We made good progress on statistics this week! Its definitely not finished, but the underlying systems are mostly functional and they're giving interesting results. Theres an increasing number of options. Its now possible to display results from the past 24 hours, the past four days, or the past 24 days. Theres an Auto-scale option that automatically adjusts the graph to the size of the most numerous item. But theres also the alternative option to use a custom scale, limiting the graph to only display items up to a number like for example 100 or 2000. Many older colonies will have large excesses of certain items like straw or leaves, making an alternative to auto-scale very useful! Last but not least, theres a toggle to Only show changed. Some items like dirt and torches can stay unchanged for a long time, resulting in pretty meaningless horizontal lines across the graph. This toggle allows players to quickly remove them from the results.
The image above is an example of the current work-in-progress menu (only available in internal testbuilds). You can see that the first one-third of the graph covers nighttime, and its clearly visible when colonists start working. Most lines are stagnant during the night, but you can see the amount of gunpowder pouches and lead bullets drop, while the amount of linen pouches rises: the clear effect of musket guards. But other data is pretty unclear, a lot of the lines are hard to read. So thats our task for the coming weeks: make this more useful and legible. There will be an option to turn on/off specific items and categories, you should be able to highlight items by hovering over them, well update the look of the lines and the colors and the background. Theres also some other data wed like to track and display. One thing Zun really wants to know is the %-idleness. How many of your cooks/blacksmiths/etc are idling because they miss ingredients or have completed all orders, and when? You can imagine some jobs working hard at the start of the day to make projectiles, but spending the rest of the time idling. Having that data would be very useful to optimize your production.
A longer period of time is visible in this graph

Corona

Last week, we wrote quite a bit about Corona. When I started writing that blog, we had just received news of the first infection in the Netherlands. Yesterday, the amount of officially confirmed infections here jumped from 38 to 82. During the same day, Italian authorities confirmed that the amount of mortalities there jumped from ~100 to 148 (with nearly 4000 infections). And just before writing this blog, Corona claimed its first deadly victim in the Netherlands. Last weeks blog received quite a lot of reactions. Some people shared the same concerns, others thought people panicked way too much, and some wondered why a development blog about a game talked extensively about Corona. To answer that last question: theres multiple reasons. Firstly, were Dutch while a large part of Colony Survival players seem to be located in North America. Europe was initially hit more severe than North America, and it seems that Corona got relatively little attention there while we were pretty concerned about it. We wanted to explain our local problems to people who didnt know about them yet. Since the last blog, Corona has spread further in the United States as well and it seems to be getting a lot more attention there as well now. Secondly, were not a massive studio with offices spread around the world. We dont have separate departments where one focuses on game development and another focuses on practical stuff like health risks, human resources and risk management. Companies like Twitter have announced all kinds of measures to deal with Corona, and Im sure theyve got experts who are currently focused fulltime on this problem. Every hour we spend researching, thinking and talking about Corona is an hour where were not doing the same thing in regards to Colony Survival. And I can assure you that weve spent quite a couple of hours worried about Corona. Were not worried too excessively - even if we personally get infected, itll probably act like a regular flu because were young and healthy. But this is the first time in our lives that we experience a epidemic like this, and the quickly rising number of deaths is pretty scary. Were worried about more vulnerable older relatives, and problems like hospitals getting too crowded to deal with both Corona and regular health concerns at once. So we expect Corona to stay around the coming weeks and months, which will probably have some impact on the development of Colony Survival. Well keep you updated! Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2020-03-06 13:13:03 CET ] [ Original post ]