Here's a fun little something we're working on.



You can play with it yourself here.

We're planning to add hull breach from a small asteroid or space-debris impact to the possible crisis scenarios in version 0.23.  But as we prepared to implement it we realized that we're not sure:

What would a hull breach actually look like?

Would the hull material be bent in and then punctured, so that from the inside, it looks something like a volcano?  Or would it actually be bent outward from the air blowing out while the metal is still hot?  Or would it simply be a ragged hole, where the hull material was instantly vaporized on impact?

For version 0.23, we're planning to inflict various disasters on your hapless residents!  These may include:

• fire
• crime
• hull breach
  

So, as with The Sims, we know that someone's going to "experiment" with disasters.

Who will be first to develop a thriving station full of a wonderful society only to remove the docking facilities and then shut down the O2 and power systems?

We're tickled pink to have just posted version 0.22 of High Frontier!

Unfortunately it's now really quite late, and I write much better copy when I'm not too tired to think straight.  So, I'll update the release notes, send out official announcements, and update the blog tomorrow.

But, for those of you kind enough to at least lurk (or better yet, post!) on this forum... you get to find out about it right away! 

Enjoy,
- Joe

Hello there! I've given a few presentations about space law and how it might affect efforts towards space settlement and I was very pleased to take part in a podcast with Voices From L5, who are supported by the National Space Society, about this.

You can hear it here: http://projection3.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/voices-from-l5-space-law.html

Thanks,
Adam

We've knocked out a lot of new features and fixes for 0.22, and a few days ago, all that was left was this little issue, where sometimes we see a resident walking off across the lake (or otherwise going where nobody should be).

And wow, that turns out to be one deep rabbit hole!

The problem is that path-finding and navigation in a cylindrical coordinate system (which applies to torus and sphere habs in High Frontier, as well as cylinders of course) is a whole lot more complicated than normal path-finding.  Every point has an infinite number of equivalent coordinates.  For example, if your cylinder is 100 units around, then a point at X=10 is the same as X=110, X=-90, X=210, and so on.

We were normalizing all coordinates (basically using modular arithmetic) to get all the coordinates into a standard range, but that doesn't work correctly in some cases.  A little path from X=90 to X=110 ends up looking like a big path from X=90 to X=10, and then we find a ton of intersections with that and other paths which are halfway around the cylinder.  Bad mojo.

We've just about got our heads wrapped around it now; it's all solvable, but tricky.  There's been surprisingly little written about this situation, so we will be doing at least a blog post, if not a tech report, once we have it all sorted out!

- Joe

We're working today on filling out the rather empty "Path" tab on the Manage palette.  Currently there is only one type of path, "Footpath", which is a 4-meter-wide tiled path for mixed use.

We are going to be adding at least two, maybe three more path types, and possibly changing that one.  All this has led to some research into path types in both urban and rural settings.

This blog has some interesting musings on path types by their usage ("Of 10 path types, only 8 are for walking").  Lots of interesting food for thought there.

One thing that has occurred to us recently is that with the coming of delivery drones, roads and vehicles in a space colony are probably even less necessary than previously thought.  The main reason to have them, in a city at least, is to move heavy things around... but if you can do that through the air, then you don't need to congest the ground any more.  Of course this assumes some sort of mass-transit system that can move people (and handheld packages) more effectively than just walking around.  We'll get to that too, though probably not in the next release.

Still, if anybody here has an interest in urban architecture, please chime in!  We'd love to hear your thoughts.

This method of recycling outputs dinner.

http://www.sciencealert.com/this-device-turns-plastic-waste-into-safe-edible-mushrooms

It's been a busy week!  Here are some issues we have resolved since 0.21:

#179: People don't appear in a new colony until it is reloaded
#181: "HEO Settler" awarded for building in LEO
#182: Tone down some of the city part sounds (and fix initial load)
#183: Crazy export revenue
#184: Pink flash when planting trees
#185: Water icons not appearing
#187: Change sounds when things go bad

Great stuff.  We're not ready to release 0.22 quite yet, as we still have some other items on our to-do list, and will probably find a few more in QA while testing the changes above.  But, soon!  We can probably get these improvements to you next week.

Cheers,
- Joe