Ape Apps

I am trying to add a device and allow sharing with my computer. When I type the password for access to computer the last 7 items I put in changes to something else. For instance - when I put in an "@" it shows correctly but I get that it can't access due to wrong password and the "@" shows as a "%". I have tried several times and it does it every time. It changes the last 6 places in the password to something else- it always seem to be changed to the same thing every time. I installed a different keypad, one that shows what I have typed. It shows exactly what I put in but when I hit the save button it comes back with incorrect password showing the wrong stuff.

Sorry to be a pest on this but I figure you'd like to know that I still can't get my upgrade. When I try to sign in from the EZ Register I get a message that the username or password are incorrect. I ask to reset the password and I get a reset link in my gmail inbox. I create a new password but the same thing happens. I've tried this three times. BTW the username password combination always works fine for opening the forum and posting messages (like this).

Network Browser from Ape Apps is quickly becoming the number one network management and media streaming app for Android, but many users are confused as to how to successfully set up a network connection between their computer and their Android device. The following instructions show how to establish a network link using Network Browser for Android and the Windows operating system.

Step 1: Install Network Browser
Obviously the first step is you need to download and install the free Network Browser app onto your device. It is available for both Android and Kindle devices:

• Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ape.apps.networkbrowser
• Amazon Appstore: https://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android?p=com.ape.apps.networkbrowser
• Direct .apk Download: https://market.ape-apps.com/network-browser.html

Step 2: Enable Sharing on your PC
If you already have a home network up and running then you can skip the next couple of steps. On some Windows installations, network sharing is disabled by default for security purposes. To enable it, do the following:

• Open the Control Panel on your PC and click on Network and Internet.
• From the Network and Internet screen. click on the Network and Sharing Center option.
• On the Network and Sharing Center screen, you should see a Change advanced sharing settings option on the right hand side. Click on it.
• Scroll down to the Password protected sharing section, and put a check in the Turn on password protected sharing option.

Step 3: Share a folder
This step is simple. Once sharing is enabled on your PC, right click on a folder you would like to share, and select Properties. From the properties window, select the Sharing tab, and click on the Share button at the top:


In the File Sharing window that opens up, select users that you would like to share the folder with (choose an account you have access to) and then click on the Share button on the bottom right corner.

Step 4: Note your IP address
In many cases, Network Browser will automatically discover your PC at this point. On some networks though, you will need to set up a manual connection using your IP address. To find it, open the Command Prompt app on your computer (you can do this by pressing the windows+R keys, and then typing "cmd" in the run window). From there, type ipconfig and press enter. There will be several options that come up. If you are on Wireless, you will want to find the section that is labeled Wireless LAN. It might look something like this:


The value you are interested in is the IPv4 Address. It will probably be something like 192.168.x.x, unless you have a more customized setup, in which case you probably already know what your IP address is.

Step 5: Set up Network Browser
Open up Network Browser on your Android device. At this point the app may automatically discover your PC. If so, great! You're done. Otherwise, open the slide-out menu and select Manual Connection at the top of the menu.

Step 6: Fill out your network settings
The last step is to input your PC information into the app. The Server Address will be where you type in the IP address you marked down earlier. Server Nickname can be anything you want to help you identify the server. Domain will be blank in most cases. Username and Password will be the Windows account settings for the user that you added to your shared folder back in step 3.


Step 7: Enjoy
For the most part, that should be it. Setup will vary by operating system and version, but it should be similar for most platforms.

Need additional help? If you are having problems, feel free to post them here in the forum and I or someone else will respond with help. Chances are, if you are having an issue, somebody else might be having the same one!

In preparation for tying My Colony into Ape Apps accounts, the upcoming release of the My Tokens app, and switching RP Forums over to the new forum software, the Ape Apps Account Portal has been updated with a few new necessary features.

First off, there is now finally a password recovery feature if you forget your account information. Just click on the 'Forgot Password' link on the login page.

Once you log in, there are a couple of new things. First of all, you can now log out, both on the account portal page, and globally.

Logging out everywhere and purging all sessions will sign you out of any app or game you have been signed in to. Right now for some reason it works on apps and games but not the forum here, but I'm working on that...

Additionally, there is now a change password feature in the account portal, which is long overdue.

Finally, I have added a session management section, where you can view each active login session on your account from any device you have signed in with, and you can log out each device individually from the account portal. This will be handy if for some reason you logged in to My Colony on a school or library computer and forgot to log out when you were done, you can actually just log yourself out from anywhere.

So anyway, that is what's new with the accounts page. There will be more coming in the future as well, but I needed these aspects to be in place before I could add account login to my top game.

do you have any weird characters in your password, or did you do a password reset at some point? You dont have to say "out loud" here but maybe the website still had a cached token allowing you to stay logged in after a password change or something. You can always try doing a reset: https://accounts.ape-apps.com/startreset.php

People forget their passwords, and most websites have a link that allows you to reset your password. If I forget my password this feature would really help.

My password does not work for https://mycolony.online as well, only for https://www.ape-apps.com. Password reset updated password on the latter, but not the former.

The list of complete changes coming to My Colony v1.0.0 just keeps growing. So far Regional map generation and Power/Bandwidth utility grids have been completely rewritten, and now I am adding another major change to the list. Currently in testing, the way the engine handles colonists is now also being completely rewritten, as it applies to their jobs, entertainment, housing, education, and medical. Basically, the entire colonist simulation engine is being rewritten, which, along with the other changes already mentioned, is making v1.0.0, at least under the hood, almost a completely different game....

Before discussing the new changes in detail, I should explain how/why the existing system came to be. Colonists were first introduced to the game in v0.3.0 (July 30, 2016) at a time when the biggest housing unit was the actual Lander that you started out in. The game was designed as the Colonist being one of the central features of the simulation. Each colonist had a name, a job, his own stats, and went about his life in the colony. He had an energy level, a happiness level, a day/night sleep cycle, and so on. The intention was for each colonist to be a unique entity with it's own relationships, feelings, etc, sort of like in the Sims.

As time went on and the game grew though, it started morphing into more of a city-builder type game VS an individual colonist simulator. So as more (and bigger) buildings and features got added to the game, the original system based on the individual colonist was simply expanded and adapted in order to keep pace. Eventually the game got to where colonies with populations in the hundreds of thousands and even millions were possible, but the core colonist simulation engine remained as it always had been.

Simulating that many individual colonists brought along major performance and memory issues, especially on mobile. I tried to work around it by implementing a "virtual avatar" system, whereby after a certain population, the game just extrapolated out statistics based on a virtual avatar, where by one "real" colonist would represent 5,000 or more "virtual" colonists. This worked OK for performance, but it always caused strange statistical problems for things like Entertainment, Schooling, Medical, and Work. For example, if one colonist would get sick or unhappy for some reason, all 5,000 of the "virtual" colonists he represented would also take on his sickness/anger, which would lead to situations where 500 virtual colonists are not working.

For the last few years, each update is a constant battle against the old colonist system, with performance issues and complaints about certain stats not lining up as expected. Game functions like Entertainment/Medical,Education barely work in a consistent manner. Moreover, the colonist day/night cycle, which I thought was somewhat neat/unique/realistic to the game, was often confusing for new players who couldn't understand why nobody was at work in their buildings.

Anyway, I think it's long been time for a change, so with v1.0.0 I am stripping out pretty much all colonist-level individuality and data, and moving to a pure statistical model, more in line with a traditional city-simulator type game. After this update, the colonists you see walking around are pretty much for show only, and will no longer have their own individual stats. You will not be able to click on a colonist to see his name, where he lives, what is job is, etc. You will not be able to assign a colonist to a specific job. The individual colonist no longer matters.

So that's the sad part. It's sort of sad because I liked all that stuff about the game, but the reality is that those kinds of things are for a different type of game that My Colony no longer represents, and keeping them in the game has only caused performance issues and forced strange workarounds in the code.

So let's discuss the new system that is currently being tested. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, all colony stats, including productivity, health, happiness, IQ, etc, are based on (roughly) on the overall land value/approval rating of the specific areas of your colony. It sounds more confusing, but I will explain more.

Housing structures are now the basic unit responsible for generating statistics in the game, taking place of the individual colonist. Housing structures now have internal statistics based on the availability of Schools, Entertainment, and Medical facilities in their proximity. While not yet implemented, there are also internal stats for Crime, which I plan on adding (along with Police Stations/Prisons) in v1.0.1 or v1.0.2.

While these numbers might be tweaked before the final release, you basically need enough Medical to accommodate 5% of your population, enough Schools for 20% of the population, and enough Entertainment for 15% of the population. These facilities must also be within range of the housing units. Medical facilities need to be within a 50 tile radius, schools 35 tile, and entertainment 25 tile. So basically, on a small sized map, an entertainment facility in the center of the map can theoretically service the entire map.

For work, job sites have to be within a 50 tile range of available housing. Jobs are prioritized by distance to house, IQ requirements, and pay. IQ level is impacted by the School rating of the housing unit. Each housing unit keeps track of the average travel distance it's residents must take to get to work, which impacts it's land value/approval rating.

The approval/land value rating of a structure is based on how fully it's needs are met in those categories, with Crime soon to be added as well. When colonists look for new places to live, they will place priority on high value dwellings first, and only reluctantly fill in the slums if necessary. When crime is implemented, criminals will originate from slum areas of town, so the more low-value areas your colony has, the more crime will be generated. Crime in turn will further lower the value of the area.

With this new system, the colonist day/night cycle is gone. As long as approval/land value conditions are good, buildings will be operating at full capacity at all times, so there is no more sitting there waiting for workers to come back on duty.

Some people will not like this new system as the change is large and will probably render many existing city layouts ineffective. You now have to think about the macro-conditions of each area of your city, making sure that there is sufficient medical, education, and entertainment for all residential areas. Since these stats were largely underutilized before, most existing cities will probably have shortages right off the bat. I plan on introducing new education and medical facilities as I get further along on the v1.0.0 update, as they will probably be needed.

There are some positives that come along with this change. Firstly, save file size and memory usage is greatly reduced, as the game no longer keeps a reference table of all workers/buildings. The game no longer conducts the expensive job/medical/school/entertainment search routines for individual colonists, which involved expensive operations of sorting all in-game structures by distance from each colonist, and then weeding through destination candidates one by one.

I estimate that most colonies will see improved performance with this change, particularly on the high end. In addition, this new system will allow me to implement probably the most requested feature of the last 3 years - mass transit, which I tentatively plan on introducing in v1.0.3 with either a new subway or monorail system (depending on what I want to draw). Since the engine no longer has to figure out paths for each individual worker, it now only needs to make sure that a mass-transit system is fully connected to itself, and then figure out a building's distance to the overall transit network, making it's implementation much, much simpler and less performance intensive than trying to resolve mass transit paths for each individual colonist.

So I've written a book here, but the reason for the long write up is because this is probably absolutely the single largest engine change to the game since it first came out, and it represents a complete rewrite of one of the core mechanics of the game. I am trying to design it in a way that will not feel overly different to long-time players and will not be overly disruptive to existing games, but with a change on this scale, you know some people will be impacted.

If you have issues/observations with the new system, you can post them in this thread. I will be working on this particular part of the game for a few more days here. Be advised, that if you open a colony on v1.0.0 from this point on, the engine changes are sufficiently large that re-opening your game in a pre-v1.0.0 client may cause issues, as v1.0.0 deletes a lot of depreciated properties from in-game objects.

Here is a collection on concepts that I am leaning towards for My Colony 2 as of today (20200624). This is all subject to change and I can be convinced by the community of anything, so keep the suggestions and feedback coming. This is going to be a super long post featuring all of my thoughts on MC2 thus far. Feel free to criticize anything and everything here. My feelings will not be hurt and nothing is set in stone. This is a starting point for community discussion to help make MC2 the best game it can be!

Relationship to My Colony 1
MC2 is an entire new game, not an upgrade to the original, or a version 2.0. It may use completely different concepts. It will not be tied in to the same server. Game files will not transfer over, as MC2 will probably have completely different buildings/tech tree, etc.

This does not mean that MC1 will be going away. I will continue to support the original and the server indefinitely. I realize that a lot of people like the style of game that MC1 is and do not want anything to change, so the original is staying where it is. It may continue to receive new content as well as bug fixes, but I do not plan on any further changes to the gameplay mechanics or core engine going forward.

That said, as long as MC1 remains popular and people keep playing it and paying for it, I will keep the game going.

Business Model/Monetizing
This is the least fun part of development, but a necessary one in order to make creating a game feasible. The business model for MC1 was tacked on as an afterthought, and reflecting back I do not like the concept of certain structures and units being premium.

None of this is set in stone, but here are my initial thoughts on the business model. My Colony 2 will be a straight paid app on all app stores, with everything unlocked at the base price, no in-app purchases. No advertising anywhere. The exception is on Ape Web Apps and the Ape Market, where it will be free, everything unlocked, but with no access to multiplayer or custom content. Maybe only one map type available.

Current My Colony 1 is basically already like this on Desktop, with the mobile client being free with additional IAP, so this change just makes the mobile version match up with what is already on desktop.

Now, I do anticipate the dissatisfaction of Android players not having the free version in the Play Store. However, Android support for Progressive Web Apps is sufficiently advanced now that you can just install the Web version to your homescreen like an app and it's hardly any different. Same with iOS. And MC1 will still be available for free like it always has been.

No free version on the mobile app stores will likely mean less players, and I understand this. But I like the idea of just buying a game and having the whole thing, not worrying about IAP's and not having any advertising.

Client/Server Structure
The biggest change to MC2 is it's design from the ground up as a multiplayer game. This does not mean that you cannot play single player, but it is being designed specifically for multiplayer.

MC1 has limited multiplayer, which basically consists of chat and trading/gifting resources. You can play together on a multiplayer region, but all you are really doing is sharing atmosphere and seeing thumbnails of other players' colonies. Not really very multiplayery (is that a word?). The MC1 multiplayer is also global and centralized, meaning everything has to go through the global My Colony server.

My Colony 2 multiplayer will be decentralized, meaning no global server that everybody plays on. Why am I doing this, because it seems like a downgrade? Look at every game out there with real global multiplayer, not just chat and trading. That takes massive infrastructure, and you pay for it with either a monthly subscription or endless IAP's. That's the only way it's really possible, and I don't think anybody wants that if you really stop and think it through.

The only realistic way to add real multiplayer to the game without investing in a massive infrastructure and charging big money for the game is to decentralize it. And since I am not Blizzard and do not want to spend my whole life maintaining MC2 servers, I am adopting a decentralized approach.

What does this mean? My Colony 2 will actually be designed as two separate applications in one, the client and the server.

The game client will be fairly light weight. It's job is to receive data from the server application and render it to the screen, and pass instructions as to what the player wants to do onto the server. That's pretty much it, and it should be fairly performant. Even though the game is moving to 3d, I still expect it to perform better than MC1, simply because 3d hardware rendering performs better than 2d software rendering.

The game server is much more interesting and is where all of the game mechanics take place, but since the server does not have to worry about handling the UI or making drawing calls, it actually has a bit more overhead to work with than on MC1. The two most expensive operations in MC1 are the rendering and the pathfinding. In MC2, the server is eliminating the rendering, and I also want to greatly reduce the pathfinding, leaving more headroom for actual fun stuff, like game mechanics simulation.

So in MC2, the game relationship is between client(s) and server. Whenever you create a new game in MC2, you are creating a new server, and then connecting to it with a client. The server is saved and retained between plays, where the client only exists while it is in use, and is not saved. So the point I just want to get across is that the client is really not that important, the server is.

The server and client code are both included in the My Colony 2 game. You will have the option of starting a regular game or creating a dedicated server. When you start a regular game, you are spinning up both a client and server and creating a 1-1 connection between the two right on your device. You can also make your game joinable by friends or others on your local network for multiplayer.

You can also create a dedicated server. When you create a MC2 dedicated server, you will be presented with a special server GUI that allows you to be in full control of the game. The server will continue to process game data as long as it is running, even if no players/clients are connected. A dedicated server will be able to establish custom game rules and parameters, and have mods installed that will be transferred to any client who connects. You will be able to make a dedicated server open to the public, or by invite only, or by specifying a list of accounts who are able to join. It's up to the server. A dedicated server will be able to moderate it's players however they want, the server can adjust resource levels, ban players for cheating, or anything. It's all up to the server owner.

The game data is saved only on the server, and the server owner will be responsible for making backups. I expect game files to be a lot bigger than MC1, so I am not going to be implementing Cloud Sync, which is known to cause corruption on larger files anyway. The ability to export and backup data will be built right into the game as usual.

Because of the way it's designed, even if you only want to play single player, it still may be desirable to set up a private dedicated server. For instance, you could run a private MC2 dedicated server on your powerful home PC that is always on/connected to the internet. Then you can connect to your server from your tablet/phone/laptop/another window on your computer, wherever you are, and your game is always there waiting for you, and all of the processing is being done on the more powerful computer.

The Game World/Game Files
In MC1, the game world is divided into cities and regions, and each city is a separate game file. In MC2, there are no cities and regions, there are planets.

This is something I am aping from Minecraft. A planet is like a regular city file in MC1, except is extends out in every direction to infinity, so you do not have to worry about running out of space for your city. A planet can have multiple cities and multiple players building cities at the same time.

Planets will be procedurally generated, and new areas will be generated in real-time as needed. Each planet type will have different biomes like in Minecraft, so that different environments and different resources are available in different parts on the planet.

This system means that you will have to build up trade networks with other cities or make additional settlement outposts across the planet in order to bring more resource types back to your colony. In MC1, practically every resource in the game is available with a square mile of your lander. This doesn't really make sense. In MC2 you will have to go out and find resources, and then build up a network for bringing them back into your city.

Technically, the MC2 world is still a big 2d grid like in MC1, but each tile does have an elevation, a z-index, for varied terrain elevations. Different resources might be found at different elevations and in different biomes. You will also be able to adjust the terrain in-game, like building up dirt to level out construction areas. There will be flat areas good for building, low canyons, and hilly or mountainous areas.

Also like in Minecraft, the terrain is generated on the fly and only transferred to the client in "chunks" as needed. So your client will only contain the data for the area that you are currently looking at, and the immediate surrounding areas. As you scroll around the map, areas you are no longer looking at will be disposed from memory as new areas are loaded from the server.

Construction / Resource Gathering and Rovers
I would really like to get rid of Rovers completely and simulate everything. It's not that I hate rovers, they are so helpful and adorable. The issue is with the pathfinding. Just driving rovers around the map takes up a huge percentage of the MC1 processing time, for what is essentially a visual effect.

Pathfinding is both CPU and memory intensive on anything larger than a medium sized MC1 map, and in MC2 the map sizes are being expanded infinitely larger. It's not just as simple as "only path finding around a certain area from the rover." Before you can even calculate pathfinding operations, you first have to generate a pathfinding map and load it into memory. The maps will be more expensive than in MC1 owing to the introduction of terrain elevation, as there will now be cliffs to work around. Each time a new structure is placed the pathfinding map needs to be recalculated. With the game being multiplayer, this will have to be taking place on a larger scale. It is one of the features holding MC1 back, due to all of the CPU time that must be dedicated to solving rover paths.

The issue of course, is that everybody likes rovers. Even I like rovers. Would the game be less fun without them? I don't know. If you could just turn off Rover Rendering in the engine settings and you didn't even see them, but everything continued to operate as normal, would it make a difference to the game, or would it matter? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't.

Everything a Rover does can be simulated for a fraction of the CPU and memory cost.

This is the largest part of MC2 that I don't have an answer to. I can't just remove rovers because that would be a blow to the fans of MC1. I also cringe thinking of all of the months wasted on optimizing path finding and the 1 star complaints about performance, all relating to a path finding feature in what is essentially a city building game.

There are options.

I could always just keep rovers in the game as they are and just keep working around the processing issues that come with it. In a single player game or a server with only a few active players at once, it probably wouldn't be a very big hit.

I have also considered just simulating rovers, sort of like colonists are just simulated in MC1. For example, you don't even have to build your own rovers. But when you place a new construction order, little rovers drive up onto the construction site and build your building anyway. These rovers do not exist on the server, but you see them building on the client. Same way for moving resources around. On the server it is just simulated, but on the client, you see a rover driving around doing all of the work. This would still require path finding, but each client would be doing their own path finding on the visual rover effect, and the player could turn it off if it became a performance issue.

If the client could just visually simulate things like rovers, colonists, police cars, busses, etc, they would all still be there visually making your city look alive, but the server wouldn't even have to worry about them.

Maybe there are other options too that I am not thinking of? All feedback on Rovers is welcome. I want the game to be performant, but I also don't want to go against the fans, so please let me know what you think either way.

Graphics
MC1 is a software rendered game using the HTML5 canvas element, arranging .png and .svg tile images onto a 2d isometric grid. Most of the graphics processing is done by the main CPU and not the graphics card, so graphics performance is largely defined by how good your processor is. This is why the game runs a lot better on desktop vs mobile, or even on iPhone vs android, and iPhone processors tend to be a bit better.

The problems is that the CPU also has to process the game, so trying to do everything at once gets expensive, especially on mobile devices.

My Colony 2 is moving to WebGL for graphics processing, which is a javascript based implementation of OpenGL that handles rendering on the GPU. This should lead to far better performance on most devices.

My original idea was to use Blender for all of the games building models. The graphics were going to be awesome. But when I dug into Blender and started working with it, I remembered how I am not actually a graphics designer, and it was going to take me forever to make all of the models for this game.

My other idea was to make blocky pixelated type graphics using my own Voxel Paint application (https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/). This means lower quality visuals but much higher output and probably better rendering performance as well. It's also so easy to use that anybody could make their own MC2 models, my wife even offering to help design structures for the game (she is a big Minecraft fan).

At the end of the day, My Colony 1 was never known for high quality graphics, but I thought that with MC2 I could really make it look great. After putzing around with Blender though, I have to acknowledge my own personal limitations. Basically, I can either spend months learning how to make great 3d models in Blender, or I can spend months working on the game code. I know which one I'd rather do. So I am probably going to go with the pixelated look, simply because it is something that I can actually do myself within a realistic timeframe, and it will also go well with the next point I'm about to explain, which is modding.

I know some people will not like a pixelated looking game. This is one of those areas where I have to say "tough," unless somebody is willing so supply me with hundreds of 3d models free of charge, which is what it is going to take in order to do this properly.

Modding
Customization is going to be huge in MC2 compared to the original. Given the global online multiplayer in MC1, custom content could not realistically be allowed in the game. The decentralized nature of MC2 changes everything though, and modding and customization, as well as all of the tools needed to make it happen, are going to be baked right into the client.

In MC2, the basic "unit" of the game is the building. Everything is going to be pretty much based on buildings, and their relationship to each other. This is basically how MC1 works as well, so this is nothing new. What is going to be knew is My Colony 2's build in Building Editor.

I am going to be creating MC2 using the games' bulit-in editor, and so the same editor I use to make the game is going to be available to all players.

Each building in the game is going to be stored as a building file, and the base game will ship with all of its standard building files, which will be loaded at runtime. This differs from MC1 where all building data is stored in a single JSON file that is shipped with the game, which cannot be easily edited.

A building file will contain three parts.

The first is the JSON formatted definition data, with information about the name of the building, what it does, what it generates, etc. All of the properties that a building can have will be stored in that data.

The second part is the model information, which will essentially be an embedded Voxel Paint file.

The third part is a small (maybe like 64x64 pixel) thumbnail or icon representing the building, which will show up on the construction sidebar and various places throughout the UI.

The three above parts are all packaged into a single file which can be added to the game client, posted online for easy sharing, or what have you. A dedicated server can include custom building files that will automatically be distributed to clients when they join the game. Each building file will have a unique UUID and version information, so if a client already has the same version of a building file that a server does, it will not need to re-transfer the data upon connection.

This system is actually a very powerful change over the original My Colony, and unlocks essentially limitless possibilities for the game. This also makes it a lot easier for the community to participate in development of the game. A creator who makes a great building idea can distribute it online where it is tested out and balanced by the community. If it works in practice and everyone likes it, the file can be included in the base game.

If you want to host a crazy dedicated server with a bunch of custom buildings that totally change the game, you can do so.

I have no idea what kind of buildings people will dream up, but including the content creation tools right into the base game will be huge, I hope. And I plan on making the process as easy as I possibly can, so that anybody can create a building. Using Voxel Paint, if you have an idea and the ability to build a house in Minecraft, you should be able to make it a reality. And being able to make something and then instantly import it into your game makes it simple to test out concepts and balance them right there on your own device.

It's possibly that nobody will care about modding or making buildings, but it still doesn't hurt to add the tools right into the game. If nothing else, it will still make it easier for me to create new content for updates, versus having to go through and edit JSON data manually.

However, it's also possible that everybody will be making custom content and the game takes off in crazy directions that we never even imagined!

It could even be possible to allow mod creators to somehow sell their mods in-game and get paid in real money, maybe through PayPal or something. That is a thought for another day though, and not a current actual plan.

Conclusion
These are my current thoughts on MC2 as of this day. Like I said, nothing is set in stone yet and everything is subject to change. I wanted to put everything out there so that the community knows what page I am on and where I am headed, and has time to stop me if I am about to drive over a cliff.

Remember that I am open to all feedback, so if you have ideas, please don't just be quite about it, or don't just complain about them in a Discord chat somewhere, because I probably will not see them. Part of being a game developer is getting hate e-mail on a regular basis on why my games suck, so believe me that your being critical of the above ideas will not hurt my feelings, and will be nothing new to me.

The whole purpose of doing all of this beforehand is to get real feedback from the community so that MC2 can go in a direction that we all like and we will all have fun playing. Once I start getting into the code, it gets harder and harder to make changes, so if there is something you don't like, now is the time to mention it. Think of all of the things I could not effectively implement in MC1 because they would require massive time-consuming changes to the entire engine. So getting ideas in right now is how we avoid that.

Like MC1, I'm trying to make something fun that I myself want to play, not a game that is going to just nickel and dime players with constant ads and IAPs so I can sit on a yacht somewhere. I think the new decentralized play model will allow the game to outlast the original. Basically, if I get in a wreck and die, the MC1 server will be forever down within a few weeks. With MC2, once players can make their own servers and create their own content right from within the game, what happens to me becomes more irrelevant, which is the way it should be.

Anyway, if you got this far, then thanks for reading my small novel. Please give some thoughts to where you want to see the game go, or discuss it with other players and really think about all of the concepts I laid out here. I want to start working on the game soon, maybe as early as mid-next month. I plan to start with the world-generating engine and the in-game building creation tools first, so people can start testing that out and seeing what it is like to make their own content.

So between now and then, if any of the above ideas are way off the mark, I need to know now. So think about it, let me know, and thanks for helping me create the follow-up to My Colony. I think it's going to be fun!

Any chance of a "save password" feature for the windows client? It seems like every time I play the game I need to re-enter my credentials. Because I use a password manager, it's a bit of a hurdle to login each time.

GrindThisGame said:Any chance of a "save password" feature for the windows client? It seems like every time I play the game I need to re-enter my credentials. Because I use a password manager, it's a bit of a hurdle to login each time.

Sure, it's supposed to save it automatically, I will check into it.

Hello. I couldn't find your email to tell you about an issue i am having. I would like to buy the premium version but it won't let me use my Google account (wont accept my password...to be specific. And i changed the password twice to see if that works). Can you please help. Thanks 😊

SupaLuba19 said:Hello. I couldn't find your email to tell you about an issue i am having. I would like to buy the premium version but it won't let me use my Google account (wont accept my password...to be specific. And i changed the password twice to see if that works). Can you please help. Thanks 😊

If you are using a desktop PC you can buy it in-game using the Ape Apps Launcher https://market.ape-apps.com/ape-apps-launcher.html

or get the license key file from this website:
https://apps.ape-apps.com/antiquitas/purchase.html

Are you sure you are using the right password?
Maybe use the password reset just in case.

I cant use the colony chat or commonwealth chat i have made sure my password is typed correctly even resetted my password to a new one and still cant use chat

I cant use the colony chat or commonwealth chat i have made sure my password is typed correctly even resetted my password to a new one and still cant use chat

Same issue here. Changed my password and still says my user name and password don't match the record.

Version 0.60.0 chrome ---- ( ALL platforms ) Well I now know what how and why And even can tell you what to change in your programming to solve one of the most talked about game problems people get .

So Ill post the rating photo and tell you why it is happing take some time to understand what I am saying .

Ok so my latest colony gets around 65 k or so have them on LIGHT work load !<<< ( this is important )
And every thing is running nice and smoothly rating staying rock steady at 100 %
around 65 k I added another 15 k jobs - colonist at the same time decided that ((( Light work load just was not producing well enough so switched to REGULAR work load .

That's when rating starts acting strange if you look closely at the photo it starts going down to 98 and back to 100 over and over . THAT IS THE TIMES when colonist get fatigued and go rest . then when rested are once again totally happy .
Now that in its self is NOT the issue . What happens next is the game starts getting all the colonists in the same work rhythm ( this is old news and I use to forced them all to work and rest at the same time ) so now the game its self ends up causing all the colonists to work and rest at the same time .
Thing is what happens next is now all the colonists get tired at once and ratings start drooping farther then they all go back to work and ratings rise BUT not back to 100 % each time they get tired the ratings drop more and each time they go back to work the rating go less high .
Now the feed back loop has started and it ends with the colonist all mad and protesting and a dead colony .

The SOLUTION !!!!!!! Change how LOW the colonists energy GETS before they go off work . now they go off work around 30 % energy change that to 45 % THEN most important Speed up the whole cycle slightly . Excample - NOW they go to work and stay-- say 15 mints before getting tired and going home change it so it takes say 10 mints .
((( IMPORTANT this will not work UNLESS you change When the colonist go off because of energy LVS That Is the biggest thing that is causing the problem .

Today I am beginning to push out the v0.71.0 update to My Colony, and it should be coming to all available platforms over the next few days. This release further builds out and improves the Regions feature, and finally adds a Capitol building to the Reptilians.

First off, let's discuss the new Region updates. The first change you will notice is that now on the Region overview screen, there will be a faint dotted line showing the borders of your various region cities, allowing you to more easily discern the difference between maps. I had noticed that once you get several cities right next to each other, it was becoming difficult to tell them apart, especially when they are using different map sizes.

This change just makes it a bit easier to see what is going on in your region.

The next change is that road tiles now "link" between maps. Before you get excited, I do not mean that rovers and colonists are walking between maps (yet), but now when you have a map with a road tile built up to the edge of a map, that same road tile will appear on the edge of adjacent maps, if there is an open spot on the map for the tile. This right now is mainly to provide a bit of continuity on the region overview display between maps, as you can see in the example screenshot above. Right now it only works on roads, but I plan on doing something similar with rivers soon.

The next change to Regions, which is a big one, is that resource consumption and production for all region maps will now continue as long as any city in your region is currently active. Region cities continue to produce resources even on the region overview display. It wont take much playtime for you to realize that this is a major game changer for region-based games.

There are other small changes and improvements to the Region system, and you will notice these while you play, but they aren't major enough to describe each in detail. Basically, the entire Region system runs a lot better than it did one version ago, and the improvements will continue over the coming updates.

The next change I made was minor but will be helpful to some. The GBT now shows a little status display at the bottom, outlining your current max trade capacity, as well as the amount of each resource that you currently have available to trade.

This is helpful because often I would find myself making trades, but the GBT window covers up the resource output display, so you don't know how much you need to buy or sell. This should help make the GBT just a bit better. In addition to this, the trade frequency timer has been reduced, so you can now make trades faster than you could before.

Next up is the new Capitol building for the Reptilian race, the Chamber of Laws.

Now that Reptilians can have a capitol to call their own, the next update will be bringing Reptilian embassies into the game. I also need a new structure to produce Oil, for when the map runs dry.

Finally, some older structures have gained the ability to be flipped. All Microchip Factories, the Civic Center, and the reptilian Antanium Impactor.

I expect to maintain weekly updates to the game going forward, and the next few will continue to focus on Reptilians and Regions. There might be a slight lag before the next update, and I am going to be preparing Antiquitas for it's Steam release, but after that, it is back to My Colony updates.

Enjoy the changes, let me know of the issues, and stay tuned for a whole lot more!

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

The first major change, which actually inadvertently started a domino effect of changes to the engine, was a total rewrite of the way the game saves files. As most of you know, when My Colony first came out there was no such thing as Regions, and so the concept wasn't even considered during game saving. Once Regions came out, many of the engine mechanics had to change to accommodate having multiple game objects processing at the same time (the individual city you are playing, the region itself, and the minor updates to the surrounding region files).

With all of these changes happening to different game objects at the same time, the game saving function remained the same as before. I sort of duct taped a solution together which worked pretty good for the most part. For instance, I had never personally run into any major issues with saving a Regions game. However, there were always reports of problems with saving in Regions, particularly with Resources and Technology levels not saving. This is unique to Regions, as it shares a single Resource and Technology pool among many different game files.

In addition to Regions, the structure of the game itself has changed considerably over the last three years, and over time, layers upon layers of different ideas have been cobbled together in the code creating a mess of sorts. To resolve all of this, I decided to completely change the manner in which game data is saved to the system. The new method allows making saves to multiple game objects at a time, instead of just the currently active game object. For example, prior to this update, when you were playing a region, the overall Region file did not save until you chose "Exit to Region" from the game menu. With this new update, you no longer have to Exit to Region for all regional data to be saved.

This is all well and good, but I didn't anticipate, or rather appreciate, just how many parts of the code were tied into the previous game saving functions. This lack of preparation on my part led to a major issue in the pre-release code on Ape Web Apps where saving a regional city would cause all colonists to lose their jobs and become homeless. Which is not good. It was like doing a fire-drill with each save, except after the fire-drill, the colony would never recover. So that was fun, and working through that led me on a breadcrumb trail that resulted in little changes and fixes all throughout the engine.

As if that wasn't enough though, I also decided to make major changes to the way virtual colonists work. Virtual Colonists are the "colonists" in your colony when your population exceeds 2000. These colonists do not actually exist, but the game instead uses statistics to simulate their education, housing, entertainment, and industrial output. With today's changes, the accuracy of this simulation should be greatly increased, especially in regards to education, which was barely simulated before.

On top of those significant engine changes, I also decided to completely rewrite the way colonists find jobs! I know, too many big changes for one update. There were so many changes here that I could write a whole article about it, but to avoid putting you to sleep, I will give the general overview. With this latest update, the game now keeps track of a "now hiring" list, sort of like a classified advertisement page. Whenever a business has an open job, it adds a now hiring record containing the x:y location of the job, the IQ requirement, pay, etc. Whenever a colonist doesn't have a job, the game takes the now hiring list, and sorts it for that colonist based on location from their house, how it matches their IQ, how it pays, etc. They then start at the top of the list and apply for the jobs. If the job is within a certain range of their house (40 tiles I think) and they meet the requirements, they will take the job. If they don't find one, they will lower their standards a bit. If they still don't find one, they will enroll in school. If they don't find a school to enroll in, they will be mad and complain about lack of education.

This change actually works pretty good, but there is a computational penalty when sorting the job openings. When only a handful of colonists are looking for jobs, it's no big deal. But if you conduct a fire-drill and the entire colony looks for work at once, you might experience a lag in the game of several seconds or more. I will need to look into a fix for this at some point soon.

Ok, so that addresses the bulk of the engine changes I made. There are some other little things here and there that you might notice, as I actually changed so much that I can't remember it all. But since there were so many changes, I would expect to see bugs as a result. Please let me know in the forum what you find!

Let's move on to non-engine related changes. First off, on the main Region city selection screen, the game now shows the name of the city on the overall map.

I will probably add a toggle to turn this on/off, I just did not get to it this time. This is mainly for mobile/touch players, since they don't have a mouse and therefore do not see the mouse-hover popup box that Desktop players see on this screen, making it hard to tell which colony is which.

Next up, I have consolidated most of the Commonwealth management settings into the main Commonwealth section of the statistics screen, so you no longer have to dig through the Policy menu to find everything.

If you look closely at the above, you will probably also notice the next thing I added. That's right, you can now finally change your Commonwealth Tax Rate! This has been requested since Commonwealths first came out, and I apologize for not adding it sooner, but it's there now. I have also capped the Commonwealth Payroll Assistance at 500%, since some of the levels on the server were insane.

Moving on, I have added a new feature called Layout Templates. This is mainly for Regions, but you can now save a "Template" of your current map and export it to the file system to share with other players. When you activate a template on your map, you see a ghosted image of the template buildings overlayed on your colony (you can turn the image on/off) that you can use as a guide for building. This is mainly for players who have designed certain build layouts and want to share the layout with others. I imagine it would work best on an empty regional map with no resources. You can find the template options on the bottom of the General Statistics screen.

There is a new engine setting that allows you to turn Gamepad input on or off. It has always been turned on from the beginning, but there was a concern that if you were playing another game on your desktop while My Colony was open, My Colony would be processing the gamepad inputs from the other game. If you find yourself in this situation, you can now turn off gamepad input completely from the Engine Settings screen.

There have been some minor changes to Colonist processing. Entertainment facilities now increase energy and happiness at a faster rate. In addition, colonist happiness will also slightly increase when they are at home. I have also increased the starting colonist IQ range to make them a bit smarter by default (will not impact current colonists, only new arrivals). And finally, I have further increased the rate that colonists age, since I still think it's too slow.

And last but not least, there were a couple of changes to existing buildings. The Mass Driver trade capacity has lifted from 100 to 300, and the basic Greenhouse now has a slightly faster production rate and a higher storage capacity.

So anyway, for me this was one of those updates that was pretty large, but for the general players of the game, it should seem like a pretty small patch. Hopefully nothing major has been broken, but continue to let me know what bugs you find. I should note that on the Android and Windows clients, there is a new "Send Feedback" button on the My Colony sidebar that will allow you to send a message or bug report directly to my Inbox, and I will add this to the Desktop, Web, and iOS versions at some point too. A lot of times people leave bug reports in the app store comments, and those are easy for me to miss.

That's all for today;s update though, let me know what you find, stay tuned for more, and thanks for playing My Colony!

I have a few ideas that may make micromanaging a lot more straightforward and less repetitive. II'm sure that all of us are very fond of the relatively new bulldoze mode, where we can delete many buildings with just a swipe of a finger. I find that this tool prevents repetitiveness and allows us to delete things quickly and in a straightforward manner.

In fact, the bulldoze tool inspired these ideas. However, instead of only being able to delete buildings will bulldoze mode, how are some other modes and what they would allow a player to do:

Mode cycler: Instead of the bulldoze button just turning bulldoze mode on and off, why not have it cycle through all of the below modes. This saves space on the button menu, and while it does require some repetitive tapping to get the mode you want, these modes will do their own share of saving you from having to deal with repetition.

Sell mode: In case you want to get resources back from the buildings that you are destroying. The screen will have a green outline instead of red and should be the next mode after bulldoze mode. This mode should do exactly the same things as bulldoze mode, but sells the buildings instead of just wiping them out. You will not be able to demolish nodes or paths in this mode. Or, you could just save having to create another mode and have the bulldozer sell buildings when it can, but then just demolish things like nodes when it can't sell them.

Upgrade mode: Self explanatory really, but allows you to upgrade several buildings in a single swipe and displays a blue outline under buildings that can be upgraded. Cannot be used to upgrade pathing, as you could make a big mess if you swipe over several paths and initiate upgrades on segments of path. Path is easy to upgrade, just go into the menu and select upgrade all. The reason behind this mode is so that players can have better control over which buildings are upgraded without having to upgrade each building individually through the menu, which is tedious, or having to upgrade them all at once, which is unwise in certain situations.

Power-on mode: This mode activate buildings that are deactivated and ignores already activated buildings. A yellow outline is displayed instead of the red outline for bulldoze mode.

Power-off mode: The opposite of power-on mode. deactivates buildings that are active. A dark yellow or brown outline should be displayed in this mode.

The reasons behind power on and off modes is because sometimes you want to have strict control over which buildings are off and which ones are on. For instance, let's say you're starting a new region city and you have the entire city built but are now just waiting on the colonists to come in. Wouldn't you want to deactivate all of the job buildings and then activate them one by one as colonists start coming in to control commute distance? These modes would allow use to exercise this control over many buildings without having to resort to repetition.

Terrain mode: This mode has a purple outline and allows the player to toggle individual tiles between solid and liquid. This enables players to edit their terrain to their liking, however, it comes with great cost. For each tile transformed from liquid to land, 1 million ore is spent, and on every world other than abandoned and lava, each tile that is turned to a liquid tile costs 1 million water. On abandoned, each ether tile that is created costs 1 million ether, and lava is not a terrain type that can be created, for obvious reasons. Any kind of terrain change will cost $100,000 and 10,000 civics per tile.

If you don't have the necessary resources, the change won't occur, but you will need to be careful when you do start getting enough resources to change several tiles at once, because the change happens instantly and is irreversible unless you have enough resources to change it back.

I have a few ideas that may make micromanaging a lot more straightforward and less repetitive. II'm sure that all of us are very fond of the relatively new bulldoze mode, where we can delete many buildings with just a swipe of a finger. I find that this tool prevents repetitiveness and allows us to delete things quickly and in a straightforward manner.

In fact, the bulldoze tool inspired these ideas. However, instead of only being able to delete buildings will bulldoze mode, how are some other modes and what they would allow a player to do:

Mode cycler: Instead of the bulldoze button just turning bulldoze mode on and off, why not have it cycle through all of the below modes. This saves space on the button menu, and while it does require some repetitive tapping to get the mode you want, these modes will do their own share of saving you from having to deal with repetition.

Sell mode: In case you want to get resources back from the buildings that you are destroying. The screen will have a green outline instead of red and should be the next mode after bulldoze mode. This mode should do exactly the same things as bulldoze mode, but sells the buildings instead of just wiping them out. You will not be able to demolish nodes or paths in this mode. Or, you could just save having to create another mode and have the bulldozer sell buildings when it can, but then just demolish things like nodes when it can't sell them.

Upgrade mode: Self explanatory really, but allows you to upgrade several buildings in a single swipe and displays a blue outline under buildings that can be upgraded. Cannot be used to upgrade pathing, as you could make a big mess if you swipe over several paths and initiate upgrades on segments of path. Path is easy to upgrade, just go into the menu and select upgrade all. The reason behind this mode is so that players can have better control over which buildings are upgraded without having to upgrade each building individually through the menu, which is tedious, or having to upgrade them all at once, which is unwise in certain situations.

Power-on mode: This mode activate buildings that are deactivated and ignores already activated buildings. A yellow outline is displayed instead of the red outline for bulldoze mode.

Power-off mode: The opposite of power-on mode. deactivates buildings that are active. A dark yellow or brown outline should be displayed in this mode.

The reasons behind power on and off modes is because sometimes you want to have strict control over which buildings are off and which ones are on. For instance, let's say you're starting a new region city and you have the entire city built but are now just waiting on the colonists to come in. Wouldn't you want to deactivate all of the job buildings and then activate them one by one as colonists start coming in to control commute distance? These modes would allow use to exercise this control over many buildings without having to resort to repetition.

Terrain mode: This mode has a purple outline and allows the player to toggle individual tiles between solid and liquid. This enables players to edit their terrain to their liking, however, it comes with great cost. For each tile transformed from liquid to land, 1 million ore is spent, and on every world other than abandoned and lava, each tile that is turned to a liquid tile costs 1 million water. On abandoned, each ether tile that is created costs 1 million ether, and lava is not a terrain type that can be created, for obvious reasons. Any kind of terrain change will cost $100,000 and 10,000 civics per tile.

If you don't have the necessary resources, the change won't occur, but you will need to be careful when you do start getting enough resources to change several tiles at once, because the change happens instantly and is irreversible unless you have enough resources to change it back.

I am currently putting the finishing touches on My Land v1.26.0, and it should be hitting all platforms within the next couple of days. This update is not necessarily large in terms of new content, but it includes a major conceptual change that will allow the game to move forward over the next coming updates. Also, thanks to the persistence of @DKMK100 , I will be moving My Land up to a more rapid and regular release schedule, closer to the pace of My Colony, while I ramp up the content and add exciting new features to the game engine. So, what has changed in this release? Let's take a look!

For starters, one of the main things that has held My Land back was the fact that the game had only one real resource, money. There were a lot of things I wanted to do in the game, like combine the crops you harvest into other things for instance, but I was unable to since the engine was limited to only one resource type and it was going to be a slight undertaking to change that.

Well, for this update I decided to finally change it, and the game now supports more resources than just Money! In order to accommodate this change, I also introduced the new concept of resource storage to the game, which is indicated by a new HUD meter at the top of the screen.

All resources share the same general storage pool, since I don't want the game to become quite as complicated as My Colony/Antiquitas. You start the game out with 0 storage capacity, and you increase your capacity by building one of this updates' new structures, Silos.

If you have free storage space in your Silos, produce that you harvest will be sent to the silo. Otherwise, it will immediately sell for money like it always has. To indicate this new behavior change, crops that are ready to harvest now show a Scythe icon instead of the previous "bouncing dollar" icon. To manage your storage, there is a new Storage item in the main slide-out menu. From there, you can see everything that you have sitting in your silos, and you can sell it for money if you want. Also, now when you plant new crops, you will first use the seeds that are in your Silo before purchasing new ones for money.

Finally, this update adds one new crop, the yummy delicious Watermelon!

The best part of this update is the new game mechanics that the new storage and resource system will enable. The next thing I plan on adding is a new class of structure that will convert combinations of existing resources into new resources. For example, a mill that turns your wheat into flour, which can further lead to an oven that turns flour into bread, which can further lead to a new bakery tourist attraction. So we are really going to be entering a whole new "era" so to speak, in terms of new My Land content and capabilities. It should be exciting!

As I said before, My Land fans can thank @DKMK100 for catching me on chat and shaming me into blowing the dust off of My Land. The updates are going to be coming a lot faster now, so be on the lookout. I may try to build My Land up to the point where it can be worthy of a Steam release by this fall. For fans of the game though, rest assured that, even with all of the new content and capabilities on the way, I plan to keep the gameplay of My Land similar to how it is now, and I will not be adding a ton of complication like you would find in My Colony. So stay tuned, there is a lot more My Land to come!

So I am just now putting the finishing touches on My Colony v0.91.0, and the update should be going out to all platforms throughout the weekend. I had originally planned on a bit larger of an update, but since it's already Friday evening and I don't want to spend the weekend working on My Colony, I decided to just go ahead and release what I have now and save the rest for next time! Hope you can forgive me 🤔!!

So this update adds a handful of new features and some more IT related content, mostly for Zolarg and Alpha Draconians, but there is some new human stuff too. There is also a "balancing" change that will probably get me a few "you broke the game" 1 star reviews in the app store, but It will be ok in the long run. I'll explain later, until then let's see what's new!

The first new engine change I made is something that has been requested for quite some time now - a variable volume slider for the in-game sound effects, which you can find in the Engine Settings menu:

So now instead of just on or off, you can set the in-game volume to whatever you want. People have been asking for this since I first added sound effects, so I hope you guys get some use out of it!

Next up, if you look at the statistics window for a specific resource, you will see a new "Trade" icon in the top-right corner, if you are playing an online game and you have the GBT.

This is just a simple shortcut that goes straight to the GBT trading screen for the particular resource you are looking at. I will probably be assigning a keyboard shortcut to this soon also, like press T to open the trading window.

Next, as requested in this thread, the global My Colony chat room is now accessible from within the game. This is the chat channel that is embedded on the my-colony.com website, and can also be accessed by clicking on the below button.

The chat channel is available whether you are playing an online or offline game, as long as you are signed into the game using an Ape Apps Account. And speaking of chat, as requested in this thread, I will probably take a couple of days off early next week to create a dedicated Ape Chat app for Android and iPhone. It's probably not necessary on Windows since the detached chat window is pretty easy to use on Desktop, and the Ape Apps Launcher also has chat built in now.

Moving on, the first time you open your colony in v0.91.0, if you had a bunch of embassies from colonies that are no longer active on the server, you will notice a few moments of explosions, as those embassies are all leveled to the ground. Moving forward, the game now verifies all of your embassies to see if they are attached to working colonies. This change is necessary because I plan on adding a couple of embassy interactions to the game over the next few updates, and they need to be attached to real colonies on the server.

Next up, as of this version, the game now keeps track of a couple of extra stats, including the total amount of hours you have played a specific colony. This stat will appear on your stats screen in the next couple of updates, but for existing colonies, the time is relative to the release of v0.91.0, since this data was not tracked beforehand.

Moving right along, you will now notice that Software is available in the GBT now for trading, so have at it!

Ok, now for the change that some people may get upset about. In the last release notes, I said that I would be going back and adding Software requirements to several existing buildings. Well, I decided to start with the biggest one first. The Robotics Factory and the Advanced Robotics Inc. now require Software to build, but more importantly, Robots now require Software as a building material. For a colony with a lot of Advanced Robotics Inc., this can be a major development, since that particular building pumps out Robots so fast, it will really suck up the Software in order to stay running. There is a new building available to help mitigate this change, but I know a lot of people are going to log in to their colony on v0.91.0 and wonder why all of their Robot production has suddenly ground to a halt. I am prepared for the hate though!

So those are the major changes in v0.91.0, let's move on to what is new. This update mainly brought a bit more Information Technology content to the Zolarg and Alpha Draconian races, but there is one new Human structure and even a brand new Premium bot, since it's been a few months since I've added anything new for the loyal paying customers.

As last time, here is a color coded list of the new structures added with this release, with Black representing Human content, Orange for Zolarg content, and Purple for Alpha Draconian content.

• Center for Automation Coding
• Tower of Thoughts
• Hall of Elders
• Mound of Online Business
• Automated Art Display
• Integrated Antanium Impactor
• Coders Den
• I.T. Studio Complex

In addition, Humans have a new technology, Advanced Networking Infrastructure, which is required for the new I.T. Studio Complex, and humans also have a new Premium-Only bot, the Megabot Deluxe, which is a snazzy gold-plated Megabot with 30x the build speed of the normal Megabot.

So the new I.T. Studio Complex pretty much makes the existing Small Software Studio look like a dumpster fire, as it really spits out the Software like nobody's business. Which is good, because you're going to need it to keep those Advanced Robotics, Inc. up and running. I did a rough(ish) calculation, and it takes about 0.75 I.T. Studio Complex structures to supply 1 Advanced Robotics, Inc., which is a pretty intense ratio. I'm sure at some point there will be an even bigger Software studio, but this is what is available at the moment. If you are not building a ton of Robots though, you will be able to keep the GBT well stocked using this new Software studio.

With the rest of the new structures, all races should now be able to produce at least a modest amount of Software. For the Reptilians, I added an earlier game Automated Art Display for producing a few paintings, as it was otherwise difficult early on to build structures like the Potter's Den and the Galactic Fine Arts Exposition.

All of that said, I still have quite a bit to do in terms of adding Information Technology content, but it is coming along somewhat. It's probably going to take at least a couple of more updates, and then moving forward, Software and Bandwidth will probably be important inputs for new content. I am thinking of adding Ether requirements to some of the later-game I.T. stuff too, but not too much since on most games Ether is only going to be available for online players.

So that is all for today's update. As I mentioned at the beginning, I plan on taking the weekend off here (although I might do a new My Colony Podcast episode if I get bored) and then spending the early part of next week on a new chat client for mobile, then I will be back to work, so keep those helpful bug reports and suggestions coming! And as always, thanks for playing My Colony, and stay tuned for more!

In time for the weekend, My Colony 2 has just been updated to v0.27.0 and should be hitting all platforms shortly! This update has a critical fix that might actually end up killing some existing colonies, so you are going to want to read on to find out what's new!


First for the big change. As I was implementing one of the new buildings for this update (the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory), I noticed that during it's production cycle, it was not consuming any Alien Artifacts. I tweaked with the building in the game editor a bit, and still no consumption. Upon further investigation, I noticed that no building was consuming any resources, and it's been like this all along!

How I missed such an obvious flaw is beyond me, although I don't know if anybody else really noticed it either. It's easy to overlook a bug that actually benefits you, I suppose. Looking back though, stockpiling resources did always seem a bit easier in MC2 as compared to MC1.

Anyway, I went ahead and fixed the issue, loaded up my main colony, and it immediately died. Stockpiles of Ore, Gold, Wood, Charcoal, Crystalline, Rum, Uranium, you name it, all quickly evaporated. My settlements had been running so long on a balance based on zero resource consumption, I never built up the necessary production and gathering capabilities to handle the industrial output. Needless to say, it pretty much brought my entire colony to a standstill. Not only that, but since I had several settlements connected to the same resource pool using trade depots, every single one was brought down to a grinding halt!

It actually took me several hours to recover my game from this calamity. In fact, the fix required me to alter the stats of several buildings, because it became plain once resource consumption was factored in that many buildings were either under producing or over consuming resources. Because of this, production and consumption stats have been altered in this update for the Sugar Extraction Lab, Tree Farm, Charcoal Factory, Uranium Enrichment Facility, Canteen, Gold Synthesis Lab, Ore Fracking Operation, and Rum Distillery. I think I have a reasonable balance going right now, but of course there are likely things that I have overlooked. If you find structures that need rebalanced because of this changed, either buffed or nerfed in some way, let me know in the comments to this post.

Now, while I was trying to figure out this new balance, it was actually quite difficult to do at the beginning, as My Colony 2 lacks detailed resource consumption/production stats like you would find in My Colony 1. At least it did lack those stats, as this update now adds a new Resources tab to the Statistics window!


As in My Colony 1, you can select each resource to see the breakdown on which buildings are providing/using a specific resource, which is a huge help when trying to work out and balance your settlement production levels.


Of course, the resource stats are not exactly, and cannot be exactly as they are in MC1, due to the nature of resource pools in MC2. Resources in this game are not kept per-player or even per settlement, but are rather stored in dynamic "pools" that can change as time goes on based on the existence of logistics stations, outposts and other such structures. This made putting together the stats collection and reporting a bit more difficult than it was in MC1, but it's mostly working here now. To view the stats of a resource pool, you have to move your camera/viewport to a settlement first, and you will be shown the stats for the resource pool that you are currently active in. At some point I will probably make it possible to view a list of all resource pools and which settlements they are connected to, I just have not gotten to it yet.

Moving along, this update brought a few big changes to roads, changes that I started working on a few updates ago and neglected to finish until now.

Firstly, roads with either production or consumption properties (such as the Solar Road) are now finally functional. Prior to this update, you could build a huge Solar Road network with 200 tiles, and it would only produce power based on the first tile placed. Now, they work as you would expect.

Next, Roads are now actually factored in to the path finder, and their "drive speed modification" stats now actually work! You may or may not have noticed, but before this update roads had basically no impact on what your Rovers did, other than providing an aesthetic look. Roads are now fully functional, and will work in basically the same manner as they do in MC1.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you can no build roads (and some other structures) anywhere you want, no settlement required!


Wouldn't it be nice to build a big beautiful highway connecting all of your settlements together? You couldn't do it before, but you can now! Roads can now be built anywhere, as long as you have an appropriate Rover in range. The resources used to pay for the roads will come from your closest settlement to the road in question (the closes settlement owned by the player building the road). The only restriction is that you can not build a road in a chunk/settlement that is "owned" by another player.

The Game Editor now also allows you to specify other buildings, besides roads, that can be built out-of-settlement. The only one right now is the Commemorative Plaque, since I figured it would nice to be able to place signs along the side of your highways.

Moving along, I did a lot of focus and work on performance optimizations in this release. When a map had larger settlements, the game was starting to get so laggy (at least on my M1 Mac) that it was barely playable anymore, so something had to be done. Obviously there is always more performance work to be done, but here are some of the changes so far.

Firstly, I reduced the radius of chunks that are generated around the camera, and I lowered the time that it takes before the engine clears out chunks that are no longer active around the camera. This provides a pretty large reduction in memory usage when you are in a big settlement, as it can reduce the number of .vpp models loaded in memory significantly. At some point I will probably make this a setting in the Engine Settings window, so people with epic desktop computers and RTX video cards can turn their chunk render distance way up if they want to, but since most players right now are using a smart phone, I decided to lower the default setting.

Speaking of default settings, most of the "pretty" engine settings, such as Anti Aliasing, Depth of Field, Dynamic Shadows, Fancy Water, etc, are now turned off by default. These you can always just turn back on in the settings menu if your machine can handle them, but I wanted the default settings to be low so that a new player wont get in the game and immediately experience lag if they are using a lower end machine.

A lot of improvements have also been made to the server code, which runs on a separate thread from the renderer. There was a pretty big issue where the game server would lag down hard if you had a ton of rovers in your game, since every "tick" a rover checks to see if it should be building something or not. To address this, the server now keeps track of whether or not there are actually buildings under construction, and so Rovers will only check if they should be building when there is actually something to build. Makes sense, right?

Moving along, since the last update introduced the Excavator and digging, it basically became possible to turn the Desert World map into a little water world by digging out your own lakes and rivers. Because of this, it only made sense to allow all of the water based structures and units to be constructed on the desert map.


You are now free to terraform your Desert World map into the holiday paradise that your colonists have been yearning for.

Next up, this update adds the classic Crystalbot from MC1, and with it comes the ability to create and grow Synthetic Crystalline Deposits. Be careful though, because the Synthetic Crystalline is a cancer that is as aggressive as ever, so I would suggest not building it too close to your settlement...


My original inspiration for Crystalline (back in MC1) was the Tiberium from Command and Conquer, a substance that provides power but that also spreads and can become an environmental catastrophe. For this reason, you need to take extra precautions when dealing with the synthetic stuff, as it can easily get out of hand if you let it.

I think I mentioned earlier in this post that the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory has been added to the game. This along with the Crystalline stuff requires two new techs, Ancient Alien Manufacturing and Crystalline Synthesis. I also added the new Luxury Townhome, a decorative housing unit for Premium players.

Since I was on the topic of new Research, I will mention the final engine change to this update. Players who are either in a hurry or want to speed through a new game can now instant-unlock new research using Ape Coins. Like I mentioned in the last My Colony 1 release notes, I am going to be looking for better ways to monetize the My Colony games without resorting to heavy advertising, and this seemed like a reasonable way that is totally optional and does not fundamentally change the game for existing players.

So all in all, this was a pretty big update for My Colony 2. I would suggest that all players be careful when they first open their games after the update, and to comb over your settlements and their research stats, because there will probably be things you need to change, particularly if you have an older established colony.

Moving forward, my near-term plans are to continue expanding the Alien/Quantum tech trees. I am also going to be bringing a Galactic Board of Trade to My Colony 2 in some form (gotta work out the details on that one), and I will also probably be adding a Spice World (not related to the Spice Girls) to implement some of the Spice suggestions from @Architecture1134 and others. There is also a lot coming soon to the original My Colony and to Colony Wars, but more on those another day. All in all, a lot of excitement coming to the My Colony Universe of games, and I should probably put together another episode of the My Colony Podcast to discuss it all. But until then, check out the new update, enjoy, have a good weekend, let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, and stay tuned for more!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2

Today I am releasing v0.37.0 of My Colony 2, and from a technical perspective, this is the largest release since the game first came out in late 2020. My Colony 2 has now been moved off of the antiquated Web App Core framework that I first developed back in 2012, and is now being hosted at it's own domain at https://mycolony2.com/. There are some important implications associated with this change, so let's get into it!


The most obvious change is that the game is now hosted at a new URL. Since the majority of My Colony 2 players access the game through the web client, everyone is going to need to update their bookmarks to the new location. If you have the game installed to your device as a Progressive Web App, you need to know that the PWA will not automatically change to the new URL, so you need to first uninstall the old PWA and then install the new one. I realize that it is a bit of a pain, but the change will be worth it in the long run.

The biggest impact this will have is related to save data. Users who sync their save file to the Cloud or who have exported their save data to the filesystem (which I highly recommend) will not be impacted at all, but if your save game is stored in the internal app cache (the riskiest solution with a browser-based game), data will not carry over to the new domain. I hope that most players took heed of this change when I announced it about a month ago! If it ends up being an issue, I might be able to cook up some sort of migration solution, but I think most players will be fine. I think (hope) that the mobile versions of the game are not impacted by this.

Beyond what was stated above, the migration off of the Web App Core framework resulted in considerable changes to the game engine "under the hood." The Web App Core functions touched almost everything, so in many ways this update constitutes a serious rewrite of major portions of the game. Because of this, I would sort of expect there to be some issues here and there. Surprisingly, I have not run into many of them during testing, so maybe things went more smoothly then I had planned, but please be on the lookout for things I may have missed, and please post about what issues you find here in the forums.

Since so much of the code was being changed in this release, I did take the time to work on a few issues that had been plaguing the engine for a while now. First of all, the issue with faded/muted colors I think is pretty well fixed. There may be a few models left that still have color balancing issues, and if you notice any of them please post a list in the forum here so I can get them re-color balanced for the next update.

There had been an issue where Spice deposits were not spreading properly on the Spice World, and this has now been corrected.

Additionally, there was an issue where players who were connected to a remote dedicated server were unable to access the Galactic Board of Trade or other MC2 Online features. This should now be fixed as well.

Game loading and startup should be a lot faster now than it used to be, especially after the first load. I decided to stop compressing the main game data bundle, and even though this added 4mb to the initial game data download, I figured it was not a big deal, since after the first load, the browser stores the bundle data anyway. This means that the data no longer needs to be decompressed when the game is starting up, which on some devices (especially mobile) this could take quite a long time. The start up time improvement can actually be pretty significant, especially if the app is installed to the system as a PWA. I have noticed start up times on the new release of just a few seconds.

Big improvements have been made to flying units. They were sort of borked before - drones randomly disappearing or flying up into the stratosphere, landers not moving, etc. They should just work now.

Don't you hate it when you join a world, then you scroll around the map trying to find a good landing spot, only to never be able to find your lander again? Fear not, if you have not yet deployed your lander, it will not be automatically placed in the Bookmarks tab, so you can always go and find where your lander is sitting.


A major rebalancing has been done in this release, thanks in large part to a document put together by @SPARKY0303 (which you can find here). There were a ton of changes implemented from this, so here is just a rough readout of everything I did:

• Increased firing range and reduced money cost of the Brick Wall Turret
• Increased the gift capacity of the Galactic Board of Trade to 25k
• Fixed the borked stats on the Museum
• Increased the ore cost and output of the Medium Software Studio
• Increased the uranium cost and the artifact storage of the Giorgio Institute
• Increase the build cost and money/civics output of the Investment Bank
• Increased the output and worker requirement of the Bank
• Increased the cost and research output for the Center for Artificial Learning
• Increased the build and input cost of the Robotics Factory while also increasing the robot output
• Increased the cost and doubled the production rate of the Plastic Factory
• Increased the cost and production output of the Advanced Microchip Factory
• Increased the cost and production rate of the Advanced Plastic Factory
• Increased the build cost and production output of the Synthetic Wood Lab
• Increased the worker requirement of the Synthetic Oil Lab while doubling production input and tripling output
• Increased the rum cost and consumption for the Galactic Stock Exchange while also increasing the money output
• Increased the food cost and money output of the Canteen
• Increased the cost and attack power of the Pillbox while decreasing the attack range
• Added worker requirement and increased salt water consumption for Fish R Us
• Increased the worker requirement and food output of the Hydroponic Farm
• Increased cost and production output of the Vertical Warehouse Farm
• Increased cost and software cosumption of the Research Facility while increasing research output
• Decreased Rum consumption and increased Money output for The Rum
• Increased money output for the Trading Depot
• Decreased build cost and aluminum output of the Advanced Drilling Platform
• Increased the cost and artifact output of the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility while decreasing the aluminum production
• Increased the cost, money output and rum consumption of the Galactic Trade Authority Office while decreasing the worker requirement
• The Spice Den can no longer be built on Spice Worlds
• Increased the worker requirement and production rates of the Aluminum Generator

There may be more rebalancing work to do in the future, so let me know what your thoughts are on the changes.

Some other things have been changed as well. The Blue Dorms have been renamed to the Painted Dorms, which you can now specify your own color for. The Ancient Alien Ore Refinery has been re-skinned with a new model provided by @SPARKY0303 .

Also fulfilling a big request from MC1 players, there are now Building Counts available on the construction sidebar.


I have also added a new option to the Performance Tweaks section of the Engine Settings menu, allowing users to customize the number of chunks that the game renders around the camera.


We also have two new models in this update from @spamdude , including the new Fish Bin Complex (for storing lots of fish), and the giant new Large Brickworks, for bumping out lots of bricks!


Next up, as hinted to in the previous update's release notes, Diamonds have been added to this update, along with the Diamond Miner and the Diamond Solar Tower.


Diamonds are a Lunar World exclusive, and can only be discovered through digging. Once you uncover a diamond deposit, the Diamond Mining tech is automatically unlocked, allowing you to construct the Diamond Miner. Diamond utility will be expanded in the coming updates. At some point once every world has it's own unique resource, there will be some late game super structure that requires a ton of the unique resources from all of the different worlds.

Ok so last but not least, probably the biggest and most common request I get for the game via the in-game feedback is to bring back the Ore Mine from MC1. I never considered the Ore Mine to be necessary, since the world sizes are infinite and you can always just go and find more Ore, and later on you can just generate Ore on all worlds. That said, people have always wanted it, so today I am introducing MC2's version of the Ore Mine, which is the new Ore Drill.


The Ore Drill works sort of like the Spice Vane that occurs naturally on the Spice World. You build it, and then every once and a while it will plop out a small Ore Deposit. Once you build your settlement up to the point where you can make your own ore, you can simply bulldoze the drill. I think this is a reasonable solution for early game Ore, and I might make a Gold version of it in the next update as well. The Ore Drill is only available on maps that have surface ore.

So that is v0.37.0 in a nutshell. The update is available right now on the Web at it's new location (https://mycolony2.com/) and will probably hit the various mobile platforms throughout the weekend or early next week. Please let me know your thoughts on the changes (good or bad), spread the word that the URL for MC2 has changed, and stay tuned for more MC2 goodness to come in the months ahead!

#mycolony2

With the latest update to My Colony 2, I went ahead and did a full migration of the game engine off of the antiquated Web App Core framework and transferred the game onto it's own unique domain. Seeing as this change went relatively smoothly, and how I have also committed to keeping the original My Colony up to date and supported for the foreseeable future, I think I am going to go ahead and do a similar migration to MC1.

Now, with My Colony 2, I had been planning for quite a while to migrate the code, so I already had some things baked into the game to make it a bit easier to do. This is not the case with the original, so this is going to be a bit larger of an undertaking. That said, if I am going to commit to keeping the code maintained and up to date for years to come, then I think that this is something I really need to do.

I have also been needing to migrate the original My Colony online server over to new hardware, and this change will give me an opportunity to take care of everything at the same time.

As with the MC2 migration, the MC1 migration will have the biggest impact to those using the Web version of the game, as non-cloud saved data will not carry over to the new game location. It will also require bookmarks to be updated, and PWA installs to be uninstalled/reinstalled using the new domain.

As for domain, I have not yet decided what the new URL will be for My Colony. mc1.my-colony.com is taken by the site that houses all of the user colony websites. I could do something like play.my-colony.com. I also own mycolony.net and mycolony.online, so those are options as well. I would appreciate feedback on this decision!

Anyway, please help get the word out to the other players of the game. Luckily, most My Colony 1 players are on mobile, and I do not expect them to be impacted (I have not heard of any mobile MC2 players having issues with that migration yet). I think most web app players probably use cloud sync and should be OK, but for those who don't, you should probably either turn it on or make sure that you have a local backup of your colony on your PC. As with the MC2 change, I will wait a few weeks before I start working on this, to give people time to prepare for the change.

#mycolony

It would be nice if there was additionally options in the ape apps account website to change your account username and to delete your account, since there are already options to "log out everywhere" and change password, etc.

What do you guys think?

No pain, no game. The cost of the generators and the small amount that they produce are what make the alien bottleneck the hardest part of the game. But once you're past the bottleneck, you're home free. We can't change the generator cost because that would allow people to build more generators faster and there would not be as much of a challenge anymore. The generators need to be expensive so that they are built at a slower pace. They also need to produce a tiny amount of alu opposed to a larger amount because if they produced more you would be able to add more advanced chip factories and dig sites and quickly get through the bottleneck with little effort, and I know a lot of players that would stop playing if this challenge was taken out of the game by increasing alu gen efficiency.

The bottleneck is there for a reason folks. If you can't get past it, that doesn't mean that the game should change or that bast is a bad game developer, it just means that you need to get better at playing the game. And if you think about it, that's the whole point of any challenge in life too, to push us to get better. You can't expect life to change just because you are facing a hard challenge. Instead, you have to change and adapt to every challenge, so why should this game be any different.

bastecklein said:...The decay rate is about 50k per minute...

I guess the *rate* was more harsh for me 'cause I only had like 60-100k aluminum that I lost.... but since my overall loss was a lot less than some in this thread I guess not.



Some of these complaints have me a bit concerned for the late-game, now that there's the 10b money cap. Personally, I'm nowhere near that point in the game yet, but when I do eventually get there, I'd like to see what I can do with the colony I've worked so hard on other than just let it stagnate and start another.

I play a game called Soda Dungeon. In that game, there's a 1.5b cap on gold, if you earn more than that at any particular time in the game, the excess money is automatically used to purchase "essence", a currency used to buy upgrades. Those upgrades enable you to go further into the infinite, linear, dungeon, thus earning more gold and essence, and eventually unlock "caps" which can be used to buy a second tier of upgrades that kind of change the fundamental assumptions of the earlier levels of the game. when you unlock the higher tier upgrades (long, long after defeating the final boss) there's even a narrator character who jokes about people who are just obsessed with achieving higher and higher numbers (alot of the blow-back you're getting on this is from the 'higher-numbers' crowd, I think). The treadmill of the standard game essentially powers a second, much slower treadmill, which powers a third even slower treadmill. Progress is still possible, but it matters less than the other goals you could be perusing at that point.

maybe you could try something like that for My Colony. after a player gets to the end of what you (bast) would think would be the end of a colony, maybe they get the option to unlock funky upgrades that will change the way they play the game. Maybe they have to go back and rearrange their building placements to make them more aesthetically pleasing (granting efficiency bonuses), or their colony can then create sister/daughter colonies that are only visible to that colony.

My point is, bast, that if you've decided to change the game from being infinite to having this fundamental cap on money, then the best solutions would be (imo) to either give a colony thats reached that point some type of "ending" or to change the goal of the game so that it can continue in a meaningful, lateral direction at that point.

Welcome everyone! Today I am releasing My Colony v0.52.0, the Christmas 2017 update! What makes it a Christmas update? Why, all of the goodies inside of it (of course). Here are the changes:

My Colony v0.52.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Structure: Crystal Vaporizer
• New Maps: Earthlike (human), Lava World (Zolarg
• New Units: Extremeobug, Obsidiobug, Rover Transport, Queen and Airborne Lander (sort of new)
• New Resource: Obsidian
• New Modding Option: Map Editor

Changes

• Water (and the new Lava) tiles now have a slight 'shore' texture around them instead of hard-ending at the edge of a tile. The shore pieces connect when multiple waters are placed next to each other.
• The U.E. Lander can now launch and turn into the Airborne Lander, which can be moved to a new location.
• Likewise, the Zolarg Mound can now transform into the Queen and move to a new location.
• Slight gameplay change, Zolarg Mounds can no longer be built, you must build the new Queen unit first and then turn the Queen into a Mound.
• Removed Power and resource consumption requirements from Creative Mode
• Increased storage of the Charcoal Pile

Notes
The biggest change here is the addition of the new Lava World, which has a few new features not seen before in the game, including moving terrain elements and natural disasters. I won't go too much into it, you can read more about the Lava World in the Lava World thread I made the other day: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=11358

The other big change is the addition of an engine feature allowing buildings to "pack-up" into units (and vice versa) so that they can be moved to a new location. I will probably expand this for other structures in the future.

The other big change for Premium users is the new Map Editor, found in the Mod Tools section. This lets you start with a blank map and add in any terrain feature found in the game. If the feature proves popular, I will expand on it, adding more terrain elements and features. Once Accounts are integrated into the game, I am also going to add the ability to upload both custom maps and texture mods to the My Colony server right from within the game, and add a section where users can download mods without having to leave the game.

Now then, this will be the last My Colony update for a few weeks. Besides for holiday travels I have coming up, there are a lot of other things I want to get caught up on over the next few weeks, including getting my servers ready for finally ditching Facebook and adding Ape Apps accounts into the game. There are also big improvements and changes to the Forum, the Chat, and the general Ape Apps Account experience coming very soon. Also, the My Colony website is going to get basically a complete overhaul.

I will return to My Colony development in mid-January with the long awaited introduction of the evil Reptilians. Just for a background, the Reptilians are the alien race that had previously enslaved the Insectoids. The Insectoids were under brutal Reptilian rule until one brave insectoid named Zolarg overthrew the Reptilians and founded the Zolarg Empire. Many Insectoid worlds are now under the protection of the Zolarg Empire, but there are also many insectoid worlds that are still enslaved by the Reptilians. This will come into play with the new Reptilian worlds, which (on the galactic map) are going to be pretty close to the Zolarg worlds. You will see when the Reptilians come out that they employ poor insectoids as slave labor throughout their colonies. Reptilians are also playing a hand in United Earth/LIS politics, but this will not be a factor in My Colony (only in the upcoming Colony Wars). The Reptilians are also more technologically advanced than both the Insectoid and the Humans, and the are going to have cool new features not found in the other colonies. So stay tuned, much more to come!

the lone wolf can change
if he want
if he need

with time all is possible
without time a lot of thing are possible

but the devil don't change face
the devil can change word

the devil can win
the devil can't win

he have a lot of face
all know the devil face

i am him,
me ADN/MaroutoutMars1
i am a strange guy,some think i am a idiot,some think i will never do something and i do it,I am predictable,I am unpredictable, i am the guy who nobody have ever heard and i am what i am
marethyu/ADN/MaroutoutMars1
the man who say what he think
the man who have change all where he pass
and i will never come in discord fed that my last post for discord

deltlead said:I'd like to make joining my commonwealth more desirable by adjusting the taxes and payroll assistance, where can I go to do that?

I don't think you can change taxes.

However to change payroll you:
1. Go to the Capitol/Consulate
2.Click on the Policy Icon
3.Click on Labor

The Option to change Payroll assistance will be the first option.

Hello everyone, I have just finished up work on My Colony v0.69.0, and it will be going out to all devices shortly.

My Colony v0.69.0 is yet another engine stability and bug fix release. In the last changelog, I talked about how My Colony has been basically blacklisted on Google Play due to having a high number of crashes. To combat this, I made several changes to the Android version of the game, including limiting map sizes, removing ads, removing the Galactic Emperor rewards, etc.

Amazingly, these changes had absolutely zero impact on the crash rate of the game. So most of them have been reversed in this update. My Colony v0.69.0 also rolls up two Antiquitas updates worth of engine patches, including a new Engine setting which allows users to disable the multi-threaded path finding engine.

For those who have been playing a long time, way back in v0.40.0, I moved all path finding operations to a separate worker thread in order to improve performance, and at the time it made a pretty big improvement. The only downfall to this was that it cost more RAM usage in order to work, because the games collision map had to be cloned and copied over to the worker thread in order for the pathfinder to be able to use it, since a Javascript object can not be accessed across two different threads. On PCs with a lot of RAM or on smaller maps, this was not such a big deal. On Android though, which restricts RAM available to each app far more than other platforms, it is possibly problematic, particularly on larger maps.

With this change, multi-threaded path finding is now turned off by default on Android only. I am testing to see if this has any impact on the crash rate. The new engine setting option is found at the very bottom of the Engine Settings list if you want to test the difference between the two path finding methods on different platforms. I suspect this might also help the issues some people have when they order a bot to go build something, and it just sits there. I am thinking the path resolution instructions were somehow getting lost in the cross-thread communications. We will see.

In my testing, turning off the multi-threading does not significantly lower performance. Back when I initially implemented the multi-threaded feature, the game calculated every path for every rover and colonist on the map. I have since made changes to where all paths are simulated, unless the unit starting or ending position is within the players viewport, as there was no reason so show an accurate path of a colonist walking from his house to his job if the player is not even going to see it happening.

There were several more bug fixes added that were carried over from the two most recent Antiquitas updates, but the path finding change was the major one, and represented a somewhat significant change in the underlying code, allowing the game to now support either single or multi-threaded operation.

Hopefully some of these changes do something to help the crash rate. My Colony has a crash rate on Android of around 7%. Oddly, Antiquitas, which runs on the exact same code base, has a crash rate of under 1%. Even more strange is the fact that Antiquitas features background music and higher resolution graphics, leading to more RAM consumption over My Colony, yet there are almost no crashes. Also strange is how I get virtually no support emails or forum posts from actual people about My Colony just force closing on Android, yet it is apparently happening to nearly 10% of users.

Regardless, the ongoing issues on Google Play have basically killed My Colony from a business standpoint. The following snippet from My Colony's weekly usage chart shows the exact point Google blacklisted the game on the Play Store:

Ignore the huge drop at the end, as that represents this week which is only half way through. The game has basically leveled off because that is the usage on Web, Desktop, Windows 10, and iPhone. There are essentially no new downloads coming from Android devices at this point, which as you can tell by the chart, amounted to about half of the My Colony userbase.

Here you can see the last 6 months worth of downloads from Google Play:

So anyway, that is where My Colony currently stands on Android. I have not added any new content this time, as I am trying to focus my time on getting the crashes resolved, if there is indeed any way to resolve them. And even if they are resolved, there is no guarantee that Google would ever un-blacklist the game anyway, so there is that.

Regardless though, there is another small change I added to the game this release. It has always bothered me that the regular textile mill was animated, by the synthetic textile mill was not. So I added animation to it!

So that's all for today. Similar to the v0.68.x series of updates, My Colony on Android will probably receive several more updates than the other platforms. It saw a 0.68.1, 0.68.2, 0.68.3, and a 0.68.4 update, and the same may happen with the release. Just trying to get it fixed. Even if the game never returns to profitability, I at least can hopefully get the engine fixed up so that it works properly for the next game.

Thanks for playing, much more to come!

I am considering changing the way the Native Client apps for all games are packaged, including the Ape Apps Launcher, by getting rid of the installers and just having the users launch the program by clicking on the icon, the way the Linux versions of the programs currently work. Auto Updating will continue to work, there will just not be a setup program that automatically places everything in your "Program Files" directory and makes desktop shortcut icons.

The reason for doing this is that it will allow me to build all of the client apps from one machine, instead of having to use a Windows, Mac, and Linux machine to build for each respective platform, which takes a lot more time.

Before making such a change though, I wanted to see if there would be objection from the community/users. The change would break the auto-update for the current Windows edition of all of the programs, but it would be a one-time break. The recommended course of action would be to uninstall the current versions when it comes time to download one of the non-setup based updates.

Note that this change only applies to the non-Steam versions of these applications.