"SummerTales" by Pyris-TT
Last week, we posted a video of functional multiple colonies. While the basics were done, many jobs and systems like science didn't work yet. Zun spent nearly the entire weekend fixing those issues, and it's done now! All jobs and systems are functional with multiple colonies now. We've made a video to show the changes:
https://youtu.be/iISE1YBYD-Q
While old systems are functional, multiple colonies require many new functions. Naming your colony, trading, travel, producing banners, info on remote colonies, etcetera. But instead of immediately continuing to work on those issues, we've decided to enjoy some variation by working on a different problem: the new world generation.
World Generation
Until now, exploration hasn't been important in Colony Survival, but it will become so in 0.7.0. The non-standard biomes are pretty simple, boring and ugly currently, so that definitely has to be fixed.
We'd like to make the landscape a lot more diverse. Random flowers and plants, rock formations, cliffs, grasslands in the desert and patches of trees in the tundra, etcetera.
The transitions between biomes is very harsh now. I've been thinking of ways to improve it. I realized there's no clear line in Finland separating taiga from tundra. Nor does the desert in the west of the US appear suddenly. There's a gradual transition that looks roughly like this:
No vegetation (snow/sand) -> grassland -> shrubland -> some trees -> forest
This doesn't mean the world will be a simple monotonous transition from grass to forests either. IRL, there are patches of sand in the middle of fertile Europe, and there are patches of green in the middle of the desert. I'd like biomes in Colony Survival to be like that as well.
When sharing these conclusions with Zun, he responded that he had already come up with similar ideas independently. He'd like to generate some underlying statics like temperature and humidity, and to pick a relevant biome based on that info. This should make the world both interesting and realistic! We hope to be able to show you some of the first experiments with the new world generation next week. A fastforwarded flythrough of the old world can be seen in the video above.
First Complete Texturepack!
There have been people in the past who've redone some textures, and others who've made new textures for mods. As far as we know, there is nobody who has redone all the textures in the game. Until now! Pyris-tt has made the SummerTales texturepack. It's used in all the screenshots in this blog, and the middle part of the video. It's beautiful! He's also made new icons for nearly all the items, and they improve a lot on the default icons. Thanks Pyris-tt!
In related news, Pandaros has expanded the team working on the Settlers Mod. The team now includes Pandaros himself, Pyris-tt, Kenovis and Servius. They've got many exciting ideas, and they're also planning to use the upcoming multiple colonies and happiness features. We can't wait to see what they'll produce!
Bedankt voor het lezen!