Hi everyone,

a new, but small update is finally out (v0.6.005), which includes some visual upgrades, a new event and some fixes.

I have to say, in the last months there was a bit going on in the background on my side, which had postponed the release of new updates & versions a little bit. (that's why I also didn't joined the winter sale this time, because I found it would have been a bit lame with nothing new to offer).

But AColony will join the steam spring sale today again - first with this update (which has a bit more focus on visuals & post processing) and a planned additional one (with more technical stuff + some new mechanics) in the end of March / begin of April around.


I have added a new event to the attack schedule of the game, which consists of more melee fighters (so with bats and no swords) + a few gatling gun fighters. The main difference to the other attack groups is, that these members have sometimes vests equipped, which protect against melee weapons. (These could previously only be obtained through crafting - so it should be easier now to get & upgrade them).


I have updated some visuals of the game to make it look a little bit better. This includes some new filters, bloom and other effects.


The problem in the past was, that some of the colors were a little bit too wrong in my opinion. (Like the grass had too much green value & the wooden material had too much red value and more). Therefore I have played around with the filtering to get a little bit more fitting way.

I have added 2 modes, where the first and new mode [left on the screenshot] has a better color balance and a second and more old mode [right on the screenshot] which has more of the old style.

You can choose the new style filer [Color1] or the old style filter [Color0] in the settings menu. By default and with this update - the new style filter is automatically set.


In addition, there is also a bloom effect now, which makes fire and rockets looking nicer. That took me a bit of time, but I think I have found all particles and materials which support this effect and have adjusted them. (This can be of course also disabled in the settings menu)


This was a relatively tricky part and I am not 100% happy with the result. While I was finally able to update the shaders of the trees so that ambient occlusion is also supporting the wind bend effect + dissolve effect in tree transparent mode, I didn't found a good solution for the special grass in AColony. So I have disabled the ambient occlusion for the grass entirely, but that has some problems.

Here we can see that it creates a nice and good looking black coloring at the corners or floor edges of the room.

But unfortunately, with excluded grass, the effect is visible through the grass in some cases which leads to a weird looking result.

I have added this effect as an option now and it is by default set to "on", but if you don't like it (or the performance impact on lower end pcs is too high) you can always disable it in the settings menu.


Another update is, that I have finally recreated all UI outlines of the game. The main problem was here, that the old function has forced to the outlines to be exactly 2 pixel in width. That was perfect for 1920x1080 resolution, but caused some problems on other resolutions (mostly 4k). With the new system, all resolutions should be supported now.


And last but not least, here I have all patch notes of this update:

• added new event (brawler attack - includes vests for melee defence)
  
• updated post processing effects & filters
  
• added bloom (impacts fire, muzzle flashes & more)
  
• added ambient occlusion (is by default set to off)
  
• updated ui outlines (for better 4k screen support)
  
• fixed problem with building not removing plant zones (will fix itself on loading a savefile)
  
• fixed that colonists stopped seeding plants at sprinkler
  
• fixed clear items infinity loop at doors (rare bug)
  
• fixed wrong animation when equip shield + drop ranged weapon
  
• fixed enemies spawned with wrong two handed melee animation
  
• fixed sprinkler metal material
  
• fixed prisoners meal times not saved
  
• updated fires, muzzle flashes, rocket trail materials & more (for bloom)
  
• fixed that rocket and arty trails were not aligned in pause mode
  
• fixed some smaller things

I hope you all have some awesome days guys,
(and even if maybe 1 or 2 days too late - also a happy near year!)
Cheers!