8/8/2022 - devlog
Michi and Nick discuss the Convergence release, and automatic contract termination is now available.
Michi (molp)
Obviously, this week was much influenced by the Convergence release. The release itself went smoothly, and players quickly tried out the new ship upgrade and especially the custom contract feature. Many players created contract drafts for shipments and sales they do on a regular basis with their business partners. That is exactly what we expected and hoped for. Unfortunately, a small percentage of the contracts created by these drafts were faulty and led to follow-up errors like stalling production lines etc.
So I spent the rest of the week hunting down the root cause of this and implementing a fix. It turned out to be a really nasty problem where a technical identifier for a contract condition, one that absolutely has to be unique, was used twice or more times in some rare circumstances. The contract system got confused by this, because sometimes it had the condition data of one of the conditions, sometimes of the other, and of course they didn't match, since those are two different conditions. I figured out most of the problems by now, but if you encounter a contract that behaves strangely and is from last week's release, let me know! I'll have a look!
In order to get rid of some faulty contracts in an automated way, I implemented a feature that was initially further down the roadmap: automatic contract termination. It really is a simple concept, where any contract that is still in an open state 48 hours after its creation will be terminated automatically. The original motivation for this feature was to have a way to remove contracts that have been sent accidentally or to the wrong (maybe inactive) player. Right now it still lacks a notification that a contract has been cancelled, but we'll implement that at a later point in time.
Nick
Like Michi stated, last week was very much a Convergence focused week. There's a lot that goes into a release from the marketing side as well like getting the website ready, sending out newsletters, contacting the press, and even posting on Steam. Everything from my side went rather smoothly, and we even had a number of news outlets write about the new release. We saw an uptick in positive reviews from Steam, so thank you all who contributed to that. We really appreciate it!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!