All changes mentioned in this blog concern the internal dev build, no update has been published to the public branch yet
Our current task is improving the pathfinding. The code has been optimized, resulting in better performance. In some situations, the colonists do make better choices in regards to their paths. They’re better at avoiding winding paths - which means they’ll also avoid unnecessarily climbing blocks and stairs.
There still is the problem where they choose their targets (beds, crates, etc) based on the straight line between the colonist and the target, totally ignoring the actual path they need to take there. Zun is thinking about this problem right now, and he’s considering some options that might fix this.
Zun’s considered solution will probably be implemented within a couple of weeks, which means we can hopefully release 0.7.5 before the end of September. 0.7.5 will include the new individual crafting limits feature, the ability to pause the game, the (hidden in cheats/dev options) capability to adjust the simulation speed and the pathfinding improvements.
Afterwards, we’ll focus on better colony management tools, like the ability to remotely assign/disable jobs. They should be released in 0.7.6 :)
Roadmap
Last week, I had a little holiday (which was great!), and instead of a regular blog we released a roadmap. This resulted in a very enthusiastic response, which is always awesome. There were also some questions which would be useful to answer publicly.
Carrot_shark - i wonder if they could give us a timeline for the updates
Sorry - no :(. 0.7.5 would have been the colony-management-tools-update, but Zun got some brilliant ideas for pathfinding/simulation speed so we ended up here. Plans and priorities shift all the time, sneaky problems and hidden opportunities appear frequently, and this makes all precise long term planning pretty much useless.
Gary - So we will only be able to attack these AI Colonies? Would it be possible to friend them for trading resources?
AI Colonies are the most distant and uncertain feature, so it’s hard to guarantee specifics. I doubt we’re getting a complex diplomacy thing but you never know!
Growlingpie - What about something simple like assigning certain jobs to certain beds. I love the game but when my miners have to walk all the way up and across my base to their beds is just a waste of time.
Hopefully, the pathfinding update solves this problem entirely! If not, we’ll consider other solutions, like job-specific beds (green beds for farmers, grey beds for guards, black beds for miners, etc).
Windvex21 - for the blueprints i would like if we can like go to like a 3D model type thing, build however we want the building to look like, then we can save and use it wherever we want
We would love that too!
Katyusha - I quite like the idea of the industrial era tech level, one thing I feel that could be a nice addition would be some fast mode of transport between colonies
Definitely agreed. Perhaps we’re getting transport modes like the glider but quicker, but we’ve also been thinking about adding teleporters with huge electricity costs as an end-game technology.
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Bedankt voor het lezen!