Our work last week has been focused under the hood. We’ve released two new updates last week: 2.4 and 2.5. Visually, nothing has changed, but some much needed fixes and performance enhancements have been added.
Last Monday, the biggest problem in Colony Survival history occurred. Some players figured out how they could get water blocks in their inventory in multiplayer, without any special permissions. Placing these blocks high up flooded entire worlds. Earlier, one other player called ‘That Quiet Bear’ found a way to do this days after the release. He edited the crafting recipes and noticed that these changes carried over to multiplayer. Instead of using this to destroy other worlds, he told us about it immediately. We’re still grateful for that! We fixed the issue immediately.
But on Monday, players figured out that you could also edit the results of destroying blocks. They could edit grass blocks so they would put water blocks in your inventory on destruction. This edit still carried over to multiplayer. Suddenly we heard lots of reports of worlds being flooded until they crashed!
Again, we started working on a fix as soon as possible. We also ended compatibility between different versions of clients and servers. If a server is updated, all players have to update as well or they cannot join again. Updated servers will be protected from players that want to exploit problems in older versions of the game.
Besides that, we’ve focused on improving the performance of the game. Performance has been pretty good for small colonies in singleplayer since release day. But we’ve never tested the game with more than 200 colonists or more than 4 players online. Now we’re seeing colonies with over 1000 colonists, and servers with dozens of players! We’re working hard to fix the causes of lag in mega colonies and servers with lots of players. The performance has gotten better in 2.4 and 2.5, and 2.6 will contain more fixes once it’s released. One example: the server reported the position of every guards six times per second, while they’re mostly standing still. Fixing issues like this will dramatically reduce network traffic and significantly improve the online experience.
We received quite a lot of complaints about broken savegames. The new updates also contain a fix to prevent some of the old problems, and we’ll keep working until all savegame issues have been solved!
TL;DR: More frames per second. Less network traffic for better online experience. Flooding issue in multiplayer solved. Some of the savegame issues fixed. Multiple improvements for big colonies and big servers, not a lot of noticeable changes for small singleplayer colonies.