6/9/2019 - devlog
With parts of the team gone, it's been a rather slow week at simulogics HQ. Nonetheless, Martin managed to get back to one of the most important changes coming this month: Player Ratings!
Martin
I started out this week by (hopefully) fixing a performance regression that many people noticed after our last update. This change will be rolled out with the next patch, along-side the naming feature I talked about previously.
Since the latter still requires some coordination with Michi who won't be back before next week, I finally got around to work on the main part of my contribution to the upcoming Locality release. Namely, I began implementing the so-called Player Rating feature that will automatically generate a rating for each company akin to a financial rating from the real world.
In essence, the idea of the Player Rating is to let players gauge how reliable another company would likely be in a contractual interaction. But that's more of a long-term goal. For Locality, we primarily need it because we plan to finally open the gates for non-paying players, and the Player Rating is our way to limit what players can do in the game world without breaking immersion too much.
This is how it works: Any paying player has a "Pro License" for APEX and our virtual "rating agency" will only issue ratings for "pro-licensed" companies. Any company without a license will receive a "U" rating, as in "unrated". But certain features of the game will require you to have at least a "P" rating - the rating you get in the first two or so weeks before enough data is available to generate a proper rating (between F and A). Which means: Unless you are a paying user, any facility in the game that requires you to have P rating or higher will be off limits to you.
Later, when players and corporations can control communal structures like exchanges and local markets, they will be able to specify their own rating requirements.
Implementation-wise, Michi had already prepared the basic interface of the rating feature so he had something to work with during development of the Local Markets feature. But the actual implementation was still missing. I got started on this this week and implemented the first of (currently) three planned rating components: The activity rating. But I think I'll keep the details on the rating components for another devlog.
Julian (Mjeno)
I'm keeping it short this week as there is nothing too interesting going on on my end right now. I was gone for about half the week and used the remaining time to help finish up the funding application I mentioned last week, contact some friendly devs about cross-promotions in the near future and upgrade our Discord server a bit. Thanks to the new boosting system, it's now even cooler on there, so come join us!
One of the perks is an animated server logo, so naturally I picked out logo, the APEX Rock. Did you know it's actually a 3D model?
(Besides, I actually played the game myself quite a bit this week. Watch your backs, fellow PE manufacturers!)
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on the forums!
Happy trading!