Friday Blog 268 - The Shape of the Next Update: QoL Improvements
Colony Survival · published
The next update is 0.16.1, not 0.17. This means: no major changes to content, but a whole bunch of improvements to Quality of Life. Tweaks that make playing the game more convenient.
The ugliest menu in the game was the Notifications tab. It was a chaotic, work-in-progress UI. It’s a lot more functional and pleasing to look at now! And it even has a connection “outside of the menu”: major events in-game, like a colonist being killed or Siege Mode triggering, will now generate an alarm-icon in the top-right of the screen, warning you about the event and connecting it to the Notifications tab.
Colonist deaths will also spawn an in-game marker of the place where it happened for 60 seconds. They can be made visible again afterwards by going to the death-notification.
From the very first version of CS, we’ve always had ammo-counters visible in the UI, helping you keep track of the stockpile of these important items. As more and more ammo types kept being added, it became a little confusing, and we could no longer display all relevant items.
Well, the selection for which items get counted is now… your problem! The first three ammo types are shown, but they can be added to, removed and replaced by the player now. You can even track food items, building blocks or any other in-game item.
We’ve also added a “tab-menu”. Press tab, and you’ll see which players are currently online on the server.
Which relates to the most technical task of all of them. A pretty serious refactor of the online infrastructure.
Hosting a server was always a little difficult in CS. Most people trying to do so from their own homes are behind a router with a shared IP that blocks incoming connections by default. That makes it really difficult to connect with others. The Steam-Friend-invite did work, so playing with Steam Friends was doable. Port forwarding would also solve the issue, but that’s a complicated procedure.
Zun tweaked the multiplayer architecture, and we’re now running a cloud server that is automatically in touch with every CS server that people run. It feeds the server browser the correct information and makes it possible for people to connect without either being Steam Friends or figuring out port forwarding!
Before releasing the update, we do want to connect this to the enhanced Notifications menu. Now that co-op servers can be listed in the server browser and joined more easily, hosts may want better control over who can and can't join. We're considering to add a whitelist mode where the host gets an in-game notification when someone wants to join, where they can then accept or reject them.
So, most of the work on 0.16.1 is finished and we should be able to release it in the next few weeks!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D