5/8/2023 - devlog
Michi talks about an unfortunate setback and Fabian introduces another quality of life improvement.
Michi (molp)
Martin and I often jokingly say that in order do something right, you have to implement it at least three times. Well, in this week, I implemented the leaderboards a second time. I do hope to not have to implement them a third time though 😉.
One of the first task this week was to deploy the leaderboards to the test server and then continue working on the parts that are still left. I wanted to see if the existing leaderboard items, like ships, bases, buildings, etc., would show up in the initial leaderboard without any action necessary from the players.
The implementation of the leaderboards relied on a technical database feature that was marked as "experimental". I read up on this feature and learned that it left the experimental phase at one point in time, but was added again due to performance limitations that are not immediately visible. Since the leaderboards are not performance relevant I decided that we can use that feature in any case.
Unfortunately, due to various technical reasons, I was not able to enable the experimental feature on the test server and after a day of trying different things I gave up. Back to the drawing board I redesigned the data model using another technique, implemented it, wrote tests, and now I am in the same spot at last week: test deployment to the test server. Let's hope it works this time!
Unfortunately that's all I have this week. These setbacks happen and hopefully shine a light on the development process and its pitfalls.
Fabian (Counterpoint)
I managed to implement another quality-of-life feature last week. With the next update, the flight control suggestions will check your pending contracts to see if there are any open delivery or pickup conditions on your end (or an "exploration survey" faction contract) and add the respective locations to the list. This should make things quicker to navigate and require less back-and-forth between contracts and flight controls to find the correct destinations.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!