What's in a Name? – development log #184

The Locality update has been pushed back a little in favor of several smaller features, fixes and balancing improvements. This week, the team continued down this path, working on the planet naming mechanic and rolling out several more bugfixes.

Martin

This was a bit of an odd week for me: Between customer work in the beginning, my usual “dad-day” on Wednesday, helping Michi with the update on Thursday and my traveling to this year’s Munich GameCamp on Friday, I didn’t expect to get much done, let alone work on any of the bigger features for our next release.

So I looked around for a smaller, self-contained, “secondary” feature that I could squeeze in between. As a result, I spent roughly a day and a half on cranking out the most basic version possible of the “name-a-planet” feature that’s a perk in our higher First Access Tiers. It works mostly as you’d expect: When viewing a planet that has not been named yet while having a “naming right” left, you get presented with a small button that leads to the planet naming tile. There you can enter the desired name, confirm you actually mean it and boom… the planet has a name! Obviously, behind the scenes, a lot more has to happen to make this work properly. And there several places on the client where the name will only update after a refresh. But all in all, I’m happy with how it turned out, given how little time I had to implement it.

You’re probably wondering when it’ll ship: I’d like to get the corresponding feature for systems done as well and then we’ll most likely ship another small maintenance update. Possibly next week.

Michi (molp)

I spent most of the week working on the bugfix / minor-improvements update that we released on Thursday. You can find its release notes here. Despite it being not too big, still a lot of effort goes into making sure everything works as intended and yet I had to hotfix the servers multiple times until everything was running smoothly again. One of the hotfixes was required to fix an error that only occurred when someone deleted a production line that still had some orders queued and liquidated that company. After the update these companies would not load back from the database anymore. Pretty esoteric bug if you ask me, but it still needed fixing. The other hotfix had to do with a new feature I introduced:

One of the bigger changes in the update is the ability to cancel running production orders. Up until now it was not possible to stop such orders. In some cases that can be very annoying, for example if you started a multi-day order by accident. When cancelling a running order, the input and potential output materials are calculated using the ‘completeness’ of the order. For example, if an order is 66% complete and it took 10 units of input material, 3 units are reimbursed. It works similarly for the output materials. Unfortunately, I based the first implementation of ‘completeness’ only on the starting and finishing timestamps of the order, totally neglecting efficiency changes during the runtime of the order. Quite a few players noticed that something was off and told us so. I was able to incorporate the efficiency changes and deliver a hotfix.

Eventually I found some time to work on the Local Market feature on Friday.

By the way, I am on paternal leave for the next two weeks, so no updates from me! See you soon!

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

Happy trading!