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My Colony 2 v0.50.0 Released
Today I have finally published the v0.50.0 update to My Colony 2. This is a technical update, brining in a complete refactoring of the engine code in order to make it work with all of the new "modular" Ape Apps libraries.
Aside from the technical changes in this release, I also tried to make some improvements to the mobile experience of the game, which has always been more of an afterthought in My Colony 2. I made improvements to the map scrolling/zooming which has always been complete jank with touch screen on MC2. I also made some minor UI adjustments and improvements to the pending building queue on touch screen. Touch-screen controls for the person mode have also been improved.
I also restored the Depth of Field/Bokeh post processing effect, that had been removed some versions back because I didn't have it working properly.
Moving forward, I am not sure what the future direction for MC2 should be. I have come to the conclusion that voxel art was a stupid design decision for the game as it is completely inefficient, and in all honesty I don't think there will ever be a way to make the game more performant than it currently is when there are a lot of models on the screen, especially big models.
I am thinking for the long term, my time might be better spent just finishing up locking down the UI/controls of the game, getting it as good as it can be on mobile, getting music/sound effects added to the game, and then start planning a new My Colony game with actual 3D models instead of voxel art models.
The issue is with how 3d graphics work. Basically everything is rendered in triangles. If you draw a scene with a single 2d plane on it, like a plain square, it is generally made by connecting two triangles together. A 3d cube would be 6 squares put together, aka 12 triangles. So suppose you want to make a skyscraper model. Theoretically, you could do it using one long cube (rectangle) with a texture mapped to it, aka 12 triangles. However with the voxel model, it is made up of thousands of small cubes which each have their own 12 triangles, so on one tall rectangular skyscraper with 12 triangles could end up having 500,000 triangles on a voxel model.
Anyway, that is a gross oversimplification of how it works, and in the real world even the true 3d models would be more detailed than what I am describing, but you can imagine how over a large colony with thousands of structures on screen at a time, the voxel art setup is not very performant. I have done a lot to get it running as good as it is, but I don't think it would ever be as great as it could be.
I also don't think that the real-time same-world multiplayer is as good of a feature as it seemed like in my head. People seem to prefer the more limited multiplayer of the original My Colony, which is actually probably better for a city building type game anyway.
But you all can let me know what you think on the matter. Until then , enjoy the latest MC2 build and stay tuned for more!
#MyColony2
Aside from the technical changes in this release, I also tried to make some improvements to the mobile experience of the game, which has always been more of an afterthought in My Colony 2. I made improvements to the map scrolling/zooming which has always been complete jank with touch screen on MC2. I also made some minor UI adjustments and improvements to the pending building queue on touch screen. Touch-screen controls for the person mode have also been improved.
I also restored the Depth of Field/Bokeh post processing effect, that had been removed some versions back because I didn't have it working properly.
Moving forward, I am not sure what the future direction for MC2 should be. I have come to the conclusion that voxel art was a stupid design decision for the game as it is completely inefficient, and in all honesty I don't think there will ever be a way to make the game more performant than it currently is when there are a lot of models on the screen, especially big models.
I am thinking for the long term, my time might be better spent just finishing up locking down the UI/controls of the game, getting it as good as it can be on mobile, getting music/sound effects added to the game, and then start planning a new My Colony game with actual 3D models instead of voxel art models.
The issue is with how 3d graphics work. Basically everything is rendered in triangles. If you draw a scene with a single 2d plane on it, like a plain square, it is generally made by connecting two triangles together. A 3d cube would be 6 squares put together, aka 12 triangles. So suppose you want to make a skyscraper model. Theoretically, you could do it using one long cube (rectangle) with a texture mapped to it, aka 12 triangles. However with the voxel model, it is made up of thousands of small cubes which each have their own 12 triangles, so on one tall rectangular skyscraper with 12 triangles could end up having 500,000 triangles on a voxel model.
Anyway, that is a gross oversimplification of how it works, and in the real world even the true 3d models would be more detailed than what I am describing, but you can imagine how over a large colony with thousands of structures on screen at a time, the voxel art setup is not very performant. I have done a lot to get it running as good as it is, but I don't think it would ever be as great as it could be.
I also don't think that the real-time same-world multiplayer is as good of a feature as it seemed like in my head. People seem to prefer the more limited multiplayer of the original My Colony, which is actually probably better for a city building type game anyway.
But you all can let me know what you think on the matter. Until then , enjoy the latest MC2 build and stay tuned for more!
#MyColony2
Posted by 
I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but could there be some sort of post-processing done on voxel models to compress a group voxels forming a rectangular prism into a single large prism, or otherwise combine flat faces made of multiple voxels into single 2d planes? I imagine the "visual noise" option could be reworked to generate an image texture to map onto a 2d plane of base color instead of turning every voxel into a different color. Maybe even some sort of raycast that eliminates all 2d planes inside of a model to generate the final model data that gets rendered. I know that it would most likely be much easier to just implement something with actual 3d models, but based on the overall composition of the voxel models in the game, I think that most of them could become exponentially easier to render. Either way, looking forward to more changes! Thank you for the update!
Boat enjoyer
Chunk loading takes too much CPU time. :/
Face the fear, build the future.
