Patch 12.4.256 Fixes Magnetic Field Generator, Loading Freeze, Save Loading
Hello everyone,
thanks for your reports so far. This is just the first of a couple of bugfix updates that are going to come throughout the next days.
This time we fixed:
Fixed an issue with the game freezing while loading (if you still get any issues or crashes, please report!)
Magnetic Field Generator no longer turns into Adamantine Mine
Fixed a save loading issue that
might* fix an issue some players had with placing buildings and roads. Let us know if issues persist and send us your save for investigation
Thanks for your reports and for your patience. More bugfix updates are on the way.
Happy playing!
InfraSpace Terraforming Update Released!
Hello everyone and welcome to the Terraforming Update!
Terraforming the area around your city is our new large end game goal.
This update doesn't only feature terraforming, but also some improvements and fixes, see changelog below. Also: all of your saves are compatible!
Terraforming
In order to terraform the planet, you will have to research a bunch of new technologies, build up some new production chains and build five different buildings to deal with the different aspects of terraforming.
Dust Particle Filtering
This is the first and easiest step of terraforming. The atmosphere on your planet is filled with some very fine dust. If your citizens are exposed to the fine dust for longer periods of time, the dust settles in their lungs, causing long term health problems. You will need to supply the dust particle filtering building with fresh filtering meshes to continue operating.
Soil Fertilization
In order to enable more plants to grow on this planet, the soil composition needs to be improved over a large area. In order to spread the fertilizer, you can use flying drones - as long as you provide them with tons of fertilizer!
(Note: currently the drones are not flying around the map yet, just a little above the building. Maybe in the next update!)
Ground Acidity Regulation
When you arrive, the ground water is way too acidic to sustain the kind of plants we know on earth. The ground acidity regulator reaches down to the ground water and removes the acidity in a large radius.
Ammonia Extraction
This building needs to reach high up in the atmosphere to extract all the ammonia necessary to make the air safe for humans. It requires expensive advanced filtering meshes to operate, but it covers a large area.
Magnetic Field Generation
Your planet does not have a protective magnetic field like the earth - and is therefore subject to way too much radiation. There is one solution: You can build a huge electromagnet that covers the whole map. You will need to construct this monument in multiple stages, like the huge adamantine drill. Once it's done, you will need to supply it with superconducting coils and huge amounts of electricity.
Terraforming Panel
The terraforming panel will give you information about your current terraforming progress and what you need to accomplish in each category.
You can even turn on visualizations to quickly see your progress on the map and any spots you might have missed:
Performance: VAT and Impostors
This update we have taken game performance more seriously and started with some core optimizations. There are two main things:
First, we a technique called impostors to reduce triangle counts and draw calls in the distance. These are basically advanced billboards that look good from any angle. For example, trees in the distance are not rendered in full detail, but just as a simple plane.
Second, we optimized our animations to run almost solely on the graphics card. This technique is called Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) and reduces load on the CPU. Check out our huge animation test scene, where we can animate thousands of buildings with almost no performance hit:
There is a caveat though: These techniques require a little more memory. We will keep an eye out to see if this becomes a problem or not. Also, you can now change your memory consumption through the graphics settings. Finally, these improvements have nothing to do with simulation performance, which we'll look at in the next update!
Changelog
Here is the list with the most important changes:
terraforming!
5 terraforming buildings, 3 new resources
terraforming panel with visualizations and stats
fixed a couple of save loading issues
fixed production priority panel resetting on load
added a bunch of new building sounds (park, arena, school, water buildings, methane buildings, terraforming buildings, solar panels)
some gondola pathfinding fixes (a piece of cargo used to take the gondola instead of faster alternatives)
VAT (animation performance)
Impostors (graphics performance)
RAM work (VAT and impostors take more RAM, but texture streaming optimizes RAM usage)
some small general performance improvements
some localization fixes
We're excited to hear about your experiences with the Terraforming Update!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #112 - Terraforming Update Next Week!
Hello everyone,
after 2,5 months of work, we're happy to release the Terraforming Update next week at 2pm CET!
The biggest news are:
Build 5 different buildings to handle the different aspects of terraforming
Handle the production chains for 3 new resources
Lots of improvements when it comes to GPU performance, namely Impostors and the VAT technique for animation. If you have a huge city, it might be CPU bound instead. Improvements for CPU performance will come in the next update after terraforming!
Fixed a bunch of save loading issues
And important side note: your saves will stay compatible with the Terraforming Update!
This week we started playtesting with a couple of fans on our Discord Server. If you still want to join playtesting to look for bugs, check out our Server and ping @Developer.
We have already fixed a couple of issues and will spend the next week polishing the update and finishing the last remaining bits and pieces
See you on March 10th, and happy playing!
Friday Dev News #111 - Terraforming Update releases March 10th!
Hello everyone,
today I'm excited to announce that we're going to release the Terraforming Update in two weeks on March 10th!
We are planning to start some beta playtesting in the middle of next week. Ping @Developer on the discord server if you're interested in participating in the playtest. As a beta playtester you need to be willing to report bugs and deal with issues while we finish up the update for release!
Check out the current look of our new, terraformed biomes:
The former desert does not feature any grass yet, we hope we'll be able to include it before release, but no guarantee.
Which biome is your favorite?
Next: Bugfixes and Polishing Update
The Terraforming Updates includes some bugfixes, especially fixing some save loading issues and some performance things.
But there is a lot more to be done and since we want to keep improving so we can leave Early Access properly in a couple of months, the next update is going to be just for bugfixing, polishing, and optimization.
We might also include some smaller features like the billboards or some decorations, but programming will focus on improving what's there.
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #110 - Terraforming Building Art
Hey everyone,
It's time for our weekly update on InfraSpace progress. We've got a bunch of news to share, so let's dive in:
Terraforming Buildings
Andreas has been working hard to finish the art for our terraforming buildings. These include the buildings that help you terraform the planet as well as some factories that provide parts for it. Here's a sneak peek:
Moss Shader and Terraformed Landscape
Lasse has been working on making the terraformed planet look more natural. He has created a moss shader for the terraformed rocks, and he's also added some new bushes to the landscape. Check it out:
Different Trees in Different Biomes
Sepehr has been busy implementing a feature that allows for different trees to spawn in different biomes when the areas are terraformed. This required a bunch of work since not every piece of data necessary was saved in the current save files. Plus, Sepehr has also made it so that these trees disappear when you place a building on them, making it easier to build your city.
Besides these, Sepehr and I investigated some small memory leaks which should help out with performance.
Futuristic Roads
Adriana has been busy creating concepts for some new futuristic roads that fit the sci-fi setting of InfraSpace. These roads should fit better with the sci fi vibe of InfraSpace.
That's it for this week's update. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you again soon with more news on InfraSpace!
Friday Dev News #109 - Biomes & Mushrooms
Hello everyone,
we hope you're having a great day and are excited for the latest news on our development. Our current focus is getting the terraforming update into a playable state.
Different Trees in different Biomes
Each biome has their own vegetation. Unfortunately, Biome data is not explicitly saved in the current version of the game, so our programmer Sepehr had to recreate it from the seed, which took some time.
But now, the terraformed planet features different vegetation in each of the biomes:
(Note: terrain paint is turned off temporarily in these screenshots, just programmer testing shots)
Volcano Mushrooms
Since the soil on the volcano is mixed with ash, the vegetation is a lot different. The terraformed version of the volcano will feature large mushroom plants, made by Lasse:
Billboards
The billboards idea has been well received so Adriana made a couple of futuristic ads for our InfraSpace companies. Which ones do you like the best?
This is how they could look like in game (sign model not done yet, this was prototyped with text building feature ;) )
That's all for now, but stay tuned for more updates on InfraSpace. We hope we can get the terraforming update to you soon, and we're grateful for your support.
Take care, The InfraSpace team
Friday Dev News #108 - Terraformed Forests
Hello everyone,
and welcome to another Friday Dev News!
Terraforming Progress
In order to feel natural, the terraformed planet needs a lot more objects of two types: Trees and grass. Our programmer Sepehr and Artist Lasse worked together this week to spawn trees on the terraformed parts of the map. Check out the result and let us know which color scheme you like best!
(Note: grass is still missing and will change the look a little. More on that next week!)
Color scheme 1:
Color scheme 2:
Color scheme 3:
Decoration Buildings: Billboards
We're planning to add some simple decorative buildings so you can change the look and feel of your city to your liking.
This week we're presenting the idea of ad billboards, featuring the companies you already see on the buildings. Check out Adriana's concepts:
Some billboards may even display a small video, like these:
What do you think about the idea of you being able to add your own pictures in-game?
Save Load Improvement and Refactoring Merge
I've been working on general code improvement in the background and merged a big reorganization of about 40% of the code into the internal development branch. The intention of this cleanup is making future development easier.
During this work, I noticed some inefficiencies regarding save loading that were introduced in the new update. I managed to reduced save load times by 58%. There is more we can do for save loading performance, but general game performance nees a look at also :)
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #107 - Superconducting Coils and Highland Trees
Hello everyone,
we're continuously marching forward to the terraforming update release and so far, we're not too far off our original time plan!
New Factories for Filtering Meshes and Superconducting Coils
Terraforming a planet is no small feat, and your industry needs to be set up to provide the necessary machines and parts.
There are three major ways of terraforming the planet:
Filtering toxic and acidic particles from the atmosphere and ground
Fertilizing the soil
Strengthening the magnetic field of the planet to keep the sun's radiation at bay
All the filtering facilities need to be provided with single-use filtering meshes that removes the undesired particles. Our concept artist Adriana made a couple of sketches:
The magnetic field generation is a different story: The generator is a massive building similar to the adamantine drill. In order to create a magnetic field that's strong enough to cover the nearby regions, you are going to need superconducting coils. These are a specialized late game resource, which are going to be produced in factories like these:
I'm hoping we'll be able to show you some 3D models next week!
# Trees for the Highland Plateaus and the River
Now that we figured out a nice and efficient shader to display our trees, we have created some more trees for the other biomes.
I'm a big fan of the colors of the new highland trees (here shown in the desert):
The river will not be that dry anymore, so the river trees look a little like mangroves:
Don't worry, you'll still be able to build in the slightly wet river (water patches not shown here) ;)
In the mean time, the coders of team are working on the terraforming algorithm and refactoring (= cleaning up) the code - more about that next week!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #106 - Terraforming and Wind
Hello everyone,
Terraforming Progress
We have started to properly work on the actual terraforming implementation. Step 1 is exchanging the old models, terrain paint, and grass colors for their terraformed versions in areas where the terraforming progress is advanced enough.
We're probably finished with the grass and terrain paint and are going to take care of changing the models next week. After that, we'll tie the terraforming progress to the respective buildings, like the ammonia extractor or the magnetic field generator.
Ready for a programmer's screenshot? This one shows how to we are changing grass + terrain paint in the circular terraformed area on the left side. Soon, an artist is going to go over it and actually make it look good.
Wind
Lasse has been working on ways to render trees in a way that looks good and is efficient enough even with all the leaves. I think we have found a good solution and it even includes a nice little wind effect:
Performance
We have integrated the VAT method and tried it out in a save of 50k people. It's a nice improvement both on the graphics card and CPU side. More optimizations to be done on the simulation.
Code Quality
In the last couple of weeks I have been refactoring the codebase and cleaning it up while all the other work is going on. I'm thinking this will make future work on the game easier and should be worth it in the long run!
Happy playing!
Friday Dev News #105 - Vertex Animation Textures
Hello everyone,
this week we have 2 major news for you.
Vertex Animation Textures
We already introduced VAT last week: It's a technique for animating things more efficiently, especially buildings. Basically, instead of the CPU updating the animation each frame, we bake the animation into a texture so that your graphics card can play the animation without any input from the CPU.
Last week we did most of the work in order to get the animation working and this week we integrated it into the game. The results are really nice!
In this picture we render 10,000 animated copper mines:
The CPU is updating every position and rotation of every part of every copper mine every frame. Quite a lot of work! With VATs, the situation is different:
10k mines without LOD optimizations is still a lot of work for the graphics card, but the CPU is free to work on other things now, so we get more than 6x the frames per second in this example.
There is also another hidden benefit: Our optimization allows us to treat each mine as one single game object (as opposed to being made out of multiple parts) and therefore we also have to send less draw calls to the graphics card. This is the batches number highlighted in red.
The programming part of VATs seems to be done, so our artists will start using VATs starting next week and apply it to the buildings!
Terraformed Trees
Terraforming will be the next big update so we already started preparing some art for it. Specifically we looked into tree shaders and we think we got a nice looking solution:
Lasse, our artist working on it, is going to spend the next weeks creating more assets for the terraformed world while we program the system to make the transition work!
