Work-in-progress terrain rendered with the new system
In the past month, Zun has made major progress on the new terrain generation! It uses a fundamentally new design philosophy.
In 2017, we released CS with arctic areas in the north and tropical areas in the south. We wanted to give players the opportunity to settle themselves in a different looking area. We did want to give players a large temperate area to find the ideal spot for their colony, so the distance youve got to travel before finding another biome is pretty huge.
In 2019, we wanted to make these distant biomes useful for gameplay. We added the multiple colonies feature, and unique resources per biome. We liked the idea, but it was disappointing in practice. Travelling and trading between colonies is very tedious, and the rewards arent worth it.
0.9.0 fixes that core problem by adding outposts, which are like new colonies, except that their stockpile is merged with the main colony. This makes it a lot easier to set them up and to benefit from their unique products.
More from the new terrain generator
Instead of demanding that players travel huge distances to distant biomes, were now reworking the world to have more variety in the spawn biome. Instead of having random patches of arctic and tropic intermingling, the spawn biome is now intended to be mostly temperate, interspersed by fens and heaths. These fens and heaths contain unique and valuable resources. Some ores are only available at mountain tops.
Its basically the same ideas as 0.7.0, but the barriers are a lot lower, and the rewards arent just some relatively useless endgame items - the rewards are now a core part of the tech tree.
Fundamental changes to the world generation are pretty much always breaking old savegames. We can add new jobs, items, monsters and weapons to 0.9.1, but we cant easily overhaul the terrain generation there. So this is something weve got to get right before the update releases. Were not merely making some adjustments to change the terrain a bit, were reworking and optimizing the way the system works to the core.
That reworked system is now capable of rendering pretty nice terrains and the results can be seen in this blog! Its very much work in progress though, it should look quite different in a couple of weeks.
Threat-shifters
In previous versions of CS, the amount of monsters that assaulted your colony every night was purely determined by the amount of colonists living in your colony. In 0.9.0, these colonists generate only a small amount of threat, and most threat is generated by unlocking certain important technologies in the tech tree. This makes it a lot easier and more rewarding to recruit large amounts of colonists.
When you start a new outpost, this threat is divided proportionally according to the amount of colonists living there. So imagine there is a total of 1000 threat. If the main colony has 200 colonists, and the outpost has 50 inhabitants, the main colony gets 4/5th = 800 of the threat, and the outpost gets 200 of the threat.
When you expand the outpost until it also has 200 inhabitants, the threat is equally divided: 500 for the main colony, 500 for the outpost. This means the amount of monsters appearing at the gates of the main colony actually decreases!
Work-in-progress "monster attraction statues"
Once I playtested this, I instantly noticed how 'relieving' my outpost was for my colony. It lost some threat, and its defenses were overwhelmed by monsters a lot less frequently. Which leads to the thought of pushing this further. What if I build a dedicated fortress, one that doesn't contain hundreds of colonists which all need to farm the fields surrounding the place, with only one heavily defended entrance, and lead the monsters there?
But that would require building a basement filled to the brim with colonists... Unless, you actually turn this into an item! Weve added some kind of statues that attract monsters. Instead of having to recruit a bunch of colonists in your fortress to get the attention of monsters, you can place these objects to instantly shift a part of the total threat to that outpost. This opens up a lot of new possibilities!
NPC-models
While Zun is programming the new terrain generator, I'm working on new models for the NPCs. These aren't in-game yet; we're striving to release the beta first.
Most of the textured objects in Colony Survival are 1x1x1 blocks. That allows us to make square textures relatively easily. Currently, CS contains one way more complicated, textured 3D-object: Harry.
Harry is the internal name for our NPC model. Harry is used for colonists, monsters and players. Harry has a lot of small surfaces, and the way to transfer textures to all these surfaces is to use a UV map. A UV map is basically a relationship between specific areas on a 3D-model, and specific areas on a flat, square image.
Harry's colonist texture
That makes it a lot harder to make textures for Harry, than to make textures for square blocks. So for over five years, we basically ignored Harry - oops! Weve added textures for new blocks, we added new 3D objects that were vertex painted, but we didnt touch Harry. Harry became a scary, complicated mess of old texturing and animating techniques that we didnt want to break, so we left it alone.
Until now. Ive been working on making new, vertex-painted models for both colonists and monsters, and Ive been animating them. Vertex-painting is the technique that weve used on for example the banner since 2017, and a bit later we started to use that technique to create non-block-shaped job spots.
A problem I noticed when test-playing the 0.9.0 devbuild, is the indistinguishability of different monster types. We introduced some new monsters with huge amounts of HP, and currently, the only way to recognize them is by eye colour. Which I have a hard time remembering, and which is difficult to notice in a glance from a distance!
Vertex-painted alternative
Giving them a new texture on the Harry model is also difficult. But with the new vertex-painted NPC models, its a lot easier! And instead of merely repainting them, I can also adjust the 3D model itself. This makes it a lot easier to add multiple monster types that are properly distinguishable, which also opens up more gameplay possibilities. We cant add deeper variation in the combat if the variation isnt clear to players.
Beta
Zun's making good progress on terrain generation, and when thats finished, we can start opening the beta! Were fairly certain that the next blog will contain instructions on how to join the beta and get access to the 0.9.0 dev build :D
Bedankt voor het lezen!
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