Hello!

Last year in the start of 2019 I released a new version of Coloniae, with a restructured design and layout arrangements. I thought Coloniae needs some rework this year as well, so here we are!

What's new

The first noticeable change is the website design. For the connoisseurs, I shifted from Bootstrap to Semantic UI, which I find more convenient to work with, simpler and overall more beautiful! Before, the website was very “white”, without much embellishment. Now there is more contrast (menu and footer) and a background image, which is for now a city of Final Space. Menus have been slightly reworked as well. The various tools (layout editor, GBT and resource comparator) have been grouped in one place to allow more space for more recent features like the Reference and the Discord Bot. Something that might not be very visible for you but a huge improvement for everyone I feel, is the fact that I have managed a complete automation of the website, that is the game version is updated automatically, the resource comparator automatically adds the resources, same for the layout editor and nearly all features on Coloniae. It means that the website is always up-to-date as soon as possible!   It was annoying when people wanted to sign in and it redirected them to the landing page all the time. Now it brings a pop-up making it easier to sign in and it stays on the page you are in so you don’t have to search for the page again (Bast if you read this you should do the same on your website btw ). I have also integrated Ape Chat in Coloniae, with a new channel specifically for it!   Small thing, but I am making Coloniae Badges official. A few months ago, you might have noticed the apparition of badges (or tags) next to some players names. Their signification and role were quite mystic as no announcement was made and no documentation was given. This is official now and I wanted to make a page just for it but since there are only two badges for now (Article Writer and Founder) it won’t be (I actually made it but hide it). I plan on adding roles such as Reference Moderator (see third paragraph) and others might come in the future.  

What was not done 

I initially had more plans for this update, like the addition of some features, but after pitching the idea to a few other community members, it turned out it wasn’t necessary nor bringing anything useful to the website, so I kept it as a draft. Basically, it was firstly the introduction of medals and an event management feature. Medals would’ve been a small funny feature to reward both in-game achievements and community involvement. I created 2 medals – Coding Merit and Testing Merit - which would be awarded manually by myself to some players for their help in developing Coloniae (thus these are community involvement medals). Medals could’ve been awarded by a small committee with the badge “Medals Committee”, for example, the medals of a player would show up in their player page under “Medals” (or “Service Record”). The second idea was the Events Hub: a Coloniae feature with tools for community events. This was meant to give more visibility to events and also to players winning/participating, to gather all community events into one place, and have a unique, dedicated, and improvable place for it instead of the forum. Given the low interest in both of those ideas, they were not developed, but I wrote it here in the event it would give anyone a better idea, or if anyone wants to make it.  

In the future

Since the Reference switched to Coloniae I have long wanted to remake it (look better, auto update, add features…). For various reasons I find it better to rebuild it instead of working from what has already been done which I have tried to do but that was a pain and it isn’t really well done. The idea is still at draft stage but it would be roughly as follows: the Reference would very much resemble a wiki, just like Wikipedia. Some special pages would be automatically generated (like the current tables we have – those will stay and won’t be modifiable) but anyone would be able to create and modify (under authentication with their ape apps account) other informative/tips pages. There would be a new badge/role, Reference Moderators, who’d have the power to ban a player form contributing/erase change etc. Ref Mods would also be the only ones able to modify the techs trees that will hopefully come back since it requires some knowledge of a tool I still don’t even know about (I wasn’t able to contact Rent Demon for info). The reference will also be linked to the ADU on auto-gen pages like the buildings pages and you’d be able to click "can I build this?": it will look at your account and prompt for your colony name, and look at your ADU stats to see what’s missing for you to build it. Shout out to Ansom for these ideas here. What I described above is how I see it now, but nothing is perfectly clear especially on how to technically do it so things may change. As suggested by some players the layouts editor should be updated as well to show the entertainment/health etc. buildings range and capacity (overall the necessary changes to adapt to v1.0). Unfortunately, this requires some dedication and I can’t afford to spend the time needed for that during this school year, so I will be able to work on it starting this summer. Until then, Coloniae won’t receive much love and developing new features will pause, I’ll just do the basic maintenance.

I hope you will continue to enjoy the website,

Your devoted dev,

Sobeirannòvaocc

PS: you managed to read through, you’re a legend! You can send me your colony screenshots on discord at Sobe#2982 and maybe it will become the next background picture!