Ape Apps

Since yesterday got a bug fix/maintenance patch for My Colony 2, and since Dark Matter Pt2 update is not yet ready for prime time, I figured My Colony 1 could get the same treatment, so the new v1.24.0 patch should be hitting all platforms over the next few days. What's new? Let's find out!


Even with the existing Turbo Drones, some of the newer buildings were taking forever and a day to construct. That is where the brand new Ultra Drone comes in! The Ultra Drone requires Dark Matter tech and is basically the build-speed equivalent of 1,500 Turbo Drones, so it's very fast at building. It is also by far the most expensive unit in the game, but just one of these bad boys should take care of all of your mega construction needs (for now at least)!

I made some cosmetic changes to the Diamond Refinery and the Diamond Miner, because they both had L.I.S. flags painted on them, even though they can also be built by United Earth. The L.I.S. logo has been removed.

Speaking of new paint job, the Challenges window was spruced up just a bit. First, Second and Third place now get Gold, Silver and Bronze colors respectively. You can now also click on every colony and federation name to bring up their respective windows.


But you might be saying, "there is no Federation window" and you would be right, until now. I have started building the federation info window, which now shows up when you click on a federation name. It gives basic info and a Request Membership button, making it easier for users to join a federation they are interested in. It is still bare bones, but will be fleshed out more later.


Also, now if a colony is a member of a federation, you will see a new button that links to their Federation window when you are looking at their colony info screen, making requesting federation membership even easier.


In the last update, there was a bug where participating in a challenge from a Region city would cause the city to keep losing resources when the regional output/input was simulated. This has been fixed. I also fixed a bug that was causing builder units to act strangely.

Now for the stuff people will not be as happy about.

Last time I spoke of removing Import/Export completely from online games. Some people liked this, some hated it. For now, I have kept Import in the game with the 99.99% price penalty, and have kept Export in the game and reduced the penalty from 99.99% to just 90%. I might adjust that further later, or may still remove it completely. TBH the extreme penalties have not really caused much of a problem that people were claiming it would.

And now for the change that I think I will get the most rage from on this update, resource decay has been increased dramatically, as in the engine will now try to get your resource level down to your storage capacity within 10 minutes or so (that is not a hard number, that is just roughly how long it takes). I consider being able to have more resources than you have storage for to be an exploit anyway, and now it has been patched, but the patch does give the player sufficient time to use export or post stuff onto the marketplace. Basically, the higher above your storage capacity, the faster your resource will decay, and if you are just a little bit over, it will decay basically at the old decay rate. So if you have, for example, 50 million star ships but can only store 10,000, you will be losing millions per second at the beginning. This is another change geared towards bringing galactic resource values into balance.

Finally, over the next month or so, I am doing a "dark structure" series on the collectable structures window (which you can find by clicking on the "New Content Available" button. These will basically be dark theme colored variants of some of the most popular regular structures, so if you have any requests of structures you would like to see get the dark treatment, let me know!


So anyway, that is all for this update. I know that some tweaks are being made to the rest of the Dark Matter update, so stay tuned for that, and as always let me know what bugs or other issues you find in the game. And until next time, enjoy!

#mycolony

I have just pushed the My Colony 2 v0.30.0 update to production on Ape Web Apps, and the patch should be hitting mobile platforms over the coming days. There are no new features or content additions in this update, this is a straight bug fix and performance tweak release, with the following corrections:

• Fixed issue with Excavator crashing the game server
• Fixed long standing issue where a reset in the Ape Apps Signaling server would put all online MC2 games offline
• Fixed major performance issue related to unit harvesting
• Fixed major server hangups that would occur during game saves
• Improvements to news ticker scroll speed
• Terrain objects on non-active chunks are now placed in a simulated state so they are not updated every singe game tick
• Communications from game server to game clients are now bundled and sent only once per game tick to reduce network bandwidth and packet decompression times
• Units that are located on non-active chunks no longer do elevation checks while moving

In addition, this update brings in the latest version of the Scroll3D library, which received several performance improvements and bug fixes during the last update to the My Tokens app.

Important to note: due to the new server-client packet bundling code, game clients v0.29.0 and lower can not connect to servers v0.30.0 or higher, so if you cannot join a game and you do not have the update yet, do not report this as a bug.

As I said, the update is now live on the Web and should be hitting everywhere else over the coming days. Sorry for the delay in getting the fixes out, let me know what further issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

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

#mycolony2

Today I am finishing up My Colony 2 v0.29.0, and the update should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This is a major update to the game, including many core changes to the engine and underlying code, so unfortunately there are probably bugs that I am not foreseeing. But what is new here anyway? Let's take a look!


To begin, this update marks the triumphant return of the Galactic Board of Trade, featuring an excellent voxel model provided by @SPARKY0303 ! This is the only new building in this update, which is accompanied by the new Long Range Communications tech which is required to build it. It also requires a level 3 settlement in order to be built. Once you build the GBT, it will unlock the new Trade tab in the statistics window, provided your camera is currently centered on a settlement that has a GBT.


From there, you are able to post resource contracts, or purchase contracts that have been posted by other players.


The Galactic Board of Trade is still in it's early stages in My Colony 2, and more features will be added as time goes on, but the basic framework is now there and available to use. Keep in mind, that the trade tab will only be available on un-modded games, so if you have mods activated, you will not be able to post trades to the GBT.

Along with the new GBT, this update also brings back the classic Newsfeed ticker from My Colony 1!


The news ticker is also in it's early stages, but has a huge advantage over the ticker found in the original My Colony, in that it now supports custom third party news feeds! Anybody can create their own news feed for My Colony 2, and I have posted information on how to do so in this thread. There are a lot of updates planned to the news ticker as well, so it will be evolving as time goes on. I also plan to let world/server admins create their own news headlines for the ticker, as a way to convey information to the players on their server.

There have been some engine changes that should help performance. On one of my worlds, a synthetic Crystalline deposit got away from one of the players, and ended up covering many chunks in the game, lagging down the server and exploding the file size. Luckily, this was an opportunity to do some heavy performance tuning and make some important changes to resource spreading as well.


Terrain objects like Synthetic Crystalline or Palm Trees now keep track of their "generation," so every time a terrain item spawns a child, it's generation number increases. When a terrain hits generation 6, it can no longer spread and spawn new children. Now, six generations still allows for a good amount of spreading, but it should keep something like Crystalline from destroying an entire world.

In addition, terrains can now no longer spread over roads and structures. They weren't supposed to be able to before, but it was bugged, but now it works, so you can more easily contain crystalline farms with a wall or road.

Now, all of the big changes mentioned above required the creation of a new centralized server for My Colony 2, which is now online and took way more man hours to set up then I expected, but it's capabilities are going to be way greater than those found in the MC1 server long term. Connecting to the MC2 Online server is done automatically behind the scenes, and the server only allows connections from non-modded games. You can tell if you are connected to the MC2 Online server because a My Colony 2 Online tab will show up in your Statistics window.


The tab right now only shows you the top 30 online colonies ordered by GDP, but this is going to be greatly expanded in the future, allowing players to see all sorts of stats, rankings, and even conduct interplanetary trades and diplomacy, so stay tuned for more on that.

The new MC2 Online server also ties into the new news ticker and can give you some important information. For example, if you are playing an online game in World A, but you also have a settlement in World B that is online, and the settlement in World B is suffering from starvation, you will get notices in the news ticker that your settlement in the other world is having starvation, in case you want to log in to the other server and help your people out.

I have really big plans for the centralized server going forward, and I am probably going to do a My Colony Podcast in the coming days to discuss some of them. All of these new features are in their infancy though, and all will be improving as time goes on.

So that is basically what is up in this update. It should be live right now on the Web, the Launcher, and on Windows Store, and should be hitting Android and iOS sometime this week, so check it out, let me know what you think, let me know what problems you find, and stay tuned for more!

#mycolony2

Today I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony v1.23.0, the Dark Matter Update (Part 1), and it should be hitting all platforms throughout the weekend. This update also adds a new Challenges mode, so let's take a look at what is new!


This update adds the first components of the new Dark Matter tech tree which was designed by @Electrogamer1943 and introduces the new Dark Matter resource and the Dark Matter Infrastructure technology.

Along with the new tech and resource we have four new structures in this update, the Dark Base Alpha, Dark Base Beta, Dark Dimensional Portal and the Dark Matter Reactor Arc. Please note that Dark Matter is not currently live on the Galactic Board of Trade, for technical reasons that will have to come during the next update.

There are several more structures coming in the Dark Matter line, which I simply did not get to in time for the update, so there will be a Dark Matter Update Part 2 update coming in the not-too-distant future. Please give feedback and comments to @Electrogamer1943 and be sure to thank her for providing all of us with some fresh new content for My Colony 1!

The next big addition in this release is the new Challenges feature, available to Online games, which you can find in the Statistics window.


Challenges are a new late-game way for big colonies and federations to compete against each other for glory (and trophies), and there can (and will) be multiple challenges running simultaneously. Challenges also provide a purpose and a use for the millions and millions in resources that people have just sitting there in storage doing nothing. The idea is to give players something else to do after they have already unlocked everything and reached end-game.

The system is fairly simple. A challenge will be posted which will run for X number of days and be worth X number of trophies as a reward. Players can contribute resources to a challenge on behalf of either their Colony or their Federation (if they are in a Federation). When the time is up, trophies will be awarded to both the Colony and the Federation who contributed the most to the challenge. You will be able to see a listing in-game of both colonies and federations ranked by the number of trophies they have earned.

I will be posting new challenges on a regular basis, and they will range from only a few days to several months, so check the Challenges screen often to make sure you don't miss out. Challenges give a good opportunity to use up some of the mass amounts of resources people have, and should also help people's GDP, as resources sitting in storage do not contribute to GDP, and having full storage shuts down your GDP production. There is one challenge up right now, but I will be adding several more after the update goes live to all platforms, so keep watching the challenges screen, and try to win some trophies!

Now for some changes to gameplay. I have raised the Import and Export (non-GBT) fees to 99.9% each, and in the next update I will probably remove the Import and Export resource features entirely from online games. Importing and Exporting makes it too easy to exploit the Galactic Board of Trade, and so it will be going away. Keep in mind this is for online games only. My inbox will be open for all incoming hate mail related to this change...

Speaking of trade, I have revamped the code for the Auto Trade feature, which was basically disabled up until now. Feel free to test the Auto Trade for different resources and let me know how the changes work and if they need tweaked some more.

Finally, there were a lot of bug fixed in this update, regarding both building rendering and performance while building with a lot of drones. If you are still having issues in those areas, please let me know!

So that is all for this update. The next update will be Dark Matter Part 2 as I mentioned before. In the meantime, I will be adding more Challenges and also more Collectable Structures on a weekly basis, so be sure to check both of those screens in-game so you don't miss anything, and stay tuned for more!

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

#mycolony

Today I am releasing the first official collectable structure for My Colony, the Cemetery!


The Cemetery is the first release of the "Trick or Treat" series of Halloween related structures that will be coming out throughout the month, and is available to collect in-game for 25 Ape Coins until October 21. It is an early game structure that provides a modest amount of entertainment and tourism, and can educate 1 colonist at a time as well (for people doing ancestry research, of course).


I will be releasing several more structures to the Trick or Treat series this month, and each will probably be available for ten days before they are gone for good. This is the first "real" structure to be released as part of the Collectors system, although many users also picked up the Dev Solar Panel that was briefly available while the system was in testing.

You can find the Cemetery in the "New Content Available" window that is in the construction bar inside of My Colony 1.

#mycolony