Dev Blog #34 – Complete new construction system news - StaudSoft's Synthetic World

New construction system

We thought that boxes and ramps are a little bit boring so we searched for a way to add any shape. And so we implemented the new building blocks. They can be used like normal shapes . Just select a material and a shape and place it. For now you can add cylinders and quarter cylinders? We uploaded an unstable version. The icons are still missing and we will add more shapes. We thought that you should be abled to test it. Here is the video:

This is an windows only update. Old versions will not be abled to load the converted maps!

The quarter cylinders

Binary XML

Till now we used XML for our save games. As this is sometimes very slow we introduced binary XML. When you now load a map with the new version it will automatically convert your old save games.

We will also use binary XML to save the data for the cities.

Increased bitmap loading speed

We removed some bugs which made the loading of the textures slow.

WE WANT MULTIPLAYER!

The main goal in the next weeks is to add multiplayer support. We already started with the development of a network communication system. And we started to restructure the code of the HUD so that it is network ready.

MacOS X 10.11 - El Capitan

And we also have a very sad news. Seems that our game is not compatible with MacOS X 10.11. This is because Apple introduced a new security system which prevents the loading of shared libraries which are necessary for our game.

We will of course try to find a solution. But at the moment we even failed to simply install MacOS X 10.11 on our Apple computer. We also tried to install it in a virtual machine. We only got a black screen.

Then I went to my university and ask whether they have Apple computers with the newest software. The answer was no. No one really seemed to like them. The computer programmers even said: "We are computer scientists, we do not use Mac's."

But we do not give up!