Short update from our visual department. Enjoy!

Want more animations?

Then check out a huge improvement to the looks of Unknown Horizons: Animated status icons that notify you whenever something could need your attention (and also show you a lot of other stuff)! Daniel Stephens contributed a batch of those icons this week. The images speak for themselves, even though these uploads are of poor quality.

Disclaimer: the in-game positioning current works for only one of four rotations. We are working on it.

Will this pavilion be in range of that tent?

We know you asked this question several times per game of Unknown Horizons. We were aware that something needs to happen, otherwise players will simply get confused and not enjoy playing UH. Thus, since last week we finally display green outlines if your to-be-constructed building is in range of other buildings. Most notably, this will tell you where to place farm fields and service providers for your inhabitants. After assembling this picture, we decided to also color the whole building in green for the effect to be more obvious.

Some more development updates

We also implemented the build menu features announced in our last posting. When hovering a building, you now see its required construction material right away and don't need to click every time. If a building lacks some of those resources, it will be displayed less prominently than those you can build. The button is still active though, so you can choose a suitable position and wait for the resources to appear.

In further news, we reduced blurriness of the distillery a bit and plan to add a few new buildings next week.
Praise Daniel in our comments and also leave all other kinds of feedback!

Stay tuned for an update on our editor soon. So long,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Heya everybody,
in case the headline confused you: We're not getting death threats for developing an awesome game. What we survived is merging a rewrite that changed huge parts of our codebase. Why doing all this?

Content Contribution made simple!

Easy: Because Nihathrael introduced a new system to store in-game objects. We used to hide these in a database difficult to access, whereas now they are stored in a simple file based format: YAML. This makes it very easy to edit and add buildings as well as units. More polishing and documentation in this area is needed to make things even easier and thus scheduled for the next weeks. A more detailed news article on this system will follow as soon as it is well documented.

Automated Testing

Squiddy continued to work hard on our testing infrastructure – we can now write tests for our whole GUI. This might sound more interesting if you're a coder, but be assured that it's awesome progress and helps us a lot fixing bugs before you even report them!

Debian!

It's been a while since we announced to be completely compatible with DFSG guidelines (no content under non-free license), but now we finally managed to get packages approved into Debian sid! Thanks to christoph for taking care of packaging both our engine, FIFE, and Unknown Horizons including all missing dependencies. Check them out: fife-python and unknown-horizons.
Our own repositories are of course still updated regularly, so if you would like to receive development snapshots packaged and use our repo already, nothing changes for you.

Website polished

We received feedback that our most valuable pages like Downloads, Support and Get Involved aren't well accessible but too chatty and heavy on text instead. Few days ago we restructured those website sections, added a lot of nice images and hope you agree it's a huge improvement. Huh, can't even remember how it looked before? Certainly not as good as now ;-)

In additional news:

• Selecting your player color is now possible by clicking on the desired color - you even see what you chose afterwards. Also fixed an annoying bug where the player settings were not saved when switching game modes.
  
• The build menu code is being refactored at the moment and will allow you to see building costs without actually building them. Furthermore we plan to allow customization of its layout, so you might rather sort the menu by classes like Infrastructure, Mining, Companies, Agriculture and so on instead of the current per-increment sorting.
• We recently got reports on our beta testers mailing list about crazy mouse speed under certain circumstances. Because we're not sure what this is caused by, Torv added a mouse sensitivity setting to Unknown Horizons. You can fix the speed there, but we obviously also want to fix the underlying bug. If you experienced mouse speed problems, please report and share your relevant system configuration (OS, native resolution, UH resolution, fullscreen yes/no, graphics chip, driver, renderer, ...)
• Your settlement is now aware of what it did when you weren't around :) Check out a history of trade actions performed in the warehouse tab! Includes selling and buying items from the free trader as well as from other players.

We were also discussing our communication culture a lot during the last couple of days. A lot of devs like chatting on IRC as their way to express thoughts and discuss questions that come to their mind. How would you prefer to keep updated on our development process? We could e.g. try to send more messages to our dev mailing list, write more technical blog posts or open threads in our forum. Do you know where to look for our current meeting logs? Regardless of whether you're more into graphics, code or playing UH: Leave a comment in our forums, we want to seriously improve here!

Stay tuned,
Your Unknown Horizons team

The whole Unknown Horizons Team wishes all of you a Merry Festivus/Hanukkah/Christmas/Winter and a good start into the new year!

(Christmas Tux by mdh3ll @ Gnome-Look)

Closer to world domination

Good news for our Asian friends: Thanks to the untiring efforts of chrisoelmueller and others, we finally managed to support CJKV characters (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese). The Japanese translation is completed by now already – 感謝 @ naraba! If you're interested in helping out with one of the other newly supported languages or those not yet finished, register at pootle and start right now! If the language of your choice has no UH project associated, please still select it in your pootle account and notify us on IRC.
We will update the translation templates later this week and add some new strings, so there is guaranteed fun for everybody :)

Interaction improvements

We've patched up our ship route configuration menu a bit in order to feature an appropriate settlement selection (it used to be a simple box without any information). Now, it looks like this:

Just click on a settlement to add it. It does not get any simpler. The boxes currently show the positions of the branch offices, so you can see where the ship is actually going to. We've also made the settlement tooltips work in the normal minimap, which by the way has seen a major overhaul, so you can expect to see it in other dialogues as well.

Other noteworthy additions

• Our road building tool has been quite smart in finding the optimal path for roads, but now, the roads are also built as straight as possible. By the way, the hotkey "R" now opens the road builder.
  
• You can now finally send ships via minimap, and every time you do, you will be rewarded with animations so magical we believe you have never seen one like that before :)
• After the Summer of Code, our ships can fight. Since one might need an army of ships and not just one, we implemented a queue control for our boat builder:
  
  Just click on a ship to cancel the order. Slight adjustments of the ship icons are still on the TODO list as you might notice ;)

New hidden goodies

Because we love interesting details, that may not be worth the work, but still are awesome to have, we've added some new goodies:

• The hotkey "O" will open a pipette mode. While it's used for colors in image editors, you can select buildings to build in Unknown Horizons. We might take it to the extreme and add a clone-mode, so you can apply your perfect settlement structure to a second island, and maybe even save a building pattern throughout games, but our usability labs will first have to evaluate this.
• With "A", you can change to settlement ownership based view, where tiles are colored in the according owner's color.
• The hotkey "K" toggles the health bar for your ships, which is usually only visible when you select it. This way you can easily get an overview of the status of your units.

Many other updates are not mentioned here because of space issues, for example some major performance improvements in the area of saving and loading. If you're interested in such technical details, please let us know via comments or in our forums and we'll dig deeper into that in the next post.

Cheers,
Your Unknown Horizons Team

Hey everyone,
we are back with a couple of updates. Enjoy!

RPM Packages

We can proudly present new packages for all major RPM-based linux distributions created by Nelson Marques (nmarques). He does it to popularize Unknown Horizons and the FIFEngine to the community. The next step is to include these packages in the offical repositories.
You'll find the packages in our Linux Download Section!

New Graphics (Fish!)

We got some great new graphics by lmg this week. Most importantly he reworked our fish swarm to look a lot more natural. Check them out below:

He also designed a great wallpaper and polished the pirate ship model on the way:

Unknown Horizons on RockPaperShotgun.com

Unknown Horizons was reviewed on RockPaperShotgun.com recently. This totally skyrocketed our visitor numbers for a few days, but the server endured it! Check out the great article here:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/23/anno-where-im-going-unknown-horizons/

Interview with Nihathrael on OSArena.net

Nihathrael gave an interview about Unknown Horizons and his work on the project at the  Greek website osarena.net. The English version can be found at the bottom of the post here:
http://osarena.net/english-writings/sinentefxi-me-ton-thomas-kinnen-tou-unknown-horizons.html

General Status

Work on Unknown Horizons is progressing nicely and we are getting a bunch of commits to the repository every day. Stay tuned for a more detailed update on this matter.

Cheers,
Your Unknown Horizons Team