bastecklein's Recent Posts
spessasus said:Hi, developer of SpessaSynth here.
I'm glad that spessasynth_lib has proven to be helpful!
One suggestion I have for the music, is using an sf3 soundfont since spessasynth supports these too.
They are essentially compressed sf2 soundfonts which allow higher quality sounds and maintain a small file size.
For example, you could use the free good quality "GeneralUser GS" soundfont which when compressed via Polyphone shrinks down to just 6 megabytes. while having a better sound quality than the current one. (or even go for a high quality soundfont like FluidR3_GM which compresses down to 17 megabytes)
Anyways, thanks for using my library in this cool game! :-)
Thank you so much, I will do that!
Today I have published an update to the original My Colony, bringing it up to v1.34.0, which should be hitting all platforms soon. There are a few changes here, so let's take a look!
First, I have reverted the in-game popup style menus to the big full window height slideout menus. Some players (on mobile in particular) were having issues with the other menu style, so I decided to just go back to the old reliable slideout menus that nobody seemed to have an issue with.
The Music Rendering engine has been completely replaced and is now using a new library called SpessaSynth that I have been following for a little while now. The developer of this new MIDI sequencing library is very good and is quite active, and has been super responsive when I have had questions or issues with the library. If you wouldn't mind, go to his Github repo and leave it a Star, because he does good work.
https://github.com/spessasus/SpessaSynth
This new library uses more modern JS coding techniques and renders .mid files in a worker thread, and so it does not impact game performance like the old MIDI renderer did. With this change though, you may notice that the music sounds a little different. Since the new library makes use of standard .sf2 sound font files, I am currently using with the game the widely available General MIDI soundfont, which is only a fraction of the size of the music patches that were being used with the old renderer. That said, this sound font objectively does not sound quite as good.
The good news is that the new library supports custom sound fonts, whereas the old one did not. If there is interest from players, I can add an option to the game that lets users select their own *.sf2 sound font file and then they can make the music sound however they want it to. For copyright reasons though, I will probably stick to the free one as the in-game packaged sound font.
Finally, this update includes beta-level support for a new Ape Apps-wide feature I have been working on behind the scenes for a while now, which is Private Cloud support. Currently, users of all of my apps, My Colony included, who opt into Cloud Sync have their save data temporarily stored on one central Ape Cloud server. Since it is expensive (and out of the scope of my business) to run mass cloud storage hosting, files are routinely purged from the server after several months of inactivity, which is why the server is branded as a sync server and not a long-term storage server.
With the new Private Cloud feature I am working on, users may set up their own private cloud server at their own location and use it as their default save location for their data. I have already been testing this on a handful of other apps, and now I am rolling it out to My Colony.
The Private Cloud system is a part of an application called the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge, which is available as both a Progressive Web App and as a stand-alone application for Windows or Linux.
To get started, install the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge (either desktop or PWA edition, for private cloud I would suggest the full desktop download) and signs in with your Ape Apps Account. Once signed in, click on the Add Resource button and select Private Cloud.
From there, you can select a folder on your computer that will be your new private cloud sync folder. If you are using the PWA version, you will probably need to re-enable folder permissions every time you restart your computer, so keep that in mind. The desktop client does not have that limitation, which is why it is preferred.
If you are going to try using the Private Cloud, I would suggest setting your computer to automatically start the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge on startup. The desktop edition can be minimized to your system try, so it is non-obtrusive.
Once Private Cloud is set up, restart My Colony. If you are signed in with your account, you will see a new Cloud Sync Location option on the title screen menu.
If you only have one cloud sync folder enabled on your account, then it will automatically be set as the default, so keep that in mind. If you are given permission to multiple cloud sync locations, you will default to the central Ape Cloud service and you will have to manually select which server you want to use.
If you decide to give the new Private Cloud feature a try, please let me know how it works for you. This feature was originally designed for some business users using EZ Office applications whose business policies did not allow them to use the central Ape Cloud servers, but in my testing so far it is working quite well for My Colony saves. Theoretically you could set a lot better saving/loading performance, especially if you are at your own house while playing.
And yes, you can still sync to your own Private Cloud, even when you are not at home.
Another Private Cloud benefit is that you can easily back up all of your Ape Apps data whenever you feel like it. It would be trivial to compress your entire Private Cloud folder on a regular basis and keep backups in any way which works for you.
How does it work?
The Private Cloud feature uses a private channel on the central Ape Apps Signaling server, tied to your individual Ape Apps Account, to locate any AWA Desktop Bridge instances you have running. When Bridge instances are located, the Signaling server then initiates a peer-to-peer handshake to make a direct WebRTC socket connection between your My Colony instance and your AWA Desktop Bridge instance, similar to the way that My Colony 2 dedicated servers work. The Signaling server then gets out of the way and you are operating with a direct peer to peer link to your own Private Cloud server, wherever it is located.
In theory, this direct peer to peer connection should perform better than the centralized Ape Cloud server, because a) it obviously has a lot less traffic going to it, and b) it is using a persistent direct connection instead of making constant HTTP requests.
So that is the Private cloud system in a nutshell. Like I said, give it a try and let me know how it works for you, or what issues it gives you. I have been using it for a little while on some EZ Office applications and it has been running without issue, but they generally have smaller file sizes than My Colony saves, so it will be interesting to see how it goes.
So that is it for this update. It should be rolling out everywhere soon, so let me know how it goes, and stay tuned for more!
https://mycolony.online/
#mycolony
First, I have reverted the in-game popup style menus to the big full window height slideout menus. Some players (on mobile in particular) were having issues with the other menu style, so I decided to just go back to the old reliable slideout menus that nobody seemed to have an issue with.
The Music Rendering engine has been completely replaced and is now using a new library called SpessaSynth that I have been following for a little while now. The developer of this new MIDI sequencing library is very good and is quite active, and has been super responsive when I have had questions or issues with the library. If you wouldn't mind, go to his Github repo and leave it a Star, because he does good work.
https://github.com/spessasus/SpessaSynth
This new library uses more modern JS coding techniques and renders .mid files in a worker thread, and so it does not impact game performance like the old MIDI renderer did. With this change though, you may notice that the music sounds a little different. Since the new library makes use of standard .sf2 sound font files, I am currently using with the game the widely available General MIDI soundfont, which is only a fraction of the size of the music patches that were being used with the old renderer. That said, this sound font objectively does not sound quite as good.
The good news is that the new library supports custom sound fonts, whereas the old one did not. If there is interest from players, I can add an option to the game that lets users select their own *.sf2 sound font file and then they can make the music sound however they want it to. For copyright reasons though, I will probably stick to the free one as the in-game packaged sound font.
Finally, this update includes beta-level support for a new Ape Apps-wide feature I have been working on behind the scenes for a while now, which is Private Cloud support. Currently, users of all of my apps, My Colony included, who opt into Cloud Sync have their save data temporarily stored on one central Ape Cloud server. Since it is expensive (and out of the scope of my business) to run mass cloud storage hosting, files are routinely purged from the server after several months of inactivity, which is why the server is branded as a sync server and not a long-term storage server.
With the new Private Cloud feature I am working on, users may set up their own private cloud server at their own location and use it as their default save location for their data. I have already been testing this on a handful of other apps, and now I am rolling it out to My Colony.
The Private Cloud system is a part of an application called the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge, which is available as both a Progressive Web App and as a stand-alone application for Windows or Linux.
To get started, install the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge (either desktop or PWA edition, for private cloud I would suggest the full desktop download) and signs in with your Ape Apps Account. Once signed in, click on the Add Resource button and select Private Cloud.
From there, you can select a folder on your computer that will be your new private cloud sync folder. If you are using the PWA version, you will probably need to re-enable folder permissions every time you restart your computer, so keep that in mind. The desktop client does not have that limitation, which is why it is preferred.
If you are going to try using the Private Cloud, I would suggest setting your computer to automatically start the Ape Web Apps Desktop Bridge on startup. The desktop edition can be minimized to your system try, so it is non-obtrusive.
Once Private Cloud is set up, restart My Colony. If you are signed in with your account, you will see a new Cloud Sync Location option on the title screen menu.
If you only have one cloud sync folder enabled on your account, then it will automatically be set as the default, so keep that in mind. If you are given permission to multiple cloud sync locations, you will default to the central Ape Cloud service and you will have to manually select which server you want to use.
If you decide to give the new Private Cloud feature a try, please let me know how it works for you. This feature was originally designed for some business users using EZ Office applications whose business policies did not allow them to use the central Ape Cloud servers, but in my testing so far it is working quite well for My Colony saves. Theoretically you could set a lot better saving/loading performance, especially if you are at your own house while playing.
And yes, you can still sync to your own Private Cloud, even when you are not at home.
Another Private Cloud benefit is that you can easily back up all of your Ape Apps data whenever you feel like it. It would be trivial to compress your entire Private Cloud folder on a regular basis and keep backups in any way which works for you.
How does it work?
The Private Cloud feature uses a private channel on the central Ape Apps Signaling server, tied to your individual Ape Apps Account, to locate any AWA Desktop Bridge instances you have running. When Bridge instances are located, the Signaling server then initiates a peer-to-peer handshake to make a direct WebRTC socket connection between your My Colony instance and your AWA Desktop Bridge instance, similar to the way that My Colony 2 dedicated servers work. The Signaling server then gets out of the way and you are operating with a direct peer to peer link to your own Private Cloud server, wherever it is located.
In theory, this direct peer to peer connection should perform better than the centralized Ape Cloud server, because a) it obviously has a lot less traffic going to it, and b) it is using a persistent direct connection instead of making constant HTTP requests.
So that is the Private cloud system in a nutshell. Like I said, give it a try and let me know how it works for you, or what issues it gives you. I have been using it for a little while on some EZ Office applications and it has been running without issue, but they generally have smaller file sizes than My Colony saves, so it will be interesting to see how it goes.
So that is it for this update. It should be rolling out everywhere soon, so let me know how it goes, and stay tuned for more!
https://mycolony.online/
#mycolony
It was hosting the Geubega world at the time. I had to stop using it because the save file got so big the iPad couldn't handle it.
So there really isn't a way to easily crack the password protection without reverse engineering your diary file. How important is it to get into the entries? Because you can also create a new diary file if you haven't added much to the old one yet.
I am continuing the push on the new Epic Adventure engine to improve controls, game-play and to get the features to the point to where I can start using the engine to make other games. To that end, I am now releasing the v3.2 update to Epic Adventure with new features and content, so let's take a look!
First off, the engine has a handful of new bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Among them, general controls for mouse, touch and gamepad should all be improved in this release. The mouse wheel can now be used to quickly cycle through belt items. Touch users get a new red destructive hit button, so you can destroy tiles instead of just using them.
There is now in-game chat so you can communicate with other players in your server. To go along with that, there is a Clear Chat option added to the in-game menu. The in-game menu also gets a new sound effects volume control.
The engine now has support for door and sign type objects, and so to go along with the engine support are the new Wood Door and Wood Sign objects.
In addition, the Cow has been added to the game, a peaceful surface biome mob. Killing the cow can drop a Leather Hide and Raw Beef. The Raw Beef can be cooked in the furnace into Cooked Beef, and the Leather Hide can be used to make a Leather Helmet.
The new Leather Helmet comes with engine support for all types of Armor and the ability to equip it, so you can expect to see full suits of armor in the coming updates, along with different kinds of weapons you can use. I think the next update will focus on adding Dungeons into the game, which will also come with all new mobs, weapons, armors, and other types of loot you can find. So stay tuned for that, and let me know what you would like to see added to the game!
https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/
#epicadventure
First off, the engine has a handful of new bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Among them, general controls for mouse, touch and gamepad should all be improved in this release. The mouse wheel can now be used to quickly cycle through belt items. Touch users get a new red destructive hit button, so you can destroy tiles instead of just using them.
There is now in-game chat so you can communicate with other players in your server. To go along with that, there is a Clear Chat option added to the in-game menu. The in-game menu also gets a new sound effects volume control.
The engine now has support for door and sign type objects, and so to go along with the engine support are the new Wood Door and Wood Sign objects.
In addition, the Cow has been added to the game, a peaceful surface biome mob. Killing the cow can drop a Leather Hide and Raw Beef. The Raw Beef can be cooked in the furnace into Cooked Beef, and the Leather Hide can be used to make a Leather Helmet.
The new Leather Helmet comes with engine support for all types of Armor and the ability to equip it, so you can expect to see full suits of armor in the coming updates, along with different kinds of weapons you can use. I think the next update will focus on adding Dungeons into the game, which will also come with all new mobs, weapons, armors, and other types of loot you can find. So stay tuned for that, and let me know what you would like to see added to the game!
https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/
#epicadventure
What version of Windows (or other operating system) is the PC in question running? I will look into this.
UnitedEarthGov said:Hopefully you meant those other weird replies I've seen around, and not me. I just really love United Earth, and wanted to share that with others. Cheers Bast!
Glory to United Earth
Yes I meant the other weird replies. Unless you have been posting chat GPT spam with an alternate account. In which case, we need to talk. lol
I couple of months ago, I mentioned that my long term plan is to replace both Ape Chat and the Ape Apps Discord channel with a resurrected Discussions app, and with the recent crash of the Ape Chat server, I have decided to begin work on this transition, which is now available for testing!
The new Discussions beta is located at https://discussions.social/?beta=1 and is still in the very early stages. On the back end, it runs off of the same server as Ape Chat and uses the same database, so the two apps will be interoperable during the transition, which should make things smoother (and prevent the breaking of any of the in-game chat features).That said, Discussions does include some new features to the chat engine which are not supported by Ape Chat, which may cause some strange rendering issues and confusion when viewing newer posts in the older Ape Chat interface.
For example, one of the new features in Discussions is threaded conversations, or the ability for a chat channel to be designated as a "forum" style.
I eventually want to move a lot of the support forum off of the Ape Apps website and into Discussions, which is why the threaded forum view for channels is necessary. I believe this will help against the constant spam I am always fighting here on the website, since Discussions will require an account for access which will greatly reduce the usefulness of ChatGPT spam that the forum has been plagued with lately.
Another new feature found in the new Discussions beta is chat channel grouping:
Chat channels can now be grouped by topic and given a sort order, which should help clean things up quite a bit.
In addition to channel groups, Discussions has the ability to connect to multiple servers as well, not just the current chat.ape-apps.com server. Once I am ready to release the full Discussions app and shut down the old Ape Chat front end, I am going to clean up the server code and release it as a stand alone package, for anyone who wishes to run their own private Discussions server.
Channel creators have new customization options for their chat channels as well. If you create a new private chat channel (done by prefixing a new channel name with a % sign), you become the moderator of that channel with the ability to add/invite users yourself. This also gives you the ability to customize the channel, from the display name, welcome message, and channel icon.
I am also planning on implementing a custom join link/url that can be used for inviting users to private channels, so that the channel admin does not have to manually invite users to the channel.
There is still quite a bit of work to do on Discussions and I don't plan to make the full transition until later this year, so this is still very much in the preview stage. I still don't have things like private messaging or notifications ported over yet, and some things are a bit wonky. But feel free to try out the new client and give feedback on how it can be improved. I think that when it's done it will be a lot better than the current Ape Chat!
https://discussions.social/?beta=1
#discussions
The new Discussions beta is located at https://discussions.social/?beta=1 and is still in the very early stages. On the back end, it runs off of the same server as Ape Chat and uses the same database, so the two apps will be interoperable during the transition, which should make things smoother (and prevent the breaking of any of the in-game chat features).That said, Discussions does include some new features to the chat engine which are not supported by Ape Chat, which may cause some strange rendering issues and confusion when viewing newer posts in the older Ape Chat interface.
For example, one of the new features in Discussions is threaded conversations, or the ability for a chat channel to be designated as a "forum" style.
I eventually want to move a lot of the support forum off of the Ape Apps website and into Discussions, which is why the threaded forum view for channels is necessary. I believe this will help against the constant spam I am always fighting here on the website, since Discussions will require an account for access which will greatly reduce the usefulness of ChatGPT spam that the forum has been plagued with lately.
Another new feature found in the new Discussions beta is chat channel grouping:
Chat channels can now be grouped by topic and given a sort order, which should help clean things up quite a bit.
In addition to channel groups, Discussions has the ability to connect to multiple servers as well, not just the current chat.ape-apps.com server. Once I am ready to release the full Discussions app and shut down the old Ape Chat front end, I am going to clean up the server code and release it as a stand alone package, for anyone who wishes to run their own private Discussions server.
Channel creators have new customization options for their chat channels as well. If you create a new private chat channel (done by prefixing a new channel name with a % sign), you become the moderator of that channel with the ability to add/invite users yourself. This also gives you the ability to customize the channel, from the display name, welcome message, and channel icon.
I am also planning on implementing a custom join link/url that can be used for inviting users to private channels, so that the channel admin does not have to manually invite users to the channel.
There is still quite a bit of work to do on Discussions and I don't plan to make the full transition until later this year, so this is still very much in the preview stage. I still don't have things like private messaging or notifications ported over yet, and some things are a bit wonky. But feel free to try out the new client and give feedback on how it can be improved. I think that when it's done it will be a lot better than the current Ape Chat!
https://discussions.social/?beta=1
#discussions
Today I am releasing the total rewrite of Epic Adventure to all available platforms. Under the hood, Epic Adventure v3.0 is basically an entire different game. What I did was write a new game engine from scratch, designed to go hand in hand with Pixel Paint based graphics (the way My Colony 2 was designed around Voxel Paint), and then I remade Epic Adventure using the new engine. This is just the first step in an "epic" new chapter for Epic Adventure though, so let's get into it!
Putting the actual Epic Adventure game aside for just a second, my ultimate goal with this new engine (called simply the "Adventure Engine") was to create an easy to develop for pixel art based engine that can be primarily be used for both scripted and procedurally generated RPG type games. I designed it to be generic enough to where multiple types of games can be created on it. For instance, I plan to use it also for my next generation of Roguelike games (ie Gone Rogue/Hell and Back), and I also want to do a scripted RPG taking place in the My Colony Universe where you have a ship and travel to different worlds throughout the story (I am thinking of calling that Colony Quest or something similar, sort of like a 2d pixel art Starfield type game in the MC Universe).
All that is for another day though, today I want to talk about the changes to Epic Adventure in this new release, and what is coming soon to the game in the months ahead.
First for the bad news. Because the game is a complete rewrite, all existing save games are gone. Sadly there was no way around this, as the old game format is not even relevant anymore to the new engine. It had to be done though in order to move the game forward, and I think most people will agree that it was worth it as the game now progresses.
Epic Adventure is now the first game to utilize the new Tiny Pixel Token class of token character from the My Tokens app, which has been around for a while now but is now finally getting some utilization.
Game controls have been altered a bit from the previous releases, but I think most players should be able to adapt fairly quickly. On mobile, the game now utilizes two virtual thumbsticks for movement, with the left stick controlling player movement and the right controlling focus direction. The game now has full gamepad support as well. On a desktop device, the controls are a little more similar to how they used to be, except for now you can move your character with keyboard input, using either WASD keys, the regular arrow keys, or the num pad.
The game now has support for chests, allowing you to store a lot more inventory than you could before. The engine also supports finding hidden chests out in the environment that can contain loot, even things you can't craft yourself, but you will not find any until the next update (since I don't have any biomes programmed in that contain them yet).
Epic Adventure now also included enemies! Yes the game did have chickens before (and still does), but they did not really attack you or fight back. Now when you adventure into the caves, you will come across evil spiders who will attack you on sight. The spiders aren't all that powerful, but don't get too complacent because in the coming updates, there will be a lot more than just spiders to contend with...
The long requested feature of Water has arrived in this release, but stay tuned because it is going to be expanded on more later...
For this initial release of the new engine, my primary goal was to code in all of the features needed to bring in every item/terrain/biome/mechanic found in the original Epic Adventure game so that nothing was missing in the update, and I do think that I was able to get there (let me know if I forgot something). The next step though is to start going far beyond what was ever available in the original game, which I am going to talk about in just a moment here.
First though, one think I want to point out is that I forgot to implement the inventory filtering mechanic in this update. You will be able to see in the inventory window what you will eventually be able to do, I just do not have it working yet (but will soon).
The great thing about the new Epic Adventure engine is how easy it is to create content for, both in terms of code and graphics. Because of this, the game is going to now be expanding fairly rapidly, and of course I will always take player feedback and suggestions into account as I build out the game. I do have some of my own ideas though, so this is what I plan on adding to Epic Adventure in the next few releases:
Dungeons
This is probably the next thing on the list, because I have always wanted to have dungeons available to explore in Epic Adventure. These will of course be randomly generated by the game, so that no two dungeons are ever the same, and you will be able to find both loot and monsters in the dungeons that are not available anywhere else. Dungeons will also have the possibility of spawning a nice boss fight for you on the bottom floor.
Towns/NPCs
Along with Dungeons, a good adventure game needs to have towns, good save areas you can travel to in order to rest, pawn off your loot, and get quests. I will talk more about towns and NPCs later, but I will say that I am working on a system of "factions" where different NPCs are part of different factions, and how much they like you will be impacted by that. You will also be able to join different factions, which will impact how your game progresses. I am thinking along the lines of the guilds and whatnot in the Elder Scrolls games.
Travel/Mounts/Boats
There needs to be a way to get around faster in the game, especially as you need to start questing between towns. I am thinking of several mechanics to handle this. First, I think each town will have a sort of fast travel agency, where you can pay gold (which means gold is also on the way) to travel from town to town. I also want to add the ability to ride horses, or to build a boat so that I can introduce full ocean biomes that you can sail across.
Armor, Magic, Projectiles
To help players on their adventures, we are going to need to have better weapons, armor to wear, projectiles to shoot, and magic spells. I plan on adding all of that and more...
Massive Content Expansion
With every update from here on, there will be new content, biomes, items, terrains, mobs, etc. I am probably also going to start introducing some items that require Premium in order to craft, since the game is free with no ads in it, I do need to find some way to make a bit of money on it. But for real, the game is so easy to code content for, you can expect a lot to be coming very soon.
At the end of the day, this is a new beginning for Epic Adventure, and I think the game will now finally be able to reach a potential that it was not able to attain before. Since the engine is still in it's infancy, please let me know what bugs and issues you find, and how I can improve the interface and controls. Also let me know what new content you want to see added, as it will be coming on a fairly regular basis now.
Thank you to those who have played the game in it's original form though, and I am so sorry for nuking all of your save games. But I promise that I will make the game worth the changes in the weeks and months ahead!
https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/
#epicadventure #pixelpaint #mytokens
Putting the actual Epic Adventure game aside for just a second, my ultimate goal with this new engine (called simply the "Adventure Engine") was to create an easy to develop for pixel art based engine that can be primarily be used for both scripted and procedurally generated RPG type games. I designed it to be generic enough to where multiple types of games can be created on it. For instance, I plan to use it also for my next generation of Roguelike games (ie Gone Rogue/Hell and Back), and I also want to do a scripted RPG taking place in the My Colony Universe where you have a ship and travel to different worlds throughout the story (I am thinking of calling that Colony Quest or something similar, sort of like a 2d pixel art Starfield type game in the MC Universe).
All that is for another day though, today I want to talk about the changes to Epic Adventure in this new release, and what is coming soon to the game in the months ahead.
First for the bad news. Because the game is a complete rewrite, all existing save games are gone. Sadly there was no way around this, as the old game format is not even relevant anymore to the new engine. It had to be done though in order to move the game forward, and I think most people will agree that it was worth it as the game now progresses.
Epic Adventure is now the first game to utilize the new Tiny Pixel Token class of token character from the My Tokens app, which has been around for a while now but is now finally getting some utilization.
Game controls have been altered a bit from the previous releases, but I think most players should be able to adapt fairly quickly. On mobile, the game now utilizes two virtual thumbsticks for movement, with the left stick controlling player movement and the right controlling focus direction. The game now has full gamepad support as well. On a desktop device, the controls are a little more similar to how they used to be, except for now you can move your character with keyboard input, using either WASD keys, the regular arrow keys, or the num pad.
The game now has support for chests, allowing you to store a lot more inventory than you could before. The engine also supports finding hidden chests out in the environment that can contain loot, even things you can't craft yourself, but you will not find any until the next update (since I don't have any biomes programmed in that contain them yet).
Epic Adventure now also included enemies! Yes the game did have chickens before (and still does), but they did not really attack you or fight back. Now when you adventure into the caves, you will come across evil spiders who will attack you on sight. The spiders aren't all that powerful, but don't get too complacent because in the coming updates, there will be a lot more than just spiders to contend with...
The long requested feature of Water has arrived in this release, but stay tuned because it is going to be expanded on more later...
For this initial release of the new engine, my primary goal was to code in all of the features needed to bring in every item/terrain/biome/mechanic found in the original Epic Adventure game so that nothing was missing in the update, and I do think that I was able to get there (let me know if I forgot something). The next step though is to start going far beyond what was ever available in the original game, which I am going to talk about in just a moment here.
First though, one think I want to point out is that I forgot to implement the inventory filtering mechanic in this update. You will be able to see in the inventory window what you will eventually be able to do, I just do not have it working yet (but will soon).
The great thing about the new Epic Adventure engine is how easy it is to create content for, both in terms of code and graphics. Because of this, the game is going to now be expanding fairly rapidly, and of course I will always take player feedback and suggestions into account as I build out the game. I do have some of my own ideas though, so this is what I plan on adding to Epic Adventure in the next few releases:
Dungeons
This is probably the next thing on the list, because I have always wanted to have dungeons available to explore in Epic Adventure. These will of course be randomly generated by the game, so that no two dungeons are ever the same, and you will be able to find both loot and monsters in the dungeons that are not available anywhere else. Dungeons will also have the possibility of spawning a nice boss fight for you on the bottom floor.
Towns/NPCs
Along with Dungeons, a good adventure game needs to have towns, good save areas you can travel to in order to rest, pawn off your loot, and get quests. I will talk more about towns and NPCs later, but I will say that I am working on a system of "factions" where different NPCs are part of different factions, and how much they like you will be impacted by that. You will also be able to join different factions, which will impact how your game progresses. I am thinking along the lines of the guilds and whatnot in the Elder Scrolls games.
Travel/Mounts/Boats
There needs to be a way to get around faster in the game, especially as you need to start questing between towns. I am thinking of several mechanics to handle this. First, I think each town will have a sort of fast travel agency, where you can pay gold (which means gold is also on the way) to travel from town to town. I also want to add the ability to ride horses, or to build a boat so that I can introduce full ocean biomes that you can sail across.
Armor, Magic, Projectiles
To help players on their adventures, we are going to need to have better weapons, armor to wear, projectiles to shoot, and magic spells. I plan on adding all of that and more...
Massive Content Expansion
With every update from here on, there will be new content, biomes, items, terrains, mobs, etc. I am probably also going to start introducing some items that require Premium in order to craft, since the game is free with no ads in it, I do need to find some way to make a bit of money on it. But for real, the game is so easy to code content for, you can expect a lot to be coming very soon.
At the end of the day, this is a new beginning for Epic Adventure, and I think the game will now finally be able to reach a potential that it was not able to attain before. Since the engine is still in it's infancy, please let me know what bugs and issues you find, and how I can improve the interface and controls. Also let me know what new content you want to see added, as it will be coming on a fairly regular basis now.
Thank you to those who have played the game in it's original form though, and I am so sorry for nuking all of your save games. But I promise that I will make the game worth the changes in the weeks and months ahead!
https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/
#epicadventure #pixelpaint #mytokens
You might wait a bit until the new version is out, because old save games will not carry over @RekEm1999
I did make a change so that you need to click/tap on the actual ground tiles that the building is placed on, and not the building model itself. Does that work @EvRan ?
Over the past couple of weeks, I have begun rewriting the Epic Adventure game from scratch, converting it to Pixel Paint graphics and greatly improving the ease of adding new content and feature set.
The original Epic Adventure code was my first attempt at multiplayer gameplay, and I made a lot of noob coding decisions that sort of put development of the game at a stand still. It was basically a convoluted mess and there was no easy way to move the project forward, so it pretty much sat idle for years.
Recently though, and pretty much out of nowhere, the game suddenly became popular on the Windows Store to where it has become one of my top played games, and a lot of requests for updates and feature improvements have started to come in via the in-app "Submit Feedback" function. Most of the requests were basically non-starters with the way the code originally worked, so I had the choice to either ignore the feedback and the recent growth of the game, or to basically start over from scratch, so I choose option 2.
The Epic Adventure rewrite (which will be Epic Adventure v3.0 once released) is build off of my new aptly titled "Adventure Game Engine" and incorporates many of the coding lessons I learned during the development of My Colony 2. The engine has been made generic enough that it will also be usable for other types of games in the future, namely Roguelike and scripted RPG type games. It can do procedurally generated worlds (such as how Epic Adventure will continue to work) or is can run off of prebuilt maps and scripts. It now supports not only click and touch controls, but also keyboard and gamepad input.
Game chunks are now loaded on the fly and in a continuous/infinite manner like in My Colony 2, and terrain features and textures can be automatically generated by the engine at run time, so that biome definitions only really need to specify colors (other customizations are possible though). The engine now supports Water, which was a top request for the current Epic Adventure game, but the water can also be given a custom color and made to be dangerous (lava?).
This new rewrite will be available to play as soon as it is able to do everything that the current version of Epic Adventure can, since I can't release an update with less features than the previous version! That basically means I need to finish creating all of the tools/items/craftable things and get them all working the same as before.
After that though, future updates and releases are going to be extremely easy to do with the way the game works now. So besides greatly expanding the current lineup of things you can craft and build, here are some of the near term plans for additions to the game:
Towns
Random towns will be generated on the overworld including NPCs that can run shops and give you basic automatically generated quests.
Dungeons
Similar to towns, dungeons will appear on the overworld, but they will be mainly a single structure with a stairway leading down to the real dungeon area, which will be multiple levels and probably have something cool at the bottom of the floor. Town NPC's will be able to give quests that involve exploring or clearing out nearby dungeons.
Vehicles
You will be able to craft and then get in and control vehicles. I am mainly thinking of boats for the water to start out with, but I also think a minecart that can run on tracks you build would be a neat addition.
Dedicated Servers
I am adding in a dedicated server mode just like in MC2, so that persistent Epic Adventure worlds can be running 24/7 that anyone can join and partake in.
I expect the initial release of this Epic Adventure rewrite to be out in a couple of weeks, and then I will start expanding it out based on feedback. I think that this new version of Epic Adventure is going to be a lot more fun than the current iteration, and I look forward to seeing what people think when I publish the update, so stay tuned!
#epicadventure
The original Epic Adventure code was my first attempt at multiplayer gameplay, and I made a lot of noob coding decisions that sort of put development of the game at a stand still. It was basically a convoluted mess and there was no easy way to move the project forward, so it pretty much sat idle for years.
Recently though, and pretty much out of nowhere, the game suddenly became popular on the Windows Store to where it has become one of my top played games, and a lot of requests for updates and feature improvements have started to come in via the in-app "Submit Feedback" function. Most of the requests were basically non-starters with the way the code originally worked, so I had the choice to either ignore the feedback and the recent growth of the game, or to basically start over from scratch, so I choose option 2.
The Epic Adventure rewrite (which will be Epic Adventure v3.0 once released) is build off of my new aptly titled "Adventure Game Engine" and incorporates many of the coding lessons I learned during the development of My Colony 2. The engine has been made generic enough that it will also be usable for other types of games in the future, namely Roguelike and scripted RPG type games. It can do procedurally generated worlds (such as how Epic Adventure will continue to work) or is can run off of prebuilt maps and scripts. It now supports not only click and touch controls, but also keyboard and gamepad input.
Game chunks are now loaded on the fly and in a continuous/infinite manner like in My Colony 2, and terrain features and textures can be automatically generated by the engine at run time, so that biome definitions only really need to specify colors (other customizations are possible though). The engine now supports Water, which was a top request for the current Epic Adventure game, but the water can also be given a custom color and made to be dangerous (lava?).
This new rewrite will be available to play as soon as it is able to do everything that the current version of Epic Adventure can, since I can't release an update with less features than the previous version! That basically means I need to finish creating all of the tools/items/craftable things and get them all working the same as before.
After that though, future updates and releases are going to be extremely easy to do with the way the game works now. So besides greatly expanding the current lineup of things you can craft and build, here are some of the near term plans for additions to the game:
Towns
Random towns will be generated on the overworld including NPCs that can run shops and give you basic automatically generated quests.
Dungeons
Similar to towns, dungeons will appear on the overworld, but they will be mainly a single structure with a stairway leading down to the real dungeon area, which will be multiple levels and probably have something cool at the bottom of the floor. Town NPC's will be able to give quests that involve exploring or clearing out nearby dungeons.
Vehicles
You will be able to craft and then get in and control vehicles. I am mainly thinking of boats for the water to start out with, but I also think a minecart that can run on tracks you build would be a neat addition.
Dedicated Servers
I am adding in a dedicated server mode just like in MC2, so that persistent Epic Adventure worlds can be running 24/7 that anyone can join and partake in.
I expect the initial release of this Epic Adventure rewrite to be out in a couple of weeks, and then I will start expanding it out based on feedback. I think that this new version of Epic Adventure is going to be a lot more fun than the current iteration, and I look forward to seeing what people think when I publish the update, so stay tuned!
#epicadventure
Today the v0.46.0 update to My Colony 2 has gone live, and it adds some exciting new content, featuring the first new playable civilization in the game (thanks to the world of @therealchromedino ), the Alpha Draconians! Let's take a look.
To begin, the bug where none of the drop down menus were working has been corrected. This issue was introduced in-between updates, due to a change in the ADL UI Library used on most Ape Apps. It's fixed now though, so all is good!
@therealchromedino submitted a massive data file with the Alpha Draconian civilization from MC1 ported to and improved for MC2, including over 70 new data objects and accompanying changes to over 30 existing data objects. This is an amazing undertaking on behalf of the community, so please show your appreciation for what @therealchromedino has given to all of us!
Along with the Alpha Draconians, two new resources are introduced in this update, which are Ant Paste and Antanium. These should now be available to trade on the GBT, although to store them as the United Earth civilization, you will need to have the Quantum Warehouse, which has been updated with storage for the new resources.
Moving along, I often times have gotten the request to re-introduce the drop-down sidebar filter that was present in My Colony 1, so in this update, I have brought it back to My Colony 2. It only appears in the larger sized expanded sidebar, and is hidden when the sidebar is in "compact" mode.
The Investment Bank has gotten an updated model thanks to @spamdude and the Lander and Outpost structures have been updated with slightly increased Spare Parts storage. The speed rating on the Dark Solar Road has also been increased.
Both sized blood bank structures received premium "gold" editions provided by @therealchromedino and there is a new expanded Water Extraction Plant, also from @therealchromedino. @spamdude provides a new super-fast road, the Alien Hexpath and @RekEm1999 provides a Quantum Ether Tank upgrade.
There were a lot more structures available that I could have added, but the feature I am about to mention next took up so much time to get working that I just didn't get to anything else.
There is now engine support in My Colony 2 for Player Mode Public Transit, but it was super hard to get working and it is still a bit glitchy. I don't need to get too much into the technical details, but the way the engine itself and the player mode stuff in particular were designed did not lend themselves very well to this, but a ton of changes were made in this update, after much trial and error, to get it to the "working" state that it's in now.
The system works with the new Regional Bus Station structure (from @spamdude ) which is unlocked by the new Public Transportation tech and requires a Megabot to build. Once you build a Regional Bus Station, you can give it a name (like you can do for a sign) and a custom color. Then in Player Mode, a character can walk up to the Bus Station and press the "E" key (or A on a gamepad) to bring up a list of all other Bus Stations on the planet. He will then be picked up by the new SkyBus unit (from @spamdude ) and flown to the other bus station.
This is where there are some visual glitches, I don't know why the SkyBus is so jumpy while it's flying. Also, your character is supposed to go invisible at that point but instead is shown hanging (for dear life) to the bottom of the SkyBus. I will fix those things eventually, but it got to the point where I was sinking so many hours into getting this stupid SkyBus working that I started falling behind on everything else, so for now it is what it is.
Anyway, for future player mode stuff, I think the Sky Bus system is going to be essential, since it would otherwise take a character forever to walk between maps. That said, I have also laid the groundwork in this update for units (such as the player character, but other units too) to be able to go inside other units, which can lead to things like APC units for example, or player controlled units, such as a personal car.
Eventually I will have the star gates working for travel between different servers. I think for settlement design then, it would make sense for people with a Star Gate in their settlement to also have a Bus Station near by.
Anyway, that is all for today. Thanks for playing the game, thank you so much to all of the contributors, and stay tuned for more!
#mycolony2
To begin, the bug where none of the drop down menus were working has been corrected. This issue was introduced in-between updates, due to a change in the ADL UI Library used on most Ape Apps. It's fixed now though, so all is good!
@therealchromedino submitted a massive data file with the Alpha Draconian civilization from MC1 ported to and improved for MC2, including over 70 new data objects and accompanying changes to over 30 existing data objects. This is an amazing undertaking on behalf of the community, so please show your appreciation for what @therealchromedino has given to all of us!
Along with the Alpha Draconians, two new resources are introduced in this update, which are Ant Paste and Antanium. These should now be available to trade on the GBT, although to store them as the United Earth civilization, you will need to have the Quantum Warehouse, which has been updated with storage for the new resources.
Moving along, I often times have gotten the request to re-introduce the drop-down sidebar filter that was present in My Colony 1, so in this update, I have brought it back to My Colony 2. It only appears in the larger sized expanded sidebar, and is hidden when the sidebar is in "compact" mode.
The Investment Bank has gotten an updated model thanks to @spamdude and the Lander and Outpost structures have been updated with slightly increased Spare Parts storage. The speed rating on the Dark Solar Road has also been increased.
Both sized blood bank structures received premium "gold" editions provided by @therealchromedino and there is a new expanded Water Extraction Plant, also from @therealchromedino. @spamdude provides a new super-fast road, the Alien Hexpath and @RekEm1999 provides a Quantum Ether Tank upgrade.
There were a lot more structures available that I could have added, but the feature I am about to mention next took up so much time to get working that I just didn't get to anything else.
There is now engine support in My Colony 2 for Player Mode Public Transit, but it was super hard to get working and it is still a bit glitchy. I don't need to get too much into the technical details, but the way the engine itself and the player mode stuff in particular were designed did not lend themselves very well to this, but a ton of changes were made in this update, after much trial and error, to get it to the "working" state that it's in now.
The system works with the new Regional Bus Station structure (from @spamdude ) which is unlocked by the new Public Transportation tech and requires a Megabot to build. Once you build a Regional Bus Station, you can give it a name (like you can do for a sign) and a custom color. Then in Player Mode, a character can walk up to the Bus Station and press the "E" key (or A on a gamepad) to bring up a list of all other Bus Stations on the planet. He will then be picked up by the new SkyBus unit (from @spamdude ) and flown to the other bus station.
This is where there are some visual glitches, I don't know why the SkyBus is so jumpy while it's flying. Also, your character is supposed to go invisible at that point but instead is shown hanging (for dear life) to the bottom of the SkyBus. I will fix those things eventually, but it got to the point where I was sinking so many hours into getting this stupid SkyBus working that I started falling behind on everything else, so for now it is what it is.
Anyway, for future player mode stuff, I think the Sky Bus system is going to be essential, since it would otherwise take a character forever to walk between maps. That said, I have also laid the groundwork in this update for units (such as the player character, but other units too) to be able to go inside other units, which can lead to things like APC units for example, or player controlled units, such as a personal car.
Eventually I will have the star gates working for travel between different servers. I think for settlement design then, it would make sense for people with a Star Gate in their settlement to also have a Bus Station near by.
Anyway, that is all for today. Thanks for playing the game, thank you so much to all of the contributors, and stay tuned for more!
#mycolony2
bastecklein
Developer
Member Since
September 2nd, 2017