Last week, we had screenshots of the work-in-progress Statistics Menu in the blog. It was a messy combination of many thin, pixelated lines. It required a lot of technical work behind the scenes to make it work, but it wasnt very clear or beautiful. Well, thats obviously a problem so weve tried to improve that. Its going in the right direction! Heres a screenshot of the current menu (only available in an internal testbuild):
Youre now able to select and deselect individual items. That makes it a lot easier to discover the specific trends youre looking for. Using this system for a moment does instantly lead to the desire for a decent amount of improvements:

• A search bar to find specific items
• A button to toggle between a linear and a logarithmic scale
• More info on the axes, changing the color of the background to indicate whether its day or night
• Displaying information thats not # in stockpile, data like total amount of calories
• Making it clear which items youve selected even if they arent visible in the window on the left: perhaps something like the mock-up below

So theres still plenty of work to do, but that should result in a very useful Statistics Menu!
Mock-up, not functional yet [Colony Survival news ends here]

Virtual Reality

The fundamentals of hardware for gaming havent changed in at least twenty years. Youre going to need a keyboard & mouse or a controller and a stationary rectangular screen, and thats it. There have been all kinds of attempts to innovate like Wii-style motion controllers, Kinect and 3D screens, but these trends have stayed small or even died down again. There have been attempts to introduce VR headsets for a long time now, but they never seemed to gain a lot of traction. They had all kinds of problems: they were expensive, the resolution was low, in-game movement was difficult and resulted in motion sickness, there was too much lag. And there was a problematic vicious cycle: because barely anybody owned VR headsets, there was a shortage of decent VR games, and because of that shortage of games, nobody bought VR headsets. But we might be reaching the knee of the curve, and VR might become a lot more popular in the coming years. 2019 saw the release of popular VR-only games like Boneworks and Beat Saber, and in ten days Half-Life: Alyx will release. Last Monday, the Valve Index, Valves new VR headset, became available for purchase in Europe [again, apparently, after earlier stock was depleted a couple of months ago]. I instantly tried to order one, but the product is so popular that I was put on a waiting list. The shipping time seems to regularly change between 2-4 weeks and 8-10 weeks, so theres no telling when I will finally be able to use it, but Im really looking forward to it. The implications of VR are more than just strapping a screen to your face. Nearly all (traditional, non-VR) first person games work by letting you rotate the camera with your mouse, and allowing you to interact with the thing in the center of your screen. And that interaction is nearly always constrained to pressing a handful of mouse buttons and keys like LMB and F.
Now, dont read this as criticism of Arma - I love it tremendously and will purchase the $100 Deluxe Edition of Arma IV as soon as its available for pre-order. But Arma is a great example of what happens when you want a complex world with many options with traditional hardware. When you want to open a door, youve got to look at it, press a button, and select the right option from a list. Its not very natural, intuitive or smooth. (Hardcore Arma fans will correct me that there are shortcuts, and thats probably true, but the core of the problem remains) The Valve Index comes with two motion controllers that track their locations in 3D space, and they know with which fingers youre touching them. This means that you gain a lot of the freedom of motion youve got in real life. You dont have to look at the thing you want to interact with: you can look to the left while firing at a zombie to the right. And instead of reducing interactions to mere button presses, you can do things like a physical grabbing motion in real life which will be correctly repeated in-game. This opens up a lot of new gaming possibilities. Dont expect instant VR-support for Colony Survival. This is a long-term thing. We started working on this current project in 2013 - so our first VR-product might be a 2027 thing.

Covid-19

Two weeks ago, we wrote quite extensively about the new Coronavirus. We worried about it a lot that week, and we felt like we were an outlier in a world that wasnt really concerned. Well, today everyone seems to be very worried, so writing about our own worries here doesnt really add much. Some statistics for posteritys sake:

• 15,113 confirmed infections in Italy, 1016 deaths - nationwide lockdown, enforced isolation
• 804 confirmed infections in the Netherlands (+31% since yesterday), 10 deaths (+50% since yesterday)- smoothly following a curve that results in Italian situations in ~2 weeks
• And new since last week, 6 infections in the province where we live, 3 in the city where I live

The amount of infections and the consequences for events, the economy and daily life are rapidly growing. Luckily, governments and other organizations are taking measures, and countries like South Korea show that these can be highly effective. We wish all of you good luck and good health. Bedankt voor het lezen! Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

[ 2020-03-13 13:50:39 CET ] [ Original post ]