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.