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Web v0.54.0 Rendering Change

6y
#1
I have started on v0.54.0 on the Web client, and I have implemented a pretty large change to the way graphics assets are loaded, so let me know what bugs you find. There will be several while I get it ironed out.

Previous to now, the game always loaded all assets at the beginning so that everything was ready to go when you loaded a map. However there are now so many different structures in the game, that this was taking up a ton of memory, especially on mobile where memory is limited.

Now the game will only load assets on demand. This makes startup time for My Colony much faster and (at least on smaller colonies) greatly reduces the memory overhead, leading to better performance. The drawback is that there will be a slight delay when placing a structure before it's graphics are first drawn, due to the on-demand loading.

I think it is a reasonable trade off though, but let me know what you guys think, and what issues you have. I will be working on bug fixes and more Reptilian content over the next few days and will hopefully have 0.54.0 pushed to all platforms by this weekend or Monday at the latest.
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
6y
#2
Sounds Great!
For bugs i recommend looking into the workplaces (unemployment) bug first since it seems to make a lot of ppl angry
6y
#3
I know, I am just not convinced it is as severe as people think. At most only 1/3 of the people will be working at any given time, by design. And that is under perfect conditions.
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
6y
#4
how much is a slight delay?
6y
#5
I'm guessing about 150ms idk its a wild guess
I love to give feedback and suggest new things!
6y
#6
your not related to James Montgomery Doohan ? ( aka scotty star trek )
He was a miracle worker as well .
Hard to believe the speed of the game is even better and nice main page load time back down to a few seconds .

ill load a larger colony and see how it runs ( no bugs yet )
loaded a larger colony game speed maxed . still about the same way as before I zoom all the way down to gain max speed but my pc is old .
as for the employment bug every one talks about I do know of it but have always been able to manage it quite well my self .
out of a colony of 6000 i have 48 unemployed that iggy new buildings But i have had a few hundred and just over building jobs usaly works then adding more houses to rebalance job vers colonists gets it back down to under 100 for me no matter how large the colony .

anyway Nice to have the main page load fast again as for when you first go in it only takes maybe 3 seconds tops for every thing to load a good trade
6y
#7
I would expect the load time to be shorter on mobile/native versions too, since it it pulling resources directly from the device instead of downloading them from the server.
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
6y
#8
well started a new colony moved the ship and every time I try to reland it creates a new ship as of now I have 9 ill post a photo in the bug section also seeing ship Can NOT loand as it just creates new ships well cant mind or build lol https://imgur.com/a/Tm28C
This will have to do as a bug post O yea chrome version .54
6y
#9
has got to be the funniest bug ever lol Start new colony move ship a few tiles then try to land ship and watch as a 2nd ship appiers at the home base
done two colony now could fill map with home ships lol
I created over 150 home ships now the place looks like a used ship lot lol
just click land ship over and over
???????? dang are you uploading a update ? now starting a new colony leaves a black screen no matter what type map
did a hard reload emptied chach that solved the black screen but still cant reland ship and when I load another map taht is built up non of the buildings show on the building bar nore when clicking bots just black empty boxes .
clicking on the tech icon does not bring up tech that can be bought with research
ps if your just doing a update a good idea would be to post Update in progress to avoid uneeded bug reports
6y
#10
Here goes a message. First there is neither testing version releases nor testers so every build is matching new "features" (and potentially bugs) along with catching old ones and polishing it overall.
here goes the list for web 0.54.0 (Firefox_64)
I will not brag about why 55 alien powers used to be better than 9 diamond crystal reactors for almost every moon base but instead

[not important][GUI] particles-on works fine while particles-off does not despawn existing ones just stopping new to appear. Looks weird when they keep coming from the sides in lava world and still need to wait some time to see whether offing does any good. Not so important but seems quite easy to work with.

[bug][render] Zooming out goes mad. I do know that more render takes more time but there are always ways to use some cheating and tricks to make it a bit easier in exchange for fast rendering, aren't they? Now we are talking about something strange. Quite a big map, quite a small zoom, not so laggy, yet goes buggy. At some mouse scrolling point it goes to scale vertical but not horizontal size making it more wide-stretched. Would see if i could add screenies for both before and after.

[UI] now we have a _red_ form of crystaline. Third one apart from _green_ synth and blue natural if I remember it correctly. But the resource icon features 4 crystals of the same color which looks a bit of strange now as we have not a single natural source of it.

[UI] playing with new colony creation does not leads to bad colonies generation as I've mentiomed it some time ago but still shows a previous colony with engine started (with non-working side menu etc) prior to selecting the name and actual start.

[Major bug][UI] Yeah you've done it right with the assets. And now we're going to encyclopedia where... Well it still is lacking the search so I need to remember where exactly do I scroll for this and that and because it lacks logic it goes mad but... The Assets new. And an Encyclopedia old. I want someone to make a shiny looking meme pic for it. They don't seem to like each other. They are no longer friends!
Erm.. excuse me. Mismatching pics or absent pics is what you might get if you pretend you ever want to see them. But the resources don't think so. They are too noble to show up for such a nooby engineer. No matter what you have loaded before it will load all the assets as soon as you open the list for the second-third time. (you'll get a strgate with a hive icons and such at the first look).
I do want to make a stop here. When I played the game first time, There were no other races and it wasn't even half as complicated as it is now. Even that time ago the only source I used for info was the game and i even managed to stuck being out of atmosphere (there was no forest or moon and surely no guide messages back then if i recall it correctly) so that time I looked it through and it was enough for me to make every building possible afterwards. I've done it at list three times now from nothingness as the game evolved and I do appreciate most of the changes. However, even at present, accidentally closed guide window will not reappear and can neither be seen in questbook or anything alike. Moreover, now we have a numerous races with overlapping techs and buildings not so important to show up in ants colony etc etc. I mean it went wild it became messy. Another complaint is that encyclopedia takes roughly about one third of the screen where it could take almost 90% in the same manner because I can't make a good use of the space to the left of it for sure. It still wont be much of a help due to saving only a couple of lines per entity and only in case that entry has multy-line description.

The solution or better to say a kind of a temporary workaround I see here is to make a tree of techs with a start or with a world load or even a few seconds after. Starting with a root tech of a current base tech as an example. It would allow for a techs like those available to different bases to appear in both trees and will not pollute the files with lists for every base to load. Though the latter approach might be more suitable for mobiles, just to consider both sides of the coin. The tree will allow to map all descendants to load and show up as icons and also to use workaround in pedia: make submenu, two entries: the one leading to a current list and other to a list based on that tree with techs already loaded with pics and ready to go. Double kill.
The way I see it is to add a couple of lines to the place it counts current buildings premium items in game etc which should be quite fine and yet not so difficult to implement.

[UI] You might also think of a random pic showing in the sub menus titles to be chosen from loaded ones or even to be static but that is not so important as previous. Probably a part of a previous bug.

[UI] Old ones to end up the list: making some not square-icon-building will stretch it to be square-like causing funny pictures of "a Consulate with a pressure of the responsibility on its shoulders" or "a helium extractor that feels like a factory" (but of cause nobody would need such a factory ever soon).

[UI] Another old one not sure if fixed already. Coal or regolith? Which of the icons is it here or there? And the icon of it without a framing with the-very-same-color background for a resource header is definitely the most interesting part of this quiz game. It has many unSeen endings. Ba-toooom! tss.

*edit* Speaking of vertical-distortions, there is quite a probability to catch it when zooming with mouse wheel does not change zoom only making stretchy effect to appear while saving the zoom. It always behaves in stretchy but is a bit hard to catch it not changing zoom in the process. I overlayed two captures and cut one of them for you to see the difference.
Spoiler:



*edit*
also a pic showing zones that are there in tech encyclopedia now:
red are neither used nor clickable until closing the popup window. Green zones cut up already lacking space for scrolling (should a big dismiss button be replaced with a red X icon or something?). Blue is ads. They look black not because I'm a racist who killed them. The turbo mode or something alike has taken them to a bar or somewhere near idk. They promised to be back before the sunset. Here goes the pic by the way, you wanted it you got it.
Spoiler:



Another good week to start making more of colonists happy, isn't it? Good luck. Keep it going and make it even better.

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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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