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.

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.

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!

I would like to briefly address where we’ve come from, where we are at, and where we are going as far as base versus base combat (BvB) is concerned in Star Sonata.

Previous to our base rebalance about a year ago, there were a number of problems with bases, but foremost was that it was too easy for a player or couple of players in very strong ships to fly through and destroy an entire galaxy worth of bases with no cost to the attackers. It was just too easy to attack, and it was too important to be online in order to defend.

Many changes were proposed, discussed with all the devs and the players on the forum, and agreed to. Mainly, bases were made much stronger in comparision to ships, so BvB supplanted PvB as the way to attack galaxies. This has been tremendously successful in deterring wanton griefing and piracy of bases, as used to run rampant. Now, if someone wants to attack a galaxy, the attacker has to declare war, put down and defend an outpost, have that outpost survive counter-attack for 24 hours, then spend the time and effort to actually BvB at great cost. Not only is it no longer cheap and easy to destroy bases, but the defenders have a real chance to actually defend. Since the base rebalance, we are not aware of any base griefing or piracy as used to occur, and the only bases destroyed in anger have been in wars between teams.

Balancing bases and BvB will continue to be an ongoing project. We already had in the works a change so that, starting next universe, bases will no longer be able to equip or use any gear that isn’t specifically for bases. This includes weapons, shields, tweaks, augmenters, grav disrupters, etc. This is to address some instances where very expensive or rare ship gear feels required to compete at the highest levels of BvB. We are also creating some new base items to fill the slots where we consider that ship gear is currently legitimately being used on bases, and the BP’s for the new gear will come out in advance of the next universe, so people will have a chance to build the new items.

In addition, we have a proposal that I would like to put forward to the players to discuss, and that is a new rule in the game where permanent bases and drones in a galaxy owned by the same team can not be aggressively tractored. This means no dragging out drones or bases one at a time in order to isolate and kill them, and less need for the defending team to be online in order to fight off tractor ships or pop disruptors. The defenders can still tractor attacking bases, though. The dev team feels like this would be a good change, but we would like to hear what you guys think.

**Update** issue has been fixed and server is back up. **

If you recently used spacepoint in game, had them removed from your account, but did not receive the aug reset / skin / ship form. Please make a ticket in the account category with for title SP Bug:accountname where youll replace accountname with the name of the account on which the problem occured obviously. http://support.starsonata.com/

If you already had a ticket, for simplicity sake (and to expedite it), please make a new ticket under the specific name format provided here and include the tracking ID of the previous ticket in the ticket message.

In the ticket be sure to include which ingame transaction had the problem, and if you attempted it multiple times or not. You are welcome to add how much SP you think you lost altho I will still have to verify everything before refunding spacepoints. The special name format is simply so that i can handle those tickets asap since i do not normally handle tickets. Those tickets will be handled as fast as i can do them, but depending on the volume please expect up to 48hours delay.

Jey

Steady progress on the global event system. All the code required to implement the event system is done, prototype for the trading event is nearly functional.

Pixel

More even fancier visages for ai stations!

Col Legno

I finished up the palace fixes.

Ryan

After getting everyone’s opinion on team skills, it was pretty solidly in favor of making team skills small perks so we’ll go forward with that. I added a “Blueprint Pack” item type that will add several blueprints of a certain type, so that we can remove some clutter from AI bases and drop tables. Website patching is in progress, so we’ll have Blue Dwarf’s shiny new website map up soon as well as a publicly available api for anyone to grab map data from.

Player questions!

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

The Problem

As many of you are aware, we have a problem currently with team skills. There are a small number of them (namely Roster and Galactic Control) that are absolutely essential for teams to function beyond a certain size while the rest of the skills are mostly ignored. This also creates additional difficulties for new teams as they don’t have the required skills. After several discussions we have a couple possible solutions, and we’d like to see what everyone would prefer.

Solution 1

Team Skills reset every uni and the acquisition rate is increased significantly. Skills like roster and galactic control would not fit under this system and would be removed. Other skills would be beefed to have pretty sizable effects by the end of the uni. This would eliminate permanent team progression, which could be seen as both good or bad.

Solution 2

Team Skills stay in their current form, but are re-balanced to all be “nice perks” with skills such as roster and galactic control being removed/nerfed. New teams would have accelerated XP gain for the first several levels, so that they can get some meaningful perks faster.

Other changes

Team Skills Resets

If we go with solution 2, we will add the ability for teams to reset their skills for a cost. This should allow teams to experiment with their skills without feeling locked in permanently. The cost would scale based off of how long it has been since the team last reset their skills.

Alternate Team XP sources

We’ll be adding new sources of active team XP aside from just the passive xp gain from score. The primary of these will be boss kills with teammates. Teams will be able to get roughly equivalent XP through this system as a current top 5 team gets passively through score (as a max) and will be the primary method for new teams to get their XP.

Survey

We’d love to hear your opinions on these two directions we could take team skills! We have a poll setup here that we’d like you to fill out to get a rough feeling for how everyone feels about where we head from here.

Jey

No real changes on my side, still working on the global event controller stuff. It’s progressing pretty well. Lots of internal changes in the code, but nothing that players can really see xD.

Pixel

More snazzy base visages: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?p=747470#p747470.

Col Legno

I fixed some bugs including one in which you couldn’t transfer higher tech base bound gear to lower tech ships. I also changed the SM 21/22 commod dynamics from being a palace like base to a commodity that can be put onto any user base to make the SM commod spawn. Put in a fix for current palace issues that needs some testing, but then should be good to go for patching.

Blue Dwarf

Coursework done! Hopefully will get some time to work more on the item viewer over the next week.

MicroCapacitor

Tracking down and removing galaxies using the neurokey system and replacing them with the auto unlocking system on their wormholes.

Theodore

Began working on creating superitem versions of common tweaks as per on the suggestion system!

Player questions!

What race would you be from Star Control?

Jeff: I’d be the Shotfixti.
Jeff: So I could get the 1000 Shotfixti maidens or whatever that was.
Jey: Orz !
Blue Dwarf: Isn’t there special also the fact that they could commit suicide?
Jeff: Yeah, but they get 1000 Shotfixti maidens before that.
Blue Dwarf: Also you hope.
Jeff: That was a plotline, there was like one old Shotfixti that was the last guy and then they like found a bunch of women him, then he repopulated the whole race by himself.
Blue Dwarf: Pretty sure that counts as incest.
Jeff: Nah.
Pixel: You sick.
Blue Dwarf: Um… I don’t know what race I’d be. I quite like Pkunk, just flying around shooting in all directions and shouting insults at your enemy.
Pixel: Ur-Quan Kzer-Za
Pixel: totally not iq’bana
Pixel: Syreen.
Pixel: Oh sorry, got a bit carried away with this.

How did you find Star Sonata?

Jey: I… don’t remember…. too long ago ><
Theodore: Found it on one of the list of mmo websites.
Blue Dwarf: The 3d Monochrome Tint advert back in late 2007 on http://freewebarcade.com while playing silly flash games.
Jeff: http://goproblems.com
Pixel: I wanted to build bases in a MMO environment where I knew they would function while I’m not online, and then I found SS.
Ryan: I was slacking off on schoolwork and stumbled onto it from who knows where.
MicroCapacitor: I found it randomly on a computer downstairs and played it with a friend.
Precursor: I was searching for a sci fi mmo and found SS in early 2003, back when Adum / Jeff / Kilroth and Mhammett still played off and on lol
Precursor: Or was in 20002. I don’t remember now

How did you come up with the Ur’qa and subspace alien languages?

Jeff: You’d have to ask Calypso about that.
Blue Dwarf: I kind of know about that anyway.
Jeff: I think Adum made the original, some of the original, ur items just kinda randomly, but maybe I’m wrong.
Blue Dwarf: Pretty much yeah, from what I know he he sorta came up with stuff and then Calypso just like added stuff and then made that translation document.

Blue Dwarf: For the Aveksaka, Calypso looked and picked a real language to use to base the language on, he found a translator and we started translating and concatenating words together. The language he chose was Sanskrit.

Before that though, we need some more questions as we’re running low on the good ones! So please ask away.

Jey

Still working on the global event system

Ryan

Web server stuff in preperation of somethings waiting to go in.

Pixel

Lots of snazzy base visages

Col Legno

Discussed ways to rethink the SM21 commod base to make a more seamless experience in obtaining SM21 and 22 commods. Going to get working on that.

Player questions!

We didn’t do any, but I have a snazzy idea to make them better in the future.

Before that though, we need some more questions as we’re running low on the good ones! So please ask away.

As I mentioned in the weekly meeting blog, I’ve been working on a new feature for the star sonata server, that I like to call the “global event system”.

My goal with the system, is to bring back some sort of coherence between the AI in the universe. Currently while we have multiple types of ai (from trader, to miner to pirate etc) you can’t really see their difference and in some case they don’t work nearly as well as before.
This is mostly due to the fact that those AI work alone and only have access to their own data. While this was fine on a small single layer universe, as the universe grew they became unable to achieve their objective on a reliable basis.

There is also the problem that, since the ai are unable to do their specific work, they don’t feel like they contribute to the universe other than just giving xp and drop when killed and being target for some missions.

The global event system will in essence be the part that regive AI their purpose by providing them with specific “events” (in most cases, event that both players and ai can participate in).
Every event will have some kind of indication somewhere (maybe a rumor section in ai base, or global message, or could even be random ai talking in gal chat) when they happen.

The reason it is needed and i can’t just improve the ai to do it on their own, come down to complexity and performance. Ai like most of our objects, are restricted to accessing what is within their galaxy. There are exceptions to this, but those exceptions must be very short on cpu load.
The calculations needed to properly generate those event and keep them controlled is much larger than we can realistically fit without severely slowing down the server.
The global event system will be a system that slowly gather all the informations needed to generate those event, in one place that only it can access. Then in a separate thread analyse that information to figure the best event to initialise if any.

Currently there is only 2 of such events being created, but more will be added overtime as the system become more complete.

* The first event, is a trading event. The system will find source and destination trade routes that are profitable, then create a temporary / limited event where if you buy the commod from the source, and sell it at the destination at a guaranteed profit and make up a story explaining the route (rats ate the rations, workers are depressed and the likes)
** To ensure that only items bought from the source during the event are considered, a new type of item will be created. Name is still to be decided, but basically will be a special type of crate containing the commodity.
*** The crate has a commodity defined inside.
*** when it is bought / sold it remove / add from the stock of the defined commodity
*** when the event is over the crate would transform back into the normal commodity automatically. To ensure you cannot stockpile those items to screw with the event later on.
** During the first half of the event, the source will have its stock replenished multiple times (specific will depend on the event), and the destination will buy infinite.
** At the last half of the event, the source will stop selling the items, but the destination will continue buying until the event is over. This is to make it as easy as possible for trader to actually sell their goods, while still limiting the source / credits input.
** The event will sell and buy those item higher than the normal highest price for those items, so mass buying them to sell the regular commodity later is a bad idea (you’d be guaranteed to lose money)

When this event is active, all trader, pirate and regular police ai that are within a certain distance of the route, will participate in the event.
* Trader ai will obviously, run the trade route (buy at source, sell at destination
* Police ai will patrol the route attacking whoever attack the traders
* Pirate ai will attack trader that they feel they can defeat if the total level of the pirates in the galaxy is higher level than the total level of polices. After killing a trader, they loot and sell the items to the destination then rinse and repeat. If there is too many cops, they will simply patrol until conditions are ripe.
Players with some of the item in their inventory will be considered traders by the pirate ai.
Players who attacked a pirate recently will be considered police by the pirate ai.
If a pirate is attacking a trader and then killed by player, the trader will reward the player part of the profit he made in the event (if multiple players are involved, then it is split using the same formula as xp)

* The second event, is a war between ai team kind of event. It’s a pretty straight forward event. Similar to the trade event, an indication of this event happening will show up somewhere visible, either the ai gossiping about it, or the bulletin board etc.
** in the first part, 2 ai teams of similar strength will regroup in 2 galaxies not too far from the battleground. Extra ai will be spawned to ensure the match is interesting to watch
** once enough of the forces gathered. They will be set to hate the other team and all rush to their target galaxy.
** inside the target galaxies, a few drones for each team will be spawned. Those drones will give 2hours long aura boost varying depending on the ai team (could be based off an average of their gear value count etc)
*** one of those drones will grant splash / chain damage resistance and disable death blossom (sorry gunners, but this would be way too easy if you could just instant splash one side). This effect will be ai only.
If a player attack one of the 2 teams of ai, the other team will invite him in a squad. If the player accept, he will then be squadded with the team of ai he sided with, and receive those 2 hours long aura boosts as well as shared xp from the kills.
Once the galaxy only contain one of the 2 ai team. The war is considered over. At this point, the winning team will see its spawn number in the galaxy doubled for a period of 2 hours (so if you have a mission / drop that you want from one of the 2 team, you might want to make it win).
The first part (call to arm) will last around 30 minutes. The fight will be balanced to last about 1 hour. Altho player intervention can make it much shorter.

There is a 3rd event that i have been thinking about, which would be pvp related (bounty hunting event) but it is still on the drawing board and nowhere near ready to be announced in detail. We will first have those 2 events implemented and running for a bit before we make one that could have a much bigger impact on players gameplay.