Space Clouds

Weekly Dev Notes – 17th June

BloggyYay, more meeting stuff!

First off, let’s welcome a new member on the team… Theodore will now help us improve the game!

What’s changed since last week?

Now, for stuff we’ve done since last week for Steam!
The account creation for Star Sonata is going to be slightly different. There will be an e-mail recheck and a confirmation if you’ve typed your password correctly. This is to improve the first startup of the game. It’s nothing exciting right now (in terms of looks), but we’re working on this. Functionality had the first priority.accCreate

We’ve also enabled SS to autofill the content of your account name etc, for a faster account creation for steam users.
Steam Wallet will be live soon.

So, who’s done what?

Jey

Jey’s been working on the client, basically non-stop all week. This is to add some of those fancy login features, but also performance wise. The client should be improved greatly! He’s testing using a 40 bases vs 40 bases setup firing at max rof. That’s his benchmark. So, having a client optimized to be able to handle that… Pretty neat, don’t you think?

As a comparison, the old client at low will freeze on load. The current beta client gets 8fps. The new client will get 15 fps. With lagkiller on, the new client reaches 80 fps. Since the load from the scenario is mostly cpu and not render- related, there’s basically no difference between low and high settings.

He’s also confirmed that every player could, in theory, use the Steam Client, even if you don’t use it on Steam. This doesn’t really affect you guys, but it makes it a LOT easier for us to push updates.

Blue Dwarf

Blue Dwarf’s made some of the changes to the account creation dialog. He’s also added some decimals to the team xp tithe report (so you won’t see just 1 xp all the time).

The Vert

Vert’s added a t22 version of the Flamberge! It’ll be called the Voulge.

He’s also been chatting with yclepticon, about station slots for galaxies. Right now attackers get unlimited slots, which defenders get a 25 base limit for unattached slots. This should be changed, and we’re looking into it for possible solutions.

Ryan

Ryan’s been prepping to update the webserver code in preperation for steam. Ran into a few issues on his test server, but managed to fix them.

He has also been looking into a long-standing vis issue with seers, but couldn’t find anything yet. He’s waiting on a list of affected characters to compare them to non-affected characters and track down the issue.

He also fixed an issue with BvB kits. Yay for bug fixing!

Theodore

Theodore’s busy with setting up to see what can be done. Stuff like haunting the bug forum, hopping in the game and asking around, or anything of the sorts.

Suit

I’ve gathered your questions and selected a few. It did come to my attention that some players used the question area to complain about the game. Sorry guys, but the dev questions is for QUESTIONS! I’m getting a lot of complaints in there. I asked you guys for questions. I’m sorry, but I’m not presenting those complaints to show in the blog as well. We’re aware of a lot of the complaints anyway, and we’re looking into those. Getting a 5 page story about something you don’t agree on (without any questions in there!) doesn’t help me when I’m looking for questions.

Player questions!

Q1: Is there any planning on new content zones similar to Arctia, Vulcan, Mira and Jungle coming soon?

Jeff: No. At this moment we’re focussed more on getting accepted by Steam
Vert: I have some ideas, but the progress on this has halted for now.
Jey: I’m not content!

Q2: When is BobboBot coming to the SS client?

Blue Dwarf: BobboBot himself will never come to Star Sonata because he’s an IRC bot. However, if you’d like something added to the game (such as colony suitability, work needed and the sorts), you could always ask.

Q3: How is the effort going to improve documentation? Such as linking the wiki to in-game descriptions so all us players can provide our labor in fixing this rather than having to point out inaccuracies and typos in the bug forum.

Jeff: Linking the wiki to ingame descriptions isn’t easy, and it would not be recommended. A real-time link is heavy (load-wise). More likely we would export the balance sheets and have a converter to convert it to the wiki. If we wanted to do it, that would be the way.
Suit: The main issue is also that some stuff is not available to the players, and we’d prefer to keep it that way.
Ryan (in response to Suit): We could add a tag that it’s been on the player marketplace, in this way everyone can have seen it.
Jeff: If people would like to see this link to the wiki, it could always officially be suggested.

Q4: How’s your day going?

Jeff: Right..
Blue Dwarf: Good, had pub dinner!
Jey: I’m hungry
Suit: Wat.

That’s it!

Would you like to see your question in next week’s blog? Ask it here!

See you next week!

 

 

 

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