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[Torvus]

Hey, So @voyagergames , I'm really trying to download and play outer worlds, but I can't find the download. I've gone just about everywhere, but I can't find the download. I tried asking on your forums, but in order to register, I have to do a reCAPTCHA code, which has apparently been shut down. Because of that, This is the only way I can think of contacting you. I would really like to play your game, but currently, I think it's impossible for me to get it. Thank you for considering.

Thanks for taking an interest in the game. I'm afraid you are correct in that there is no way to download the game currently. Sam decided to take the demo down when he began moving toward isometric graphics as the old tile view would no longer be a good preview of the finished game. You can expect a new demo once there are enough sprites to support it.

As for the forums, I'm sorry to say it has become a favorite target for Spam bots so registration has to be disabled for the time being.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but when a new demo is available,  you can be sure it will be announced in this thread.

[Mephansteras]

PTW

[VoyagerGames]

Lately I haven't been posting updates after just a week or two, but I figured I'd drop one this evening, just to give a window into what a typical weekend of Outer Colony progress is like.

To kick things off on Saturday, I got a few emails out to keep the pixel artists chugging away on their current contracts. The first animated sprites are now in-game and operational, and animations for a bunch of machinery and technical objects are being produced now. We're working hard on hammering out a cohesive aesthetic, so some of the work has been pretty concept heavy, but I think the diligence in producing a coherent and sharp style for Outer Colony tech is going to pay dividends.

Work is also underway on building-material sprites, so you should be seeing wooden, stone, metal, and other structures appearing in-game soon. Coding for procedural item sprite generation is also complete, and once a few more of the actual sprites are done, I should be able to post a pretty cool demo to show the whole thing off.

After finishing off the obligatory team emails, I took the rest of the weekend to work on engine and performance improvements. I managed to write a bunch of new code for improved occlusion culling and better engine support for JavaFX's hardware rendering pipeline, so Outer Colony should now take full advantage of players' GPU hardware. This effort yielded a pretty drastic and measurable improvement by the time I wrapped it up this evening, particularly for zoomed-out views. The counts on draw calls have been cut by a further 60%+ over the last round of optimizations, and everything's now rendering at the FPS cap without putting significant strain on my CPU.

I'm really glad I finally had a chance to make some of these engine improvements, as they constitute and important piece of the usability puzzle. Outer Colony should now run as smoothly as a player would expect a game to be. I also updated the project to run on Java 12, and that's the JRE I'm now distributing along with internal releases.

That's about what a typical weekend of work on Outer Colony looks like. I know progress is a bit slow, but I appreciate everybody's patience and continued interest. Hopefully I'll be able to post another, more content-rich update soon. 'Til next time, I'll leave you guys with a screenshot of some settlement ruins near a beach, showing some animated solar power generators, and (now) running at FPS cap!

[( Tchey )]

Thanks for the update.

The camera is fixed, or can be rotated ?
If fixed, how will you deal with stuff behind other stuff ?
If rotations, ther are free or 90/45/others ?

[EuchreJack]

Its looking better.

[Blood_Librarian]

I'm happy enough that development is still chugging along, the game is starting to shape out to something wonderful

Do the solar panels track the sun as it passes by?



I also noticed that the UI is still what it was, Are there any plans for the UI to be modified, @VoyagerGames?

[Torvus]

Thanks for the update.

The camera is fixed, or can be rotated ?
If fixed, how will you deal with stuff behind other stuff ?
If rotations, ther are free or 90/45/others ?

Sam can correct me if I'm wrong, but it will rotate at fixed angles.

Do the solar panels track the sun as it passes by?

I dont believe so, but they will noticeably turn off at night or when the sky is sufficiently overcast

[ollobrains]

it is looking pretty nifty

[VoyagerGames]

Hey guys, this is just a quick, end-of-the-weekend update.
Programming work chugs along with the typical sorts of tasks. This weekend, I fixed a handful of minor bugs I've found in isometric rendering, I've been working on new, Z-level shift animations to try to help new players understand 3-space even more, and I've been incorporating all the new sprites that the art team has been producing.

Much of the focus recently has been solidifying the isometric, animation framework, and the artists are getting as comfortable as possible with animating sprites at the Outer Colony pixel resolutions. A lot of the start of this process has been with machinery animations, and I'll just share a few gifs of machines that've been produced so far.

You can see a video of a bunch of wind power generators on a slope in some badlands here:
Wind Generators in Action!

Once the remaining machinery sprites are finished, we'll be moving on to procedurally generated human sprites and finishing the procedurally generated item sprites. Some pretty cool demos should follow in the not-too-distant future.

As progress has continued with machinery sprites, new building material sprites have also made their way into the game. Here's an outpost made out of stone, specifically granite:


And here are some fiberglass / tech-material structures, near some coastline in frigid wastes:


The outpost in this picture is dug into a slope, which makes it the subject of my next video:

The camera is fixed, or can be rotated ?
If fixed, how will you deal with stuff behind other stuff ?
If rotations, ther are free or 90/45/others ?

Great question, Tchey, and Torvus is right. The camera angle can be rotated, at 90 degree increments. Here's a quick video that demonstrates this, showing all 4 angles of the outpost from the screenshot above:
Camera Rotation Demo

I also noticed that the UI is still what it was, Are there any plans for the UI to be modified, @VoyagerGames?

Another good question, BloodLibrarian. The game's UI is the subject of constant improvement, the goal being to iterate from where we are now to a more smooth and functional experience. What we have now is a baseline - everything works. But there's a lot of room for improvement. We need to finish the isometric overhaul and re-release the beta with the new system in place. Then we can get the play-testing and real user feedback we need to make the necessary improvements.

Right now, I could guess at what would work well for users, but I don't think it'll be as effective a use of my time as implementing feedback from real play testing. So there's a lot of work to be done on this front, but it's on hold until we get real players hammering away at the game again.

I dont believe so, but they will noticeably turn off at night or when the sky is sufficiently overcast

This is correct. Solar panels don't visually track the sun, because of the how our sprites exist in the rendering engine. They're isometric pixel art, rather than 3D models, so there's no way to "rotate" them the way you might expect of a 3D game. There are things we could do with static animations in the future, but right now, the animations satisfy their purpose of showing the functionality of the device. They show when they're working (in sufficiently bright sunlight) and show when they're not working (when it's nighttime, too overcast, in a sandstorm, etc).

Thanks for the kind worlds, EuchreJack and Ollobrains, and as always, I appreciate everyone's continued patience. I hope to get you guys something playable again in the coming months!

[Vivalas]

This does look pretty cool now, excited for when it comes out on release again

[VoyagerGames]

It's been a while since I've posted an update, but I wanted to let everybody know that development is still chugging along. I'll aim to post a more thorough progress update either next weekend or the one after, but tonight I'll share a couple neat visuals that have come together over the course of the last couple months.

I decided to invest a bit of time in programming a system to render per-tile weather effects, which more accurately depict what's happening in the underlying world model. There's still a bit of ground to cover, and I'm waiting on sprites for snow and sandstorm effects, but rain is in-place. You can see a quick demo video here, although it looks really bad on YouTube at the moment. Hopefully it looks better after YouTube has had some more time to process the video, but if you see compression artifacts / blurring out the falling rain and raindrops hitting the ground, know that it doesn't look like that in-game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiE5hRgUbUI&feature=youtu.be

My hope is that being able to see storms moving across the world in real-time, watching rain drops hit individual spots, seeing exactly where rain transitions into snow - that these sorts of things help the user experience the world in higher fidelity, and maybe that it improves immersion a bit. If nothing else, hopefully it'll at least looks cool.

Various systems for procedural sprite generation are also fully programmed, and I'm just waiting on assets from the artists to demo them. Procedural human sprite generation and animation are ready to go, so you'll now see characters wearing different clothing items, having different hair colors, holding different items, and other features that will visually convey the actual state of the humans as they exist in-game.

The same goes for procedural item sprite generation, which now allows users to see the materials that their items are made out of. The screenshot below shows a procedurally generated sprite for a luxurious bed, with a frame made of solid gold, a mattress / sheets made from dyed cotton, a headboard hewn of human bone, and a headboard adornment fashioned from omspice tree wood:


I think it's pretty cool being able to actually see the materials and sub-components that your items are made out of, and programming the various shaders / image cachers / other stuff that went into this system was a ton of fun. I hope that this also helps users connect more with their colonies (being able to actually see a solid gold sculpture next to a granite one is cool) and to experience the depth of simulation more easily.

Needless to say, making all this work has involved an astronomical number of individual sprites, so progress isn't fast - but almost all the item sprites are done, and I feel like the results have been worth the effort.

I'm a bit tired and have to get some sleep before work tomorrow, but I'll aim to make a demo video in the coming weekends, showing swapping out components made of different materials and really walking everybody through how it all works.

Huge thanks to everyone for all your patience, and I hope to post another update soon!

[( Tchey )]

I'm looking forward to playing that again, one day.

[se5a]

Yeah I too am keen to give it another shot.

[stingpie]

Hey, don't mean to be rude, but I would really like an update on the procedural graphics. I don't need an extensive update, I would just like to know what percentage of the sprites are done.

[VoyagerGames]

Hey, don't mean to be rude, but I would really like an update on the procedural graphics.

Hi Stingpie, thanks for the question! It's never rude to post here, always feel free to ask anything you'd like. I appreciate any interest that anyone has in the project.

I haven't posted an update here in a while, but I've been meaning to do so. My day job was pretty taxing in the back half of 2019, but work continues every weekend. I only have very limited free time at present, and I've been focusing what little I have on keeping the project moving forward. Unfortunately, that's come at the expense of communicating updates.

There's a ton of stuff I could talk about, but I've really got to get some sleep, as I have to be up for work in a few hours. As for your question, it's so, so hard to give a percentage. I can break down progress on features that have to be finished prior to the isometric re-release, and hopefully this can give an idea of where things are:

-Isometric Terrain Sprites: Done
-Isometric Plant Sprites: Done
-Isometric Building Sprites: Done
-Isometric Item Sprites: Underway
--All animated items, like machinery: Done
--Procedurally Generated Furniture Items: Done
--Procedurally Generated Tombs / Monuments / Coffins: Done
--Miscellaneous Items (Food, Ammo, Weapons, etc): Underway
-Isometric Creature Sprites: Underway (code all in place, ~20% of species fully animated / complete)
-Isometric / Procedural Human Sprites: Underway
--Baseline Human Animations / Formatting / Generation Work: Done
--Clothing / Item Sets: Underway (first full clothing set under contract / being worked on now)
-Isometric Vehicle Sprites: Not Started
-Isometric Robot Sprites: Not Started

Plenty of other important work has been hammered out, too. I've been focusing hard on improving the user interface / UX, and smoothing / simplifying the controls to the greatest extent possible. Some of the early efforts here have focused on engine improvements. For starters, I replaced the OS-level windows with internal windows / frames, which provide a more familiar experience to people accustomed to computer games. You can see what the streamlined UI looks like below. All the windows are movable, so you can lay out the UI however you deem fit. It eliminates a lot of the wasted space of the right-side toolbar that existed before and leaves the player with a lot more usable area:



This wound up taking a bunch of time. JavaFX doesn't feature any sort of internal-windowing system, so I had to write my own windowing framework from scratch. This sort of thing is the downside of building your own game engine.

Hopefully I can post some new videos and better updates soon. I'm going to keep pressing forward - thanks to everybody for your continued patience!