12/5/2022 - devlog
Michi unravels a coding mystery, and the team prepares for tomorrow's Prestige release!
Martin
A quick update from the realm of supporter perks: After we shipped the first batch of goodie bags recently, we quickly ran out of stock for some items. Since re-ordering them does incur some one-time fees, we decided to wait a bit longer, likely until January 2023. That way we can take any orders into account that arrive over the holiday season. So, if you haven't supported us yet but feel like doing so: Any tier at or above the Star level includes a small or large goodie bag!
Michi (molp)
The Prestige update is almost here! Naturally I was pretty busy preparing the release itself. I also found some time to look through our bug tracker and looked into a few bugs that have not been fixed yet.
One of these bugs seemed to be a rather small issue, but turned out to be quite the rabbit hole, a good one though. A player reported that they were trying to snipe a plot on one of the larger planets that are usually full. They kept the PLI command open, and what do you know? The plot count went from 0 / 360 (some ghost plots) to 1 / 360 (no ghost plots). They quickly tried to build a base, but the error message still was: no free plots. They then reported the issue.
After looking into it, it was obvious that the mechanism updating the planet information was not working properly. Actually, there were two such mechanisms at work here: one that has the planet's main data (resources, name, ..) and one that only has the information about plots. The former uses the new system for public data, which comes with automatic updates and other nice features. The latter though, uses an old system that we are slowly phasing out. That system does not have automatic updates and is cumbersome to keep in sync with other systems. You can already guess what happened. The system responsible for the plot data didn't get the plot changes and the data got stale, resulting in the erroneous display that the player saw.
In the end, I dived into all the usages of the old system, at least in the context of plots, and removed every single usage. Removing old code and replacing it with a streamlined and easier-to-use alternative always feels great. It's kind of the "spring-cleaning" of software development :)
Nick
Congratulations to Planet QQ-001a, who is now called Circa. A big thanks to all the players who participated in the community event on the forums. We will do it again in the future, so don't worry if your favorite planet didn't get chosen!
I worked mainly on the Prestige release last week, getting things ready for tomorrow's release. I sent out a bunch of press releases, got the copy ready for the website, newsletter, and Steam. We will also be having a post-Prestige LiveStream next week on Monday at 7pm CET. I will post more about that soon after the release. Fingers crossed that everything goes well!
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!