Charting the Uncharted - Development Log #295

Michi continues to work on the planetary surface maps, Fabian gets into the coding groove, and Nick is back from vacation.

Avatar Michi

Michi (molp)

I finished the (re-)implementation of the planetary surface maps this week. Learning the ins and outs of this new way of doing 3d graphics takes some time, so I tried to avoid implementing new things and stuck to the design and functionality of the old surface maps.

The exception to the rule (there is always one, right?) are the ships' orbits. The last/current version draws a full orbit path using a thin, semi-transparent line. While it clearly shows where the orbit lays, it is kind of odd that it doesn't highlight where the ship is on the orbit, other than the ship icon itself. In the new version, I am using a tapered line that only covers a fifth of the full orbit or so. I immediately liked that visualization better and kept it. Additionally, a player's own ships are drawn in yellow now, as opposed to the white of the other ships.

In other news, we started to reduce the health and safety bonus bases provide as described in this topic. We will reduce the value further this week and use the server reboot to also adjust the second STL fuel recipe, as outlined here.

Avatar Fabian

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I took on the first few tickets and bugs as part of my new role as part game designer, part programmer. These included some quality-of-life improvements from our backlog for the next maintenance release, such as a confirmation on relocating your HQ (which also displays the name of the target base), the commodity ticker being part of Local Market ads (including a clickable commodity icon in the ad's buffer), or the preservation of a company's name in your notification even after it has been liquidated (so you e.g. don't need to compare "before" and "after" corporation member lists anymore).

I also went on quite few bug hunts, which were sometimes more, and other times less successful, but they definitely helped with getting used to the code base and how everything is structured. This week I'm going to try and up the ante by implementing a few slightly more involved things!

Avatar Nick

Nick

Not to much for me to report this week since I was on vacation, but I have been keeping up with new influencer videos. Expect to see several new videos in the coming weeks thanks to our increased budget for the month of July. I am excited to see the reactions and analyze the results since I was able to pick several different types of content creators. This will be the first time we will target an economics and space/science audience on YouTube.

As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!