5/30/2022 - devlog
Michi talks Contract Drafts and Nick cordially invites you to a Twitch stream tomorrow!
Michi (molp)
Last week has been a short 3-day-week for the whole team due to a public holiday on Thursday and everyone took Friday off as well, for nice long weekend.
Nonetheless, we still got some work done. On our everlasting crusade for more performance, I had a look at contracts. Contracts are a rather large data structure, and older players accumulate easily 5000 and more over time. Up until now, (finished) contracts have been stored for 180 days. I reduced that to 90 days, which is still plenty. The CONTS panel has been switched to endless scrolling mode as well. There's room for more optimizations though: Right now we download every contract on startup to have it ready on the client, a remnant of the early days when universes didn't last very long. This can obviously be improved, but this is a story for another time.
I also continued where Fabian and I left off last week regarding the upcoming features we want to implement. Custom contracts are the next big topic, and in order to get it started, we want to tackle a sub-feature we call "contract drafts" first. Essentially, this allows one to create contract drafts and send them directly to another player without going through a local market. The addressee will receive a notification and can then accept or decline the contract draft. Once the contract is accepted, it will work like any other contract. To keep it simple, the current goal is to only allow template contracts similar to the ones created via local market ads.
Nick
Like Michi said, last week was pretty short for us, so I only have one topic to discuss. We are doing a Twitch stream with Blackboa tomorrow at 11am EST / 17:00 CEST. You are all of course invited to come and watch. The streamer will be interviewing myself and Michi and also streaming the game. We would love it if you would also chime in during the stream in the chat section. Sometimes new players that stream the game are unfamiliar with APEX and need some help navigating and understanding how to use the interface and what to do. Hope to see you there tomorrow!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!