Execute: Pest Control Initiative - Development Log #245

In today’s issue: Michi squashes bugs, Fabian gets really into ship blueprints, and Nick finds some YouTubers.

Michi (molp)

I’ve been working on several smaller issues and bugs this week as we are nearing internal testing of the Populous release. The idea is to setup Populous on a test machine, so the team can test while I am working on the last missing sub-feature that still needs implementation. More on that (and if it works out :)) in the next devlog.

Among the bugs that I fixed this week were two that have been reported many times in the past and I am happy that they are gone now:

Auto-provisioning of local market shipping contracts did not work if the origin was not equal to the local market address. It only worked the other way round: if the local market address and the origin had been the same. This is fixed now and will be available once we release Populous.

There has been another bug related to auto-provisioning. If a contract with auto-provisioning was cancelled due to the inactivity of the contract parties the contract would correctly being marked as cancelled, but the provisioning condition would not be inactive. So the next time the respective commodity became available in the auto-provisioning inventory the condition would snag it and create a block, effectively preventing the owner to recover the commodities. If you run into this bug please let us know, as we can remove the blocks manually.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week was mainly about tweaking all the different ship parts for the ship-building update. This included their features (such as thrust for STL engines, power for FTL engines, volume span and power requirement for FTL emitters, cargo bay and fuel tank sizes etc.), as well as their setup in the material tree (recipes, volume, weight). While my initial goal was to use those parts to define a large set of ship blueprints, I mostly ended up doing the latter for balancing purposes in the end.

Why? Well, as a matter of fact it was quite fun to play around with different setups of ship parts and observe the changes to the resulting ship features (acceleration, speed, weight, hull size etc.) that were automatically calculated. Therefore we’re strongly considering putting this basic type of ship customization into the update itself, so you would actually be able to design your own ships, just without the fancy 3D editor (which is still planned for later on of course).

Nick

Aside from the usual ads, SEO, and social media tasks, I did a major push on contacting YouTubers for sponsorships. I was really happy with the results so far as some of my top picks, which were recommended by the PrUn community, have responded and are willing to do videos about the game. I’m extremely grateful to the community for providing me with such great recommendations and super excited to see what some of the these content creators come up with in regards to featuring the game. I think you guys will be pleasantly surprised when you find out who will be doing the video so stay tuned!

I also got some really good feedback on my “article” about space colonization that will be used as long-from ad copy. I am going to be implementing the changes and adding topics to make it more fleshed out and interesting. If you have any interest in what I wrote, please send me a message and I’ll send it to you for some feedback.

As always: We’d love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!

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