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Mars stopped repeating itself

A player sent three frames from different altitudes and wrote: "repeating patches and streaks show up on the surface. It looks unnatural. As if one texture had been copied and multiplied." And set a condition: loading time may grow, frame rate may not drop.

There turned out to be three causes, unrelated to one another.

The first was in the random-number formula the micro-relief grows from. It was symmetric: swap two coordinates and you get exactly the same number back. Measured over two hundred thousand points, the match was total for every single one. The surface therefore mirrored itself and broke up into identical little hooks - the ones the player circled on the frame taken from a kilometre up.

The second, and the main one. The colour layer took a small noise image of 256 by 256 points, holding just three patches, and tiled it across the planet every 192 metres. So the same three 64-metre blots travelled all over Mars - literally what the player described as "copied and multiplied". The image is now four times larger, tiles four times less often, holds forty-eight patches instead of three, and carries three finer layers on top. Most important, the coordinate is displaced by another noise before sampling: patch edges stopped following the lattice cells and came to look like drifts of dust.

The third: the world number never reached the surface. The terrain depended on it, the colour and micro-relief did not, and the ground looked the same in every game. Now the whole noise image is re-baked from the world number.

The price is a story of its own. Our first move was an honest integer generator: it cured not only the symmetry but the coarseness of the scale as well - four billion distinguishable levels instead of 64. And it cost thirteen per cent of the frame. That broke the player's condition, so the variant went in the bin and a formula of the same length took its place: it removes the defect the eye can see and leaves the budget alone. Three paired measurements in a row showed the new build is never slower than the old one. Baking the noise at load time grew from 92 to 334 milliseconds - exactly the trade the player allowed.

Along the way the expanded diagnostics panel moved. It used to run down towards the game buttons and the tails of its lines were lost. It now sits level with the counters and to the right of their column, and if a narrow screen cannot fit it there, it honestly drops back down - but whole.

The carrier count now works both ways

A player described an oddity: "I set seven carriers and seven carry. I set six after that, and seven still carry. The switch works upwards but not downwards, with both buildings." A measurement confirmed it: the extractor panel was moved from four to zero, and a minute later four robosomas were still serving the building.

There turned out to be three separate causes. For the extractor, shrinking the shift was never written at all - the code only knew how to add hands. For the workshop the shrink existed, but it demanded a hand that was empty, without a task and outside the gate: a working carrier is never like that, so the loop bailed out on its first step. The third cause was a set of old exemptions saying "zero, but one carrier is still needed to haul out what has accumulated" - three such places in the code, each of which on its own sent a robosoma back to a switched-off building.

The number in the panel is now the staff of the building, and it is honoured in both directions. A surplus hand does not drop its load on the way: it finishes the trip, delivers it and leaves the shift at that moment. Zero carriers is equivalent to switching the building off - every robosoma is released and picks up other work on its own, while the container quietly waits until you assign a shift again.

Along the way a long-standing defect surfaced: a released robosoma stayed at the head of the warehouse gate queue - with no role and no reason to move - and everyone behind it waited forever. Measured: two robosomas hung with eighty regolith in hand while the container was full and the store was empty.

The rocket became a building

A player sent four saves and described a long-standing problem: an enemy robosoma walking through the rocket would get stuck at one of its legs and twitch back and forth endlessly. This bug had been fixed five times in four days back in August, and every time it came back.

The post-mortem explained why. The rocket was not solid by one rule but by a set of exceptions: the hull was not an obstacle at all, the six legs lived in a separate list, the ramp was a chain of little circles, and passes were granted on top of all that. Each fix repaired one exception and left the rest. The main culprit turned out to be the pass: a robosoma walking down from the ship had every obstacle within a thirty-metre circle switched off for eight seconds, the legs included. When the pass expired while the robot stood inside a leg, it was pushed out two metres per tick, walked back to its target and entered again.

The rocket is now an ordinary building for navigation: a single round body reaching its farthest point, be it a landing foot or the end of the lowered ramp. Avoidance, the route field and the line-of-sight check all see the same body, so there is nothing left for them to disagree about. A pass now lifts exactly the ship it belongs to, while the legs stay in place, so nobody walks through a leg any more. Measured on the save the player sent: the old build logged 28 twitch events in three minutes, the new one logged none.

Two related things were fixed along the way. The ramp no longer drops again on every load - its position is stored in the file, and older saves are understood as they are. And avoidance accounts for the ramp: you cannot crawl under it from above, while in first-person view the ramp stops being an obstacle, so you can walk up to it, climb it and step inside the ship.

The main screen was rebuilt

The first screen of the game finally has a composition. A panel on the left carries the game title, a thin rule and a short account of what this game is — a real-time strategy on the surface of Mars, where you begin with a single machine and expand a colony across the planet. Under the text sit three lines about what matters: real terrain at 1:1 scale, up to a thousand robosomas in battle, network play and a first-person view. The menu sits on the right.

The buttons became noticeably larger: the room once taken by the full-screen sign now belongs to them. On a 1920x1080 screen a button grew from 99 to 137 pixels, on a 3440x1440 monitor from 132 to 184. Neither the title nor the menu is pressed against the screen edge any more — each block has its own margins and its content is centred inside it.

The layout was not checked by eye alone: on a phone in landscape, on a square 4:3 tablet, on an ordinary monitor and on an ultrawide one, in both languages and in both input layouts — touch and mouse. The same pass found and fixed a rare rounding error that silently replaced the last line of the description with an ellipsis on some resolutions.

The game title grew to fill the screen

On a phone the game title in the main menu turned out indecently small: a narrow strip at the top that you could barely read. The word now fills the whole screen and stands behind the buttons — three-dimensional, with extruded sides and a soft rim, drifting slowly as if it hung in space. The vanishing point travels a full circle in about forty seconds, so the letters turn almost imperceptibly.

To keep the menu readable, the sign and the button labels were separated by lightness: the word lives in the dark blue half of the scale, the text on the buttons is nearly white, and the button body became dense. The screen is pleasant to look at and still comfortable to press. The word keeps the ROBOSOMA spelling in English and switches to the Cyrillic one in the Russian build.

The same pass fixed what a player spotted immediately: leaving to the menu during play still showed the old page — buttons in two columns, with the save label running past the neighbouring frame. The pause menu is now built by the same rules as the main one: a single column, a shared width and honest padding around the text.

The menu is now a single column

A player sent a screenshot: in the main menu the label «LOAD GAME» did not fit its button and ran past the frame. The reason was simple and embarrassing — the label font size was derived from the button height alone and never checked against its width. Short words fitted by luck; a long one did not.

The menu was rebuilt: six buttons now stand in one column with a shared width and an even step, and the text inside received honest padding on both sides. A long line shrinks the font instead of eating the padding, so text never leaves the frame again — and that is now verified automatically on screens from 4:3 to ultrawide and on the touch layout.

The game title moved up to the top frame and is finally localised: it keeps the ROBOSOMA spelling in English and switches to Cyrillic in the Russian build.

Robosomas stopped standing around

Players kept noticing the same oddity: an extractor panel asked for seven carriers, yet only five hauled regolith while the rest waited nearby for orders. The number in the panel behaved as a ceiling for the immediate need rather than as the building's staff, so while the container held one or two loads, the remaining hands were never recruited at all. It is now a real shift: as many robosomas as the panel says are assigned to the building, and hands that become free take the empty places themselves. The workshop was fixed the same way.

The second bug was visible to the naked eye: a robosoma walked out of the colony, stopped, returned to the base and left again in a loop. Two different algorithms really were fighting over it, assigning and cancelling work within the same tick. Every robosoma now has a single owner: whoever gave it work keeps it for a few seconds, and outside automation cannot snatch it away. A player order still overrides everything.

Colonies also stopped scattering across distant deposits: robosomas work their own ground, and sending one further is a manual order. All three rules apply equally to the AI opponent. Version 0.7.49 is available for Windows and Android.

Settings redesigned for phones

Every button in the main menu and settings now follows one touch-friendly size. The crowded Screen page was split into Map, Frame and Effects, while privacy and support received a separate Info tab.

The Russian and English guides now use fresh frames captured from the real release build through the same command path as a player. Version 0.7.49 includes this interface on Windows and Android.

The website is now available in English

Every public page received an English counterpart, a manual RU/EN switch and matching navigation. On the first visit, the site uses the browser's preferred language; a manual choice is remembered on the device.

A clearer route for new players

The home page became shorter. Quick start, news, FAQ, known issues and a structured bug report form now have their own places. Scientific facts are explicitly separated from simulation models and lore.

English added to the game

Menus, hints, information panels, construction errors and object labels were translated. The game detects the device language on first launch, while a manual selector remains in settings.

This was more than replacing words. Longer English strings had to be checked on real game screens so text stayed inside panels and every required glyph rendered correctly.

Robosoma published on Google Play and RuStore

The game is available from Google Play and RuStore. Google first rejected it over a possible impersonation issue, so I had to document the domain, the name and the origin of the artwork.

After the review, the game was approved with the Robosoma name and original icon. It remains free, with no ads or purchases.