Hello everyone and welcome to the InfraSpace Improvement Update!
This update has been in the works for 2 months and we're bringing you lots of bugfixes, performance improvements and even some new decoration buildings and small extra features!
Special surprise: We got a small Intro Cinematic!
Intro Cinematic
In InfraSpace, you start out as a ship stranded in space. If you start a new game, you will now get a small movie to introduce you to the situation. Our 2d artist Adriana has been working on it for a while, so I hope you like it!
New Features
“Pixel buildings” so you can highlight parts of your city
Color wheel for pixel buildings and trains so you can have them in any color you want
Lots of new decoration buildings for your enjoyment, like crashed ufo, ferris wheel, new parks, fences, parking lot, …
We added lots of new decoration buildings, this screenshot only shows a couple:
The new pixel buildings can be used to make any kind of shape ingame:
You can use the color wheel to customize pixel buildings, fences, and trains:
Performance Improvements
Improving the performance of the game has been one of the primary focuses of the Improvement Update. And I think we were quite successful: especially in large saves, your fps could increase by 50% or even 100%, depending on your city layout and city size.
Pathfinding Performance has been vastly improved, which is especially relevant for large saves
We removed one source of regular stutter (Visualization mode verification ran every 5 seconds)
No hanging when placing long roads, especially in large saves
Improved terraforming buildings performance
Bugfixes
When you place roads they are now built in the shape you expect
Fixed terrain decals below roads not being rendered correctly
Fixed green grass not appearing in grasslands and forests after terraforming
Fixed a bug where you could connect different types of pipes
"Road missing" icon no longer appears when a pipe is connected to a building
You can now exit move and delete mode with escape
The targeting station now has an animation
Fixed the price calculation when placing gondolas. Now dependent on distance
Fixed height and length of roads not being shown anymore
Even very long and steep roads are now built in the shape you expect them to be:
That's it for this update, let us know how you like it! We hope the Improvement Update improves your InfraSpace experience. Stay tuned for more news next week!
Until then, happy playing!
Friday Dev News #120 - Improvement Update next week!
Hello everyone!
The Improvement Update releases next Friday, on May 12th!
Here is a small summary of the changes:
Performance
Pathfinding Performance has been vastly improved, which is especially relevant for large saves
We removed one source of regular stutter (Visualization mode verification ran every 5 seconds)
No hanging when placing long roads in really large saves
Bugs fixed
When you place roads they are now built in the shape you expect
Fixed terrain decals below roads not being rendered correctly
Fixed green grass not appearing in grasslands and forests after terraforming
New features
"Pixel buildings" so you can highlight parts of your city
Color wheel for pixel buildings and trains so you can have them in any color you want
Lots of new decoration buildings for your enjoyment, like crashed ufo, ferris wheel, new parks, ...
If you're interested in the details, check out the Friday Dev News posts from the last weeks!
This week's progress
If you're a regular reader of Friday Dev News and are wondering what are the new changes form last week: We were busy getting all the stuff ready for the update! There was a big issue stopping the pathfinding performance integration, but I'm happy to report we just released an update to our playtesters, so it should be all ready for the release next week!
After the Improvement Update?
We are preparing InfraSpace for 1.0 launch and in order to do that we thought it might be good to release another polishing update, basically Improvement Update Part 2. Cause there is still a bunch we want to improve!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #119 - Pathfinding Performance, Update on May 12th!
Hello everyone!
First of all: The Decoration & Polishing Update releases in 2 weeks, on May 12th! We are trying to get InfraSpace ready for its 1.0 release in a couple months.
Pathfinding Performance
We have posted about pathfinding performance before (see Friday Dev News #29 and #84 for example), but this week I think we've implemented a solution that is gonna handle any city you can throw at it!
Instead of our C# implementation of an optimization algorithm called contraction hierarchies, we are now running a highly optimized C++ library called RoutingKit, which is a research project from the Karlsruher Institute of Technology. Well, and this version is much faster.
For example, a city with 8,500 bidrectional roads is represented as a graph structure with. 17,000 edges (two edges per road). Our old version used to take 15.6 seconds to calculate the acceleration structure in the background, while the new optimized version is way faster at 0.051 seconds. Finding the actual path is also significantly faster.
We were looking into pathfinding performance, because it turned out that it has become one of the major performance bottlenecks in bigger saves. I'm looking forward to seeing your experiences once the update is out!
New Parks and Fences
While Sepehr worked on the pathfinding performance, Lasse added some new buildings to the game, the first being a new park with a nice little animation:
Second, we now have small fences you can use to visually separate parks of your city:
Update releases May 12th, we hope you'll like it! Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #118 - Polishing / Decorative Update Release on May 12th (maybe)
Hello everyone!
Road Building Performance
Polishing continues and this time our programmer Sepehr fixed something that has been a long standing issue when you build long roads, especially in already large cities: Road building performance!
It used to be that every time you place down a road via mouse click, the game would hang for a short while, leading to quite the stuttering experience. We looked at all the different areas that need to be done when placing a road:
Calculating the shape of the road
Splitting the road into multiple segments
Connecting it to the nearby intersections
Removing any grass that might be below the road
Calculating the small decals beneath the road for better looks
Updating the nearby terrain to fit to the road if necessary
and much more
We optimized most of the slow parts and got from 400 milliseconds down to 60 milliseconds (6.7 times faster!) when building a road in our test case:
This is a relatively long road performing quite well in a city of 50k inhabitants.
Decorative Parking Lots
Thanks to our artist Lasse, we got some nice looking parking lots!
Unfortunately they are only decorative, since we're spending our programming time on improvement and it's not entirely clear how trucks would use the parking lot in InfraSpace. After all, the most efficient thing is to go directly from source to target building for production purposes.
Still, it looks really cool and if you have some creative ideas for applications, let us know :)
Polishing / Decorative Update Release
Currently it seems like we might be able to release our current progress as update in 3 weeks, on May 12th. That way, you can already play with a lot of the improvements. Wish us luck, we'll keep you posted!
This week I just wanted to take some time and update you all on the progress of InfraSpace and when we're gonna hit 1.0 and release Early Access.
InfraSpace has been in Early Access for almost 2 years now and we have long finished all of the promised roadmap items as well as a bunch of extra features and stuff that wasn't on the roadmap. During development we prioritized dev speed over stability and performance, but it's time to change that and improve the game we already have. Let's make it an experience fit for a mature 1.0 release, probably leaving Early Access in 3 months or so.
That means less focus on new shiny features and more focus on fixing bugs and performance issues as well as tutorials. And I want to be clear that we will not make huge changes like adding "Area 02" for making another city in the same save or multiplayer or anything like that. That is in the realm of "InfraSpace 2" or whatever may happen in the future ;)
I have heard some people complain about "how can you work on a ferris wheel when bug X is still there?". The reason is that artists will not fix programming issues. The ferris wheel does not require programming, so this is something our artists can do to improve the game, while our programmers work on other issues in the background.
The terrain is an open question. Of course we have heard your feedback especially regarding the love for the old terrain. The thing is, working on terrain takes a large amount of time and currently I feel it's better spend on fixing multiple smaller things instead. We'll see!
As for how much content comes after updates, I've said in the past multiple times it depends on how many players will play it at that point. For now we focus on improvement and getting it ready for 1.0.
Fixing common road placement bug
In that bugfixing spirit:
It's long been a gripe of players that placed roads do not always have the shape their draft shows before they're placed, especially on hills.
Well, our programmer Sepehr just fixed it:
Balance
InfraSpace's production ratios have alwyays been a little whacky and unpredictable. Andreas is working on finding a new balance for the production chains so you can much easier calculate how many mines you need to supply a factory.
Also, we're planning to do away with huge fields of nanotube factories or electronics factoriers. To that end, we might introduce 1-2 new resource chains. More info on that to come later!
Playtesting Pixel Buildings
On Discord we have a small group of playtesters playing our in development version trying to find bugs. This week, they've already had a go at the new pixel buildings (screenshots are from AaronJerda):
That's it for this week. I hope you understand that we'll not focus on huge new features for the forseeable future, but if you got bugs, performance, or broken gameplay issues, let us know!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #116 - Pixel Buildings
Hello everyone!
Easter time is here, so we had a little shorter week this time and we hope all of you are enjoying the holidays if you have some. This week we already released a small bugfix update on Monday to make sure the magnetic field generator is working properly for absolutely everybody.
So now, I wanna reveal a fun little thing we've been making, called pixel buildings:
Inspiration
It's always been great to see players use the signs in their cities for all kinds of purposes. Sometimes they declare districts names, remind players of future plans, or are just plain little funny messages.
Another cool thing we saw is that some "road building artists" on our discord server made some absolutely amazing things. Check out the adamantine icon made out of roads in this city by AronJerda on Discord:
So we thought with relatively little effort it might be possible to give you way better tools besides pre-made decoration.
Pixel Buildings
"Pixel Buildings" are just some buildings that are exactly 1x1 unit wide and come in some different shapes like rectangles, slops, and circles.
You can use them for all manner of purposes. You could make pixel art or just fill up some space. We're just gonna give them to you and see what happens :D
All the colors can be set with the new color picker, implemented by our programmer Sepehr:
Unfortunately, because of some tricky issues, implementing the color picker took longer than expected. We haven't forgot that we want to focus on polishing, fixes, and performance as well this update and will get back to it soon.
On a positive note though, the color picker automatically also works with trains and any future thing that might be editable:
Check out next week's post to hear some more news about balancing!
Until then, happy playing!
Patch Alpha 12.7 Updates Old Magnetic Field Generators
Hello everyone!
A couple players still complained about their magnetic field generators turning into the adamantine drill. With this small update we change the save game loading so that old, broken magnetic field generators from the time before our terraforming update hotfix are get fixed as well.
If anyone still has issues with these, let us know.
Happ playing!
Friday Dev News #115 - Big Ferris Wheel
Hello everyone!
our studio has a lot to do right now with a mix of refactoring, polishing, adding some new buildings, and a visit to the Game Developers Conference.
This week, I'll show you some of the new decorative buildings thanks to Lasse, while the rest of the team are working on improvements on things in the background.
Big Ferris Wheel
This Ferris Wheel let's your citizens see the plant from a whole new perspective! For now this is just a decorative building, but we might make it an alternative to the stadium for people to get entertainment. What do you think?
Crashed UFO
Where could this have come from? Seems like it's been here for a long time.
Building Variations
InfraSpace's industrial districts frequently look a little bland cause many players group buildings of the same product together in large areas. To improve the look of these zones, we're adding some variations to many often-used factories:
That's it for this week's updates. Let us know what you think and happy playing!
Friday Dev News #114 - Bugfix Update
Hello everyone,
one week has passed since the Terraforming Update and we've been busy with bugfixes for you.
A big reason for some of the new bugs was a multithreading issue that happened because we cleaned up a huge chunk of our codebase, about 40%. This should make future dev easier, but during that cleanup, we also made a last minute performance improvement. It worked, but sometimes led to issues with other threads, breaking a bunch of things.
That threading issue was fixed with the Monday update and that's where most reported bugs have been eliminated. Some were still left, so today you're getting another update:
fixed keybindings that were not working
fixed animations not playing properly if they were not using VAT (immigration spaceship). Some players thought this meant immigration was broken
fixed animations and particles out of sync when placing roads next to building
fixed red dots not disappearing when placing first couple of buildings
On Monday we fixed the bug where the Magnetic Field Generator turned into the adamantine drill. However, you need to place a NEW generator, because old generators still have the wrong values inside of them. If you are sure you have placed a new generator and you still see it turning into the adamantine mine, send us the save.
That's it for this week. You're going to hear more about our plans for the next update next week.
Best, Daniel
Big Patch Alpha 12.5.257!
Hello everyone!
In the comments I promised a big bugfixing session on Monday and with this update we're delivering the results:
fixed a multithreading issue that caused a number of bugs like power and consumption flickering
fixed error icons not showing up
fixed issue where you couldn't place/move buildings and roads
fixed issues where you couldn't select buildings and rocks
fixed an issue where road pathfinding was not set up properly after save loading
probably fixed mass upgrade/downgrade messages after returning from space scene
There are still a couple of fixes left for another bugfix patch, but this should already improve stability a lot!
Let us know how it's going and thanks for the reports so far.
