Hey, everyone!

As I love informing you guys on everything, I’ve asked the others from the dev team if I could post information from our weekly meetings (yes, we have those!)

Whenever possible, I’ll make some notes on the weekly meetings and I’ll update you guys on what’s been done, and what’s being planned in the near future (except for surprises, because, you know… surprises).

Anyway, we’re off!

So, who’s done what?

Blue Dwarf

Blue Dwarf’s stopped easter. (Boo!)

He’s also worked on some achievement bugs for Steam. He’s working on implementing achievements such as building a base, etc.

Ryan

Ryan has been working on the payments through Steam, to allow you guys to buy both spacepoints and subscriptions through Steam. He also figured out a bug with subspace spawners that were causing hundreds of ai to spawn an hours and fixed it. Before the fix there were over 1606 ai ships in a gal!

Jey

Jey’s been working on the integration of the new server, doing a lot of testing of it all. It looks very positive. Quoting him, the database is “swimming in ram”, the server should hold our live + test servers quite easily.

He’s going to do a full patch, hopefully friday or monday (in the best case scenario. If he encounters any issues, this could be delayed). If all goes well, the server will be migrated the following day.

Jeff

Jeff has been working on banners for Steam. Here’s a few of them! These are some first versions, we’ve been discussing on which ships we should use for this. They should be interesting, but not too high tech (so players can pilot the “banner” ships quite quickly in the game). They also shouldn’t be too dark, since it’s often against a dark background so the ships would get lost in it.

Suit

I’ve been… Making this blog, I guess? I have no idea.

I’ve been playing around ingame, spawning stuff for people in the Colosseum, which was really fun. I got to talk to a lot of you guys, you all gave me some really nice input and/or feedback which I’ve also discussed with the team. I’ll definitely try and be ingame more often.

So, that’s it for this week! As I’ve said ingame, after the server migration, we’ll be able to hand out some Steam beta keys. I’ll keep you updated on this.

See you next week!

As a few may have heard, we have been investigating the possibility of changing provider for our servers. This did not come from our current ones being insufficient, although the webserver was rather overloaded.
But instead came from Jeff mentioning he saw some Hacker News post praising a datacenter company in Quebec called OVH.

After that point, I had a look at what they offered, prices / specs and multiple reviews I could find on the internet.
The price for the specs were… pretty darn impressive, to get machine a bit stronger than what we currently have, we end paying about half our current price but, specs arent everything and the price felt too good to be true.




None the less, we ordered a machine for a week so that we could test the quality of their network and hardware when compared to our current machines.

on liquid we currently have

• www:
  • AMD Phenom(tm) II X6 1055T Processor (6×2.8GHz)
  • 16 gb ram ddr3 1333MHz
  • 300gb sas raid1 (15k rpm) for the database/webserver
  • 1Tb 7200rpm sata drive for the immediate backups (theres 2 other levels of backups hosted externaly, this is just for the quick every 30minutes backups)
  • 100mbit connection

• liberty:
  • AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6128 x4 (32x2GHz)
  • 16 gb ram ddr3 1333MHz
  • raid 1 sata 7200rpm for the main os / source code
  • 1x ssd drive for the universe save (reduce the lag impact from the save to <2ms instead of the old 130ms that often occured on regular harddrive).
  • 1gbit connection (to ensure minimal latency to the game at all time even with a lot of players)

the machines we are getting on ovh are

• www:
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 v2 @ 3.50GHz (6cores with H-T 12threads)
  • 128 gb ram ddr3 1600MHz
  • 300gb ssd raid 1 for the database/webserver
  • 2tb sata raid1 7200rpm for the immediate backups
  • 500gb of external backup storage (free with most dedicated servers at ovh)
  • 1gbit/500mbit out unlimited connection (1gbit burst up to 10secs)
  • ddos hardware protection from 100gbit/sec to 500gbit/sec depending on the specific

• liberty:
  • Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2670 v2 (20×2.5ghz with hyperthread so 40logical threads, turbo 2.9ghz and maintained at low temperature)
  • 256 gb ram ddr3 1600MHz
  • 3x ssd 300gb in raid1 for the os install and a partition in raid0 for higher performance uni save
  • 500gb of external backup storage (free with most dedicated servers at ovh)
  • 1gbit/500mbit out unlimited connection (1gbit burst up to 10secs)
  • ddos hardware protection from 100gbit/sec to 500gbit/sec depending on the specific

Now, on paper this mean that the website should be a lot more responsive once we switch.
The database will have so much ram available for caching that it should be a world apart from our current configuration, not to mention the cpu being by far superior and so is the storage on which the database will be.
What this also mean for the webserver, is that we will be able to run test servers with full universe without impacting performance all that much.

Currently test server is rather limited on full uni testing, it cannot have both livetest and test running full uni at the same time or the memory drops too low and the database ends up affected.
With this new server, we should in theory have no problem with 2 or maybe even 3 -4 test servers (private test servers for the content devs to run their own separate player related tests etc).
Offcourse cpu is limited, but servers with 1-2 players on them use very little cpu so theres generally no issue here for a test server.

For liberty we are looking at an improvement of a little over 250% performance all around the board. There is a slight drop in the number of physical cores (from 32 to 20) but the performance per core is quite a bit faster.
Both in lag scenario (1500ai fighting in a single galaxy) and the current uni without players, the performance was always 2-3 times faster on the new server compared to the current liberty.




Now for the part the specs and paper rarely properly cover, the connection reliability. As some of you know, it’s been a constant issue over the years.
Some people unable to connect even tho others can, part of the world losing access and need to rely on proxy / gateway temporarily, frequent disconnection even tho their internet never lost the connection as far as they can tell etc.

It is extremely hard to properly test for those things due to the apparent randomness involved, so I came up with a test that I think should catch it as best as possible to allow for comparison.
No server is perfect and our network code is extremely fragile (its been a problem for a long time, the slightest corruption or interruption is often enough to cause a full disconection), therefor having a network that experience less of those interruption sound like a good improvement

Now for the specifics, I split the tests in 3 categories, each with their own frequency. All tests were ran on both liberty and the test machine we took on ovh for 5 days.

1. A ping test: Every second, each server pinged 49 locations (7 per test regions) around the world looking for packetloss / disconnection as well as latency.
2. A route test: Every 5 minutes, each server took a snapshot of the route used to reach all 49 locations to compare with the previous and note route change.
3. A bandwith test: Every 2 hours, each server ran a speed test using the speedtest.net command line tool to 21 (3 per test regions) different speedtest nodes spread around the world.

The ping test has up to 1 second error per grouped packet loss (1 packet loss is 0-1 sec, 2 packet loss in a row is 1-2 sec, 3 is between 2-3 secs etc.). Downtime that were identical to both liberty and the ovh server were removed (the target was likely down and not the route to it)
the new server had a total all around disconnections between 397 and 1489 seconds out of 432000 seconds tested (0.0009% to 0.0034% off the time when not all the international routes were functional)

• Africa Central: 193-835 seconds down (249ms)
• Asia: 112-154 seconds down (195ms)
• Australia: 32-157 seconds down (203ms)
• England: 27-117 seconds down (97ms)
• Germany: 23-106 seconds down (85ms)
• US south west: 6-78 seconds down (72ms)
• US east: 4-39 seconds down (19ms)

current liberty had a total all around disconnections between 866 and 2309 seconds out of 432000 seconds tested (0.002% to 0.0053% off the time when not all the international routes were functional)

• Africa Central: 393-1135 seconds down (280ms)
• Asia: 212-468 seconds down (195ms)
• Australia: 74-235 seconds down (207ms)
• England: 87-178 seconds down (120ms)
• Germany: 73-162 seconds down (105ms)
• US south west: 12-81 seconds down (60ms)
• US east: 15-50 seconds down (23ms)

Interestingly enough, the ping on the server based in Quebec, is lower on average (with the exception of the worst case scenario and that would be the US south west), this was not expected.
But it can be explained due to the effort OVH put on their network, they have a lot of private routes / deals with other providers to ensure good connections whenever possible (which is along other things, needed for their impressive ddos protection).
All in all, the downtimes were a lot shorter on the OVH network than on liquid’s.




the second test, theres a little too much data to be put in a way that would remain clear in a post (most routes tested are international, and imply 10-20 gateways), but there was a pretty clear difference in the routes used by each server.

The current liberty changed route on average twice per hour, rarely major change, just a different gateway here and here. Those change often happened at the same time a disconnection was found during a ping, but not always.

On the new server, there were very few actual route changes, 4-5 per day with the exception of central Africa, which saw about 2 every hours as well.




The third test was the bandwith test. While bandwith doesn’t equate to performance when you’re looking at a video game (you dont need 30mbit to play ss, especially not on download) it does give a somewhat good representation to the link quality and load, as a rule of thumb, if a link let you transfer faster, it mean its able to take a whole lot more load.
Keep in mind that while this is the average bandwith speed obtained using speedtest cli, a lot of those ended up thottled at one point or another along the line because it was only 1 source. When doing multiple different tests in similar location at the same time, the total bandwith nearly always approached 700/400 DL/UL

The current liberty network average for each regions DL/UL MBit/sec

• Africa Central: 97/38
• Asia: 84/24
• Australia: 138/96
• England: 157/43
• Germany: 165/52
• US south west: 443/319
• US east: 409/294

The new server network average for each regions DL/UL MBit/sec

• Africa Central: 122/44
• Asia: 124/74
• Australia: 238/126
• England: 357/213
• Germany: 365/252
• US south west: 343/189
• US east: 705/494

In a nutshell, trying as I may to find a problem with the new server location, I could not. All I could find were more reasons on why we should switch over. Altho liquid do have their incredible support team going for them (never had problems fixed as fast as with them).
OVH gives us quite a fair bit more power over the hardware which should normally greatly reduce the need to rely on the support (beyond hardware repairs).
Funnily enough this is something quite a few of the review on the internet actually complain about, their control panel is compared to most other services I tried, complex and dangerous.

The OVH server end up being way cheaper than our current ones, an order of magnitude faster and have a more reliable connection as far as I could test.

It’s that time of the year again, with all kinds of fun easter stuff!

Until the 13th of April, Easter Warren’s in Sol for a lot of fun missions to do.

The (Zombie) Easter Bunny is back as well, with a vengeance! Can you manage to kill him?

We also have the roaming rats and egg crates, as well as some Easter drops which drop… Everywhere!

Are you ready to hunt some eggs?

As an added bonus, we’ve added a +40% XP bonus until the end of the event. Enjoy, everyone!

Hey there guys, girls, and other people!

I wanted to update you guys on a few things. I’ve been quite busy on working on stats on my 2 new ships. The missions are done, I just have to think of one last thing, which I’m not going to spoil already.

The last time I made the stats, they were incredibly broken. Then I made them underpowered. Hopefully, this time I’ve got it just right! We’ve thought of some nice inbuilt extra’s for you guys. If I’ve done it correctly, they’ll be mid-range in their tech level, not too expensive and quite useful for everybody. After much thinking, I’ve also decided to keep their AI appearance, seeing how you could always add your own funky texture to it. It’d kind of ruin the AI-ship feeling if it would have another skin.

Now, what we’ve been waiting for. STEAM!

We’re working very hard on finishing up stuff, but look. LOOK AT THIS BEAUTY!

That’s right. I have it. Deal with it.

We’re still doing some finishing touches, like how it interacts with Steam. Since we don’t know what issues could pop up, I can’t give a definite date. Sorry guys! I’ll try and update you as soon as possible. I poke the others a lot of information, to try and keep you guys up to date as much as I am.

And finally, uni reset! It’s going to be this saturday, we have to change some stuff for Steam!

Just kidding.

Or not, who knows?

(I’m kidding, don’t worry. There won’t be a reset this saturday. A uni reset is always announced at least 2 weeks in advance, and with a special post about it.)

Hey everyone!

As a few of you have noticed from reading all chat and the forums, there has been some major rework to the spawners in Perilous Perilous Space. In this blog post I’ll quickly give you the details on what we’ve done.

The first time we launched Perilous Perilous Space, we did not have the time to test it as much as we should have, due to it being launched with the universe reset, and because it was a volunteer project that I was in charge of It turned out bigger than I expected!

Most of the galaxies looked like the one in the picture below. There were some unknown aspects of the code that I used, which I wasn’t aware of, that resulted in the AI swarming a lot. Most spawners would try to swarm, and all spawners were roaming, and they really only cared about jumping to other galaxies.

This meant that the majority of galaxies had a lot of AI jumping between wormholes. The unknown aspect of code was that teamed AI would automatically swarm together. In result, this made the content way harder than intended.

To address this, we had to go through some new values, and design the spawners in a new way. In the picture below, you can see how the new values behave in game.

The values themselves are based around the following structure:

• 75% of all AI are static. This means they don’t jump to other galaxies, they roam around in the galaxy that they spawn in
• 25% of all AI are roaming. This means that they will always jump to other galaxies, and their respawn location will be random
• All factions now have subteams, which means they will swarm to a minimum

In raw numbers, each galaxy should get around 8-15 AI in total. This will build up if you stay in the galaxy for too long, as the roamers would eventually catch you!

I should also mention that I increased the strength of the AI slightly since I lowered the total spawner amount.

And a big thanks to The SI who spent 40 minutes mass deleting the old spawners, so we could replace them with these new ones. He has been a great help in improving the Perilous Perilous Space.I encourage everyone to post feedback in this thread, and the next few weeks ahead I’ll probably try to finish some more items to improve the diversity of player obtainable content that is related to Perilous Perilous Space

Coming in the next full patch will be a feature to get bonus XP the first time you capture each type of ship. This is actually the very last part of a highly voted suggestion from a while ago called “Alternate XP Methods”.

Each character will have saved a list of the different types of hulls that he’s captured from wild AI. You can view your own list and your total count with a slash command, “/caps”. For now, the bonus XP is set to a flat 500 XP regardless of level. How many different ships can you capture? Gotta catch ‘em all!

He breathes fire and leads an army of powerful dragons… Beware the dragon master that resides within the depths of the dragon lair!

Ancalagon the Black is a dungeon version of Timotheus the Red. The boss himself and his guards are considerably stronger, but they use almost identical scripts. If you are interested in the raw details, keep reading.

The dungeon consists of two guard floors, which the player has to kill to be allowed entry to Ancalagon’s Lair. Since this is not an instance, we have made it so that the first gate stay unlocked for 10 minutes, and that the second gate stays unlocked for 30 minutes. This means, that if the gate is locked, no players have passed through within the last 30 minutes. If the gate is unlocked, players have passed through within the last 30 minutes. In the future, we might want to improve on this, but hopefully this will help players on determining whether there are someone in the boss room or not.

The guards that lead to the boss have short respawn times, and they hurt. Hopefully this will prevent people from camping the entrance.

And now for Ancalagon himself. Ancalagon is a Black Nightfury. He is extremely powerful, and I would recommend taking a large squad to fight him. He has several phases, so the fight itself should be quite lengthy.

Ancalagon has a 25% drop chance of dropping a Nightfury item from the same drop table that Timotheus the Red uses. To add to this, I also made a tweak crate and a holoprojector that he will drop every time he is killed. His lockout is 10 days, but the respawn is only 10 minutes.

Enjoy!

Hey everyone! I’m super thrilled to present some more screenshots of Perilous Perilous Space to you guys. In this blog post I’ll show you some of the challenges you can expect to encounter in Perilous Perilous Space. In the words of a wise man: “Prepare for battle!”

One major faction are the moonfighters. They are Selenites and Lunarians, who have sworn to protect the various moons in Perilous Perilous Space. They are extremely hostile to any Terran lifeforms. Some moonfighters roam around in the various galaxies and some were set to guard the several dungeons in Perilous Perilous Space.

Lunarians and Selenites are fighting side by side. They have sworn to drive any Terran lifeform out of Perilous Perilous Space, so their moons can be left alone from the Terran machinery.

The moonfighters aren’t the only ones with a strong hate towards Terran factions and Earthforce. In Perilous Perilous Space, there are also cyborgs. These were initially designed and developed by Earthforce scientists, but somewhere in the process they got corrupted, they were dumped in outer space and left to rust and rot. What Earthforce scientists didn’t predict was that these corrupted lifeforms were able to survive in outer space. They survived, and multiplied, and developed their own unique ships and technologies.

The Corrupted Cyborgs consist of four standard ships and two advanced ships.

Now, let’s visit some of the less common AI you will face. Like Perilous Space, there are also birds o’ prey present in Perilous Perilous Space. The Harrier and the Caracara strike from above, and take down any prey who doesn’t move out of the way fast enough.

And that UrQa there? Oh yes, that is an UrQa capital ship. This UrQa capital ship was once a great commander of the UrQa, but due to conflicts within the UrQa, it was banished from the rest of the UrQa fleet. It now roams around in Perilous Perilous Space, angry and upset, but it has not forgotten the arts of UrQa warfare…

And there is also room for one more faction, which you all know from before. Let me take you guys back in time. The Kalthi are ancient, they were wiped out by the UrQa. Kalthi are advanced fighters, specialized in warfare, but nobody saw much of their presence, since the Paxians reported that the Kalthi expeditions were destroyed. However, the Paxians didn’t look in the farthest corners of the universe. The Kalthi were able to establish a Kalthi Outpost somewhere in Perilous Perilous Space, a place where they could rebuild and try to regain communication with the Kalthi in Hyperion. However, due to extreme distances, the Kalthi have not been able to reach Hyperion, and most expeditions have been destroyed by the UrQa, and so they are hesitant to establish communication until they know for sure that they can safely reach Hyperion. Until then, the Kalthi are very aggressive towards any unknown lifeforms that enter the Perilous Perilous Space, as they fear that the UrQa are sending spies, possibly disguised as other lifeforms, in an attempt to find out why there were Kalthi expeditions sent from outer space towards Hyperion.

Now, it is up to you guys, noble Sonatians, to see if you actually dare to enter the Perilous Perilous Space. Gear up your strongest ships, prepare your fleets, and get ready to face… MADNESS.

Hey everyone! As some of you might have noticed, I’ve started doing more content development lately, and not so much bug support. Recently I’ve finished quite a lot of content additions, but one major content addition that was voted up on the player suggestions was to make a Perilous Perilous Space. So, let me give you guys a small taste of what it will be like.

Perilous Perilous Space will be an extension of the current Perilous Space, and all galaxies above Danger Factor 400, up to Danger Factor 500 will be considered Perilous Perilous Space. I must warn you however, the AI you will face in here will give you guys a serious fight – so prepare to spend some time in your escape pods!

There will be three new major factions, these make up the majority of all ships. However, there will be a nifty variety of different AI flying around, and I’ve also added in some roaming bosses. I’m not going to reveal too much about what is obtainable and not, but there will be a lot of rewards coming from roaming AI, and the roaming bosses will also be represented with their own dungeon versions and their own unique drops. Which brings me to the next part: dungeons.

Dungeons will now be a lot harder. However, most of the loot in these dungeons will be new additions, and will be high-end loot, like it was suggested by some players. We’re moving some pretty powerful items into these dungeons, and we will probably expand this mid-universe if needed. We want these dungeons to feel exclusive and unique, so we might just do some extra tweaking to them… You’ll see next universe I guess!

The most important part for us – management wise – is to make sure the universe generates the right danger factors and the dungeons, so they behave the way we want them to for the entire universe. There are some things we can add mid-universe, and since this project is based upon volunteer developer work, it has been short on time.

I hope you guys are looking forward to it, and you’re all welcome to come and play with my new lovely minions when the new universe has launched! Moahahahaha…

I have been collecting various skins that have been posted on the forums at various places, as well as creating new skins myself. In this latest client and server patch, here is a list of new skins that players will be able to use. This list is in alphabetical order of skin name, with columns specifying the ship/s that the skin applies to (some skins will work on multiple ships), and what the account name of the creator of the skin is.

The skins  Earthforce Police Battlecruiser,  Earthforce Police Battleship, Earthforce Police Cruiser, Earthforce Police Destroyer,  Earthforce Police Dreadnought,  Earthforce Police Zebra, HM1080, Rainbow-imizer and Rainbow-imizer+ have animations on them, and the images below corresponding to those ships have a link to a GIF file where you can see the animation that is featured in the skin. All of the areformentioned skins’ animations play continuously through a loop, the animation for the HM1080 plays when a weapon is first used after undocking, and resets once docked again.

The skins except from Adamantiumized Samgrahak’ayu, Ember Vazi, Frozen Zeus, Hybridized Black Paxian Battle Frigate, and the Neon Machine + may have their engine mounts not appearing correctly where they should be; I do not know if the problem was fixed in the latest client and server patch, but I will tell you when it does get fixed if it has not been already. The Zebucart Mark 2 skin I believe appears approximately 3% smaller than it should be on the ships, due to the volcom model being scaled to the size of the ships the skin applies to; this is something that I will try to fix.

I plan to add more skins in the future, such as a skin for the Battle Sphere and Singularity sphere that changes their model to have a slightly cubic shape compared to what they are now, and a skin for the Wattage and Resistance each that replaces the glowing spheres on the back of the ships with a miniature version of a star that is seen in the galaxies in Star Sonata. Also, any players who have not received a free copy of the skin that they designed that is currently in the game please send me a forum pm.

Skin name	Image of skin	Ship/s that the skin can be used for	Account name of creator of skin
Adamantiumized Samgrahak’ayu		Samgrahak’ayu	xcrunner5
Earthforce Police Battlecruiser		Earthforce Battlecruiser	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Battleship		Earthforce Battleship	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Cruiser		Earthforce Cruiser	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Destroyer		Earthforce Destroyer	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Dreadnought		Earthforce Dreadnought	egrosphere
Earthforce Police Zebra		Zebra	egrosphere
Ember Vazi		Vaziayu	Sk1rm1sh
Frozen Zeus		Zeus Throne	grimer
Hephaestus Machine Frame		Hephaestus Machine	egrosphere
HM1080		Hephaestus Machine	thecrazygamemaster (combat mode animation made by egrosphere)
Hybridized Black Paxian Battle Frigate		Paxian Battle Frigate	joku1999
Neon Machine +		Hephaestus Machine+	Tomzta09
Rainbow-imizer		Equanimizer, Equaminizer	egrosphere
Rainbow-imizer+		Equanimizer+	egrosphere
Zebucart Mark 2		Zebucart, Zebucart+, Advanced Zebucart, Oversized Zebucart, Micro Zebu	egrosphere
Zebu Master Mark 2		Zebu Master, Zebu Master+	egrosphere