It has been a week since 0.7.0 was released! It feels like a much longer period. We've received lots of feedback, and nearly everybody had a positive view of the update. There have been some issues though. Twenty minutes before the release of the update, Zun uploaded a new build with optimized networking. Sadly, it introduced major problems when trying to load a world. So shortly after releasing 0.7.0, we had to release a hotfix that reverted back the networking. A problem that hasn't been fixed yet is broken achievements. The achievements for colonizing new biomes and the 100+ happiness achievement cannot be unlocked. This should obviously be resolved. The most pressing issues that Colony Survival still had in 0.6.3 are resolved in 0.7.0. FaceIt doesn't break the game anymore and savegames are way less likely to corrupt. But there are still some wonky behaviors that can cause issues. One of them is pathfinding. Colonists look for the closest bed, crate and grocery store in a straight line, right through the ground, walls and floors. They do not care about the actual path they have to take. Generally, in large colonies where jobs, beds and crates are spread out evenly, this doesn't cause any issues. But it can create lots of confusion in specific scenarios.
Let's take a look at the example above. There's a house with beds for guards and farmers, and there's a mine with a couple of colonists. Inside of the mine, there's an underground room with beds where the miners can sleep.
When nighttime arrives, the miners leave their jobs and walk towards the underground room with beds.
...and they walk straight past it to claim the beds in the house. They even go past the beds on the ground floor and go to the basement. They deliberately search out the farthest beds possible. But actually, they're the closest beds! They're right above them when they're working. So these are the beds they claim, and then they calculate a path towards them, not caring about available beds along the way. These issues can compound and cause further issues. There might be colonists working right next to the house who lose their beds. If other nearby beds are also claimed already, they might have to walk a long distance towards beds on the other side of the colony. It's pretty easy to prevent these problems: [olist]

Don't make very complex paths with beds hidden behind difficult mazes.[/olist] Follow one or both rules and you'll probably be fine. But if you're building complex structures with difficult entrances and exits, and you're placing a limited amount of beds for specific groups of colonists, you'll run into problems. We could of course change it so that colonists don't merely look for the closest bed in a straight line, but let them compare beds while keeping in mind the distance they are forced to travel. But this would dramatically increase the required computing power. Imagine hundreds or thousands of colonists, each calculating paths to multiple beds every night. It would be way less optimized, for something that is only a problem in a relatively small minority of worlds. Still, it's a problem that we can work on. There is probably a middle ground between the current way of selecting beds and fully realistic, detailed pathfinding every night. We've also thought about other solutions, like special beds for certain jobs. Green beds for farmers, black beds for miners, grey beds for guards. If that's something that appeals to you, please let us know!
In general, we had a pretty relaxed week. We listened to feedback and watched pretty much all new Colony Survival videos on YouTube. We've discussed plans for future updates, but we haven't actually worked on the game a lot. For more than a year, we lived with the idea that we'd release 0.7.0 in a couple of months. The release really did feel like a burden was lifted of our shoulders. We're recuperating for a bit and are looking forward to the next updates! Bedankt voor het lezen :) Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2019-08-02 14:17:09 CET ] [ Original post ]