Ape Apps

Just wanted to give props (and a link-back) to the website Free Apps for Me, which rated My Colony as #4 on their list of best base building games for Android and iOS:

freeappsforme.com/base-building-games/

Sort of like Sim City 4 in a way. I think it is a good idea, would require a few changes, but it is certainly doable.

ASpaf said:That would be awesome! Do you know when the next update will roll out? If you're short on Fire Stick players and there's any testing you need done, please let me know.

It will be this month for sure. There is actually another game I am releasing first based on the Level Up engine that already has this issue fixed along with several big UI changes. Once that game is done, the new engine updates will be ported back to Level Up.

They say never use Comic Sans on a website. It just looks noobish.

So much style!

DO NOT BECOME A MEME

Another thread for testing more new tags

Just to demonstrate, here is the new torrent tag.

[torrent]webtorrent.io/torrents/sintel.torrent[/torrent]

or

[torrent]magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2dff1a8afdb53c2b11fa315d0a679576645f110c&dn=4QWrGsi8g2ZH.mp4&tr=udp://explodie.org:6969&tr=udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6969&tr=udp://tracker.empire-js.us:1337&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969&tr=udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337&tr=wss://tracker.openwebtorrent.com&as=seed13.bitchute.com/EsSVjLui2aGL/4QWrGsi8g2ZH.mp4&xs=https://www.bitchute.com/torrent/EsSVjLui2aGL/4QWrGsi8g2ZH.webtorrent[/torrent]

You can either put in the url to a .torrent file, or use a magnet link

test of posting a straight up external torrent file link

So I was looking at the website BitChute the other day, which is sort of like a poor mans' YouTube except that videos are streamed peer to peer using Bit Torrent (WebTorrent actually), and I started looking into how they developed the tech to serve all of their videos peer to peer, and it looked like it would actually be fairly easy to implement, and so today I went ahead and did it.



So going forward, any audio or video files attached to a post in the forums will still be hosted on the server as normal, but will also distribute peer to peer in order to cut down on server bandwidth.

Now generally this isn't a very big deal, as there are almost no videos posted here to the site. However it does add some cool capabilities to the site, which I will finish implementing with the next day or so. With a little more work, the same tech used to host forum-posted videos peer to peer will also allow users to live-stream their My Colony (or other games) play sessions right to their Ape Apps profile page, or even host a live web cam stream, or a group chat similar to Google Hangouts. There are really quite a few possibilities. You should also be able to embed an entire movie into your post using a Bit Torrent magnet link, but I will have to create a new forum tag for that.

Anyway, its a new feature that doesn't seem that interesting at first, but long term can add a lot of new features and possibilities to both the website, and to the different games.

final torrent test

torrent mp4 test

webm test 2 with torrent

webm video test

vid test 1

this is for testing new file features

So for the past year or so, I have been using this website, as well as discussions.ape-apps.com/ to test out the new forum software that will eventually someday replace phpBB for RP Forums, which is by far the most active website that I own. Today marks another small step in that direction (I am essentially crawling towards it) with the re-release of the classic Discussions Legacy app for Android.

market.ape-apps.com/discussions-legacy.html

The purpose of the app is to test out how the new forum software will interface with the "Legacy" wrapper, which powers the current Android RP Forums Legacy app that some of you may be familiar with. Since I am developing both the website and the Legacy wrapper, the integration between the two will be able to be quite a bit tighter than the current RP Forums Legacy app allows.

So anyway, if you want to help move the ball along, feel free to download and test the new Legacy code out from the Ape Market, using the link I posted above. Please leave comments and suggestions either here, or preferably at the Discussions site. I also updated the app on Google Play, as it hadn't been updated since 2013, although it has to go through Google approval first, so I am not sure if it will ever be live on there again.

For those of you who are not aware, this website is not the first time I created an online forum from scratch. Back in 2010 I created Discussions, which turned out to be my first "big" hit app and actually grew into a fairly large forum community. My RP Forums app actually grew out of (and eventually split off from) Discussions. The problem was that the app had sections for several popular video games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, and those sections used icons and backgrounds from the game. The app ended up getting banned from the app stores for using copyrighted material, and the whole thing slowly died from there on out.

I don't expect anyone to use Discussions except for testing the new forums software, but if people want me to bring it back at some point, I can always add a few legit sections to it. It was essentially an anything-goes type of forum community.

ASpaf said:Hi - I've just started playing Level Up via my new Amazon Fire Stick remote, and I can't figure out how to view the vendor inventory and buy items. I'm able to sell items no problem. Can someone let me know what key sequence I need to use to get to the vendor inventory when the vendor is already in front of me?

Also, I've noticed the edges of the game are cut off on my TV screen, so I can't see how much gold I have, or the last row of my inventory. I'm not sure if this is a game issue, or a TV/Fire Stick display issue (I haven't tried looking for a game mode on my TV yet), but I thought I'd ask.

This might be an oversight on my part :-/

I will have both issues corrected for the next update.

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!

So you are talking about the Free App of the Month deal, and I can see how some might not think it is fair. I try to only do it for my older games that are not as popular anymore, to try to spur renewed interest and downloads. I can reevaluate the promotion method if more people have an issue with it.

ssj2071 said:I recently bought the premium version of My Colony on my iPhone SE and I just logged in to my ape apps account of the Facebook version of the game via Facebook, but the premium mode didn't carry over. If anyone could please help me with this issue, I would be grateful.

I fixed your account, it should work now. For some reason the premium flag did not get triggered, maybe there was a connection issue at the "moment of truth".

I have just published v1.15.0 of Antiquitas to all app stores, and it should be arriving to devices within the next couple of days.

This update adds three new Egyptian structures, the Ship Yard, the Fishing Docks, and the Egyptian Docks.

In addition, I have made some changes to the engine, and there is a new Engine Setting allowing you to disable multi-threaded pathfinding. I am testing this out with Antiquitas to see if it cures some of the "workers/rovers will not move" issues, before I push it out to My Colony in the next update for that game.

Anyway, let me know what issues you have, and thanks for playing!

What version of the game?

Maybe? Can you expand on that a bit? Are you thinking like the My Land engine but with stores instead of crops and animals?

Do you have any kind of ad-blocker on the PC that might be blocking the cloud server? it is cloud.ape-apps.com
Maybe add some kind of exception for that domain

there

yay lets test all these same links again, so fun

discussions.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=529
www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=16
discussions.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=357

MORE TRIALS PLEASE!

discussions.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=529
www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=16
discussions.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=357