Ape Apps

Web users may have noticed that work has begun on My Colony v0.72.0.

The v0.72.0 release should be out either tomorrow or the next day. Besides further improvements and bugfixes to Regions, it also brings a major fix to Pathfinding, (hopefully, fingers crossed) eliminating the issue where vehicles just sit there ignoring orders. There will also be a couple of new Reptilian structures in the mix.

In addition, the main focus for this update is a revamp of the TV/Gamepad mode interface and controls.

The update should make playing My Colony (and ultimately, Antiquitas) a lot better on Amazon Fire TV and Xbox One devices. It also adds code to prepare the game for Steam's "Big Picture" mode, and the upcoming TV mode on the Ape Apps Launcher. In addition to a cleanup of UI elements and an improvement of gamepad controls, the update brings the UI element margins in a bit, as some players were having issues where the overscan on their TV's was cutting off the sides of the game.

Finally, v0.72.0 is also bringing several improvements to the Desktop Native Client, including improved Gamepad support, and also an error/crash log saved to the Documents/My Colony folder on the system.

Really nice.

Could we have some details about the region bugs?
Just so we don't post about them before then...

I don't remember everything exactly, because a lot of them were patched in Antiquitas v0.17.0. If you are playing on the web version, post region bugs you find in this thread, if you find them between now and the release.

First off, the new way the bots move and build almost completely fixed the crashes. Beforehand whenever the turbo drones moved the game would slow down to a crawl and/or crash even when I specifically look away so the game doesn't have to render it. Now I can look at the bots work and move, delete what they are moving towards and build another so they have to path again and it still won't crash the game. I actively tried to crash the game for about an hour and failed to do so, hell of an update on that front.

In the midst of my testing while trying to crash the game I ended up with extra colonists than I had housing and the game slowed to a crawl, but never crashed. I did a recording using the dev tool and apparently all the processing was going into finding a school for these extra people.

After I found this out I deported the homeless extra people I had that were probably the bulk of people unemployed and likely trying to find a school and the game instantaneously stopped lagging completely.

I then went to test regions mode out for another few hours. Each game had a problem with employing colonists. Before this update there was a problem that nobody beyond a certain number (eg 50) would employ no matter how many extra colonists you had. This update colonists would remain at a particular number of employment until you immigrated more people, only then would any more people employ. I couldn't seem to get the unemployment ratio below 25% no matter what I did though, causing problems with approval rating due to unemployment.
Also note that when I tried this out in a creative mode, 100% of colonists employed. Bear in mind it was creative mode so I was using stargates to immigrate and just employing into investment banks to rapidly test the employment ratio so the problem could be either with the early game buildings or with normal gameplay.
Also, if the game crashes while on a regions game all resources and research is reverted to what they would be if you first started a city. However saving and quitting, then returning does not do this.

If the resource and research losing crash bug could be fixed, the lag generated by unemployed people trying to find a school frantically and the unemployment bug could be fixed in this update or the next then that would be absolutely amazing. This update is not finished yet, but the bot movement is a huge improvement and I look forward to seeing what's coming.