This week’s update is going to focus on some post-reset bug fixing, a few changes to the Ally AI type, an update on a mission feature and a look forward to what’s ahead for the Nexus! Keep reading to find out more.
With the reset we pushed the new Nexus — but don’t think we’re going to stop working on it. The Nexus is perhaps the most important area of the game. It’s the first thing a potential new player sees and it really needs to excite them. More importantly, it needs to make them want to keep playing. That’s why we’re committed to continually iterating it until it’s perfect. It’s in a much better state now than it was when we started this latest rework, but it’s not done yet. So expect to keep seeing Nexus changes as we move forward.
This past week I made a few changes to the Ally AI type that was developed for the Nexus revamp. I extended it so it functions with drones. Now when an allied AI drops a drone it will properly prioritize targets for both healing and attacking based on the type of ally that dropped it. For example, let’s say a pirate-allied AI drops a drone that has a healing wand and a pulse gun. If there are pirate affiliated players in the area, the drone will heal them. If there are hostile Earthforce affiliated players in the area, the drone will instead attack them. If it’s a factionless ally, say a Paxian, the drone will only heal players.
This is a pretty big change that let’s us do some pretty cool things with content. For one, we can have AI healers that will help players out. More importantly though, it further lays the groundwork for another extension of the ally system, one in which faction affiliation determines AI aggression. Eventually I’d like to be able to have neutral AI that can be attacked by either affiliation, but would lean towards one when it come to aggression. For example, one day it would be kind of cool if Space Blue AI weren’t naturally hostile towards pirate affiliated players, but Merchant AI, like Goldenboys were.
While I was in the drone code working on the new features, I also took care of a bug that I’m sure has been annoying some of you — drones shooting at immune targets. Along with that I took care of quite a few smaller issues as well, many of which have made their way to live servers already.
Finally, this past week I worked on an additional feature related to the autocomplete feature that was introduced a while back. There has been a lot of upset over the feature when it comes to turn-in missions for things like skills or other rewards, so I’ve added a new tag so we can manually flag some missions to never be autocompleted. This will be added in the very near future to all the missions in Staff Quarters, any of the T21 skill turn-in missions and other places like Strontium-90. Along with the slash-command toggle this should hopefully alleviate any of the issues some people have with the autocomplete feature.
That’s it for this week’s update, I’ll be back again next week with another update! Until then, as always, feel free to sound off in the forums with questions, comments and suggestions!
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