Greetings Founders!
We have been pretty heads down working on some major changes, so today's Foundry Friday is a bit of a grab bag of topics. We are going to go over the survey results, show off the orbital uplink tool, show some optimization progress of modular buildings and tease a new mega structure.
Survey Results
Last Foundry Friday we shared a survey with our community to better understand where we should focus our efforts on improving Foundry, and we received TONS of responses and were able to draw some valuable insights.
Although there was a great deal overlap in respondents' opinions, the feedback fell into two broad buckets. Our retained players focus on quality-of-life improvements, like refining resource gathering and adding smoother gameplay tweaks, reflecting how invested they are in the experience. Meanwhile, players who’ve taken a break often cited the need for more content, a clearer endgame, and blueprints to bring them back. This mix of perspectives gives us a solid direction: making iterative improvements to keep regular players engaged while expanding content and adding features to draw back those who’ve stepped away. This survey affirmed our need to add more content and a thematic goal- but also reminds us we also need to expand the existing core pillars of the game.
Of note, the pressure mechanic was not seen as a priority. I believe that’s because it’s something that has conflicts with the general vibe of the game- so it’s interesting to see the community respond with a similar opinion. Also… everyone wants trains.
Orbital Uplink Tool
In Foundry Friday #62 we shared information about the Orbital Laser. This late(ish) Space Station upgrade helps players terraform large chunks of terrain with ease. And now commanding the space station with the new Orbital Uplink Tool design is a breeze. This craftable handheld has a right-click modal menu that lets you switch between different Space Station features (like the Orbital Laser).
Optimizing Modular Buildings
Foundry is receiving a ton of optimizations, but there is still much left to do in order to allow absolutely massive factories smoothly on a wide range of hardware. This week we tackled optimizing Modular Buildings, the mid to late game super structures that are built in modules by construction ships and drones. These buildings presented a unique challenge in that they don’t utilize our existing systems for rendering.
By manually processing the drawing of these buildings (and their related handrails, scaffolding and modules) we were able to improve performance on this “blast furnace” test scene from a poultry 27fps to a much more acceptable 103fps.
Modular buildings can contain thousands of pieces like hand railings and scaffolding.
Modular buildings now have the same batching optimizations as regular buildings
Foundry is the most fun when you try to scale, and because of this it’s important that we have each element run as fast as possible. We have done a ton of other rendering and streaming optimizations that we haven’t talked about yet, and our development builds are running smoother than ever. The next update should be really solid for those who like to build "big".
Mega Modular Buildings
Now that modular buildings have received a large optimization- we might as well tease where this feature is going. Even larger, even more modular mega structures! Next Foundry Friday we will reveal one of the most mega modular buildings yet. In fact, it’s so large you can actually go inside and to get it to work requires numerous new modular buildings. This building is so iconic that it was hard to get a work-in-progress screenshot where you wouldn't immediately guess what it is. So you get this early rendering of one of the components instead:
What could it be?
Well, that's it for this week. We are hard at work on a ton of things behind the scenes and we are eager to share more in the coming posts.
Cheers
-markl
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