Wil's colony

We decided on a release date for the next update! Its Monday May 10. This gives us one big week to perfect the last couple of details.

This week, we added the last big new category to the statistics menu: info on idling colonists. When youve got a lack of workers with a certain job, your production chain will break down because of shortages. But the reverse can also happen: too many workers in one job, resulting in a lack of items to craft, or a lack of ingredients to craft those items.

Unlike in real life, idling workers dont have any benefits in Colony Survival. It doesnt cause them to relax and become happier; it doesnt make them ponder about their work methods resulting in boosted efficiency. Its a costly waste: these colonists dont produce anything but they keep consuming food and happiness items, and their mere presence attracts extra monsters every night.

But determining which workers are truly superfluous is pretty hard. Periods of idling come and go. Many colonies start the day furiously compensating for ammo lost during the day, but these tasks are often finished long before the day is over. Other shortages in the supply chain can cause idling to appear and disappear randomly throughout the day.

Accurately assessing this while physically strolling through your colony is pretty difficult, and the statistics menu makes it a lot easier. It counts the total amount of milliseconds spend idling per second, per job category. When lots of workers in a job category start idling, they generate a massive peak that is easy to identify. When you compare these peaks to the trend in earlier days, it becomes very easy to notice structural issues in your job allocation.



Weve made more progress this week. A couple of weeks ago, we added a new system allowing players to use commands in the search bar. These commands can be used to search for specific categories, or to filter out items based on other parameters. To make players familiar with this new system, weve added buttons to the stockpile. In the previously empty space next to the search bar, there are a couple of buttons that put helpful default commands into the search bar. In the screenshot below, you can see how this works with the combat button.



We also spend this week doing seemingly unimportant optimizations that are required to get the update up to release quality. One example is localization, another can be seen in the screenshot below. As you can see, some texts are rendered sharper than others. That has been fixed, but theyre the kind of unpredictable small problems that make the difference between functional and ready for release.



There are still a couple of similar problems waiting to be addressed. Right now, Zun is testing performance on worlds with lots of colonies with lots of colonists - like servers with many players. Weve also still got to look at the way this update impacts mods. And today, were starting a closed beta test that might result in unforeseen problems. But were pretty convinced that well be able to release update 0.7.3 in 9 days, on Monday May 10!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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