Thursday, June 27, 2019

Trying to turn up the fun

So the latest testing is showing the game is too slow paced still.  Part of that is that players aren't yet interacting with other players (seeing that the game hasn't launched yet), but part of that is the very large maps are just too slow to get across and fights with AI ships are too spread out.

So I'm going to yet again increase all ship speeds significantly, and increase AI spawns.  Also, going to add more AI ship classes and make it so AI ships that have not moved in hours will disappear, which will trigger them to respawn at a new random location.  The last part is to address an issue where AI ships on far off edges of the map might not ever be interacted with, and they tie up one of the available AI spawn slots basically.

Additionally, a yet unexplained issue with server crashes is occurring that is being investigating.  The symptoms are after 4+ days of run time the server processes randomly exit with no log message.  This is occurring on both server clusters, so is not hardware related.  The original plan has always been to shut down and restart the server processes each night, but currently to do so is a manual process (connect with the Command Console app, order cluster auto shutdown, wait 5-10 minutes for shutdown, and then run the startup script).  For 0.7.1 I'm going to make this an automated process.

edit:
Added a couple new AI ship spawns, rebalanced all the spawners, and increased the number of spawners per zone.  Also the 20 ship AI fleet spawner has been reintroduced (was previously removed for performance reasons, but performance has been partially addressed in 0.7.0).

Found a possible bug in some ship speeds not matching what was expected, where the "fun factor" speed multiplier was not being applied properly.  This should be resolved, and will tweak speeds in the future as needed. 

Monday, June 17, 2019

0.7.0 Going Live

Version 0.7.0 is now going live.  The squadron feature and player info features are now included.  A few sub features of squadron are not yet available, such as squadron chat even though the chat box is there, and you can't kick other squadron members.  The player info window also has non-functional company invite and private conversation buttons, but the squadron invite button does work. 

In 0.7.1 those missing features will be implemented, as well as color coding the ship icons on the minimap for squadron members. 

I'll also try to get in some of the resource gathering, such as fishing and whaling. 

Until work on 0.7.1 starts, I'm going to put 0.7.0 up on Steam for testers, and the download link outside of Steam will be available on this site as well. 

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Hind Class Galleon


A lot of exciting changes going into 0.7.0

So 0.7.0 is getting more than the usual amount of work for a new build.  The Squadron system is already mostly functional now.  Mostly UI work is still going into it.  The Player Info window is already done.  A bunch of minor fixes are also going in. 

Work has started on Trade Companies, but this build is going to go out before that work is complete.  So expect that to be working within a few months. 

This though will be the first build to be pushed to Steam for better access to beta testers.  Currently I'm just putting the builds in a self extracting archive and posting a drop box link, which will still happen when this build is ready.  This is problematic because the builds are quite large already, and will continue to get larger.  0.6.14 was 419MB.  When all the other terrains get added, we are probably looking at several GB eventually.  Repeatedly downloading new builds is a hard ask for some testers, especially when on metered connections. 

Steam though uses a diff like update process, where it only sends the changes from the previous build instead of downloading an entirely new build.  This will save a whole lot of tester hassle.  Relevant Steam keys will be provided to testers.