Things got wonky in 4K
All mentioned changes in this blog concern the internal dev build that has not been released yet
This week's work had quite a lot of visible results, and we’re eager to share them with you. First of all, we’ve added a new menu called “interface settings”. It adds the much requested feature to be able to permanently see the blue “block highlight”, that during normal gameplay only appears when you’re removing and placing blocks. Toggling this option “on” means you’ll always see it when hovering over a block.
Apart from that, the menu also allows you to rapidly re-enable the “developer buttons”. These are the functions mapped to the F keys. They were enabled by default in 0.1.0, but too many people accidentally broke their game with them. A while ago, they were disabled and hidden behind a toggle, and that toggle has received a better place in the UI now.
A new option, enabled by default, is the adaptive crosshair. It subtly changes shape and color according to the context. It’s small and simple when the crosshair is aiming at the air or a distant block. When clicking will result in mining a block, the crosshair grows larger. When hovering over the banner, it turns red/yellow; when hovering over a colonist; orange, when hovering over a job block; blue. The results can be seen in the following image, with the size of the crosshair 400% enlarged for clarity purposes:
It’s a minor change, but it should make the game feel slightly more “tactile” and intuitive. Last but not least, there’s a UI scaling option that’s mainly meant to resolve a common issue for people with 4K monitors. Until now, the UI itself didn’t scale with resolution. Compare it to plates on a table: when you shrink the table, the plates stay the same size. That’s pretty useful to keep things legible on a small / low-res monitor, but on a 4K monitor it meant you had some tiny plates in the corners of a massive table.
We thought fixing this issue was relatively complicated, but some minor tweaks worked a lot better than expected, so we’ve now got support for UI scaling. Players can choose what they feel is comfortable, and playing in 4K resolution is a lot more viable now.
While Zun has been working on issues like this, I’ve kept growing my Unity / C# / VR skills. My projects have been growing steadily more complicated - up to the point that I’m regularly breaking them in a way that can’t be fixed with some CTRL-Z’s. I’ve finally decided to learn to deal with Git. It was easier to set up than I thought, and it works very well. Git is a hugely important tool in many organizations that develop software, and it makes collaboration a lot easier and more reliable. It’s another small step in the long road of being able to contribute to Colony Survival directly, instead of merely providing textures / 3D-models / ideas :)
Bedankt voor het lezen!