Filter Selection - Development Log #417

This week the team talks about little features that will make a big difference and support work in general.

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Last week I had the chance to dive back into development for a bit and tackle some community-reported issues and wishes:

• Ships without FTL fuel tanks now won't be listed in INV anymore when you filter for FTL tanks.
• The EXP command will now show a progress bar for each category, indicating how close you are to your next expert.
• PRO users will be able to filter the contract list in CONTS by status.

Michi (molp)

Last week I went through my inbox and tried to look into as many support cases as possible. There were account deletion requests, a population that was not working properly, a UI bug report I had to look into and many more. While it can be interesting to look into some of these issues, most of the time it is just busy work that has to be done and reduces the amount of time we have for actual development work. If a certain type of support case pops up over and over again it is often worth to look into the underlying issue. If it is a bug, obviously, we should fix it. If not sometimes an automation can help. All in all, though, I am relatively happy with the amount of necessary support work at the moment.

Sometimes support or maintenance work is based on the infrastructure and the frameworks we use. Last week I had to increase the volumes our database uses, for it to not run out of disk space. That was easy, we have done it in the past, and have documented to process fairly well. Other times frameworks we use in the server or client need updates as well. Reasons vary from security concerns to other frameworks depending on a more modern version. Updates can be tricky, as the programming interfaces might have changed, or migrations might be necessary.

Why am I writing about this? I just felt the need to explain what else there is for us to do, besides working on shiny new features ;)

There are good news from the (German) translation: We tested what we have so far on the test server and are ready to deploy the german translation within the next few weeks.

I also contacted some players that offered to help with non-official / community translations. We are not yet ready to translate the game client itself into other languages than the officially supported ones, but we asked for help regarding the Steam store page. So far we have released a translation in Simplified Chinese and translations in Spanish, French and Russian are currently being worked on. Thank you so much for helping us out with these!

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

Happy trading!