The release of 0.7.4 went smoothly! But as predicted, there was a minor issue. The colony ownership buttons (kick / set to leader / leave) weren’t working properly. So we released 0.7.4.1 this week, fixing that and simultaneously updating the German and Chinese translations.
Zun already had an idea for a new change. We did have a command for changing the time of day, but it didn’t affect the rest of the world. He has been working on a new system that alters the speed of nearly all in-game systems. You can make a day pass by 10 times as fast, and colonists will actually walk and work 10 times as fast as well. It also works in the reverse direction, with a 0.1x speed being possible, resulting in extreme slow-motion. Last but not least, it enables us to easily add pausing to the game. In our internal unreleased 0.7.5 dev build, pressing escape now freezes your world.
In that dev build, numpad 1 to 5 control the speed, going from slow-motion to fast-forwarding. But this only works when “Enable developer buttons” has been toggled on and cheats have been enabled as well. For finer control, there’s also a new command: /debug setsimspeed #. “#” can be anything from 0 to infinity.
We’ve been thinking about making access to the simulation speed available in a more “official” way, but we’re not sure whether that’s a good idea. Why grow bigger and recruit 10 scientists, when you can have 1 scientist and fast-forward x10 for the same effect? We’re worried it’ll remove a core incentive of the gameplay.
Currently, monsters aren’t saved. When going back to the main menu, monsters are ‘deleted’ and will not reappear when reloading the world. This happens because otherwise they will try to do things in a half-loaded world, which leads to all kinds of problems. With our newfound ability to change the simulation speed, the monsters can be paused during loading, preventing these problems and allowing us to restore monsters when loading a world. Zun will try to implement this next week!
Slow-motion and fast-forwarding are obviously features that don’t work well in static pictures. That’s why we made a video! Disclaimer: there's some stuttering/teleporting going on because of the high sim speed (x30), it's a known issue and WIP :) Here it is:
https://youtu.be/4F-h0nAUK1g
Bedankt voor het lezen!