Release Video
Special Thanks to BlueSky-WR for the good testing this iteration!
Due to the changes in the last iterations the demo got really short. I added more stuff to the playtest demo version. The registration ended in the last week and i keep adding more and more playtesters every release, to get feedback to the newest changes. If you still feel the demo too short, you can get the community license by joining our Discord at Discord.io
Residence
The main simulation feature this Iteration are the residences. Crew rooms with beds can be converted into private rooms by assigning the persons to them. Private crew rooms can just be used by the owners. Later the interior of this room will also effect the person. For the start, the person will just get a mood panalty if there the person has no residence assigned.
I improved the UI for the Person, so there is a big resident and workplace area to choose it.
Thoughts
The next new simulation feature are thoughts for persons. They are added when the person is in a special state like he has no resitence or an event happened like he pee himself. Thoughts can have a duration and effects the mood over time. Later a news from earth or other things would also be added as thoughts to effect the mood. New Crew members got also an additional bonus when they arrive in the station.
Walk in Station Camera
There are new cameras added to the game: The Walk in station camera will allow the player to move inside of the ship in first person view. Its a part of a further planned feature to add player controllable drones, to repair buildings in case of emergencies or push persons to work harder. Till now, it's just another view angle that can be entered with Num-4.
Free Camera
Another new camera is a free that is active when holding the mouse-wheel down. Than the player can look around with the mouse and move with WASD. There is no gameplay planned with it, its just due to it can be nice to look around :)
Visualisation of Connections
To make it easier to see and configure the building connections, I added a visualisation. Its following the box-paths the connections will use, so they directly start and end at the storage. Its selection sensitive, so when a storage is selected directly, its just showing the connections of it. Similar for interior showing all related storages to the activity the interior belongs to. By hover over a connection, it just shows the connection, to identify them faster. Its also possible to see all connections with a given resource by hovering over the resource overview in the lower left. I also added a walking path to the person, to have a nice visual.
Cheat option
The cheats i used in the editor for development are now also available in the compiled version. It can be enabled in the options. Enabling it results in no more steam achievements and high scores. Also future stats (steam and for the player) will be also disabled than. The cheats are a bit hidden implemented, most of the time its using the regular ui with some modifier keys. E.g. with Ctrl and click on an empty resource box will fill up the storage. A ctrl click on the Start Planning cause an instant finish the plan. Holding additional shift will fill up all storages in the buildings and alt let workers spawn.
The idea of that is to have kind of a sandbox mode, so the player can quickly build large ships or what he wants. (thanks to ichao for the sandbox idea)
Distance specific productivity
To prevent having one big maintenance building for the whole base, i added a distance penalty. As further the target to maintain or construct is away as more penalty will be added and as longer it took.
Worker use idle time
Till now, workers were just working in the buildings if there was something to do or not. Now, they will just go to the building, when there is really something to do so they can fill up their mood till the next task starts.
Warnings and Error Report
I started a while ago to migrate the crashing exceptions in the simulations to simple errors, so the player can keep playing. Also some auto repair features, so the bugs will not cause an unplayable state of the game. To make it visible to the player whats happening i added a small warnings and errors element to the UI. Its shown at the debug section and a popup with details will open. It also contains a one click report option.
More Performance
As started at the last iterations i also improved the performance again this time. I recalculate the positions for most of the entities less often and added a dirty mechanism also to other parts. I changed the approach to change the walkways to allow them also to use different LOD levels to reduce more verticies to draw on further distances, added camera frustrum culling to the self rendered objectes and render also less things separate from unity. I also moved some systems around, to make them work on other cpu cores while long running unity processes are executed. All in all i could increase the speed for a large ship in the editor by a factor of 2. It should have a bigger effect as less cores the player has.
Other smaller changes
- Fixed Problems with the Tube System (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Make a rare case not crash the game for no need (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed a rare UI bug happend when seal a building in a special situation (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed missing route check when sealing in a special condition (thanks to BlueSky-WR and ichao for report)
- Improved Shadow quality
- Readded Photovoltaicpanels curving to ship shape (thanks to BlueSky-WR for the hint)
- Fixed rare problem at the TaskManager at end of a gameyear (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Max size for worker/customer panel for large buildings
- Fixed wrong calculation in build menu templates (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed Name of normal buildings didn't use the correct language (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Using the real name of the building if possible in activity user label (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed Pathfinding for full circles (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed buildings like greenhouse were not working well (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed Exception when multi Select a buildinglot (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Only update the floor holes if its needed to reduce cpu load
- More reduction of verticies with lod and culling for resources and doors
- Persons can eat and drink more, to stop changing tasks too often (thanks to BlueSky-WR)
- Fixed left over interior in special case (thanks to BlueSky-WR)
- Readded color in multi selection represents the state
- Added F5 for a general consistency check and cache refresh of selection
- Fixed wrong animationPaths when running on very high simulation speed (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Removed no Customer warning, due to it was missleading
- Fixed problem where persons selecting wrong servicebuilding (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed missing normalize in grid rotation caused problem with effects (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed Problem with gametime calculations on extreme high millisecond additions (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Improved Path of Boxes to exit
- Fixed In Animation position on 90° rotated buidlings
- More error tollerance in creating savegames to prevent the savegame is completely broken. (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed bug when configuring a building and person is idling in a buildinglot next to it. (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Fixed Problem where the next ResourceEvent was missing in a special case (thanks to BlueSky-WR for report)
- Improved Merging of Container Users for very large ships (thanks to BurritoBotV3000 for report)
- Fixed Change of Floor and Wall was not persistent
- Fixed Animation bug where persons walk through walls
- Fixed metabolism not starting instant when e.g. nutrition is empty and person starts to eat
- Fixed wrong problem shown in the Metabolism warning
