Eco Dev Tracker

Vivox Proximity voice chat

We added Vivox proximity voice chat to the game. Now you can talk with your fellow citizens about the latest news, in town debates or just barter with them directly. The chat is based on proximity, so you’ll only hear people that are near to you. Of course, you can also disable the voice chat completely or mute specific players. With that, we also introduced a new face animation for people talking.

Reworked controls for vehicles
On popular request we have improved and redesigned the controls for the excavators and skid steers and made sure they are explained understandably. The excavator got a new UI toolbar, you can look around freely in both skidsteer and excavator now, ... Read more

Hey everyone,
for the first time ever, Eco is on sale in Steam. Get your 10% discount while the sale lasts and support charitable organisations with your purchase.

Hey all, for this week I want to go into some big ideas we have for Eco 9 with levels of government.

We’re exploring ideas about how to bring multiple levels of government to Eco, and how their growing and combining would work within the game. Along with that comes a new approach to property. Check it out and let us know your feedback, this is an initial concept so lots more to be designed still.

Eco will be changed to have the following new features:

• Multiple governments will be allowed in tiers: individuals, towns, nations, global.
  
• Governments start bottom-up, with growing towns merging into nations, and nations merging into a global government.
  
• Property is controlled by the governments (no longer affected by reading skillscrolls).
  
• Multiple governments will compete for citizens, offering incentives when new players spawn into their region, or w...

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Hey folks, this week I wanted to show you the fancy new mining system we’re creating in Eco:







... Read more

This week I’d like to dive into the core of Eco’s design a bit, and talk about the principles that guide the design and development of the game. These are things that go way back to the beginning ideas of what Eco would be, and are used to this day to determine what we choose to bring next in the game.

Game Mission
Eco’s design mission is to have players “Solve the Tragedy of the Commons,[en.wikipedia.org]” taking place among real people. That means creating conflicts among people with the same end goals, where a collection of self-interests is not enough to succeed, you need some representation of collective interest.

To implement that, the game e... Read more

We have released patch 0.8.1.4 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes

• Fixed issue with elevator UI can't be opened (holding hammer in hands and pressing 'E')
  
• Fixed issue with non-working elevator buttons.
  
• Fixed issue with staring big old worlds in-game
  
• Fixed crash when fast moving items to storage from toolbar with no item selected (with mouse right button)
  
• Fixed rare server crash during building SkillTree

Improvements

• Added new admin command /teleporttodark - teleports you to the opposite side of the world

Eco is a game that has a huge scope, covering a massive section of human development and history, and through that time humanity’s powers have increased exponentially. That’s what we want the arc of Eco to be: the progression from powerless to massively powerful, and the increasing need for management of those powers to prevent them from becoming self-destructive.



The driver of this progression is technology, and as an Eco world advances in technology their ability to impact the world increases massively, for better or for worse. With each advance in technology, you gain the ability to do everything you already do in greater quantities. And with each step in technology, the challenges become greater, making those powers very necessary to continue advancing. This manifests in gameplay in the following ways.

• ...

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Hey all, for this Friday’s Eco Peak I wanted to talk about the new government system I’m working on for Eco 9.0.

The high-level idea is that in the current version of Eco you run a government. In 9.0, you will build a government.

First thing you’ll need to do to create a government is form a constitution, which will be an object placed in the world. The value of the building it’s placed in will determine how much influence the government has, and whichever government has the most influence will dictate the rules for the world.

Overthrowing the Government This means that governments can be overthrown by making a more powerful one, represented by a more valuable building, and players will need to create fantastic palaces to ensure the legitimacy of their government and prevent being overtaken. (Later, we will allow... Read more

It’s been over one year since we launched Eco on Steam Early-Access, celebration! But in the long-game, it’s just the beginning.



Eco: The First Three and a Half Years
Eco was born out of the core idea of ‘Tragedy of the Commons: The Game’ where all your resources come from the ecosystem, and all economic and governmental actions happen through real people. That’s a huge, seemingly impossibly scoped game, and I believe we’ve made incredible progress.



The above screenshot comparison (between our Kickstarter and today) is crazy to look at. We’ve been working on the game nonstop since 2015, and it’s improved continuously, incrementally, until it looks like a totally different game. ... Read more

We have released patch 0.8.1.1 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes

• Fixed elevators to be usable again.
  
• Fixed allocate and tax in the treasury.
  
• Mint now performs a single check and single action record per Mint operation (previously it was for every single item in request, for 1000 items - 1000 checks and inserts). It greatly improves Mint speed if Mint limiting law is active and also reduces DB size (in any case).
  
• Changed logic of Mint operation. Now it completely aborts Mint operation if you don't pass a law instead of partially execute it (i.e. you have limit of 100 items per day, minted 50 items and try another 100. Old behavior: 50 will be minted + error message. New behavior: operation rejected + error message with corresponding law statement).
  
• To prevent extra queries law statement logic changed. Now it counts Mint actions before user action, but also added Cur...

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We have released update 0.8.1.0 with the following fixes and improvements:

Additions:

• Added the barrel cactus, white bursage and joshua tree to the desert biome.
  
• Added exclusive fullscreen mode.
  
• Added spruce trees to the taiga biome.
  
• Added configuration menu for single player world to allow adjusting some settings easily.
  
• Added /repairallrooms command to repair rooms that should contribute to the housing score, but don’t.
  
• Added several admin commands to manage bank accounts:
  AddAccountManager (accountID, userID)
  RemoveAccountManager (accountID, userID)
  AddAccountUser (accountID, userID)
  RemoveAccountUser (accountID, userID)
  CreateAccount (name(optional))
  DeleteAccount (accountID)
  SetAccountOwner (accountID, userID)

Performance:

• Fixed an issue that caused FPS drops when opening a store wi...

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We have released patch 0.8.0.7 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes:
* Fixes memory leak that was crashing servers
* Fixes Sweeping hands talent
* Water pumps now migrate to mechanical pumps
* Fixed skill level update in skill level UI on level up
* Fix repair cost display for repair table
* Fix crash with transfers

We have released patch 0.8.0.6 with the following fixes and improvements:

Features
* Added new GI quality setting levels.

Localization
* Revised existing localized strings
* Added localization to species Yield and Capacity
* Fixed registrar localization category filter failure

Gameplay
* Compost now has a tooltip in the water filter UI.
* Trashed compostables will now turn into compost.
* Pickaxes now work on a damage system rather than a strict tier system. Repeatedly hitting harder rocks will eventually destroy them.
* The water pump was split into a mechanical and electrical version.
* Waste Filters that shut down due to full inventories will now restart themselves if there is more inventory space available.
* Added specialties display in foodstatus hud
* Made water filter accept 20x more throughput (from .1 sewage block per second to 20 sewage blocks per second)
* Made water filter outpu... Read more

We have released patch 0.8.0.4 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes:

• Fixed zero tax display in transfer UI.
  
• Fixed world leader removal from treasury bank account
  
• "Your currency" law clause now counts all funds on all accounts!
  
• Optimized rubble.
  
• Fixed initial currency setup from server default currency
  
• Fixed issue with non-withdrawing funds during trade when total tax (seller + buyer) is greater than buyer funds.
  
• Fixed currency dropdown indexing (from master) => results in working /leader command and some minor stuff
  
• Fixed black screen on first login
  
• Fixed steam tractor exceptions when it moved with no driver

Starting with this version, we ship a 32-bit version of the EcoServer.exe which is used by default for singleplayer worlds, greatly reducing memory consumption.

After many long months of work, Eco 8.0 is released! We’ve got a ton of new stuff in this update, resulting in a very different feel to the game overall.

New World Generation


World generation has undergone a variety of changes and improvements.  Many new parameters have been added to world generation, such as land/water balance, number of continents and islands, sizes of biomes, and number of water features such as rivers and lakes.  All of these parameters may be tweaked within the world generator config file. As a result, worlds are much more varied with specific resources only being made available within specific biomes.

... Read more

We have released patch 0.8.0.3 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes:

• Fixed contract payment issue (source user hadn't access to escrow account, to get back his payment/deposit)
  
• Fixed confused "zero" tax string when transfering funds to special account
  
• Fixed issue with vehicles and players sometimes become invisible.
  
• Make Real Estate Desk working again!
  
• Fix for the not working law taxes

MacOS & Linux clients included!

We have released patch 0.8.0.2 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes:

• tweaking for view distance and chunk loading
  
• fixed completed tutorials list layout
  
• fixed "?" as balance string in treasury
  
• fixed DefaultWorld to one with valid Citizenship law
  
• fixed dead-lock with steel (when pump was needed for steel and steel needed for pump)

Improvements:

• graceful shutdown for Windows servers. If you close it (Alt+F4 or with close button) then it will try to save state (Windows will only provide 5-10 seconds for that) or you can configure your software to send Ctrl+C to console app and configure own timeout for shutdown.
  
• added ping retries if for some reason ping was last for first attempt

Performance:

• minor performance improvements

We have released patch 0.8.0.1 with the following fixes and improvements:

Fixes:

• vehicles crossing 0-coordinate should behave less obstinate
  
• fixed some "Alice in Wonderland" effects (world titled issue)
  
• fixed problem with unfair deals when you get full price for part of sold/bought items if destination inventory has not enough space
  
• fixed links to previous elections in Web UI
  
• fixed starting New Game from clean Steam installation
  
• fixed incorrect ping calculation
  
• fixed crash while connecting pipes through zero point
  
• fixed redefine District action to take into account existing Districts
  
• fixed issue with large world generation and ore amounts - low sample size sometimes created inadequate amounts of ore in worlds 200x200 or larger

Performance improvements:

• memory optimizat...

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Fellow Eco-Players,
the Big Eco Game community event with Jeff Grubb and friends started this night.
They're playing through Eco 8.0 all month long with 70+ players and three major factions!

Multiple people are streaming this event, so here are some of them you can follow to get a look on Eco 8.0 in action on a highly populated server:

- GamesBeat on Twitch http://twitch.tv/gamesbeat/
- Jeff Grubb on Twitch http://twitch.tv/jeffgrubb
- DrJonez on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/drjonez
- Rinderblock on Twitch ... Read more

We're blown away, it's so great to see people 'get' what we're going for with the game, and this is just the beginning, still in Early Access, so much more to come.

https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/27/jeff-grubb-game-of-the-year-2018/

"Eco made me realize that games are actually crucial for understanding our relationship to all kinds of natural and man-made systems. The thing that gives me chills is that I think it is only in games that we can play with economic systems. And I walked away from my experience in Eco feeling like I learned so much even though we had no instructor. No one was connecting the dots for us. We simply learned through play."