Hello everyone! I hope you all liked the New Depths update. Today it is time for another update. While it is not a very big update compared to the previous one at least some people might be excited to be able to play the game in their own language as the main addition in this one is support to some more languages than English. You can see the full list of new supported languages in the patch notes below.
Translating a game can be quite a difficult task to get right and it is not always easy to convey the context for the texts to the translators, so if you find anything that feels off in the translation of a particular language, let me know either in the Discord server or on the Steam forums, and I will have it updated the next time I send stuff for translation.
I know that for players already playing the game fine in English new language support is not very exciting. So I wanted to have at least some new thing in the game in this update. So here is a much requested feature, a map feature to allow zooming out further.
Being able to zoom out more has been one of the most requested features since the release of the game. And I totally get it, when the base gets large you want to see more of it at the same time. Both to get a better overview of it and to be able to manage it on a larger scale. The issue with it has been that the game is already running close to the limit of most typical GPUs at the current max zoom level on large bases due to rendering a lot of things. And while there is room for improvement performance wise in the rendering it would likely take quite a lot of time for not as much more zoom.
So the solution, which also has been suggested by several people, is a 2d map. If you have played Factorio it will fell familiar as it works very similar to its map view. Now if you zoom out further than the previous limit the game will switch to a 2d map view of the base. The game can still be played normally in this view, you can select things and upgrade them just as you can in the normal 3d view. It is just a much simpler representation of the base.
Now I did not have time to make the map view as optimized as I would have wanted in time for this update, so it there is a zoom limit for it as well so it wont go into too low fps when zoomed out. But I figured it is much more zoom than before so it was worth including this version in the update. My plan is to increase the zoom limit of the map quite a lot in a future update after I've done some more optimizations of it.
Speaking of plans for future updates, now with this translation update done, the next thing I will start working on is new upgrades for the grinders and the storage minecart which are currently causing big bottlenecks in late game bases.
Features/Additions/Improvements
- Increased max zoom out, with new 2d rendering when zooming out further than previous max
- Added support for the following languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese
- Various UI changes to support the new languages