Blue Dwarf was exhausted from a unicycling adventure today, so I’m writing the weekly dev blog again.

We have one new developer to welcome this week, Pixel.  Welcome!

Yclepticon

Investigated an issue with the universe civilization formula and thinks he has come up with the reason the universe is still uncivilized and the palace hasn’t spawned yet.  Looks like it has to do with the server counting too many unbuildable/ unownable galaxies towards the civilization requirements.

Precursor

Made a change for Tardis in the drop table to be replaced by a tardis crate that’s size 50, it seems to be a popular request.  Has been looking through the suggestion forums and has identified several for the team to work on.

One is making the ship tab in ai bases more user friendly http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=61045.

Another is alternatives to augmenter tweaking missions: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=61134 . The dev team discussed several possibilities for these missions and will post more information when we have something written up.

Jey

Is working on patches for live test so that he can push out a patch for live very soon.

We also had a liberty issue last week, i narrowed it down to a network failure but i’m not sure if it was on ovh side or on our drivers. The network just had partially failed. www could still talk to liberty, but liberty couldn’t reach www.

Microcapicitor

Has been looking into making a wormhole usage requirement for enemy drones similar to the current wormhole usage requirement for enemy ships.  This should make some custom DGs able to be upgrade to no longer use key syncs.

Col Legno

Entered the formula for the SM 21/22 spawner code.

Looked into why icons and stars aren’t showing.  It probably has to do with a client optimization somewhere, but it’s still remaining illusive.

Pixel

Although he just joined yesterday, he’s already managed to QA some bugs that have been fixed and moved to the test server.

Ryan

Has been fixing up webserver stuff.  He also made station dialogs resizable.

Yesterday’s weekly developer meeting included some discussion of pvp game mechanic issues, which started further discussion in the weekly dev blog discussion post.  In an effort to facilitate discussion about pvp issues, I’m opening another thread specifically devoted the topic.  That thread can be found in the development notes forum.

Discussed in yesterday’s meeting were:

• Issues with people using off-team alts in wars
• A proposal that when you get back into your ship from death, you can’t jump into another gal owned by the owners for 30 seconds. We’re hoping this mitigates the “suicide to get deeper and deeper into enemy territory” issue, and we’re curious to hear player feedback on this.
• Lifting the pvp ranges by danger factor in w3 wild space.

Discussions from yesterday’s blog post can be found here: http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=61122

Blue Dwarf had university classes starting this week and got a bit busy, so I’m writing the blog this week.  Welcome to new developers MicroCapacitor and Morat!

Morat

Welcome our new content developer!  Morat has been working on making Steppes and Ruby Steppes less painful for navigating and bringing slaves.

Yclepticon

Worked on SM 21/22 content.

He brought up some issues with people using off-team alts in wars and proposes that when you get back into your ship from death, you can’t jump into another gal owned by the owners for 30 seconds. We’re hoping this mitigates the “suicide to get deeper and deeper into enemy territory” issue, and we’re curious to hear player feedback on this.

He would also like to lift the pvp ranges by danger factor in w3 wild space.

Precursor

Is back from a long hiatus and is thinking about ruins.

MicroCapacitor

Welcome our new server/ content dev.  Micro fixed some minor issues in the nexus.

Col Legno

As always, I fixed some bugs.  I also worked on some new code to support upcoming SM 21/22 content and helped Blue Dwarf fix aura issues in non-pvp galaxies.

I fixed the aggro issues between off team players and slaves.  If you have a shm healing you, your slaves will no longer attack the shm.

The fixes will go in at the next patch.

Ryan

I’ve been experimenting with making the station dialogue resizeable as well as some other tweaks to it. This was made possible by the recent code changes for resiable inventories. I also have been working on some required changes with paypal on our backend.

** update 1144 ** (all known beta issue fixed)
* fix for the graphic corruption causing random crash (and bluescreen on some cases) as well as missing particles

** update 509 **
* Fix for the biggest issues that were added with the beta clients. All ships should now render properly / where they are expected to be
* Your ship should no longer shake seemingly randomly when you move around.
* A few various crashes and corruptions were also fixed.

– As with all beta client, there are likely more issues to be found and fixed. This is why it is beta after all.

Its been a long time coming. I started this client optimisation pass with the goal of supporting large scale bvb action (which currently result in more or less locked up client).

* In the process I ended up having to write new optimized container for our nodes childrens list (before we used a list, now its using an hybrid between a vector and a map for fastest possible iteration and somewhat fast element removal).
* I also ended up rewriting the way our particle system use d3d hardware buffer (before it was constantly rewriting it, now it only flag and rewrite the bits that changed)
* I rewrote how our scenenodes (the objects containing everything that end up on the screen including their rotation / resize etc) are created to remove useless parents set and overwrite (some nodes ended up moved around from parent to parent 3-4 times everytime they were made).
* Changed our billboard nodes to use a single hardware buffer containing the actual billboard index (which are used for most projectiles). While this is in practice slower when theres only a small amount of projectiles to use the hardware buffer over just sending the data directly to the gpu, the time it represent in a frame is extremely small. On the other hand, when sending the data directly to the gpu vs using a buffer, if you have 200+ of said billboards to do in the frame, it become a whole lot slower and represent nearly 20% of the gpu/cpu time in those situation (since the gpu will wait for the cpu to upload the data), this change resulted in a large improvement in the amount of billboards (projectiles) that could be on screen at once.
* This beta should also fix the few crash dumps i received over the past weeks.
* The ship preview on connection has been fixed.
* The account creation now include a password and email validation field with dynamic coloring if they match / dont match.
* Multiple other smaller performance improvements.

All in all, you should see a small generic improvement to the fps, between 5-20% depending on the scenario. On the other hand, during what was previously borderline on the client load or completely above client capacity, you should see an increase in the 20-25times the performance.

Keep in mind that while I did test and fix hundreds of problems during those optimisation there are likely a lot remaining. If you do find any new bug in this beta, please mention it in forum pm or in this blog forum post.

I wanted to do a side by side comparison of the previous beta with this one in my test scenario (20 stations firing mags at 10k range with max rof) but sadly current beta just froze / gave a frame every 15-20sec so it didnt make much of an animated gif heh.

Heres one of the new version, with lagkiller disabled and very high graphic settings (altho in a mostly empty galaxy except for the 13000 projectiles floating around at all time).

Those on the current beta client will automatically get an update at that time. If you do not have the beta client and want to try it, use http://www.starsonata.com/dl/StarSonata_2_beta.exe. It is independent from the live client and you can use both on liberty.

Col Legno

I altered base bound gear (Junkyard stuff is most of what will be affected by this) so that you can no longer put higher tech gear on lower tech bases. This way gear won’t get stuck on bases unintentionally.
I added a pop up confirm dialog for transfering base bound gear to bases so that there are less accidents while transfering gear around.
I also fixed some minor spelling and mission issues.

Jey

I finally confirmed that the hardware buffer corruption is fixed, altho in the process another issue was found in the client where some effect nodes end up stuck on the screen. Waiting for secondary test of the issue.

Applies fixes to the webserver for dealing with team score updates.

Blue Dwarf

Finally finished up the changes I was making to aura generators, cleaning up some of the code behind the environmental damage auras (common in Subspace areas) and addressing the issue that auras affect people in instances when they shouldn’t (e.g., protected galaxies).

I’ve also tweaked the Omni Census PDP-01 item to be a bit more useful, the size and energy cost have been reduced to 25 and 750 respectively and it can now be used directly from your ship. The display has also been improved a bit.

Ryan

It turns out slaves got caught up in a change where ai could no longer own debris and could no longer own debris themselves, so I fixed that. I worked on the UZ lockouts with Col Legno and now all the ai share the same instance-wide lockouts, so you can no longer get trapped in the boss room. We originally avoided this because you could kill a 10 minute lockout ai to overwrote your longer boss lockout, but I’ve changed it so that lockouts can now only be extended from new kills.

Player questions!

Question 1

Who has had the biggest influence as an programmer within this game?
Jey: i guess it would be blindside
because he was a god able to write shaders and stuff !
graphic programmers are mythical creatures
you dont often see them in the wild

Jeff: I liked the guy who wrote Effective C++

Col Legno: I’m kind of stuck on Roy Osherove atm. nothing to do with the game at all. but he’s kind of a unit testing god. He has some really cool ideas.
and Michael feathers – working effectively with legacy code.

Blue Dwarf: I don’t know, I kinda take a bit of everything from everywhere. I liked some stuff from Doug Crockford (particularly JavaScript: The Good Parts), but somethings are just ugh (One True Brace Style can suck it). I guess that’s a good thing, given I learnt Perl first.
Oh, Gary Bernhardt, because who doesn’t love some batman?

Jeff is stingy and didn’t want to do questions, so only one this week! Give us some more awesome questions so Jeff isn’t so stingy next week!

Here’s the link to submit a question!

Col Legno

I fixed bugs.

Jey

I found the buffer issue for the client and think it’s fixed, needs tests run on it.
Fighting the webserver over team scores which are taking too long to calculate.

Blue Dwarf

Not a great deal from me, really. Nothing fancy or exciting.

Shameless plug for a shout out and making an attempt to actually be organized though, next weekend is our bonus weekend. Is there anything in particular you guys want?

Ryan

My main focus this week was on towing, specifically in the Nexus for new players. I fixed a few bugs (such as inventory disappearing after towing) and we’re also making the starting bases towing bases so that new players can tow right away instead of waiting out their stasis timers and get right back into the action. I also fixed a font bug for the names below AI ships, where characters were aligned improperly.

Player questions!

Question 1

When will the SPEX system or whatever it was called be implemented? The ingame voucher system that was discussed years ago.
Ryan: It’s waiting on a webserver patch that has been delayed for a while now due to a variety of reasons. I’ll give this a solid soon™.

Question 2

What is the meaning of life?
Jey: Life is code and code is life
Jeff: Meaning is relative to the person evaluating a thing. There is no extrinsic meaning of life. The meaning of life is the meaning that you choose to give it.
Col Legno: dude…no 42 for the meaning of life?!?!?! come on!

Here’s the link to submit a question!

Ryan

I fixed a longstanding issue relating to field generators that was causing HQ and Outpost kits to become stuck in a strike when they ran out of rations.

I’ve worked on the (Empty Itemtype slot) stuff that a few of you have seen on the forums.
The Userbase side of it was very easy, but there is a little bit of work to finish up to get it working at 100% for ships.

I also fixed a few bugs with our gui tables and have added support for resizing inventories! I hope you all enjoy it as you play, I know I will.

Col Legno

I’ve been fixing T21 daily missions, the dailies will now allow you to do one mission a day but each mission has a three day lockout. I fixed some subspace issues too.

Blue Dwarf

So the Outpost/HQ/Palace thing is pretty much done and includes some small, but nice, new management changes for teams.

It works simply so:
If you share a galaxy with a team mate, own the Palace, an Outpost or the Headquarters you’re unable to leave the team, unless you’re Councillor+ (for OP/HQ).
If you are booted the Palace is abandoned, all other offending bases are set to destroyed (dropping no items).

In addition to this there is now a confirmation dialog for booting players which should save some players from those accidental boots. The dialog will inform you if booting the player would affect your team but not what bases or where.

Which brings me to the last point, there’s a new command for checking any offending bases, /basecheck which’ll provide a report on your bases.

Additionally, bases will automatically be set to your team on deployment and transferred bases between team mates will keep their team ownership, removing the need to team a lot of your kits.

Theodore

Theodore is content now! Yay.

Added repeatable olympus boss key missions.
Adjusted the inertial dampener bps to prevent excessive prom needed at one time.

Player questions!

Question 1

Can the subspace invasion be looked at. It doesn’t seem possible to reverse the colony nerf by any mechanism. Ie it’s not possible to lose the aveksaka ownership of the galaxy. It’s not possible to clear a galaxy as there’s eggs that never stop spawning even when you clear the pillbox. Or at least explain the intended mechanism to us. Thanks buzzy
Ryan: We have the colony nerf turned down until we’re satisfied everything is 100% worked out. In the meantime there are some fixes on test server and they’ll work their way live soon. Once we’re satisfied everything is working as intended, the alien device will begin working at full strength again.

Question 2

I know it’s asked a lot, but can you give any estimated date for the Steam release?
Jeff: Last time we submitted it, they took issue with a few things which we have now fixed, and we’re ready to give people beta keys to test the Steam functionality in client. We misunderstood what we were submitting last time, and though it was just the online assets, but instead they actually looked at and tested the game, so that’s why we have been polishing the in-game Steam stuff a bit. We should be able to resubmit very soon, but the last time we submitted at this stage, it took them several months to get back to us. Fingers crossed.

Here’s the link to submit a question!

Look. It’s a zebucart. Wow. This is amazing.

Something something Improcerus event. Congratulations to the winners, I guess?

Bye.

Btw, uni reset in 3 weeks. Kthnx.

(In all seriousness, that’s the zebucart reward for the Improcerus event. Just found it funny to do a lazy blog. Wonder what the other dev’s reactions are going to be when they found out I posted this. And no, there’s not really a reset.)

If you have problems with some skins and ships not appearing correctly after the most recent server patch, you can go to the following post in the forums with instructions on how it can be hopefully fixed.

http://forum.starsonata.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=61028

General Improvements and Fixes:
* Commified credit values in mission messages to the player
* Removed Transference Resistance from the base drones and given them all 100% Transference Efficiency
* Added in new superitems to all player obtainable Kalthi ships, Divine Behemoth, Merchant Navy Contriver, Harrier and UrQa’qa Qu’ishi Qa.
+ Tweaked universe generation settings so subspaces won’t be created to Perilous Perilous Space galaxies from Wild Space galaxies
* Removed erroneous newlines from fighter/missile error messages
* Fixed Super Intelligent’s Critical Hit Rate bonus being multiplicative instead of additive
* Replaced display of GG in slave status with item durabilities
* Improved mining slave error checking and reporting
* Fixed a wrong mission requirement cost in some Junkyard missions
* Fixed a mistake in a Player Progress Mission
* Fixed special galaxies in Earthforce Space not having the same blueprint restriction as other Earthforce Galaxies
* Given the Armada Ambrosia Drone the same treatment as the rest of the base healing drone series
* Given team exp tithe report in event chat a resolution of a thousandth of an XP
* Gave Attached Adonis, Argonaut, Ambrosia and Andaman Drones the same treatment as their non-attached versions
* Fixed an issue where f2p could not be attacked in wild space
* Fixed Auric Sector missions not being there.
+ Removed the level 200 limit from The Plantarium and instead gave it F2P only PvP
* Set the starting cash on Palace to 10m
+ Gave the Palace sticky and cost free versions of Hydroponics and MRE Factory
* Decayed item message cleanup
* The remove option in the trading bay now removes the item from the vending list (as does setting all the values in modify to 0)
+ changed the purple emperor’s favor reward from tourmaline traveler -> topaz traveler to topaz traveler -> tourmaline traveler.
* Fixed Eridium Transdim Extension Blueprint DG drop
* Removed profanity from War Chant of Ares+ Augmenter Blueprint
* Fixed a bug where you could equip drones to husks that aren’t ships
* Multiple missions and items spelling fixes
* Replaced the aura on the Vazi’a with a less powerful version
* Fixed an issue where Micro Vacuum Scoop was listed twice in the drop tables, where one instance should have been the Mini Vacuum Scoop, so I added that
* Individual wild slave balance. This only affects Green Battleship, Multifiring Bigger Green and Qokuji’qi. This does not affect the AI itself, but when captured as a wild slave they will have the following nerfs: Green Battleship has 50% lower resistances and 20% lower range. Multifiring Bigger Green have 50% lower resistances and 30% lower damage. Qokuji’qi have 20% lower resistances.
* Fixed a bug where items built by blueprints would get their values calculated incorrectly if the blueprint made multiples of them
* Made the Golden Warrior and Neon Warrior skins also apply to the Kalthi Armored Warrior and Kalthi Wrathful Warrior, and added the files for the Raging Warrior skin.
* Fixed Hullet Radar (II) mistake to get radar 5 in shadow
* Fixed typo with ‘Hellfire Remains’
* Made the Raging Warrior skin also apply to the Kalthi Armored Warrior and the Kalthi Wrathful Warrior.
* Squad Transwarp will no longer warp squadmates in escape pods.
* Base kits now have more starting space depending on their tech and rarity/price so that they can fit 1-2 matching extensions.
* Added clarification about how many outposts you can have
* Biogenic Plasma Conduit blueprint typo fix
* Fine Tuned blueprint decription typo fixes

Spawner Fixes:
* Added the ability for wild spawners to not be placed in owned or protected galaxies
* Made it so the AI Outposts won’t spawn in owned/protected galaxies
+ reduced copper 5 spawn time to match the rest of the levels.
+ doubled the voltage and ampage spawners in EF layer so people trying to do strontium have a few more ai to kill. The additional spawners will not be aggro so low level players won’t have trouble with the increased amount of ai. The experience and drops on the additional ai have been decreased.
* Fixed some spawners jumping out of galaxies when they were not supposed to (I’m looking at you Space Rat Broodmother!)
* Increased emp’s despawn time to match his respawn time (120hr, used to be 1hr)
* Set Cardinal Bellarmine’s respawn time to 1day (from 20 minutes) as he’s instanced
* Fixed High Prophet’s lockout
+ Converted protoplasmica gates from key syncs to gate lock system
+ Giant asteroid spawner generation fix
* Fixed an issue where UrQa’qa Qu’ishi was not randomized and bound to its layer

Temple of adum:
* changed the timezone on the secret temple of adum mission to match server time instead of gmt.
+ fixing sentinel boss spawners in trials of adum so that they will as intended unequip their weapons upon engage unless you do something wrong in the trial.

Subspace missions:
+ Removed incorrect second starting galaxy for BluePhoton and Lyceum intro missions.
* some tweaks to the mission text – adding in directions to instances, reminding players they’ll need a planet scanner, cleanup of text.
* fixed some mission start and ends that had been commented out due to autocomplete. Players can now abandon and then restart autostart missions. I also made the autostart missions dialogs popup in the EFI arm of subspace.
+ Subspace missions blue photon arm boss will now drop the mission commod even if the boss is one shotted.
+ higher level missile and fighter missions have been decoupled from the lower level missions. Players will now be able to start these missions without having completed the low level mission chain.
+ added subspace enforcer for the prize at the end of the EF I subspace missions

T21 Missions:
+ Roaming Hermes will no longer roam into perilous perilous space.
+ Adding The Pilot Farm galaxy in staff quarters for the t21 capture the pilot missions.
+ Added a key mission to the Arena chain of t21 missions. All missions in the chain will need to be opened in order to open the key mission to get into the pilot farm. They key mission will be in the same base as the rest of the arena missions.
+ added a custom wave dungeon for the guardian missions for t21 skills.
+ Electric Eel now has a custom DG in staff quarters.
+ T21 missions are no longer randomized. You can now do any one of them per day.
+ T21 dailies increased to 3 day lockout, but randomization removed.
+ moved the instance holes in staff quarters to make more sense.

* are things that will go in at the time of the patch
+ are things that require a new universe before they actually apply.