published on August 04, 2025 in devlog
Michi talks about structured website data, the Steam client update and orbital addresses.
Michi (molp)
This week has been full of distractions that kept me from working on the gateway flight model. In the end, these distractions will hopefully turn out to have a positive impact.
On Tuesday I added structured data to our website, following the best practices of schema.org. We are monitoring where our players come from, by keeping track of the referrer, if there is one. The biggest two referring sites are google and Steam. The amount of organic leads from google seems to trend down slightly. I think that is due to their AI result box on top of most of the search results. It prevents people from clicking on the search results below. I think their AI model does not set a referrer when linking to websites.. Also, I strongly believe that the AI tools are replacing more and more the classic search engines. I am noticing that not only in my own behavior but also when talking about it with friends and colleagues. Has the way you search the web changed with the rise of AI tools? Let me know! That's why I think it is more important than ever to make sure that the LLM crawlers understand what our page is about, so they can recommend Prosperous Universe to someone asking them for a game recommendation. Regular search engine crawlers benefit from the structured data as well, of course.
Martin started working on the Steam client update. Both games, AirlineSim and Prosperous Universe haven't seen a Steam client update in a long while. We update the games' logic and content on our own servers, so updating the Steam client isn't really necessary from a technical point, but there are other advantages: Players have requested to be able to change the font size pretty much from the beginning, and using the newest version will hopefully make that possible. Also, the Steam algorithm doesn't really know when we update our games if we don't update the Steam client as well. We sure do post news articles, but I think it'll help to update the Steam client from time to time, so they don't think that the games are not being developed actively anymore.
I am working on a Linux machine, so naturally I helped out Martin with the Steam client update. We didn't manage to finish it in time though, and it'll have to wait until Martin is back from vacation.
With the little time left for the actual gateway work, I wanted to implement a feature that would produce a screenshot for today's devlog, but that didn't work out. So far during development and testing gateways always had the same address as the planet they are built on. Of course, we want to have the in orbit, showing on the PLI, the screenshot!, but I quickly realized something: If a gateway construction project starts, the construction store will be in orbit as well, and as you might know, there is no way yet to set an orbit as the destination of a flight. Also, there is no single "orbit" to address. A ship that flies into orbit basically gets a random orbit address. That is exactly the reason why even when two of your ships are in orbit they cannot transfer materials or fuel to one another: the orbits don't match.
To fix this, I'll introduce a new way to address infrastructure in orbit, very similar to the way we already do it with stations. So the screenshot will have to wait a bit, but we'll get there. In the meantime you can enjoy the latest monthly economic report ;)
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Happy trading!