Infraspace
Patch 2.19.316
this patch adds more logging capabilities for the remaining crash reports so we know which version it appeared in as well as some technical device info.
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #134 - Achievements & New Map
Memory Leak fix
Yesterday we already released a fix to an InfraSpace memory leak that lead to crashes and sluggish behaviour during gameplay and when quitting to main menu.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1511460/announcements/detail/7038615889389631054
During the next week we'll keep our eyes open if any other crash reports come in through our automated error reporting tool.
Achievements
We had lots of players asking for them throughout the years of InfraSpace development and we're happy to confirm that they'll be in the 1.0 release!
Programming is not 100% finished yet, but check out some of our achievement icons so far:
Achievements will be disabled automatically when you use world settings to make a creative mode out of it, when you use mods or when you cheat.
New Map progress
We're making progress on the new map! It's just the terrain for now, but check out our work-in-progress screenshots and let us know how you feel about them!
As always,
happy playing!
Patch Beta 2.18.315 fixes crashes!
we have found and fixed the reason for the crashes!
The underlying issue was a misunderstanding of Unity's handling of materials (the thing that says how a object looks). It used to be a small issues since materials don't take much memory at all.
But our visualization modes change the materials of a lot of buildings and over long play sessions it added up and crashed some players' games if they had little RAM left.
Thanks for your help in fixing it!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #133 - New Map Sneak Peek
We are preparing for our 1.0 release and most programming resources are spent on fixing issues and tracking down bugs. One of the most important ones are some rare crashes that may not happen to some players at all, but to others more often. You may have noticed this week we released a lot of small updates. These add more and more logging capabilities to InfraSpace so we can track down all possible sources of issues.
Distribution Center Animation
Last week I introduced you to the Distribution Center idea we had to give you more control over InfraSpace traffic. I'm glad many of you like the idea so much! We are gonna try really hard to get it into the 1.0 update as well. Lasse was already working on the model, now he finished the animations as well:
Collection Center
The counterpart to the distribution center is going to be the collection center. That's why it will look a little similar, but still different. Here is our current art progress on it:
New Map Sneak Peek
We have been working on a new map editor for a while now and in the last weeks Andreas was able to use Sepehr's tools to make a first small test map. This is far from final - more of a test of the capabilities for our internal tests - but now that we got this map running and working, we're hoping that we can start on the official map soon!
As always,
Happy playing!
Beta 2.17.312
this patch just adds some more crash reporting tools.
We're trying to get as much info as possible from the Player.log files in case something goes wrong.
Happy playing!
Patch 2.17.311
this patch just adds some memory handling safeguards because we believe some crashes might be related to how native memory is being handled.
Happy playing!
FDN #132 - Distribution Center, Tutorials & Traffic Info
We've kept ourselves quite busy this week and released another 2 small patches. Besides that, I already want to share some actual new features for the 1.0 update on September 19th!
Distribution Center
One of the biggest remaining sources of friction in the InfraSpace gameplay experience is the limited control you have over traffic and deliveries. You can control it a little bit with districts, but they are hard to use for many players.
The new distribution centers should help!
The idea is that you can build a collection center to gather resources from nearby factories that produce them and build a distribution center to distribute materials to nearby factories that need them. Then, you can also hook up the collection center to the distribution center and that way you can control the whole traffic flow of a group of buildings!
Don't worry if this sounds complicated now. Basically, you're getting some advanced storehouses that also deliver into a certain radius which you can choose.
The details are still up for implemenation, but this is Adriana's concept for what they could look like:
Lasse already started turning it into a 3d model for the game and while it's not completely finished, you can get an idea here:
Tutorials
Some features in InfraSpace may need improvement, but others just require good explanations! We see many people confused about why outgoing storage is full or incoming storage is empty. Or how train signaling works. Or districts. Or ESPECIALLY how to deal with large amounts of traffic.
Wtih the 1.0 update, we're planning to release a bunch of new tutorials - this time with videos!
Also, you'll get an encyclopedia so you can look up anything you might have missed.
Sepehr has already implemented most of the tutorial system and released it to our playtesters today.
Traffic Info
And finally I wanted to show you a small little extra we made: The traffic info view!
This little number just shows you how well the traffic in your city is flowing and can be used to learn about inefficienies and jams and also to compare different cities.
I hope you like the changes coming to you in September for the Early Access Graduation Update. Let us know what you think!
Happy playing!
Patch Beta 2.17.309
- home appliances and plastics are unlocked with the electronics technology now
- added some diagnostic logging to track down a memory issue when you save and go the main menu
Happy playing!
Patch Beta 2.16.307
In this patch we:
- Fixed some issues which caused some players' saves to not load
- Updated community links in the main menu from forum.foundersfortune.com to forum.dionicsoftware.com
- Fixed broken trains and gondola lifts
Thank you all for your bug reports.
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #131 - Looking back on the Balancing Update
Looking back on the Balancing Update
One week has passed since we released the Balancing Update to you and overall, the reception has been quite positive!
All players together have spent more than 20.000 hours playing with the new production chains and more buildings. There were some complaints, but most bugs have been fixed pretty quickly.
I think we did a good job keeping most bugs out of the update this time by doing lots of playtesting on the Discord server. If you also want to help playtesting our updates, before they come out, join the Discord Server. After the update was released, we've released 7 patches so far and there might be one or two more in store for you in the next days. Thanks to Sepehr to his diligent work on these.
The most troublesome issues now are beginning to be not bugs, but misunderstandings or design issues, like outgoing storage being full. We're looking into how we can give you tools, tutorials, and visualizations to show you how to fix your city :)
Leaving Early Access in September
As you can see on our Steam store page, we only intended to keep working on InfraSpace Early Access for 6 months. But community interest has been high, so we've extended the Early Acces period again and again and kept adding more features. Now, InfraSpace has been in Early Access for 21 months and it's time to get our little game ready to graduate!
We're planning to release out of Early Access in September and until then we'll focus on bugfixes and fixing quality of life things here and there based on your feedback. We will only include a couple of new features - big on that list are:
- Some feature to give you more control over the flow of goods
- Hopefully a new map, made with our map editor!
- Many tutorials, because that is expected of a game outside of Early Access
- Mac support
- Making Steam Deck support official
- And some more
After 1.0 we will check again how popular InfraSpace is with the players and then see if we can get any more additional features in. We do not promise any content updates after 1.0 (after all, the game is done), but there will probably be at least one and what I can promise is of course bugfix updates as long as necessary.
Kindergarten, Theater
While our programmers were busy bugfixing, Lasse has already made some of Adriana's building concepts reality. In 1.0 you're gonna get a couple of more city community buildings like the theater:
And also the kindergarten:
Let us know how you liked the Balancing Update!
Happy playing!
