5/25/2021 - devlog
This week Fabian spills the beans on beacons, Michi gives us the rundown on resource concentrations, and Nick talks tutorial remakes.
Fabian (Counterpoint)
Besides continuing to work on the details of the politics rework I outlined in previous devlogs, I also started working on the first new kind of infrastructure that will work with the new system: Beacons will reduce the distance between your ship and the planet for the final step in an inter-system flight, thus saving time and STL fuel. Of course, the owner of a beacon will collect usage fees per flight. This will be a step towards making different regions of the universe genuinely different, not just in terms of planets and resources available but also in how players can impact them long-term.
By the way, since the question came up, we won't just use the new politics systems for new types of infrastructure; we're planning to also migrate existing types (such as planetary projects or population infrastructure) to the new system step by step once we have it in place, and we're able to see the basics of it in action with the beacons.
Michi (molp)
I made some progress on the data collection and aggregation framework I mentioned in my last devlog. The first goal I set for myself was to gather resource concentrations from all planets and aggregate them on planet and system levels. With this concrete example in mind, I was able to create a framework that will work with other kinds of data as well. The actor that aggregates the data keeps it around as well, so future data requests will not have to be gathered from all planets and systems again.
The aggregation actor now also has an interface that lets the caller specify at which granularity the data is required and which parts of the data are necessary. This is especially important for the case of planetary resources. Imagine that the client requested the resource concentrations for every system in the map, this would mean that we'd have to send out all resources concentrations in all systems, which is quite a lot of data. A more realistic use case would be that a player is looking for a specific resource, or a small set of resources, so the interface would allow a selection of resources to be specified.
I am now starting to implement a prototype on the client side to see if it works from end to end. If it does, I will have to go back to the backend and implement a mechanism to subscribe to updates of the requested data, as it could change quite frequently. This is not so much of an issue for my resource concentration example, but populations, traffic and the like change often.
In any case I hope to be able to show some visuals of the prototype next week!
Nick
Not too much to update you guys with this week. I have been working on a strategy for remaking the Prosperous Universe tutorial videos that are on YouTube. I have brought this up before, but the project was more or less put on hold since we don't have the new UI update ready and Julian (the narrator) is also tied up with his own projects. The time is fast approaching where we will have the UI update live, and thus the need to update the videos both in terms of new functionality but also visuals will be significant. Therefore, I have been spending some time developing a plan on how to go about doing these remakes. I'm hoping that they will turn out well and also be helpful for new players that need help getting started.
Also, expect a new influencer video out this week!
Happy trading!