Welcome to another Star Sonata Dev Diary!

Today we’re going to talk about an upcoming backend expansion, Base Logs and Market Check! One of the most sought after and longest asked for things in the history of Star Sonata!

Base Logs

Currently on the live server, base logs are divided into 4 categories that store 15 logs each – Trade, Construction, Management, and Important (trades over 100 million credits). None of which saves when the server crashes or is restarted currently. Most important gets washed away by docking, bot purchases or various odd-ball tasks.

We’ve taken that and expanded it to 9 categories and 15 logs per category. Some categories retain memory while the server is up but on restart or crash are not retained due to being lower priority.

List of Items that display and save with server crash/restart:

Trade: Buying and Selling under 100 million credits.

Important Trades: Trades greater than 100 million credit but lower than 10 billion credits.

Very Important Trades: Trades greater than 10 billion credits.

Management: Equip/Unequip, Use Item, Toss Item, Set Trade Bay

Ledger: Construction Started/Finished, Transfer Item, Install Blueprint, Cancel Construction, Add/Remove Credits.

Status: Set Name, Changed Rank Access, Set Team, Transfer Base, Hostile Takeover, Abandoned.

List of items that are retained in memory but don’t save:

Construction Misc: Pausing/Resuming/Setting Description.

Bots: Docking and Buying/Selling of Bots.

Docking: Docking by players.

While not a radical departure from the current state and the interface remains the same – we hope to add additional features that are able to build off this first iteration to help players better manage their shops, production hubs and have greater insight into past events.

Market Check

Next up is the market check search, which can now perform “fuzzy” searches. When an exact match can’t be found the client will present a selection dialog with a list of up to 50 similarly spelt items, ordered by how similar they are to the search term. The algorithm is fairly simple, looking at the number of matching words and letters.

We also optimized the interface to ignore capitalization as some items (Artifact) were picky about exact matches in the past. These changes should help players spend less time focusing on exact spelling.