Building a New Rendering Engine for My Colony

This year is the 10th anniversary of My Colony, and I had originally planned to mark the occasion with the release of My Colony 2, but that would require massive rushing of a product and releasing something that would be nowhere near ready, so I instead am going to put that on the back burner and to a pretty major overhaul of the original My Colony with many of the fixes, features and updates that people have been wanting for a while now. So, over the next couple of months, I will be doing a series of posts highlighting some of the different mechanics that are being overhauled in My Colony v3.0, coming later this spring. Starting with a major one - a complete rewrite of the rendering engine!

Currently, My Colony uses a software-based rendering engine, which mostly works fine but you can start to see some issues with performance, particularly when you have a lot of structures in your colony and you attempt to zoom out. Even on high end hardware, this brings the game to its knees.

To address this, I have begun the process of rewriting the graphics engine to a hardware-based GPU accelerated one, with the goal of greatly improving rendering performance for the game.

You might be wondering what you are looking at in the above image. That is 65 thousand investment banks packed wall to wall in a 512x512 tile map, zoomed all the way out with the new rendering engine running at 60fps with very little GPU memory used. As you can see, the new renderer can handle substantially more than the current software-based engine can.

As a hardware-based engine, the new renderer also supports some neat effects that are unavailable on the current implementation, including normal and emissive mapping for sprites, as well as dynamic lighting. See the below screenshot.

The windows on these banks now light up at night, and in addition, each face of the bank sprite can be lit dynamically in reaction to point lighting.

Above you can see the base bank sprite, along with the normal and emissive map images. Of course, all of the new effects and changes you will be able to toggle on/off in the soon to be revamped Engine Settings menu.

Another improvement with the new engine is the decoupling of the game logic from the rendering clock. Right now, you might notice that you cannot run My Colony idle in the background, as the logic clocked is tied to the rendering code and the logic loop is fired every time a rendering frame is drawn. Because of this, when the game is in the background and the operating system quits rendering it, the game logic also stops. I will discuss more about the updates to the logic engine in a future post, but this will no longer be an issue in the upcoming 3.0 update.

There will also be support for reflective surface effects, for instance on water tiles or on things like solar panels. The bottom line is that the game will look a lot prettier and run a lot faster once the new engine is implemented.

In the coming weeks I will be discussing some of the other big changes coming to the game. One major potential change, which I have not decided on yet (so feel free to leave feedback on this) is getting rid of the region system altogether and instead allowing for massive sized maps, where sections of the map that are not currently in focus are simulated in the background, similar to how non-active region cities are today. The simulation code is also going to be moved off of the main thread and into a background worker thread which is a major architectural change, so I thought it would also be a good time to overhaul the way regions work. If any of you have played the previous voxel-based version of My Colony 2 (now MC2 Classic), this is basically how that game worked. So we will see, if people are not interested in that change I might not do it. It would allow for some cool things though!

So as I said, this is just one small part of the new overhaul coming to MC1 for its 10th anniversary. Let me know what you think, what else you would like to see overhauled, and stay tuned for more updates. I think we can kick the original My Colony up to level 11!