Adding Squadrons, Trade Companies, and Steam

Squadrons

Squadrons are player created temporary fleets for organizing players together.  They are used for players to cooperate together, generally for some temporary goal.  For example, a bunch of players want to form up to fight another group of players.

Squadrons will label all members with a squadron color, which overrides other colors for the purpose of determining if the player is friend or foe.  Squadrons have their own chat channel, and all members can see all other members' location and ship class.  Any member of a squadron can invite other players to the squadron.

Trade Companies

Trade Companies are player created organizations, often called clans in other games.  These are semi-permanent and meant for long term cooperation of players.

Trade Companies have their own separate city storage, can control entire port cities, and have their own separate chat channel.  Only the CEO or Directors of the company can invite new players to join.

Steam

Broadside: Perilous Waters will be available through Steam.  The game has already been added to Steam, but not yet uploaded.  Work is starting soon to add the Steam API to the game client.  After that is done then game testers will be provided the appropriate keys for accessing the client through Steam instead of having down manually download a new client version each time there is an update available.


Edit:
A lot of this is entailing some unfinished work on the Tracker server.  Currently implementing a feature where the Tracker server gets repeated updates on the status of all online players.  Without this functionality at this time there is no way to know exactly what players are currently in the game.  But this will be a central location where all player movement is tracked.  The Squadrons system leverages this, because the Tracker server will also continually send squadron updates to all zone servers which have players currently members of that squadron. 

The squadron updates contain the locations of all other members of the squadron as well as what ship class they are sailing, which is then sent to each of those players on a regular basis.  This will allow the squadron UI window to display fairly up to date statuses of all other squadron members, so everyone will know how far away other members are and what their capabilities are. 

Something similar will be available for trade companies, but will likely update on a less frequent basis. 

Eventually when the private chat message is added, this will also leverage the player tracker, so chat messages are routed to the correct zone server to be sent to the player. 

Adding new ship classes

0.6.13 was successful, and testers are having a good time with it.  0.6.14 is going to focus on adding new content.  Currently adding the Hind Class Galleon.  After that is added, going to add one of the early Frigates, another Caravel, a Carrack, and possibly an early Ship Of The Line.  Should bring the total supported ships from around 7 to 12.  Going to also add AI using some different ships.

After that going to focus on improving item drops (currently only drops from cargo instead of items fit to the ship), and after that improving the AI's weak combat ability.  Make them much more likely to connect hits.

Edit:
The following ship classes have now been added, and ready to use in the next build
Santa Clara Class Caravel
Santa Maria Class Light Carrack
Hind Class Galleon
Essex Class Race Built Galleon
Niagara Class Corvette
Nantes Class Early Frigate

Latest Development

Current development for 0.6.13 will be:

1) Add ability to switch between the Perilous and Development servers
2) Add effects of bonuses for all skills - currently skills only work for unlocking new items and skills, but any bonuses aren't yet implemented
3) Add effects for Bilge Pumps, Reinforced Hull, and Copper Plating - currently they can all be installed on your ship, but they don't provide their advertised bonus
4) Further adjust ship speeds (likely increasing full sail speed again, while keeping speed while under combat sails to keep the speed approximately the same as now)

New Live Server

Up until now all testing has been done using an internal dedicated server.  It has been difficult keeping beta testers interested in playing because I frequently take the server down to upload new test builds, making the client testers have no longer usable until I build and send them an update.

Starting this week though while all development testing will be on the same internal server, a dedicated server has been rented for use with game when it goes live to the public (eventually it will be a cluster of physical servers, but that is not necessary at the moment).  That new server will host the public version of the game and will be updated far less frequently and remain running all of the time.

Edit: Now referred to as the "Perilous" cluster, the new server is now in use with 0.6.12's release.  Internal game play testing is now using this server instead of the development server.