Hello everyone, it's time for another InfraSpace update!
New Mountain Map
While this update is mostly about improving bits and pieces in InfraSpace and fixing bugs, there is one big new thing: The Mountain Map!
This one is meant to be a map for advanced players. Building space is at a premium which means a couple of things are harder now:
- You can't get production bonuses as easily. Because you have so little space, you need to make choices about which buildings you put next to which for the neighbor bonus.
- There are only a couple of flat valleys. Do you mix the residential area and industiral area somewhere? Keep it apart? What about area of effect buildings?
- Traffic is harder to route, especially if you want your roads and rails to fit to the terrain
- Sometimes you need to rebuild and enlarge an intersection for better throughput. With less space, you have to think twice about how exactly you want to do it.
Some of the resources are also hidden below rocks now. You'll have to use the big space ship laser cannon to remove those first, so it can make sense to rush the tech tree towards space ship repair.
Terrain Placement Rules Changed
When I playtested the new mountain map, I found that it was a big pain to put down power poles, because a lot of the terrain was too steep. Wind turbines had a similar issue: It would make so much sense to place them on mountains, but it was too steep.
That's why I changed the terrain placement rules a little
- Can place power poles and wind turbines anywhere, no matter how steep
- Wind turbines no longer flatten the nearby terrain (power poles never did)
- However: Solar power plants are now only placeable on 10° slopes (earlier it was the default 20°)
The last change made sense because solar parks take a lot of flat area, which is exactly the tradeoff that should exist here. Sprinkling them all over the mountains also would look terrible with their auto terrain flattening.
If you load an old save, you might have to adjust some solar parks' placement a little.
Better Logistics Centers
Buildings can now connect to multiple collection and distribution centers!
Earlier, they could only connect to one center, but this was confusing to a lot of people, that's why we're trying this change. This should also make the behaviour a little more consistent, because before it could be little random which logistics center buildings would connect to if there were multiple availble.
Another small change is that we added made the list of connected collection and distribution centers scrollable, so you can hook up more without having to mess with the UI scale (that's what some players did earlier as a workaround).
Save Loading Performance
If you've been building large cities in InfraSpace, you might be
famililar with the "Update Road Decals" loading screen text:
It's on of the last step of loading a save, and used to take a long time. We optimized the code and properly multithreaded it, so in a particularly large save we were able to go from 39.37 seconds of loading time to just 2.02 seconds for this loading step. Yay!
Better Stats Panel
In order to fix a bug, we had to revisit the city stats tracking and as I was working on this, I also improved the stats panel a little. The graphs now show 200 data samples instead of the previous 50.
Small Changes
- Spaceship tab can now be exited with escape
- Train signals tutorial now only triggers when trains are actually unlocked
- Updated Engine Version
Fixes
- Fixed grass not disappearing when building a road on top of it
- Fixed an issue where the "total industrialization" achievement would not trigger in some circumstances (produce all resources)
- Fixed a host of Mac-Steam issues: Achivements not triggering, mods not loading
- Fixed other Mac issues, like mod folder not opening or mod config files export not working
- Fixed different font size in german in some UIs
- After playing the intro cinematic, the world settings UI would show again for a second. Now it doesn't
- Removed old messages about city level up
- Fixed some localization and text issues
Thanks to everyone that reported issues and shared their save files with us for reproducing the issues!
Future
As you know, InfraSpace reached 1.0 in October last year and is now considered a finished game. Since then. we have provided some extra feature updates for it and a bunch of bugfixes. Our plan is to continue providing bugfixes for a long time, like with our other game Founders' Fortune. However, unless there is some critical issue, we will wait for a couple of months for a bunch of minor bug reports and other feedback to accumulate, track them all, and then fix them all at once in a big update.
Currently we're hard at work on our next game. We learned a lot with InfraSpace and want to improve a lot of things. The new game is still under wraps, but we do have a mailing list if you enjoyed one of our games and want to be notified once there is news.
Thanks a lot for all the support. Let me know if you have any issues, and as always,
Happy Playing!!
