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. 

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