This week’s update is going to further cover the changes and additions coming to the alien invasion announced last week. Keep reading to find out more!

Firstly, I’ve made some changes to the way overall alien ownership is calculated. Currently, it’s extremely easy to keep the overall ownership down (and negate any of the effects that alien ownership has) by clearing out the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms of the layer. So I’ve added an ownership weight to each arm and instead of taking a true average of the ownerships of each arm, I’m taking a weighted average. This means that ownership in the lower level arms is valued less while ownership in the higher level arms is valued more. With the current weights, 25% of the overall ownership is contributed by the Ekam, Dve and Tra arms and the remaining 75% is contributed by the Katur, Pajca and Sas arms. This was especially important to do considering ownership is going to control a lot more than it currently does. Not only will it affect colony income, but it will control a lot of spawners in both Subspace and P-Space.

This past week I did a lot more work on the back end of things as the major features discussed last week were mostly implemented. This mainly meant updates to the alien invasion page of our admin control interface. There were some things we couldn’t set without changing the configuration files for the invasions (which means a server restart!) and all of them are now accessible via the control panel, including the new ownership weights. These additions are good for two reasons. First, it makes testing out anything invasion related a lot faster and easier — being able to manually set the alien ownership levels made testing out the ‘growth’ factor of the world boss a lot simpler! Secondly, it will allow us to make tweaks on the live server to some aspects of the invasion we couldn’t before as well as some extra manual control for events if we want.

Finally, I’ve done a small pass at the alien loot. I’ve added a few new items, but more importantly, I’ve added some rolls from the instance loot tables onto some of the harder aliens spawned by the subspace invasion! Paired with an experience increase, this will hopefully address some of the risk vs. reward issues we have with killing the harder outposts in subspace.

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

This week’s update is going to cover a bevy of changes and additions that are being made to Subspace and Alien Invasions! Keep reading to find out more!

Over the last few weeks the dev team has been internally discussing subspace, alien invasions and what we can do to motivate players to participate in the layer a bit more. Most importantly though, we wanted to recapture the feel and fun factor of the first universe after we added the layer. I am sure everyone remembers how hectic and overrun the layer was and more importantly, how epic the battles there felt. So this past week I’ve been working on quite a few changes based on our discussions to shake up the layer and really bring back the invasion feel.

Firstly, I’ve made some small changes to the default parameters for invasions in order to increase the number of aliens that spawn dramatically during invasions. The new parameters will increase the number of eggs in a clutch, the overall number of clutches that spawn during an invasion and increase the duration of the invasion. The new parameters also allow for a much faster and more dramatic ramp up. This will make the actual invasions a lot more hectic. As an added bonus for fighting during invasions, the aliens spawned by invasion spawners will have a significant XP bonus. Finally, I’ll be taking an in-depth look at the loot you can get from invasions to make sure that it’s worth facing the alien hordes. Invasion alien loot will definitely see a boost in quality.

Secondly, I’ve made some substantial changes to the way alien garrisons work. When the aliens ‘win’ an invasion, they set up an outpost and a limited number of  roaming guards. For starters, I’ve tracked down an fixed the bug causing multiple outposts to spawn — this will make recapturing an alien galaxy a lot less tedious. Additionally I’ve increased the numbers of guard aliens quite a bit. This was done to address the issue of the layer being barren between invasions. The biggest change I made however was a change to how the number of guards scale. Previously, they scaled over time (much like the invasion spawners do), with the changes they scale based on the proximity of their galaxy to other alien owned galaxies. This means a galaxy in the middle of a clump of alien owned territory is going to create more alien guards than one on the outskirts.

To further facilitate this, I’ve changed the way aliens pick which galaxies they plan on invading. Currently they just pick a random galaxy in their slice of the layer from the pool of remaining galaxies. With the changes aliens will prioritize picking galaxies adjacent to currently owned territory. The effect is they will create pockets of alien owned space in the layer in order to better take advantage of the new way garrison spawning works.

Finally, I’ve added a new spawner feature that will allow us to do a lot of really, really cool things. It’s a prerequisite to spawn based on the ownership percentage of the alien layer. We have two planned uses for it. The first is a set of alien spawners that will be added to Perilous Space. These will kick in when the aliens have ownership of a chunk of the layer an the aliens spawned by them will be aggressive towards both players an AI. It should definitely add an interesting twist to P-Space if players let the aliens build up in Subspace. Secondly, this feature will control the spawn of a brand new roaming boss in Subspace.

This boss is called the Gurujana Ekam and will make Astro-Santa look like a chump. This alien will only spawn when the layer is at least 25% occupied and his strength will go up and down based on alien ownership. At his weakest he will take multiple squads to down, at his strongest he will be next to impossible. In return for killing him players will receive a token that can be traded in for a substantial amount of credits and a special mystery reward. The rewards haven’t been entirely decided upon but they will not be limited to items from subspace and will definitely include some rare and hard to get items.

That’s all I have for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then keep posting your questions, comments and suggestions to the forums!

This week’s update will cover a multitude of bug fixes that took place last week and a new feature that will soon be in the game.

This is going to be a bit shorter for a weekly update since most of my week was spent handing support tickets and bug reports from the forums — that is to say, I spent a lot of time tracking down bugs! The following is a brief list of what was fixed up!

• Augmenter Bonus stat strings are being removed from drones to avoid stat string confusion.
• Updated a few zones in Perilious Space so they’re properly flagged as premium space so non-premium players can’t access them with transwarp devices.
• Fixed an issue where irradiated Permanent Drones were being destroyed preventing capture.
• Fixed an issue with the Ship Statistics window not displaying hostility in the permanent bonuses table.
• Fixed the tooltip text for the docking button on the lower bar of the client.
• Fixed the issue causing destroyed drones to lose their visage and go invisible.
• Fixed an issue causing subspace outposts to get additional limited spawns.

These are just a few of the more noticeable issues I took care of and with those fixes finished, I closed the week out with a new feature.

For those of you not familiar with it, we have a system in game to automatically level out the number of skill points a player has to the proper amount should they get into a situation where they have too many or too few. This situation is called a Skill Point Debt (or Credit). If a player has too many skill points, they’ll only gain 4 per level up instead of 5. If they don’t have enough, they’ll gain 6 per level up. This has been around for quite some time, but it’s feasible that very few people really know about it since there wasn’t any way in game for players to actually know they had an incorrect amount of points.

If you are in debt, or need to be credited, there is now a line in the Avatar dialog that will denote this. If you have the proper amount of points, this line won’t appear for you at all. In addition, when you level up you will now be told how many skill points you are receiving in the even chat tab. This is extremely useful for new players since they’ll more clearly be able to link leveling up with skill points (if they skip all the mission dialogs). In addition, if you have a debt or credit, it will also display how many points you are in debt or need to be credited.

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update about the next project I am starting on! Until then feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

Hey guys, Bageese here. It’s been a pretty kick ass few years at Star Sonata for me. I joined the game in 2009, was part of the very first Hephaestus kill, and became the Community Manager in January 2012. It has been a privilege to get to know so many of you and interact with you in game, on our forums, and in PM.

As some of you have probably noticed, I haven’t been the most active one recently, and there’s a reason for it. Today is my last day as Star Sonata’s Community Manager and my last day at Star Sonata. SI will be replacing me as support lead, and moderation lead. Blue Dwarf will be the head of community shenanigans, such as events and all that goodness. I’m also glad to report that Voomy has returned and is spearheading getting the bug tickets resolved and back to manageable levels (never ever let Jey be the default on a ticket category! His hometown will flood!). If you’re waiting on your prizes for some of the contests from this year expect a PM about that in the next 24 hours.

I’m not leaving for another game, no game could capture my heart quite like Star Sonata and it’s community. I’m actually leaving to follow my lifelong dream of becoming a school teacher and helping kids. I am beyond excited and I am so ready to begin the next chapter of my life.

As is customary in SS leaving posts here’s my list of personal messages to as many people as I can remember.

The Old Strawberry Pancakes – Thanks for carrying me along in a little zebra and indulging my Pos Wave fantasies. If it wasn’t for your passion for Star Sonata I wouldn’t be posting this blog post today.
To Zero Gravity – My first team filled with so many kickass people. ^_^ Thanks for showing me the ropes and giving me so many laughs and good times.
To all teams that started wars and poked people. You made my job so interesting… In a good way!
The Mod Team – Keep rocking it. Seriously. You are the unsung heroes of SS and have helped in more ways than you know.
Jey – Thanks for keeping me straight and sane, and for answering all my stupid questions.
BlueDwarf- For keeping me not straight and very insane, and for helping me do really stupid things.
SI – I’m staring at you right now as I’m typing this. Hi. Thanks for your help, for listening, and for your patience.
Vert, Yclepticon, Suit – For being so active and helping me out in so many ways. SS wouldn’t be functioning without you three keeping us straight.
All dev team members past and present – Many people came to us from the game, and it was your drive and determination that makes the game so awesome today. I’d name you all, but there are so many of you. <3
And Jeff, for giving me the flexibility to carve my own path and giving me an opportunity I will remember fondly for a lifetime.

And finally to you reading this, yes you. Thank you for being awesome and being a part of the most unique online community in the world and making the last few years so amazingly kickass for me. I was the admin, manager, but thanks to so many of you I was also a friend which is better than anything else. You guys are amazing.

So long and thanks for all the fish,

Marty (Bageese)

This week’s update will discuss a few new features and updates that will be coming to the game in the near future! Keep reading to find out more!

Since I didn’t have a large project to work on this week (the base rebalance change have been mostly completed), I instead worked on a few smaller projects that have been recently requested as well as some bug fixing.

The first of my small projects for the week was to add in a way for people who have used a Rovert on their base to know they’ve done that. Currently the only way to check if you’d upgraded your construction bay was to try to upgrade it again — something that could waste a lot of commodities since you’d be building extra Rovert Upgrades. My solution was to add a line of text to the construction bay dialog to tell players exactly how much of a bonus they are getting to the bay. I’ve also reduced the alpha a bit on the background image of the construction dialog to increase readability of the text on that tab.

Secondly, I made another small change to the Ship Statistic window. I’ve added a checkbox to toggle showing critical hit information on the weapon stats table. Clicking this checkbox will do three things. First, it will update the damage column to reflect how much your weapon would critical hit for. Secondly, it will update the DPE column to show the damage-per-energy your critical hits do. Finally, it will update the DPS column to show the expected change in your average damage-per-second based on critical hit percentage and strength. This DPS change isn’t going to be 100% accurate considering critical hits are randomly determined, but it should give you a fairly good approximation. I know there are currently suggestions to add hostility, sniper analysis and other unique damage modifiers to the window and I have been thinking about a ways to integrate them but I don’t have any good solutions yet.

Finally I’ve worked on a fairly useful change to debris visages! I’ve modified the attached effect system used for Holoprojectors slightly — so we can attach effects to other types of objects, not just space ships. This in turn allows us to attache additional effects to things like debris, something we will be doing for debris containing neurobound items. This will give players a visual indication that the item they are about to scoop is bound so they can better decide who is going to be the one scooping it!

That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update on what I’ve been up to! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums.

This week’s update will get everyone up to speed on exactly what I’ve been working on since I’ve returned from vacation. It includes some new tweak types, some bug fixing and a few other changes I’ve been working on as part of the planned base rebalance! Keep reading to find out more!

Firstly, a short announcement — with the new patch I’ve been able to push Mira live! Hopefully players are enjoying the new content!

Second up I’ve worked on three new aura types for Field Generators and Neurotweaks. The first of these is a new aura type for Projectile Speed. Next I worked on a Transference Power aura type and finally, a Transference Efficiency aura type. These three aura types were requested by ycleption as part of his base rebalance. Since we’re continuing our decoupling of combat skills from trade skills (and some unintended bonuses stations get from class skills are going away) his goal is to have a line of station-only, class locked super items to aid in galaxy defense. These new aura types will more than likely be used there. They function pretty much as expected. Projectile Speed increases the maximum speed any projectile based weapon travels. Transference Power increases the transference damage done and Transference Efficiency decreases damage taken from outgoing heals.

On the subject of decoupling — a lot of unintended bonuses stations were getting from class skills is being removed. Seer will no longer benefit station radars, Engineer will no longer get bonuses to station tweaking and neuro tweaking on their stations and Snipers will no longer give bases projectile speed bonuses.

Thirdly, the project that took up most of the time I spent working last week — outpost drones. These are another item planned to go in with the base rebalance and again were proposed by ycleption. These are temporary drones with a 24 hour lifespan that function almost identically to outposts. The main differentiation between their functionality and an outpost is that you must have at least one team owned station in the galaxy in order to own it. You can’t only have the drone. They’ll be decently geared, they also won’t count against the number of outposts your team can own but they will be rather pricey. The goal for these is to give players a way to BvB galaxies that aren’t on team borders — but have unowned territory nearby.

Finally, I did a fair amount of bug fixing! Jey patched while I was away on vacation and some of the new features coming in didn’t work entirely as intended and needed some fixing. Chief among these were a few issues with transwarps and the ship statistics window. First, with the new patch some refactored code for the Transwarp devices went live — unfortunately it also contained a bug with Fleet Commander transwarps. They were ignoring the distance requirements for taking along your friends. This was fixed, but that introduced another bug preventing transwarp usage entirely. This has also been fixed! As for the issue with the ship stats window — the resistance table wasn’t properly updating when players equipped and unequipped diffusers. This made it a bit taxing to see just how effective your diffusers are at blocking incoming damage. This has also been remedied.

That’s it for this week’s update. I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then, feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums!

This patch introduce 2 new major features alongside the generic fixes / tweaks etc.

– The new ship info window, containing all sorts of useful information about your ships current stats.

– The ship paintjob (skins) which are available in every spacestation at a cost of 10 spacepoints each for the first iteration of the system.
Not all ships have skins available but many of the mid to high end ships do. See at the end of this post for a preliminary list of the skins available.
- Once you buy a skin, it is permanently added to your account, all your characters can use it at any time on any ship that they own. You can also use skins on your slaves, but transfering the slave will cause it to lose the skin on server restart (will probably be changed to a demo paintjob timer)
- Skins can be seen in the preview window when buying them and can be demoed 30 seconds for free.
** Winners of the skin contest will had their skins donated to their account.

bug fixes:
* Made it so a solarbody can’t get two different types of ruins (you could only access one anyway)
* Players can no longer transwarp docked ships.
* Made it so you can’t equip fighter bays or missile launchers on ships with 0 weapon slots
* Stations now dropped in attempt to BvB keep track of that fact
** Altered the enemy-lines abandonment to only abandon bases from failed BvB attempts
* Fix for missions auto-abandoning when the server has been up for around two weeks
* Fixed an issue causing the alt key to become locked when alt-tabbing on some systems. (does not affect the locking of thrust / brake / firing that are on purpose)
* Fixed ‘Destroyed was destroyed by ‘ typo-bug
* Error message changed from ‘&myguy doesn’t belong to any squad’ to ‘You don’t belong to any squad’ when trying to do squad actions without one
* Fixed autopilot to unknown galaxy message from “Traveling to .” to “Traveling to unknown Galaxy”
* Fixed an issue with the rightclick -> activate control bot not working sometimes when the ship had never been opened.
* Fixed an issue where the weapon manager did not reset properly on reconnection.
* Fixed an issue causing inventory to not display (especially with higher /nf value)
* Fixed an issue with scoop speed.
* Hopefully fixed the issue causing docked ships to appear when docking.
* Fixed rts control for drones. They should now properly attack what you tell them to (target itself to reset to default behavior), if they are combat only drone, targeting yourself or a friendly will cause them to revert to normal behavior, and the inverse is also true for pure healing drones. targeting an enemy will cause them to revert to default behavior.

optimizations:
* Optimized client performance when a lot of objects are created or destroyed constantly.
* Network optimization reducing the bandwidth output by the server in busy area by nearly 40% (download rate from the player perspective).
* Optimized the low level network handling code.

content:
* Fixed an issue with mission item rewards and autocomplete.
* Rudimentary Augmenters will no longer drop from AI.
* Beefed the T22 Resistance ship
* Fixed description errors on the Aurora Beam line
* Increased docking speed on Zebucarts, Phunkas, Volcoms, Wingships (I), Recomissioned Cadet, Patrol Cadet, Pods, and Spirits.
* Marked a lot of ships as wild slave capturable
* Made the Bigger Green a little bit bigger
* New T9 Paxian Capital Ship, Pax Vega.
* New T5 Class Overloaders, with level 1 class skill requirement.
* T10 Class Overloaders now only have a level 5 class skill requirement.
* Removed civilization from Mzungu Tag Test exterminator
+ Lowered the respawn time on the Giant Asteroid in Mzungu Angani from 2 hours to 15 minutes
+ Removed Crack Whore Haven from the planet name list
* Added a ton of new contextual tutorial events for when the player gets stuck on the first few cadet missions
* Added auto-targeting for when you use a super item that contains a weapon and don’t have anything targeted
* Made the Target Dummy MK II highly resistant to everything but physical
+ Fixed generation issue which caused dungeons to sometimes have multiple boss galaxies with the same name
* Moved the default position of the tutorial bot dialog to not overlap the mission tracker/other dialogs
* Added glow map for Warden
* Fixed visison typo in the Station Mastery descrption
* Converted the Vampyre Black Heart to consume Distilled Life Force, obtained by breaking the Vampyre Life Force crate
* Improved the text of the player progression missions
* Roaming charges fix for copper
+ Added a new drop to Dark Curse to train Cloaking 20
* Bunch of new stuff for UrQa AI.
* Fixed a bug where you could capture ships which you didn’t have skills for
* Fixed ‘Radation’ -> ‘Radiation’ in various Color Empire missions
* Missile now self-destruct when the ship that launched them docks.
* Fixed ‘Poisonious’ -> ‘Poisonous’ typoes
* ‘crack whores’ -> ‘Entertainers’ in T21 solo missions
+ Made L Star solar systems a bit bigger
* Fixed Attached Drones which were flagged as non-scoopable being scoopable
* Added the first iteration for the skins system
* Added tooltip lightly explaining the benefit of DDS textures
* Replaced the Poseidon Trident kills in Drones of Olympus with other drones to kill
* Fixed a missing space in neurotweak descriptions
* Fixed ‘seconds seconds’ in item not charged error message
* Augmenters in the trade bay should now be properly colored.
* Changed the initial velocity of credits from a ship killed by a player so that the farther away the player is, the less initial velocity the credits gain. This is to help snipers killing guys from very far away so that they money doesn’t go flying out too far.
* Added a glowmap for shrimp
* Increased cash rewards on Platinum priority target missions in Strontium-90
+ Added Mira
* AI will now no longer use Oilheart’s Afterburner Device on low shields.
* Added the new ship stats window.
* The default credits and xp values for ai is now be lowered for fast spawning ai.
* Fixed the band at the top of the screen not being clickable
* Extra information on transwarp stat string
* Fixed Resilient skill, tweaked description
* Lowered autopilot text by 27 pixels.
* Added a close button to the radar window
* Added /HideHuiMethod, this change the hideUI key “h” behavior from a deadman switch to a toggle for the session (usefull for taking videos and stuff)
* Changed solar panel stat string from every 1.2sec to energy / sec.
* Made it so fighters are no longer displayed in the small target lists.
* When a squadmate is shot, every member of the squad in the galaxy will gain a minimal level of hate toward the aggressor (the kind that fade within 30 seconds if left alone).

Skins list in the first iteration. (most of the skins are available on many variants of a ship)

Delquad -> Chilled Metal
Hermes -> Kleptomaniac Prometheus
Pax Ships -> Assasination
Chromatichrome, Santa’s Special Sleigh -> Infected Chrome
Santa’s Special Sleigh -> Infected Sleigh
Apprentice Ward, Mini Mad Scientist -> Tron’s Ward
Apprentice’s Ward+ -> Tron’s Ward+
Hybridized Ward -> Hybridized Tron’s Ward
Deathstriker -> Ice Striker
Deathstriker+ -> Ice Striker+
Faranji Wingship, Unt Faranji Wingship -> Faranji Bloodstriker
Wattage, Divine Mini Wattage, Demonic Wattage -> Tesla’s Wattage
Lion -> Mane of Flames
Hybridized Lion -> Hybridized Mane of Flames
Space Blue Beta -> Hotrod Space Red Beta
Warden -> 5-0
Earthforce Capital Ship -> Earthforce Teal Edition
Prawn, Shrimp, Shrimp+, Kidd’s Prawn, Reconditioned Shrimp, Hybridized Shrimp -> Golden Shrimp
Zeus Throne, Jovian Lackey -> Igneous Throne
Zeus Throne, Jovian Lackey -> Molten Throne
Ancient Scoutship -> Eternal Sunset
Leviathan, Leviathan+ -> Dark Leviathan
Space Blue Gamma -> Space Green Gamma
Nightfury/Scrupling -> Firespitter
Poseidon Wave -> Citrus Wave
Red Photon Warship, Red Photon Heavy Cruiser, Red Photon Carrier, Red Photon Warship Prototype, Red Photon Support Cruiser, Red Photon Logistics Cruiser -> Blue Photon
Ares War Chariot/+, Wingship II Pro -> Ornamented Chariot
Lion -> Liger
Hybridized Lion -> Hybridized Liger
Zebra, Hybridized Zebra -> Classic Zebra
Vulture, Hornet -> Lightning Vulture
Apprentice Ward, Mini Mad Scientist, Apprentice’s Ward+, Hybridized Ward -> Blue Hybrid Ward
Panther, Panther Kitten, Hybridized Panther -> Black Panther
Panther, Panther Kitten, Hybridized Panther -> Neon Panther
Vaziayu -> Crystal Vaz
Hephaestus Machine -> Deep Blue
Prawn, Shrimp, Shrimp+, Kidd’s Prawn, Reconditioned Shrimp, Hybridized Shrimp -> Tiger Prawn
Wattage, Divine Mini Wattage, Demonic Wattage -> Kilo Wattage
Shrimp, Shrimp+, Prawn -> Dark Shrimp
Earthforce Frigate, Earthforce Battlecruiser, Hybridized Battlecruiser, Earthforce Battleship, Hybridized Battleship, Earthforce Dreadnought -> Dark Capital Ship
Scrupling -> Black Stone Scrupling
Scrupling -> Cream Stone Scrupling
Scrupling -> Grey Stone Scrupling

Skins that we haven’t quite finished, but should be in the next patch:

eMassive, The Pop Tart, Crispy Lobster, Fireball, Herbal Essence, Honey Badger, Cursed Ares, Fallen Hephaestus Machine, Zeus Thunder, Red Wingship, Yellow Frigate

Submitters of accepted skins will be getting one copy of the skin that they made for free.

As some of you know, there was a patch initialy scheduled for last week (July 30) but never happened because I delayed it.

There were many reasons for the delays, but the main one was due to some bugs that were found during testing that still escaped me up till earlier this morning, especially a very random one causing visages to be created from a cache but not all the time, which in turn caused skins to not always display seemingly randomly.

Alongside that bug hunting, I still kept doing my normal stuff, client crash tracking and fixing and optimisations.

This blog post is to announce that the next full patch including the first iteration of the skins system and many other things will be live this Sunday (August 10)

As for the things I been working on when i was not tracking that damn bug, my recent attention was turned to the deathblossom induced lags, both server and client side.
deathblossom allowed for a lot more enemies to be killed quickly and in sync, on top of the fact a lot of projectiles / lasers were created/destroyed compared to before.

I made a simple extreme testing ground using 300 phobos for optimisations purposes, and configured my ship to fire hephaestus burning maul at maximum rof with the highest deathblossom available.

This is what it looked like on my test machine on the current beta client.

As you can see in that small gif, it lagged hardcore. There were 2 major sources of lag, the lasers creations and the objects destructions (including lasers)

The first one was due to the laser using a brightpass and how the operation of adding to the brightpass was not optimised. Everytime we added an object to the brightpass, it first checked its container to be sure the object was not already in the bright pass. Which is safe and was fine when the call was not frequent, but with 140 lasers per seconds being added and destroyed (14 at max rof), it quickly added up. This was pretty easy to improve since we can safely assume any newly created object is not already in the bright pass, we can skip that check the first time any object is added, which is most of the cases. This resulted in a noticeable improvement in performance all around.

The other problem was the amount of objects being destroyed every 0.1 seconds + the number of ships blowing up in the process. There is very little I could do directly to that, since well, the objects do need to be created and destroyed (pooling them wouldn’t had helped much since its not their memory allocation/destruction, but the whole process of placing them adding the effects etc that is causing the lag). Which is why instead I went with a distributed approach, instead of trying to delete 140lasers (which end up being about 1200nodes with all the effects and stuff) every 0.1 sec, I remove them from view and queue them for a deletion over the next few frames. As a result, the total workload is the same, but its evenly distributed so there is much less noticeable lag, especially on system where your fps is capped or your logic fps is much higher than fps in which case the only reduction is on the logic fps and not the fps.

This was the result of those optimisations in the same scenario.

Its important to note, there were no graphic alterations whatsoever in those optimisations. The visible result is exactly the same, just done slightly differently.

We’re excited to announce that in an upcoming update, we’re adding the ability to trade space points in-game as items! After purchased on the website, they will show up in your TSL and be tradeable to other players. Any player can then redeem them and after a short delay spend them on anything that space points can be spent on (such as subscriptions, aug resets, and name changes).

For the initial release, we’re adding a very unique protection to the items to make sure that it is impossible for them to leave your possession except through a sale.  To start, we’re only allowing transactions through userbases, and only the base owner can add or remove any of the item from the base. If the base is destroyed then the item will be transported back to the base owner’s TSL. We might open up these restrictions in the future, but for now we’re leaning on the safe side.

Now, you may be noticing that I haven’t said what these items are called. Thats because we don’t know yet! While we’re just about ready to patch these in we haven’t actually came up with a name. We figure that our players are the ones that will be seeing this name ever day, so we’d like to give you guy some input on the naming process. Any and all name suggestions are welcome in the discussion topic. We’re aiming for something a little more interesting than “20 Space Point Voucher” but a little less out there than “Spacepointium”.

This week’s update is going to be a little shorter, but will encompass the latest round of changes to the forthcoming ship dialog updates as well as some information on my next project!

This past week didn’t see too many more major changes to the dialog as most of the hard work on the project was already done. However, I did make a few pretty important and noticeable fixes and additions! They are as follows.

• I reworked the server / client messages so that both the Resistance and Weapon Stat windows properly update to reflect temporary bonuses from auras, tweaks and field generators without closing and reopening the window.
• I fixed a few bugs with the function that determines what’s a “good” or “bad” bonus value for coloring the text in the permanent bonus table.
• I right justified all the values for the permanent bonus table to increase readability.
• I’ve changed the way coloring is applied to the Resistances table — a 0% resistance will now properly display and will be displayed in white text as opposed to red.
• I fixed a bug in the damage calculation formulas when it comes to weapons with 0 DPS (like Prismatic Conversion).
• I also came up with a fix so the new dialog will be sized properly for players without a clean install.

The dialog with all the current updates currently looks like this –

Apart from that, I’ve started with all the necessary code changes to support the upcoming base rebalance! There is a fair amount that needs done to make sure that we get everything right so I’ve been working down a list of requests from ycleption. I’ll talk more about them when he’s ready to reveal a bit more of what he’s planned!

That’s it for this week’s update. I won’t be making an update next week due to me taking vacation this week, but still feel free to post questions, comments and suggestions in the forums and I’ll do my best to respond! I’ll be back again with another update in two weeks!