Developer tools and multifaction

Hi! The Patreon has been open for a bit over a month now so I though an update is due. Thank you very much to all supporters!

There's a new video on YouTube showing my progress on the Multiplayer update adding support for multiple player factions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFM7CxYh1nQ

The info from Discord:

"My lumberjacks visit an allied colony to help them with their tree chopping. A third player joins and creates a new faction but they aren't so friendly.

This shows one of the two modes I'm planning for the multifaction update: it's similar to the current co-op but, of course, with multiple player factions.

The other one will build upon the first but have each faction simulate their colonies separately with Multiplayer explicitly handling planet interactions. This should allow servers to scale to support a lot of players (I'm aiming for a couple hundred concurrent users running smoothly).

The update is still very much a work in progress and I don't have any ETA for it."

Besides Multiplayer, there's a new update available to my mod Prepatcher:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2934420800

The mod is both a library for modders and a mod manager available before the game fully loads.

The update improves the latter adding features related to managing mod lists and makes the manager open only after pressing Space and not on every launch (which might sound minor but it took a few days of programming to get right; the game can now effectively restart an infinite amount of times if you "Open the manager, Launch game, Open the manager, Launch game...").

I'm definitely planning to integrate joining Multiplayer games from Prepatcher before the game loads in the future.

Last but not least, I'm in the progress of making and improving the developer tools we use when working on Multiplayer. This includes a testing framework (a program which "plays" the game automatically looking for issues) and a hot code reloader which I want to make useful for RimWorld mod developers in general. I don't have much to show here yet though.