bastecklein's Recent Posts

So a couple of days ago the state of the Ape Apps website was briefly being discussed, and I mentioned the idea of merging the forum section of the website into Ape Chat and just having all discussions take place in there. I have since given it a little thought, and I believe I have come up with the solution that I am ultimately going to implement, and that is what I want to discuss here.

Some time (probably) this year, I am going to be retiring the forums here on ape-apps.com, the official Discord server and even Ape Chat, and I will be sort of merging all three of them into a new/resurrected Discussions app.

Since most people here have joined during the My Colony "era" of Ape Apps, many may not remember the "Discussions" era, but it was my original app business success story, basically the thing that let me quit my "real" job and go full time with app development. I am going to give a quick history here of the Discussions app, and then talk about why that is the direction I am going to be going in and what it's going to look like.

Back in 2010, one of my very first apps was called Super Bored, which was an extremely basic communications app where people could post text and eventually pictures onto a single threaded chat board. The app started to gain a following, so I decided to copy/past the code and release another simple forum app called World of Warcraft Discussion. That one became even more popular, so I followed it up with Star Craft Discussion, Halo Discussion, Call of Duty Discussion, Body Building Discussion, and several others. The next thing I knew, all of these "Discussion" apps were getting a pretty active following, but it was sort of a pain to maintain all of them, so since they were all running on the same server anyway, I decided to merge them all into one giant forum app that was simply called Discussions.

Discussions was pretty active, up until Google removed it from the Play store (back then it was still called the Android Market) due to copyright complaints from Activision over the Call of Duty section and CoD images being visible in some of the screenshots. I tried to appeal, but not only was I rejected, they actually followed up by nuking my entire developer account because of the other video game themed Discussion apps I had (Halo, WoW, etc).

Anyway, the community lived on for a while, but with out the apps being on the market place anymore, it slowly faded away. There is still a remnant of it on a Discord channel, and part of it slit off into the RP Forums forum community. But eventually my interests moved on to making games and business applications and I never really put a serious effort into bringing back Discussions. There is still a remnant of Discussions that you can see as the first category here in the forums section of the website.

So fast forward to now, where I have Ape Chat, which is now embedded into both of the My Colony games. I have found it to be extremely handy to be able to communicate with the game players without having to actually have the game running, and my plan was to start implementing Ape Chat into most of my applications. But then we run into the situation where Ape Apps now has the chat, the forums, and also now the Discord channel for discussions. To my thinking, why do we need to have three different places, when everything could just be together in the same app?

So this is my plan for the new Discussions app, a merging of the Ape Chat, Forums, and Discord server into one unified place. Now I am not going to be using the old Discussions code or anything, and really beyond the name of the app, it's not going to have much to do with the old Discussions. But in my opinion, the name "Ape Chat" does not make sense for an app that allows more than chat. And plus I already own several domains related to Discussions that have been sitting collecting dust in my account for years now.

So what will the new Discussions be like?

I have a lot of plans, but here is what I am thinking right now. When I originally created Ape Chat, I designed it to be like an IRC server, and a lot of its limitations come from that initial design decision. It works pretty well for just plain chat, but when you want to start adding advanced stuff, it shows its limitations.

First of all, as compared to Ape Chat, the front end and the server are going to be completely disconnected, and in fact, the new Discussions client will allow people to spin up their own servers on their own hardware and run their own private Discussions community with their own rules and setup. Of course, the app will come pre-loaded with the official Ape Apps server.

Within each server there can be any number of channels. I don't know if channel is a good word for it or not, we can come up with something else, but they will also be able to be grouped by topic. So for example, there can now be a My Colony group, with several channels related to My Colony.

There will be multiple types of channels as well. The regular chat channel, which is how Ape Chat is now. There will be threaded channels for a more forum-like setup. There will be voice channels and video chat channels.

There will also be a private messaging system that will be replacing both the "Mail" and "Conversations" features here on ape-apps.com. Private messaging will be one-on-one between two users, or users will be able to create their own private channels like they can now in Ape Chat and do whatever they want. For one-on-one private messaging channels, I plan to support both voice and video, as well as direct P2P file transfers.

What will happen to the forums here?

They will be archived for a while and eventually taken down. The code behind the forums is a mess that has been layered upon more mess over the years, and I will be glad to be done with it. Plus I am tired of fighting constant spam. Users will be encouraged to migrate to the new Discussions platform.

The rest of the site is going to be redone from scratch, and will be more of a static information and marketing site for my stuff, but I will still maintain "What's New" type posts and updates, as well as an RSS feed that people can subscribe to. Actually, the new Discussions app will probably read that RSS feed as well.

What will happen to the Discord server?

It will ultimately be shut down once the new service is ready. I don't really think it will be needed anymore, and plus I really don't like Discord. You may look at the features from the new Discussions and ask "why not just use Discord instead?" The reason is that I cannot embed Discord into my apps, and not only will I be able to do that with Discussions, I will be able to do it in a completely custom way that lets the service have app specific features.

What will happen to Ape Chat?

Discussions is basically the next version of Ape Chat with a re-branding. It will simply redirect to the new domain, and all of the in-game implementations of Ape Chat will be migrated over to Discussions.

Conclusion

This is probably going to happen some time this summer. If you have suggestions on what the new service can look like, you can feel free to leave them here. I think it's going to be a lot better than the current Ape Chat, and it will be nice to only have to go to one place for communications!

Also fun fact, Discussions has an id of 1 on the Ape Market internal database, it's the first app I ever added to the Ape Market (actually, the whole reason I created the Ape Market was to host Discussions after Google took it down).
5d ago
I just uploaded a new build @cave v2.10.1, can you try it out and let me know if it works now?

https://market.ape-apps.com/network-browser.html
11d ago
I think that @therealchromedino was so preoccupied with whether or not he could, he didn't stop to think if he should.
11d ago
Thank you for the report @cave I will research the issue.
11d ago
It's been about two years since the last point release of Network Browser (although it goes get smaller bug fixes monthly), but since I had to go ahead and change out the primary library used for the in-app video player, I decided to go ahead and increment the version, as well as quickly discuss the plans for Network browser moving forward.

Users had been experiencing issues with the dark theme on the last update, and so this should now be fixed with this release.

On a more technical side, the app had been using the ExoPlayer library for the in-app video playback, but this was depreciated by Google and replaced with the "new" (although still largely the same) AndroidX Media player. In my testing, everything still seems to work as it did, but let me know if there are new media playback issues as a result of this change.

Moving forward, the 2.10.x series will be the last of the v2 line for Network Browser. I plan to do a complete rewrite of the application sometime this year, featuring a little more modern UI and better overall performance (don't worry, I will not do anything crazy). If you have any big ideas or suggestions on how to improve this app, this would be the time to let me know, as it will be easier to implement new things during the total rewrite then it would be to otherwise try to shoehorn them in later.

Anyway, that is about it for this release of Network Browser. Thank you everyone who uses and supports the app, and stay tuned for more good things to come in the months ahead!

#networkbrowser

Network Browser on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ape.apps.networkbrowser

Network Browser on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android?p=com.ape.apps.networkbrowser

12d ago
The premium shows as being on your account, so you should be good to go. Maybe on the phone try logging off and logging back in again.
16d ago
Updated on 2024-03-02 to document the csv and em URL parameters.
16d ago
This morning I have released the 2.5.0 update for Voxel Paint, which includes a new bi-directional integration with Ape Chat. This feature is new for both apps and will be expanded and improved in the months ahead, but let's take a look at what it does right now!


Now when you click on the toolbar's top-right settings icon, you will see two new options (only available if you are signed in with an Ape Apps Account), Voxel Paint Chat and Set Chat Channel. If you click on Voxel Paint Chat, it will open the new embedded Ape Chat sidebar that will be familiar to players of My Colony and My Colony 2. The Set Chat Channel option lets you customize which Ape Chat channel is used by the app (the default is #voxelpaint, but you can use anything you want, like #mc2-voxeling for instance).

While the Ape Chat sidebar is open, two brand new features are unlocked that tie directly to chat. First, if you click on the toolbar camera icon which is normally used to save a .png of your model, you will now get a new dropdown menu with a Post to Chat option. This will still take a .png of your model as before, but instead of exporting to your device, it will post it directly into whatever Ape Chat channel you are currently signed in to.

Similar to posting .png images, the folder menu contains a new Post to Chat export option, which does the same thing, except it uploads the full model instead of a render. The render can then be viewed, manipulated and downloaded by users in the Ape Chat client.

These features are early and there are still some issues, particularly on the Ape Chat side. For example, currently the Download button in the in-chat renderer seems to be showing a plain text version of your model instead of actually downloading it. The header above the model is not formatted well for the slide-out chat side. It also messes with mouse wheel scrolling. So if you notice any of the aforementioned issues, you do not need to report them, as I already am aware!

Moving forward, I plan to expand this further. For instance, in the model renderer in the slide-out chat frame, I want to have a button that lets you instantly import the model you are looking at into your Voxel Paint workspace. That way if multiple people are in the chat, you can sort of collaborate on something. Someone could make a part of the model, post it, you could click on the import button and it would paste it in selected, and you can move it to where you need it to be.

Over the next day or two, these features will also be making their way to Pixel Paint. I probably will not make a new post about them since they will work largely in the same way that they do in Voxel Paint, but keep a look out for them in the coming days.

That is it for this update to Voxel Paint. I plan to improve the integration on both the Voxel Paint and Ape Chat side of things, so if you have ideas on how to make it even cooler, let me know!

https://voxelpaint.online/

#voxelpaint #pixelpaint
16d ago
Today I am happy to announce the release of My Colony 2 v0.45.0! This update continues to clean up some of the fallout related to the conversion to a statistics based simulation model, and adds a couple of new things along the way. Let's take a look!


Let's discuss fixes first. I think that I have finally isolated and corrected the issue where settlement utilities would be completely messed up when loading up a game save, but it may require one load/save/quit/load cycle to fix. Please let me know if you are still having this issue though.

Moving on, buildings now require workers again in order to operate. For the last few updates, worker shortages were no problem at all, but now you will actually have enough people to man your factories and shops.

Also, settlement approval rating was not being properly calculated before this update. It should now be working again like it used to.

Moving right along, there was a bug where disabling player building colors was not having any impact on the game. This should be working again.

Now on to game changes. If you are playing in a larger sized viewport (bigger than 1280x720), the overall game UI has been changed slightly.


Game UI elements have been "detached" from the sides of the viewport and are now floating a bit, with a new black border around everything. I think it looks a bit nicer, but you can let me know if you disagree. I have also increased the padding around all popup windows, which I also think looks a bit nicer than before.

In addition, I have changed most of the icons in the popup windows from ionic icon set based .svg icons to the icon font used by most Ape Apps applications, which should load a bit faster than the old icons did. I am probably going to change all the icons on the title screen soon too.

In the encyclopedia, the Units section has been expanded a bit, and I have also started adding the Research section. Still a lot of work to do on the encyclopedia, but we are making some progress!

The video section in Engine Settings now has a new slider to adjust the game rendering video resolution.


I am hoping this can help performance a bit, especially on the mobile side of things. There are lower end smart phones and laptops out there that barely have a GPU, but include super high resolution displays. With this new slider, you should be able to scale the output resolution down considerably. If it ends up making a big impact, I might have the resolution lowered by default on some mobile devices.

Next up, Ape Chat comes to My Colony 2! The in-game chat in the original My Colony has long been powered by the Ape Chat system, and now My Colony 2 has been migrated over as well. If you are using the stand alone Ape Chat client, you can join the in-game My Colony 2 channel #mc2.

The channel does not have its own custom icon yet, but that will be coming soon (I actually need to do an Ape Chat client update first). One of the benefits of running the in-game chat off of the Ape Chat service, is that you can subscribe to the channel and get notifications when people are talking and playing in the game, allowing you to jump into the game when activity is going on. You can also help people with their questions without even having the game open.

I will be watching the #mc2 channel to make sure things don't get out of hand. There may come a point where moderators are needed for the chat room (I might also need some new mods for mc1 chat), so keep that in mind if you are interested in helping in that regard, and if/when the time comes for moderators, I will reach out to people who have expressed an interest in the position.

Continuing on. If you look in the settlement stats window, you will notice a couple of new things. First, unemployment rate now shows up, so you can keep track of how many of your people do not have work. Unemployment can be caused by not enough jobs, but is also impacted by health, education and other ratings, and will weigh down on your overall approval rating.


Next, there is a new placeholder status bar for Faith. In the building editor, there is also a stat for structure faith rating. This is a new mechanic that will be coming soon, but at the core of it, there will be an opportunity to add faith related structures to the game, statues, temples, shrines, churches, etc. This will be sort of another stat like entertainment, but I also want a mechanic to where players can create a religion. They can then send missionaries to other settlements, or even to other worlds via the star gate system. There will then be global stats on which religions are spreading and to which planets/settlements. I think it can be a cool mechanic, so if you are interested in helping design this new feature, post some ideas!

Let's turn to some new content next. There is a new planet type (pictured in the first screenshot to this post) called Dusk World provided by @therealchromedino and it's awesome! This world provides a new resource called Duskshrooms, as well as a new rover and the Small Thermal Plant and Duskshroom Market structures. If you were looking into starting a new world, now might be a great time!

For Lunar maps, @RekEm1999 has provided a new upgraded Diamond Drilling Operation for advanced diamond extraction.

For expanding out the Alien Tech line a bit, I have added the Alien Power Tower, the Quantum Warehouse, and the new Quantum Housing Pod, a (very) high density housing upgrade to the base Bunkbed Shelter.


There are a few other new structures curtesy of @therealchromedino in this release. The Small and Advanced Blood Banks are new medical structures, the Cartel Prison is a new security structure, and the Transcendent Solar Tower is an epic new solar tower for those with Transcendent tech that can best the output of the Small Nuclear Reactor.

So that is about it for this update. There are still a lot of things that need fixing, and a big one is the combat system, which may be the focus of next update. Until then though, thanks to all contributors, thank you all for playing the game, and stay tuned for more!

https://mycolony2.com

#mycolony2
18d ago
Usually this is caused by an ad blocker, so check that first!
23d ago
The 1.32.0 patch for the original My Colony is now available and should be hitting all platforms in the coming days. This is a minor update containing bug fixes and updates to the latest libraries and whatnot. I have also updated the desktop packages for both Windows and Linux (x64 and ARM) on both the Ape Market and Steam, since some users were reporting issues launching the desktop clients before.

Note that there are no new macOS builds in this update. I do not plan to support macOS any longer as it's usage on my desktop apps has fallen below even Linux, and the latest releases of macOS make it nearly impossible to install third party software that has not been notarized by Apple (a service that Apple charges an annual fee for). Mac users are encouraged to just install the PWA version of the game using a chromium based web browser. The PWA can be found at the following URL:

https://mycolony.online/

#mycolony
1mo ago
The Death 3D engine (which also powers the game Dungeon Infinity) was my last major project waiting to be migrated off of the old Web App Core platform and onto it's own domain, and this project took way more time than I had anticipated, but now at last Death 3D v2.0.0 has arrived, with an almost total rewrite of most of the engine code.


The changes in this update are extremely numerous so I will not bother posting all of them, but I will hit on the major ones.

First off, the game itself can now be found at the following URL:

https://play.death3d.com/

Also, the Death 3D Map Editor has been yanked out of the base Death 3D game and is now hosted at it's own sub domain (along with a slight ui refresh):

https://editor.death3d.com/

The Editor is now it's own stand alone application, and can now be updated and improved independently of the base Death 3D game.


The biggest improvement to the editor is the new Test Map button, which allows you to jump into Death 3D and test out your changes with out first saving your map, closing the editor, loading the game, and going back, etc. It is now a lot quicker to develop and test Death 3D maps.

Moving on, every single menu in the game is now GPU rendered, with the rare exception of a couple of pop-up dialog boxes. This is to enable all menus to work in a VR headset, such as a Quest 3. Death 3D is now 100% playable with all features available in full immersive VR mode if you have a headset capable of WebXR.


For mobile users, the touch screen interface has been completely revamped as well. The game now utilizes virtual on-screen analog sticks for movement and looking. Of course all platforms have full gamepad and keyboard/mouse support.


The game now defaults to all video settings on low for all platforms, just so there is good performance out of the box. If you have a capable GPU, I suggest going into engine settings and turning on Lighting Engine and Bumpmapping Engine for the best experience. I do not suggest using the realtime shadows, and music also seems to impact performance a bit.

The new Death 3D rewrite is currently live on the Web platform only, and if there are no glaring bugs, I will release the new version to the various app stores probably next month some time. I will also be bringing the new engine to Dungeon Infinity soon.

At some point (when I ever have time) I want to do a pretty big revamp of the map editor, since it is now a bit dated, especially when compared to the editor used in Raycast Studio. But that is a project for another time. Until then, enjoy the Death update!

#death3d
1mo ago
I will start the main two back up. At one point I had 8 servers going at my house and it was impacting my internet and the family was letting their discontent known.
1mo ago
Right now it is just based off of the theme color of your device. I can also add an overwrite though so you can set it however you want.
1mo ago
I have just released v2.6.0 of Ape Chat, which should now be hitting all platforms (including embedded instances, such as the My Colony in-game chat, and the chat here in the forum).


The main changes in this release are the revamp of the UI for individual chat posts (the "box" around them has been removed, padding altered, font size changes, etc), and the ability to now react to chat messages! To do a reaction, you simply right-click (long press on Android) on a chat message, and you will have the option to add a reaction.


User avatars on chat posts will now always show their profile picture. Before, it was rendering their default My Tokens character if they had one, but to me I thought this looked a bit out of place, so I removed that feature.

There were also some new server and developer related features added that nobody but me will notice, so I will not bother logging them here. And of course, multiple big fixes have been implemented in this update.

The future of Ape Chat

I have a lot of features planned for Ape Chat, which I will be implementing whenever I get around to them, but I am also open to suggestions from the community.

In the long-term I want to move away from the Discord server and have everything Ape Apps related going through Ape Chat. This is more of a security thing, you never know what Discord (or any third-party service) is going to end up doing in the future, so it's nice to be able to have control of the user support system myself. That might be a little ways off, since Ape Chat still needs a few more features before I am ready to make that switch.

I plan to replace the private messaging system here on ape-apps.com with the Ape Chat based private messages, so that all user-to-user messaging for Ape Apps is contained in the same place.

I also plan on replacing the My Colony 2 in-game chat with an Ape Chat channel, just like how MC1 and Antiquitas currently work.

When a user creates a new channel on Ape Chat, they are automatically made the moderator of that channel, but there aren't many customization options right now for channel owners. I plan on adding new ways for channel owners to customize and differentiate their channels, and am open to suggestions on this front as well.

Speaking on channels, I plan on adding in in-app directory of all public channels on the server.

Finally, I plan on adding direct peer-to-peer file transfers inside direct private messaging windows. You will be able to drag a file from your desktop into the private chat window and it will open a direct socket between you and the other user (bypassing the Ape Chat server) for fast file transferring.

Those are my immediate ideas for Ape Chat. Let me know what others you have, and stay tuned for more!

#apechat

https://chat.ape-apps.com
1mo ago
I think its just the menu button on the remote, does that do anything for you?
2mo ago
Today Colony Wars has been updated to v0.14.0 and should be available soon on all supported platforms! This update fixes some existing bugs and adds a little new flair, so let's take a look!


The first thing you will notice in this release is that the title screen has been revamped! Now instead of a static still image, the game will load up a random map from all maps that you have installed, fill it with AI players, and set them at war with each other. If you are bored and want to watch the AI's fight, then you can pop some popcorn and sit there watching the title screen.

On larger screen devices, I have also revamped the game sidebar, undocking it from the left side and giving it a semi-transparent effect.


I am considering adding a radar to the top of the sidebar, but I am not sure if it is needed since you can also zoom the game in and out, but you can let me know what you think.

In addition, I fixed an issue where bombers would actually end up bombing themselves, and now when you are playing a quick match, all enemy units will actually be destroyed when the player loses.

Next I want to change the controls a bit for keyboard/mouse play. I want automatic map scrolling when you mouse to the edge of the map when playing in fullscreen, and also on mouse i want you to be able to drag/select units without clicking and holding first.

Anyway, that is it for this release. Once I think the engine is good and healthy again, I will finish adding the United Earth faction units and move on to implementing LIS.

https://wars.my-colony.com/

#colonywars
2mo ago
Yes @ffest , one of the buttons on the remote control switches the audio track, I don't remember which one I programmed it to off the top of my head though :-/
2mo ago
Just in time for Christmas is the v0.44.0 patch for My Colony 2! I did not have a ton of time for My Colony development this month, but I wanted to get something published before spending time with the family, so let's see what is new!


Aside from minor bug fixes, the following user submissions have been added to the game, with content from @spamdude @RekEm1999 and @therealchromedino
  • Diamond Drill (RekEm1999)
  • Vehicle Foundry (spamdude)
  • Cybercoin Mine (RekEm1999)
  • Bakery (spamdude)
  • Tenement (spamdude)
  • Small Server Farm Operation (RekEm1999)
  • Statue of Achievement (therealchromedino)
  • Spice Clinic (therealchromedino)
In addition, the model for the Vehicle Factory has been updated. The Small Warm Lightpost has been depreciated, and replaced by the custom color selection option added to the regular Small Light Post.

Anyway, keep the suggestions and content coming, I know the players really appreciate the efforts! I probably will not be doing much work for the rest of the year, but I will be back at it again in January with more MC2 goodness, so stay tuned!

#mycolony2

https://mycolony2.com/
2mo ago

bastecklein

Developer
Member Since
September 2nd, 2017
Welcome
Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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