Eco

Eco Dev Tracker




29 May

Comment

Originally posted by FungusGungus

I think the problem is that they have a roadmap suggestion and haven’t bothered to work on the #1 thing on there

We just can't. The game is not in a state where it could support the fast chunkloading that would be needed for trains - it was clear to us that this will be one of the last and most optional features of all the things we want to do, no matter how many votes it gets. Votes alone don't decide what is implemented, they tell us what people think would be really cool. And trains would also be really cool for us. But there is no way to implement them at the moment, that is something you might see after the end of early access. I've already told our web developer that he might want to clarify what the roadmap is - a way to show what you find most cool to us and a way to show you what we plan to implement from us, not a vote on what we do next. I'm quite sure that will be part of the website relaunch that is planned for the future.

Comment

Originally posted by Awsomeman1089

Thanks for the information about the roadmap. The part I don't like about the new ore system is that you would have to spend a lot of time building stuff just to get rid of the waste. That is super boring with tailings already. It feels just like smelting except you have to do it over and over.

Eco is meant to simulate real life to a certain degree and ecology is one of the basic game pillars. I know that it can be very tedious for players to store those things away, but on bigger servers that ususally works quite good with multiple people collaborating. For sure, in singleplayer we'll give you the option to adjust resource needs and therefore waste production, but in the end there will be a use of storing the new waste products - because in opposite to tailings they WILL be dangerous and not storing will cause major problems.

Sure, we need to balance the game between fun and realism and we do that - but waste is a major problem in real life and there just is no way for the some of the new waste products to be used. In the end it is supposed to be tedious to make you think twice if you really need that much of a specific product. I know that given the professions and goods not being nearly completed it doesn't feel like that in the moment, but in the end it hopef...

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28 May

Comment

The roadmap is showing what we currently work on and a voting page for all the features we plan to include in the game until final release, the order of the items does NOT represent if or when they are implemented into the game - that's also written on the roadmap page. We don't have a long-term roadmap, we are introducing the planned features for the next patches via our dev-newsletters. Decision on what is implemented next takes serveral things into account, not only the roadmap votes. We also regularily put in small stages of one of the roadmap items, so quite some of them already have a lot of it implemented, but not everything.

Sorry to hear you don't seem to like the new ore concept - it'll introduce a lot more things to do and new professions. Eco is a game that tries to resemble realism, which the new features offer.

For fixing tediousness for single player, we'll have new configuration options for resource needs and crafting time, too.

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That's an issue with the room calculation that is marked as fixed for 8.2.

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It's not coming out before June 10, but until then it should be very ready to ship as fast as possible.

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Originally posted by hitzu

Yeah... Factorio and the Wube team really spoiled me. Quelle dommage that their workflow and attitude is not the industry standard for early access games. I feel kinda trapped in the position where I should excuse but I don't quite understand for what. For my playstyle? For not being in the paid QA team to properly report bugfixes and not understanding what bugs are resolved for what version and what bugs are proudly considered features? For not finding concrete and up to date information from all the sources including personal responses in Discord, Reddit, the Forum, and ever-wrong wiki, (not mentioning that it's nearly impossible to google something with "eco" prefix and get the game related information) rather than from one reliable source like devlog? Or maybe I should excuse for that SLG cannot hire a professional community manager?

You don't need to excuse anything. It's not like we are doing most things as of business standards and i'm neither the person that decides what will be announced in a newsletter or blog post - that's decided by different people. My job is to communicate with you and give you the answers for question you ask for and cooperate with people, admins, modders and projects from the community, giving your feedback back to the developers. Your feedback was given to them.

And even though i'm not a professional community manager - which some people do like way more than a professional person, btw, given a lot of our former community players didn't even regularily play the game - i feel i'm doing a good job in that. I'm sorry if you don't feel the same and i'm happy about any suggestions you have for me to improve.

But i'm not the guy that decides where the game heads, how the game is developed, when bugs get fixed or how big our Quality Assurance team is, despite i'm having so...

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Comment
    SLG-Dennis on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Dear Staines,
even though you deleted your post, i'll answer to it anyway.

I did listen to your concerns and i also did explain in very much detail that i do see those, but also why i don't agree with the results presented. If you are misunderstanding me, i beg for the bonus of english not being my native language.

In the end Eco has a specific vision and it's our job to get the vision into the game while making it playable and useful. Some changes are more important to be done earlier, some are less important to be done.Hundreds of factors play a role. Some changes can't just be made like some people want without hurting the vision. That's why we state Eco is made for multiplayer - multiplayer with a medium to large sized group of people. If we could make the game complete and perfect in a simple snip, we would do it. Unfortunately we are a little indie game company and need to distribute our resources where they are most needed. And where they are most ne... Read more

27 May

Comment
    SLG-Dennis on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
@Staines:
No, that is not what i said. Boats are a planned feature, but one that has low priority at the moment due to the reasons i have stated. I also never stated there would be no people that feel the same like you. I know there are. But you need to understand that this still is not a majority of people.

I was just stating that i don't feel like boats missing is something like a bug (which some people requesting boats seem to state) - they are not a required feature to me which would cause it to have highest priority. For connecting early settlements we usually do a simple thing in just under an hour: Craft ramps, place them in a useful manner and build a basic bridge out of hewn logs over water. That enabled everyone on the servers i play on to trade with everyone in no time, travelling through the wilds and i actually see this happen on a lot of public servers. (Given i personally dislike unplanned roads and things like that, i notice it immediately) This is no... Read more
Comment

Originally posted by BullshitSloth

First I want to say I love this game. It’s extremely enjoyable to build a society with friends while working towards a common goal.

However.. you guys have GOT to optimize this game. I understand wanting to add more features and content but my god the bugs, glitches, and the sheer ridiculous amount of CPU resources this game uses are infuriating to put it lightly. I cannot comprehend how this game can not load chunks which causes the player and their cart/truck to fall through the world.

Again I love the game but please focus on making it function better before putting more content into it.

That's what our focus was on for all patches since 8.0 to 8.2. We cannot only do that stuff, either, though, as we need to cater to the people requesting new features, too.

The chunkloading in 8.2 is way better than it is now, but Eco is and forever will remain a extremely CPU heavy game (by design - it is a big simulation with underlying databases that accumulate gigabytes of data in no time) that requires a lot of resources. Optimizing stuff at this stage of development is hard and a lot of the work lost on every new feature. We know it's running too bad for now, but you shouldn't expect it to run "good" before the main features are finished and working. Of course you can expect it to run "okay". That is what we're trying to do.

Comment

Originally posted by hitzu

Performance and bugs are number one priority at the moment, which is why there have been nearly no new features from 8.0 to 8.2.

Then you have to give some publicity on that regard. Yes, talking about bugfixing and game stabilizing is not as fun as about new features, but it's important to make players sure you pay attention to them as well.

Governments are not a decoration though, but one of the major game pillars and they work quite well with less than hundred players - i'm doing all that stuff with my server since at least a year already, just with manual work and imagination. And yes, the server has a 30 days reset cycle and the same bugs than anyone else.

It doesn't mean it will be like this on the majority of the servers. It just proves you are capable to do that.

In regards to bugs you might want to report them on Github

My experience with that was,...

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Then you have to give some publicity on that regard. Yes, talking about bugfixing and game stabilizing is not as fun as about new features, but it's important to make players sure you pay attention to them as well.

I don't have the feeling we don't do that. We've acknlowedged the issues in the changelogs since then, it's written on the roadmap, i'm answering people accordingly on all our channels and doing anything i can to make sure people know. The only thing we do not do is making a whole blog post or newsletter about the issue (but they did include information to that, too!). And that should be understandable, given those are mainly marketing, not information.

It doesn't mean it will be like this on the majority of the servers. It just proves you are capable to do that.

Eco is not about the majority of the servers, but about the capabilities the game offers. It's totally intended that every single ser...

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26 May

Comment

Originally posted by hitzu

Performance, performance, performance, bugs, bugs, bugs. That's what should be your number one priority. And then the economy foundation should be stable. You can of course make decorations like govts on top of that but it will be a huge disappointment when it will turn out to be unplayable. There will be no real politics in the world with less than hundreds of active players. It will by just fluffy decoration or annoying content gating depending what benefits all of this should bring. But your game is currently built to be at best a month or two long session for a couple of friends who get will eventually get bored and annoyed by everpersistent bugs dated since 0.7, repeating crashes 10 times a play session, memory leaking, incomplete base mechanics, broken professions, absolute imbalance in XP gaining, storaging, and goods production, not even mentioning of a total game logic inconsistency across the whole game. And do you really think anyone could play politics on top of that un...

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Performance and bugs are number one priority at the moment, which is why there have been nearly no new features from 8.0 to 8.2.

Governments are not a decoration though, but one of the major game pillars and they work quite well with less than hundred players - i'm doing all that stuff with my server since at least a year already, just with manual work and imagination. And yes, the server has a 30 days reset cycle and the same bugs than anyone else.

In regards to bugs you might want to report them on Github or at least go into detail which already existing bugs are most annoying to you - we have a lot of minor bugs with different priorities and often some players extremely dislike one bug, while others don't care at all. I've been making sure all the bugs that were reported to me as extremely annoying by several players in the past were treated with priority.

Regarding crashes - i never had a single crash in a release version of Eco since im playing i...

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Comment

Originally posted by PM_ME_STUFF_N_THINGS

It's awesome you guys are constantly expanding and improving Eco, sadly that seems rare these days with EA games.

Can you please also increase focus on bug fixing, there have been several annoying bugs in the game for months now, almost years.. some spanning 0.7 and 0.8.

Rubble behaviour, unstuck/stuck weirdness, performance issues to name a few. Performance is getting better in recent versions but still needs focus.. and keep up the good work lads :)

That's the focus of the current updates in work.

Bugs do have a priority you can look up on GitHub, we nearly cleared all high priority bugs recently.

Rubble is some portal magic, we've tried fixing that a hundred times now, but some issue keeps getting back, this likely will require more in-depth changes we cannot do with a single patch.

Comment
    SLG-Dennis on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Hey both of you,
i'd like to join one of the server you play on in the future, i feel like there is very little use made of the features ingame, as you just told me if i ever have seen the road builders tearing down the forests - no, i actually haven't. (Though we never do roads with hewn logs, people don't get paid for using those - regulations) I play on a high population server with even more than high collab setting (and therefore even higher player loss) that is medium communicative (but STILL does only play 30 day cycles and actually it dies off way earlier, too!) and where people discuss where roads are going to be and lay out a district and road-laws in planning. I have the feeling you don't use these tools?

We usually pay for the infrastructure projects by government - that's a good reason it is there for. The people planning to skill in cement and basic engineering ususally start from day one with roadmaking and earn their money through that, so roads are p... Read more

25 May

Post

With the upcoming changes to laws and government, introducing constitutions in Update 9.0, we also thought about ways how several different governments could exist next to each other and even how different tiers of governments could be implemented into the game. Check out our newest newsletter to get to know what our vision on that is:

...

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Comment
    SLG-Dennis on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Hello Staines,
i can understand your opinion, but actually do not have the same feeling.
Building bridges and transporting things with the goods with vehicles work very good for me and the players on my server.

Do you probably play on especially big worlds with low playercounts? When you choose the recommended world sizes for different player counts you usually should not have a problem with transportation and bridges indeed are a big project, but nothing too hard. Building infrastructure is also something we want to encourage.

Boats are a feature that require massive changes, from implementing water physics to adapting world generation once again - making old worlds no longer compatible - for in my opinion little benefit. The only point in time where i ever thought of boats being useful for me (and i have at least 1500 hours actually played this game) was the early-game, when no roads are established and boats could be used for early game transportation... Read more

24 May

Post
    WAVES on Steam - Thread - Direct
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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23 May

Comment
    SLG-Dennis on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Hello Staines,
the only roadmap we have at the moment is this one: https://accounts.strangeloopgames.com/roadmap

It displays what is in progress at the moment, as in what the focus for the next update is. (In this case 8.2) We don't have a long-term roadmap at the moment, the listed points below "In Progress" are things we all want to do and want to know your opinion on, but they do not represent the order or likelyhood of if and when they get into the game - that is also stated on that page.

Boats aren't cancelled, but - as we've been stating since quite a while - will come later. Don't expect them in 9.0 or 10.0.

The focus on 9.0 lies on a new mining concept (see our social media for more details) and improvements for the law and government systems. Other notable changes will include fleshing-out work on professio... Read more
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You cannot fix this, it's caused by Require Auth being disabled which causes steam players to be displayed as a Hash. We removed the Require Auth option for 8.2, so this is no longer a problem. If players can't join with require auth off and you are not a cracked server, you should try to get that fixed. Support will gladly help you with that.

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To clear this up: The master server died.