This is WAR – development log #221

Work on the Presence update has officially kicked into gear. Have a first look at the upcoming upgradable warehouses in today’s devlog!

Michi (molp)

I finally started to work on our next named release Presence this week! As usual with new features there is not much to show yet as I usually start to implement them on the server first and then move to the client. To be able to show at least a bit in this devlog I created the new warehouse command WAR and started to flesh it out:

The warehouse is a planetary project just like the existing ones and can be built on any planet without any dependencies. Once it is finished, the command shown above will be available. The upper half shows general information about the warehouse like its current operator (e.g. faction or the governor’s corporation), the current fees and how many storage units are available.

The ‘rental’ section contains company specific information, for example how many units have been rented, how much storage space is available and of course a link to the store itself. I will add more information to this section later, especially about the next due rent.

Finally, the last section will contain information about the current extension status of the warehouse. As stated in the last devlog, the warehouse will be extendable a few times to increase the amount of storage units.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

While the actual implementation work for the “Presence” release started this week, I pretty much fully focussed on coming up with ideas and conceptual drafts for the next, yet to be disclosed, named release. We’ll soon discuss its content more in detail internally, and once we clearly settle in on a design direction we’ll be able to share more with all of you.

In terms of the nearer future, I’m keeping an eye on market prices to finalize the MM balancing tweaks I mentioned a couple weeks back. Also, there were some interesting discussions and suggestion in the forums and on the Discord surrounding the topic of “order deletion penalties”. The intention there is not just to put a stop to “market maker” bots, but also to make being online all the time to undercut your competitors’ prices by a cent again and again less attractive. We haven’t decided on it yet, but it’s certainly an option and it’s great to see all those constructive debates. Keep the feedback coming!

Martin

Short and sweet: As Michi already discussed, implementation work on “Presence” commenced this week. My job right now is to get some rather fundamental changes into the game’s storage system. Right now, all stores in the game deal with quantities of materials only. But for Presence, we need to support discrete “items”, which behave slightly differently. Most of the respective server-side changes are done and my client-side work was focused primarily on getting everything back to work the way it did before the required changes to the data structures. Next week I’ll work on actually displaying and handling items in the client. Once that’s done, Michi can take over and implement the new shipping contracts.

As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!