Hello again! I checked in on version .27, and was delighted to see you incorporated changes based on my earlier feedback about paths. I find the new system a lot more intuitive. Lots of other improvements too!

Since it seemed helpful last time I weighed in, I had a few other suggestions I wanted to throw out there, most of them intended to streamline zoning (which is already improved from the .25 version).

First, it would be great if you could select different size swatches, so you can paint larger or smaller areas. That'd be especially helpful for larger stations.

Secondly, when designing a station, it would be cool if you could copy/paste a component. (Maybe you already can, and I just didn't figure out how.)

Lastly, if you could copy and paste zoning between stations with livable habitats of the same size, that would be cool. I think it's possible the reason you don't already have that possibility is because right now, that's most of the task of building a new colony... Right now, if you copied and pasted all zoning, you'd be pretty much done.

But I want to compare this idea to how you can copy/paste station designs themselves. You can save and load designs. But you can't just take a LEO station design and use it in HEO out of the box. You can keep its structure and spin rate, but you have to change shielding, power, and heat sinks. You keep about 80% of it, and tweak the other 20% to fit the circumstances. It feels less like starting over from scratch, and more like refining something. Building on what came before.

Maybe you should be able to copy a zoning map to a new station, but stations in different orbits have different needs... Like ones further from Earth need more agricultural zoning, for example, due to the difficulty of resupplying food and oxygen. Or ones in the asteroid belt have a special zone for refining metals. Or whatever your research suggests might be an economic need in a particular region. If zoning can be copied, but 20% of it has to be tactically customized to the circumstances and role of the station, then you'd get the same "I'm building something new!" feeling without the "Oh man, I gotta start over from scratch..." feeling.

P.S. - and this is a really small thing that would be probably rather difficult to make happen - but it would be super cool if the police drones obeyed the Coriolis effect. I assume they don't yet, because their flight paths don't look weird. Coriolis usually make stuff look really weird! Disclaimer - I have only had a few emergencies, so I can't be sure you haven't already implemented something similar to my suggestion below, but the drones I saw flying flew mostly along the outside of the cylinder.

The quickest path in a rotating cylinder is rarely going to be a "straight" line along the surface of the cylinder, as that's similar to taking the outside track. They'd fly "up" really high and then "down" again, in what appear to be dramatic parabolic arcs (but are actually straight lines). They would also rarely want to fly along the rotation of the station. Rather, they'd fly against it, even if it looks "closer" to go the other way. Sometimes, they'd fly "straight" "up" to get where they're going, at least in a cylinder. I have no idea how difficult this would be, but it would be super cool if possible to implement, and if your physics are implemented correctly, I'm sure you'd discover further counterintuitive shortest paths to an emergency (or flaws in my own assumptions above).

Love the direction the game is going! Will definitely keep checking out new updates, and might add to this thread if I think of anything else.

High Frontier user Bob Brodbeck has been using the game, not so much as a game, but as a tool to aid in designing real-world space stations.  He's just published an article about his design, "The G-Hab Hotel" over at the well-respected online publication The Space Review.



He writes:

Quote:Partial artificial gravity most importantly improves crew and guest health. The system will mitigate the negative effects of zero-g on human health and productivity, both in-space and after Earth return.

We have just posted version 0.27 of the High Frontier video game!




This is a huge release with 24 different enhancements.  You can read about them all in the Release Notes, but here are some of the highlights:

• Cash now matters! You will receive a warning when you start to go into debt, and your spending will be cut off (except for emergency services) when you are more than $1M in debt. Please budget wisely!
• High-density agricultural buildings now will not appear until you have done the CELS (Closed Ecological Life Support) project.
• Internet bandwidth complaints now depend not only on the size of your dish, but also how far you are from Earth, and whether you have done the SpaceNet project.
• Builders who are unable to find a suitable site for a building will now occasionally squawk about this in the Squawker feed.
• In management mode, clicking the right mouse button now means “I’m done.” When laying a road, this aborts the final in-progress segment but keeps the rest; in other modes, it simply exits the mode.
  

FYI, in 0.27, we now have the ability to make buildings require certain projects.

All our of the built-in buildings are in fact implemented as mods.  As are the projects (you know, the tree of things you can spend your XP on).  They're just mods that happen to be built into the game.

Well, for version 0.27 we needed to make the high-density agriculture buildings require the CELS project (ticket #251).  So we added a simple "requires" property you can put in any building mod, that makes the building unavailable until that project is completed (except in sandbox mode of course).

All this means that mod developers can now make mods that add new projects, and new buildings that depend on those projects!  Pretty neat, eh?

Check out this list of improvements for 0.27!




It's HUGE!   We're very excited about all these little bits of spit'n'polish, and it was nice to take a break from deep physics code for a few weeks.  If you want any more details on any of the items above, feel free to poke around in the ticket list.

I'd love to push this out the door now, but we need to spend some time testing everything.  We'll get the new version to you just as soon as we're confident that it's ready!

More things we've been working on lately for 0.27...

• You can now go no more than $1M in debt, after which you can't spend any more money (except for summoning emergency services — that is always allowed).  And you can still zone, since zoning is free.
• Improved the Clear tool in a number of ways: now shows what's going to be cleared and what it will cost, and cost varies now depending on what you're clearing.  Also, trees now fall over like trees, rather than being demolished like buildings!
• Right-click can now be used to mean "done" in many contexts, such as finishing a path, or exiting a mode.
• You can no longer make a cylinder with inverted endcaps that intersect each other.
  

Hullo,

whenever I manage my colonies I struggle to remember which one was placed where. So, in a sense I’d like to see the same overview as in the Build part, with cislunar space / inner planets / outer planets, with a brief overview over the colonies in such and such orbit. Something like

• Cislunar Space
  • LEO
    • Powell - pop 190
      
  • HEO
    • Pernell - pop 160
    • Looking Glass - pop 490
      
  • L1
    • Society – pop 2300
      
  • L4
    • –
      
  • L5
    • –
      
  • LLO
    • Moonscape – pop 2400
      

Permeable Ceiling pointed out that you could make a stack of toruses with windows, and light them all up with one mirror.

This turned out to be a fairly specific problem with the secondary mirrors on torus and barbell parts not shading neighboring parts as they should.  That's fixed now, so this particular exploit won't work in version 0.27.

However you can still make a stack of donuts if you want, by adjusting the hub radius so as to push the secondary mirrors out:




Why would you do this?  I'm not sure.  But you can!

(Starting this as a new thread, as the other had gotten rather long.)

I got a chance this morning to load up your (Permeable Ceiling's) Powell colony to see what's going on with the CO2.




It appears to be basically a population oscillation, where the "population" in this case is the grass and trees.  When CO2 is high, these do great and grow like gangbusters (population boom), converting CO2 to O2... but then there isn't enough CO2, so they all wilt and stop photosynthesizing (population crash).  And then the people gradually convert the O2 back into CO2, starting the cycle again.

It's still surprising that the oscillations don't dampen out to an equilibrium, though... especially with the atmospheric regulator in there, which is supposed to counteract any imbalance.  There is a bit of a delay in those too though; it looks like somehow you've hit upon a resonant frequency of both the regulator and the plants (probably tied to the time step in the atmosphere simulation).


But what really cracked me up — and prompted me to post this screen shot — was the Squawker feed.  Your residents don't care about the growing/wilting plants too much, because they're too busy trying not to lose their lunch from the 3.9 RPM spin. 

• Cislunar Space
  • LEO
    • Powell – pop 190 – notes: puddle lakes 
      
  • HEO
    • Pernell – pop 160 – notes: dawn lighting, crime alley, future home 
    • Looking Glass – pop 490 – notes: vomit comet for police
      
  • L1
    • Society – pop 2300 – notes: 
      
  • L4
    • –
      
  • L5
    • –
      
  • LLO
    • Moonscape – pop 2400