It’s been while since I’ve posted anything, and recently I’ve been up to some really cool stuff over the last couple of months. For a content developer, I must admit I don’t get up to doing much content, although Calypso does a great deal and his stuff is looking great, I get up to more server code related stuff, specifically what we call ‘content code’, like boss scripting features and extending or creating types of items, or general bug fixing. Of course, I occasionally get up to way more interesting things, like what I’m going to tell you about today.

Free Towing from Bob* (damages not included)

First on the list is the Towing system. Not extremely exciting, but should be mentioned. Quite some time ago we made it so you could tow your spaceship from stasis to the nearest tow station, at the time it was possible to tow your ship from the tow station but it was incredibly costly to do, while towing from your ship was free to do. The credit cost associated with towing has been completely removed and has been replaced with items on your ship being damaged.

From now on towing your ship will deal 5 deaths worth of item damage (and yes, Nanotech Plating will reduce the damage done), from either method. Slaves will get the double bonuses they do on death, and towing from an arena galaxy is still free.

Team Taxation Tithe

Team Tithe is the second thing, a lot of teams don’t use the team tithe, but the changes make it much more reasonable and I hope it’ll get used more often now. Previously the team tithe effected any credit transfer where the team member gained credits, be it from scooping, pulling credits off their station or selling items to an AI station. This has now changed, team tithe no longer takes credits from the following situations:

• A player giving credits to another player
• User station trading
• Taking credits from a slave ship (excludes credits gained by capturing a ship)
• Taking credits from a user station

Essentially, teams get tithe from players scooping credits and selling stuff to AI stations. Additionally teams also get tithe directly from colonial transactions now, instead of indirectly when the owner took the credits from the station, and the amount is shown in the stations’ log.

Interactions which cause you to have some credits taken by team tithe are now shown in the event chat log with the amount which was ‘donated’ to your team.

PvP and Building Permissions

A rather cool change I’ve done, which will need into my next point, is some changes in the way PvP and base building rules were handled.

Previously, these were both set for a layer globally, with dungeons getting their own hard coded open PvP and temporary only drone rules, custom galaxies overrode this rules with their own setting.

Now we can distribute rules for both of these permissions to sections of a layer based on danger factor, additionally I’ve included some new PvP options instead of the black-and-white yay or nay situation before. Although mostly unused currently, we can now set PvP to be open (as it was before), unmixed (p2p and f2p, but not between each other), p2p, f2p or none (as it was before).

In addition to this, dungeons now inherit their parents galaxy PvP rules, as such, Earthforce layer dungeons are now no PvP.

Bases Return to Earthforce Space

Continuing from the last change, since we can now hand out galaxy building permission rules based on danger factor, it was also decided to remove the Celestial Garden layer!

Don’t fear though! As you may of figured, you can now build in warp 0 and warp 1 galaxies in Earthforce Space, but not warp 2 or warp 3. All of the galaxies which were special in Celestial Gardens, such as the Building Academy, Ring and Free Market among others have been moved back to Earthforce Space too.

As an extra thing for the newbies, Deep Space now links directly off Sol, which should make getting across the space pond a bit easier.

Overall this leads to a small increase in the number of buildable galaxies for players. Along with this change, populations of colonies in Earthforce space caps out at around 2 billion now.

Dungeon Locks

We’ve decided, following some player suggestion, that dungeon bosses get a lockout. The default for this is one hour, bosses with longer lockouts will keep their longer lockouts. To make keeping track of all these lockouts easier, dungeon naming has been improved a little bit. The random number component of dungeon names has been replaced with a unique static number for that dungeon, additionally splits are identifiable by letters appearing after the unique number when the split starts.

This change also sees a slight increase in drop chances.