2/12/2024 - devlog
Michi talks about the recent maintenance release and the work on the politics update
Michi (molp)
As you might know, we released the 2024.01 maintenance release last week. You can find the release notes on the forums. The most notable features we added are filters for the CXOS and CONTS commands that allow PRO players to filter contracts and CX orders by status and other parameters.
The release itself was rather unspectacular from a technical point of view, which is very welcome as you can imagine. Still, there is no release without issues, we had to deploy a fix for the automatic linking of planets and systems in the chat channels. I also forgot to merge the changes that Fabian did to the ship repair.. but they are now in!
I also continued to work on the politics update this week. We want to change the way the government's accounting works. The status quo is, that the governor can select where taxes and fees go: either their own corporation or the respective faction. The fees received in the corporation are paid out as dividends to the governors company. Unfortunately that makes accounting for governors unnecessarily complicated. If their corporation has multiple members the income is divided between corporation members that have nothing to do with the office. The logical consequence was that many players created one-person-corporations just to be able to fulfill their role as governor better.
The logical solution to the problem is to let the government have their own accounting, independent of the player(s) that make up that government. We decided that the administration centers are going to be the foundation of each government. So this week, I added the accounting functionality that usually is part of a company to the administration centers. It is easier said than done, there are quite a few (technical) problems to solve until this can work.
Imagine the following situation: We have a planet that is within faction space of any faction. It doesn't have an admin center yet, because it's inhabitants simply haven't built one. Where should the fees and production taxes go? In the past they automatically went to the faction, but that doesn't feel right. It should go to the local government / admin center, so once an admin center is built, the government can work with these funds. To fix that we decided to create admin center entities in the background for all planets, even if the players didn't finish the respective planetary project yet. Once they do, the admin center will become available as usual. This trick allows us to "keep it simple" in the server code, and always assume that we have a proper entity to work with.
This isn't the only problem we encounter, but I'll go into the details once I solve them.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!