Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
Poly Universe
Version 0.9.4.21 is Live! -- Starmap and Interstellar Trade update
This new update brings a complete overhaul to interplanetary trade:
* You can now redirect trade ships to new planets if you decide they'd be more efficient there. Or if, you know, unexpected situations arise that make a planet need a little more help than usual.
* Trade routes can now be configured to carry as many types of resources as you like -- but there's still an overall limit on how much cargo a ship can carry.
* The Galactic Map looks six orders of magnitude better than it did before. Many thanks to Freya Holmer's "Shapes" Tool for making this possible. =)
Also, a number of bugs are fixed:
* The screen won't zoom in and out wildly if you use the mouse wheel to scroll thru a scrollable window.
* The number of colonists on a colonization mission is no longer accidentally clamped at 5.
* I've added better error logging for any bugs that happen with regards to save files, so those should be easier for me to track down in the future.
* Oh, and I guess this isn't a bug per se, but I've made some tweaks to improve the clarity of the UI.
Next up, I'm planning on looking into better procedural generation of planets. I think there's a lot I can do there to add more detail without losing the 'low poly' look. Expect an update on that early in 2022!
Thanks for Playing! -Pouchmouse
Version 0.9.4.20 is now available in the Experimental Branch.
Happy (pre)-Thanksgiving!
I've just uploaded v0.9.4.2 to the Experimental branch. It features:
* A brand new Galactic Map, which I think is a bit of an improvement over the previous one... * Improvements to Trade - You can now send more than three types of resources between planets, though you're still limited to a fixed number of total items. * Fixed a bug where the screen would zoom in and out wildly if you use the mouse wheel to scroll thru a scrollable window. * Fixed a bug where you could only send exactly 5 colonists on a colonization mission. * Better error logging for any bugs that happen with regards to save files. * Some tweaks to the overall look of the UI, but there's plenty more to do there...
Give it a shot and let me know what you think! If everything works correctly this new build will leave the experimental branch and become the main game in about a week. =)
Update 0.9.3.5
Happy... Tuesday? Sorry, I meant to publish this on Sunday, but life got in the way. =)
The 0.9.3.5 update is now live! And it introduces a raft of new research projects which will unlock new upgraded versions of the game's buildings. I've also refactored how the game handles narrative events, and fleshed out the writing in the game's objectives and dialogues.
Also of note: certain research projects now have prerequisites -- things which you must do before the research is possible. Domesticating alien creatures, for instance, will require that you actually have a lab on the world that creature is native to.
Also, also: It is now possible to reroute trade ships to new planets, after you've constructed and assigned them. Hopefully this make building an extensive trade network 95% less cumbersome.
And, of course, a bunch of smaller usability tweaks and bug fixes have gone in:
Inventory for the current planet fits the screen better now.
Ship construction menu tells you what resources are missing, if any are missing.
Research menu UI is improved (though there's still plenty more work to do on UI...)
Health and Happiness are now hard limits on a planets growth, instead of tedious modifiers to how _quickly_ the planet grows.
...but happiness producing buildings can be upgraded now, so you have that going for you. =)
Fixed some mistakes in the dialogues where the characters don't accurately describe your next objective.
Fixed a bug where new settlers on a world would sometimes refuse to work.
Colonization menus now show how much is packed on this ship, so you have an idea of what still needs to be done before it launches.
Fixed some stray exceptions in the UI for resource-producing buildings.
Fixed the mission objectives pop-up to not appear over the buttons for placing buildings.
Building upgrades are purely functional at the moment, so the upgraded version will still have the physical appearance of an un-upgraded one, at least until you mouse over it at which point the tooltip will explain that the building is upgraded. That's not great, I know! So my mission now is to create new building art and improve the old models, as well. More on that in the next update!
Update 0.9.2.2
Good morning folks, and happy Sunday!
Before we get started, I want to mention that I also post updates on Twitter! So if you'd like to hear news about the game that way (or if you're interested in the other random prototypes and tutorials that I sometimes throw together), Follow me here: @Pouchmouse
Right! So, with this update I'm looking to fix a number of small problems before continuing with larger gameplay features. Here's what's changed:
* The spaceship landing vfx no longer shows up at odd times, when no ship is actually landing.
* The options menu is now available in-game, so you can tweak graphics settings under 'real-world' conditions. =)
* The feedback form's error report now has a dismiss button, and won't be stuck on screen permanently if it fails to send.
* Tile bonuses now appear correctly on other worlds than the starting world.
* I've fixed some exceptions in the bridge code which might not have been visible to players, but definitely weren't helping the game run any faster.
That's it for today. Now I'll be going back to looking at building upgrades, and improving the game's mission structure so it's less linear in the beginning. Hopefully I'll have more on that front soon...
Thanks for playing! -Pouchmouse
Quick update (v. 0.9.2.1)
So this was a bit of an oversight, but up until now I'd forgotten that you'd need a way to delete old save files.* This update fixes that. =)
* Okay, I didn't actually forget. I just figured hey, making the UI is hard and if people want to delete saves they can always do it manually. What I forgot was that if you delete a save from outside of the game, Steam's cloud-save system will actually resurrect it for you the next time you play, making your unwanted save files effectively immortal...
FX Update (v.0.9.2.0)
Happy Thursday Everyone!
Just a small update today, featuring new visual effects for rockets taking off, landing, crashing, and exploding. Plus new sounds for menu interactions and a subtle sound for when characters are speaking.
Also a small but important optimization: The planet generation code would sometimes cause hitches in the framerate when you started a new game. This is corrected now, so the opening sequence should be a smooth 60 fps again. =)
Also, also, I added a feedback form to make it easier to report bugs and make suggestions. Poly Universe is already a much bigger and better game than I'd originally set out to make, and I owe 100% of that improvement to the feedback I've been getting in Early Access. So... Thanks!
That's it for now, but expect a larger update concerning building upgrades and late-game resources soon. ;)
The 60-FPS New Years Update (0.9.1.9)
Happy Saturday, Everyone!
I dug into the game's rendering and discovered a lot of room for optimization. Many of the models in the game were being rendered individually instead of in batches, causing the game to waste time on unnecessary draw calls.
To put the problem in perspective, before I got started I was seeing an advanced world with a population of 100 take about 25 milliseconds to render. After taking some time to make sure that GPU instancing was used to render as many objects as possible in single batches, that same world now renders in 4 milliseconds. I think I'll be able to improve performance more beyond this, but I figured I should push an update now because this should already be enough to make the game run at 60 fps on many people's machines.
That's it for now! I'll be back next weekend with more optimizations, and hopefully some improvements to art and effects, too.
-Pouchmouse
Christmas Update - 0.9.1.8
Merry Christmas everyone!
Version 0.9.1.8 is now live, and it introduces a couple new mechanics and features:
* Roads and Bridges are back in the game! They'd been in a much earlier version, but hadn't affected gameplay much. Now they're back and buildings which are adjacent to a road get an efficiency bonus proportional to the percentage of buildings on the planet that you can reach along that road. There's also a new special vision mode which highlights how much of a bonus each building is currently getting.
* The placement of your Outposts and Forts matter now. Buildings are considered 'defended' if they are close to a Fort or Outpost, and your colony's chances of withstanding an invasion drop with each undefended building you have. As with Roads, there's now a special rendering mode that lets you see how well defended each building is -- this is available in the Military menu.
* I've added an option for changing the style of the water between the classic look, and the new wavy look. Feel free to choose the style you like better. =)
* Now that the game has two special rendering modes that use red and green to highlight problems in your colonies, it seemed like a good time to introduce some options for color-blindness. Now in the options you can pick from a variety of color schemes for the game to use when it shows you how efficient the road network is, or how well defended buildings are.
* I've fixed a bug where you couldn't load very old saves from before the time that I introduced a story to the campaign. Now if you load a save that's that old it will be in sandbox mode (where there is no story).
* Also, a bunch of small fixes went in for missing localization and UI that wasn't working properly. For instance, the Interplanetary Trade menus should now correctly identify the names of the planets you're trading between.
Broadly, here's what I'm planning on looking at next:
Optimizations - There's still bugs where the game will slow down to a crawl sometimes, especially with large civilizations that span many worlds. I've also noticed that the game is generating far too many draw calls for what it's rendering - trees, for instance, are all rendered separately when they could be rendered as a single batch. Fixing this will make the frame rate a whole lot better. I want to look into moving the game's AI towards an entity/component model as well, which will further improve performance.
Story Rewrites - I'm not satisfied with how the story plays out at the moment, and that means two things need to change: 1) I want to rewrite how the engine handles story events, so it's easier for me to make changes without breaking peoples' existing saves, and then 2) I want to introduce more events and make the pacing a little faster in the beginning.
Building Upgrades - I'd like to add upgraded versions of existing buildings, which can be unlocked thru research and built with late-game resources.
That's it for now; Happy New Year everyone! -Pouchmouse
Weekend Update (0.9.1.5)
Happy Sunday, everyone!
I've spent the past two weeks attempting to track down the crashes that people have been experiencing. I found two places where the game was allocating new objects each frame, and I suspect these were causing the game to eventually run out of memory and crash. Both are fixed now so hopefully you have a crash-free experience on your hands.
I've also enabled much better crash logging, so I should be faster at fixing crashes in the future.
Sorry! -Pouchmouse
P.S. If you're curious what the specific issues were:
1. Certain icons in the UI would allocate a new sprite for themselves each frame, instead of holding on to the one they already had. Depending on how many menus you generally like to have open at once, this could make the game run out of memory quickly, or only after a long time.
2. Storage buildings weren't completely initializing themselves until you visited the planet that they were built on. So if you loaded a save with multiple worlds, every Storage building on the planets you hadn't looked at yet would be in a half-way state between being Storage and Not-Storage. This caused Peabs to run over and take supplies out of them (because supplies shouldn't be left sitting in Non-Storage buildings), but then immediately turn around and put the supplies back in the building (because it's the nearest Storage building). They would repeat this forever until you actually inspected the planet, and the process of looping resources in and out of the building would gradually build up excess object allocations that never got resolved.
Anyway, both of those are fixed now. =)
Weekend Update (0.9.1.4)
Happy Sunday Everyone-
I've been experimenting with ways to improve the look of the ocean; trying to make it look more dynamic and wavy while still keeping to the game's polygonal art style. After a lot of experimentation with different shaders, I've finally arrived at something that looks quite good! That's my opinion, at least. You're free to disagree in the comments. =)
I've also continued re-modelling the game's buildings, including an improved spaceship with an animating hatch for Peabs to jump out of when they crash.
Oh, and bug fixes! I've fixed issues with the Colonization menu that would have caused the amount of stuff being shipped to the new planet to reset to zero each time you opened the menu. As always, if you find bugs, send me a save file and steps to reproduce it. This helps tremendously when it comes to tracking down bugs.
