Morat

Morat has been reworking the repair costs for temporary drones to bring them in line with each other and much fairer for Engineers compared to other classes and superitems on the T22 ships.

Pixel

Pixel has been working on super secret tasks. If you asked him, he’d only try sell you Payment Protection Insurance…. Or solar panels… Or claim for your workplace ‘accident’.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been working on something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time which is to make our bonus weekend events automatic. The new system will be pretty flexible and configurable by content developers, in addition far more many things will be possible for events, we have ideas ranging from the common like XP and mod bonuses to things like increased prospecting, faster spawns, extra DG loot and increased squad size. I have plans for this system eventually run all our holiday events for us too (with some new ideas for some smaller events in mind).

Web map

The web map which I made towards the end of last year is up and available to use, additionally the universe data used to generate the map is freely accessible from here. I’ll write up how use the data somewhere soon. Currently the data for the map isn’t automatically updated, but it should be soon.

Please note that the map uses a lot of HMTL 5 features and as such requires an up to date browser (that’s preferrably not Internet Explorer, milage may vary).

Theodore

Theodore’s work on bringing the unavailable imperial skills to the game is complete, although I have no time frame for when they’ll be on live for you to train.

Jey

Jey’s been up to preparing our next patch which should be coming very Soon™ as well as more client crash fixes!

Ryan

Ryan has been up to more odds and sods, fixing the Transference Power mod and the Colonial Administration skill description. Additionally he’s fixed station inventories not showing the asterisk for modded items and allowed users to search their inventories for specific mods. Lastly Ryan has been through our lower tech ruin items and adjusted how the prices and balance for a lot of them is calculated, the overall result should be that some items are a bit cheaper, some are more expensive, but they’re more powerful than they were before.

Pixel

Pixel has been working more on our permanent drones and playing around with making some missions automatically start when you enter the galaxy. He’s also done even more UI improvements.

Blue Dwarf

I’ve been dipping my hand back in a bit, after a long time of not really doing much aside from running the weekend events (when I remember) and bugging (or being bugged by) players on all chat, I’ve fixed up the bug that affected Strontium-90 missions last week and fixed a bug charging the wrong amount to repair destroyed drones.

During our meeting today, myself and a few others of us retrieved the log in details for our Twitter account! So expect some potential ramblings or news or things appearing on our Twitter, which you can follow @StarSonata.

Background

Currently, AI bases purchase any non-commodity item at reduced rate, unless its server value is above a certain amount.  Players have been using this mechanic to convert unlimited quantities of raw materials such as Metals into credits.  The most popular conversion is through Station Extension Y’s, which net 17.435 credits per Metals when built by the thousand.  This project expands the idea of converting resources into credits by creating similar options for all basic commodities, not just Metals.  It also makes the whole system more natively supported by game mechanics by introducing a proper player-driven economy.  Finally, it creates new possibilities for trading by encouraging players to ship resources beyond team territory and seek out arbitrage opportunities between AI bases.

Overview

We have created seven new lines of manufactured commodities that are all produced by base-equipped factories.  Like standard commodities, these items can be bought and sold by AI and trade slaves and appear in the same trading tab.  The lowest tier of each theme is manufactured from a tier 0 resource such as Metals.  Higher tier manufactured commodities are constructed from higher tier extracted resources such as Plasma Crystals or Adamantium.  Each AI base has a theme that goes with one of the lines of commodities, and will only trade in manufactured commodities of that theme.  AI bases will consume their supply of commodities over time in order to balance the total number of credits created per day.

Details

The average value of the new commodities is balanced to be comparable to the exchange rate for Metals that is obtained in current mechanics.  Resources that extract slower than Metals are valued proportionally more.  Higher-tier commodities are produced from multiple lower-tier commodities in addition to high-tier resources.  For example:

• Steel Girders (1000 Metals): average value 20,000
• Adamantium Reinforced Girders (1,000,000 Metals, 50 Titanium, 5 Laconia, 1 Adamantium): average value 155,000,000
• Sentient Chatbots (500 Silicon): average value 15,000
• Overclocked Chatbots (100,000 Silicon, 300 Psion Icicles, 5 Plasma Crystals): average value 20,500,000

Actual prices will range between 50% and 200% of the average value depending on AI base supply levels.  Since AI bases will steadily consume their supply of each commodity, it will be possible to fully automate the process with trade slaves.  Of course, if too many players attempt to route their manufactured commodities to a single AI base, the market will saturate and someone will have to ship goods to another base instead.  We want AI bases to gobble up plenty of resources, but we don’t want them to be infinite resource sinks either.  In order to get the balance right on this, we have done a careful review of AI base placement in the universe generation code, and will adjust pricing and consumption rates on an ongoing basis if the first draft doesn’t get the balance right.

Important notes

We are planning to add the manufactured commodities and associated factories to the game before the end of the universe on test server so players can get a head start on figuring out the new system. Also, along with the introduction of the new manufacturing economy next universe, AI bases will no longer buy items that have been built from blueprint.  The code governing AI base purchases is only intended to allow players to sell unwanted loot such as augmenters and tweaks.  There will no longer be any reason to build an item just for the purpose of selling it to an AI base, so that functionality will be removed.  We are committed to replacing that old system with something that is not only comparable in economic reward, but also truer to the free market principles of the game and more rewarding to industrialists and traders alike.  We look forward to player feedback when the new economy goes live so that we can achieve that goal as soon as possible.

Hello again everyone! It’s been a long time since our last dev blog, but don’t fear we’ve still been having our meetings and stuff is stll going on behind the scenes (as many of you have seen on the forums).
I must confess the fault is mine, really, our last blog was 16th December which was also our last before Christmas. After we picked things back up I was back at university with a nice shiny new 9AM start every day, naturally this doesn’t fit well when our meetings often ended at 1 or 2AM my time so I had been missing meetings. We’ve now moved our meetings back by a couple of hours though, meaning I can attend and resume doing our weekly blog post.

Enough jibber-jabber with missed posts though, time for some 4 weeks worth of updates!

A new member has joined our team, known to us as Dokimastis.

Theodore

A large portion of you may not know this, but there exist six more skills in the same lines as the five Imperial Seal skills, while the skills were implemented and work they were never made available in game for players, a small number of lucky players were awarded levels in some of these skills for various things. Theodore has been working on getting these so far hidden skills being available to players to train. Once the work has been done all six of the new skills will be added to the current five. The current Imperial Seal Skills will not be changed.

Theodore has also been working on the Tweak Super Item suggestion that’s residing in our suggestions system, although with some slight changes from the original proposal, such as moving the source to be from Blueprints obtained from Shadow instead of missions from Perpetual Motion.

Jey

Jey’s been working on his global event system that’ll eventually encompass the AI trading events.
He’s also been working on fixing client and server crashes and working on the recent server lag that’s been a result of the recent BvB battles between Red Faction and Resident Evil.
Lastly from Jey, a full server and client patch is coming up soon, expect the announcement some point this or next week.

Ryan

Ryan has been working on lots of things of late, from working on more things to get us on Steam and fixing the colony suitability bug to our current top voted suggestion; Item Rarity Tiers.

He’s also implemented a new kind of item like the station tech upgrades but for ships. Using this item will increase the tech level of your ship by one, however it’ll also limit your ship to the normal number of augmenters for that hull class (sorry, no T22, 4 aug Prawns for you). This can also be done multiple times to the same ship but it will get very costly.

The synchronized lockout system is done and is has been setup for the Serengeti for next patch, before being pushed out to more bosses. Instead of being locked out for so many days, the lockouts from the new system will reset together at a set time resulting in less coordination required between teammates and friends as your lockout cycles are always synchronized.

Ryan has also been helping Pixel a lot providing code needed for various UI changes that some of you have already seen on the forums, and will see soon in the client, but more of that in Pixel’s section. Speaking of which….

Pixel

Pixel has been doing loads of cool stuff.

Going back a few weeks he was working on creating a new set of items which have already hit live, but I’ll cover them briefly if you missed it. Blueprint Packs are a new swish style of blueprint item which actually contain multiple blueprints, this means you can set your station up with blueprints for the full Achilles station gear suite from just one item.

He’s also been on more of a spree of making everything look AWESOME. From fancy looking holoprojectors for your space stations to reworking sections of the user interface. You can see a lot of his changes in his forum topic over in Star Sonata General Discussion. Here’s a picture of the new space station control panel.

Also, say hello to the shiny new and red Annihilator Pulse Gun.

Stronium-90 missions

On Saturday night, a large portion of your lost your progress on your Strontium-90 missions. This was due to a funky bug and was kind of intentional in the way you wouldn’t expect. The issue is unlikely to strike again and we’ll be fixing it so that Strontium-90 missions don’t forcibly abandon themselves. Apologies for inconveniences.

This was a small patch to fix some issues that have cropped up recently. To compensate for the colony suit bug for the first week of the uni colonies will be ticking 50% more often for the next week. (1 hour 20 mins instead of 2 hours) Fixes: *Colony suitability issues fixed * “AI Base 1″ visage fixed *Certain overweight bps have lost some weight *Base OLs have had a small credit cost added.

A client patch will be required with the reset, but available for manual download around 12h00 EST. Just run your patchbot to get the update beforehand and avoid having to wait once the server come back up after uni reset.
You can also connect to livetest.starsonata.com to automatically download the patch instead of running the patchbot.

Additions:
* Added the Vermilion Behemoth skin for the Behemoth, Behemoth+, Emperor’s Behemoth, Assault Behemoth, Assault Behemoth+ and Divine Behemoth.
* Added Flaming Harrier skin for the Harrier and Hawk.
* Added Cubic Sphere skin for the Singularity Sphere, Battle Sphere and Merchant Navy Contriver.
* Added New Skins: Lord Narwhal and Neon Narwhal
* Added beer freighter skin
* Added Cyborg Dark Freight Skin
* Added Kalthi Deployer Frame skin for the Kalthi Deployer, Kalthi Armored Deployer and Kalthi Wrathful Deployer.
* Added Bule and Faranji kits to ruins.
* Fix for Dragonslayers Presence holoprojector
* Added Golden Attached Kits V and VI
* Added prefab attached / unattached tech 0, 3, and 6 kits
* Added t0 and t3 base exterminators

Changes:
* Updated Clench, Burst and RNF Licin Stats.
+ Reduced Whiskey Outpost respawn times.
+ Changed Earthforce Outpost mission to just require a kill of the outpost instead of kill and loot.
* Lowered the size of Apollo and Ares shield trans
* Brought the build cost down on the new T12 spirit augs to match other T12 augs
* Adjusted Nexus galaxies vis to make it easier for new players to see.
* Removed unnecessary skills from Janitor’s Outpost in Nexus.
* Increased lifespan and weight of some of the Nexus starter drones.
* Updated shard missions to accept unstable dust and stable dust at the same time
* Most ruin related userbases were reworked, enjoy.
* Changed Amzuadiz Bhisaj from Transference damage to Surgical
* Lowered snake hole rock health one third
* Weakened the mobs in Nexus Bana, made a few mission tweaks.
* Reduced number of kills necessary for a Volcom mission.
* Only base type items and items marked as “Base Only” can be equipped on bases

Fixes:
* Nexus fixes, made small pest drones unobtainable from the AI base, typos, re-added tunnels and droppings mission indicator.

Jey

Tracked down and fixed weird crash issue relating to Control bots.
Preperation for Christmas to go live in a few days.

Ryan

I’ve been working on some brand new christmas content! I think everyone will like it a lot, there are 11 new gals and a boss that scales based on how many people are attacking it (and everyone will get personal loot).

Pixel

Worked on some lots more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, as well as some cool sounding items

Astro-Santa Letter Competition

The Astro-Santa letter competition is now drawing to a close with just a few hours left, so if you want to be in with a chance to win, you better send your letter to Astro-Santa!

You can find out more about this here.

Universe Reset

The Scientists have been at the eggnog, getting their party on early and in their drunkness have missed the prediction of the universe’s imposion. Fortunately, being the time of Christmas, Astro-Santa’s Astro-Elves have been hard at work making all the presents as well as conducting research for new ideas! Amongst their research findings the Astro-Elves have learnt that the universe is becoming unstable and have predicted that it’ll eventually suffer a total collapse at 540 on 9th of Aer, 153rd Grand Age of the Elves. However, due to also being drunk the Elves have made a mistake and actually the date of the collapse will be around 14 Earth days later, making the demise of our universe occur on January 16th, 2016 at 1PM EST.

This patch may appear smaller than our usual full patch. But this is because it is a preparation patch for the holiday event coming up and also fixed an issue that prevented me from releasing new beta clients (due to compatibility issue between server and client).

Additions:
* Added new look for most base types (adamantium, laconia, titanium etc) Only newly deployed base will have them tho (currently existing bases will still show the default look)
* Station dialog is now resizable
* Neuro training background is now animated upon training a skill.
* Added new base shield transferances (t1, t6 and t18) bps
* Base Overloader BPs have been added to Free Market
* /help and /lkc help to use the blackbox interface (easier to read)

Changes:
+ AI bases conversion to the animatrix format (instead of their current animated mesh) / small changes to some of their look.
* Changed it so that you could turn in a batch of augmenters of their respective tiers instead of Condensers in the Augmenter Tweaking mission chain.
* Changed Olympus boss gates from asking for neuroKeysyncs from mini bosses to checking if those mini bosses are alive or not
* Removed NeuroKeysyncs from oly mini bosses drop table
* Changed the gate from maelstrom to diablo to check for the “Doom Guard”
* Removed neurokeys from the infernos/Doom Guard only in maelstrom
* Renamed the second “Rats!! Undead Rats!” mission to “Rats!! Undead Rat Queen”
* Changed t20 base weapon colours to red Anni lasers and mags
* Changed zebu gunship to heavyfighter and increased diameters

Fixes:
* Raised T9 and T12 ai base and junkyard kit mining weakness to match the Fortified kits of the same tech level
* Checking that the destination is a base before denying transfer of higher tech base bound item to lower tech base. This will fix the issue with not being able to transfer junkyard gear to lower tech ships.
* Fixed an issue where unteamed bases would count against ownership score
* Fixed an issue where loyalty score would sometimes not save
* Fixed an issue causing projectiles to be ignored from the rendering when they shouldnt be.
* Multiple spelling errors

We’re back after a week of downing Turkeys and some weekend shopping madness which seems to infecting the grand British empire!

Jey

I finalized an improvement I’ve been working on to optimize the performance of large inventories. The final result was an improvement by a factor of 60 (30s to 0.5s when transferring 24,000 item stacks).

Patch preparation to make Christmas event patch run smoothly.

More work on the global trading event

Ryan

Working with a Steam employee who contacted us to help get things in line for them so we can get on Steam!

Pixel

Worked on some more pretty artwork which you’ll be seeing in game soon, hopefully.

Blue Dwarf

Not really an update, just a plug that our annual Astro-Santa letter competition is now running and you can find details here.

Player questions!

Didn’t do any this week, we’re running low on the good ones! So ask us more more!

Astro-Santa is soon returning to our universe to dash our systems with his presents. He’s made his list and checked it twice but he doesn’t know what to get anyone?!

Can you help out Astro-Santa by writing him a letter claiming what you want?

Yes, it’s time for our annual Astro-Santa Letter competition.
The challenge is simple and easy to do, write a letter to send to Astro-Santa and submit it to us. Your letter doesn’t even have to be a letter, it could be a song you’ve made up, a poem or haiku about Christmas. As usual bonus points for apt references to Star Sonata.

When the competition ends, we’ll choose a few of our favourites, depending how many entries there are (maximum of 5), and award the players who submitted them. Winning players will get their letter added to the game with a corresponding mission to go with it and a collection of items will be given to each player too.

• Players are allowed to make multiple submissions.
• Deadline for submissions is Thursday 17th December, 00:00 EST (05:00 GMT).
• Submissions to be posted in the topic for this post.
• If you want your letter to be counted as from your player name instead of your account name, include it. Ideally, put your letter in a [quote][/quote] block and leave other comments outside to make it clear what you want in your letter.