6/10/2024 - devlog
Michi allocated some time to fix a few bugs and implement some quality of life improvements.
Michi (molp)
This week I took a break from the development of the upcoming parliament/politics update and focused on fixing some long-standing bugs and necessary quality of life improvements. These changes will not be part of the release, but we'll release a maintenance release shortly after the politics update.
I started with the dreaded HQ relocation bug. If a player has multiple bases they can relocate their headquarters to receive a different set of bonuses depending on the new HQ location. Sometimes though, the HQ would not be relocated to the selected base but somewhere else. In the past, at least I thought so, I fixed this issue, but in some circumstances it would fail anyway. I found out that it only failed when a new base has been found right before trying to move the HQ. With this hint I was able to pinpoint the cause and hopefully fixed it for good.
Another years-old bug would allow to demolish a newly built building after exactly 7 days and return all the building costs. Usually a building degrades over time and only a part of the original building costs can be recovered. I wrote a few automated tests to try to reproduce the issue and once that worked, I found the cause. I was quite happy about that, because I have tried to fix this bug twice over the cause of the last two years or so, and failed both times!
The last bug I fixed is about the Explorer's Grace bonus. That bonus grants a very high happiness bonus for four weeks to the planetary population when a planet is settled for the first time. Somehow the bonus was only applied once the second base was found on a planet and not the first one.
There are quite a few players with companies that are several hundred days old. Oftentimes these players have a lot of bases and managing them can be tedious. It surely doesn't help that many different commands BRA, BS, SFC, INV etc show lists of addresses in a slightly different way, making it unnecessarily hard to find the one you are looking for. Using the ideas proposed in the forums I came up with a relatively stable sort order: We show planets in named systems first, within these systems we show named planets first and the planets and systems are sorted alphabetically. Of course the order is changed when a system or planet is named, but these are rather rare events. Here is a screenshot from the BRA command's base selector:
Did you ever buy all the necessary repair materials for a base, but once you arrive there the repair bill increased and you cannot repair all the buildings? It has happened to all of us and it can be very frustrating. The updated BRA command now allows to select a time offset that will show the bill of materials in 24 or 48 hours.
As always: we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!