensible, so that has been fixed in our testbuild. All colonies with the same colonist count will encounter the same amount of monsters, regardless of path length and guard placement.

This means your colony might be overrun and slaughtered by monsters when we release the update! If you want to prepare your colony, keep the next things in mind. If monsters need to travel very far to get to your banner, especially if they survive this path for a long time, invest in more guards and more ammo production! If you've built walls and towers outside of the safe zone, make sure you're prepared for monsters that will spawn on top of them. Keep the path from those towers and walls into your safe zone guarded. There are multiple other things we want to add to 0.6.2 before we release it.

• More advanced difficulty options when starting a new world. Currently, the options are no monsters, standard monsters, double monsters, and day monsters. We'd like to add some kind of slider that allows a better selection of the desired monster amount. For example, "half monsters" or triple monsters. Another fun challenge would be continuously increasing monster amounts, instead of keeping them in sync with the colonist count.
• A way to easily change those settings once you've started a world would be useful too.
• We want to port the hotbar/inventory from client to server side. It gives us and modders more options to stop cheating, and it also means it'll be easier to add features like "shift-click to transfer items from the stockpile to the inventory".
• Last but not least, another significant optimization to monster pathfinding.

We hope to finish and release 0.6.2 in two weeks. Afterwards, we want to start working on "new real content" again, as seen in the table below. Just add "+1" to 0.6.2, 0.6.3 and 0.6.4 ;)
In last week's blog, we asked you whether you wanted underground monster spawning, below the safe zone. Opinions were very divided. Some people loved it and totally didn't mind colony-breaking updates; it's an Early Access game for a reason. Others were more concerned about the consequences. We've decided not to add monsters below your safe zone in 0.6.2, but they might still come in 0.7.0 :) We also expressed concern about a sudden increase in negative reviews. We welcomed a lot of new players during the sale, but they also brought along lots of negative reviews. For a few days, our ratio of positive/negative reviews was roughly 50/50! We hoped this would improve later, because negative reviews are often written by people who've become bored or frustrated by the game after a couple of hours (sometimes even minutes), while positive reviews are often written by people who've spent dozens of hours in-game. We were very happy to see this prediction proven true!
Our recent review graph, last Friday versus this Friday Apart from the positive reviews, we also received lots of kind comments praising Colony Survival and telling us not to worry too much about the negative reviews. We appreciate those comments a lot, so thank you very much! We're very grateful that so many people enjoy Colony Survival. Bedankt voor het lezen en tot volgende week! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2018-05-18 10:22:38 CET ] [ Original post ]