published on August 11, 2025 in devlog
Michi talks about implementing a new subtype of addresses for infrastructure, a name-clashing bug and taking a few days off over the summer holidays.
Michi (molp)
Summer is here and with it the kids' summer holidays. That means I have to take a few days off to take care of the kids. I will also have to finish a few outstanding modernization tasks on the house in the next two or three weeks. So, game development will be slow for the next weeks.
Last week, in devlog #494, I talked about adding a new way of addressing infrastructure in orbit and made some progress with that. Everytime a new infrastructure, gateways for now, is added, it will receive a 'satellite' address. Technically this is simply a list of three ids: the system id, the planet id and the id of the gateway. This allows us to use many existing systems that work with addresses without having to worry about actual orbits too much. The gateway, of course, knows about its orbit, and we can use it for rendering purposes. Here is the promised screenshot, showing an unfinished gateway at Umbra.
I started integrating the satellite addresses to the navigation system, so they can become destinations in a flight, but didn't manage to get it implemented in time.
I have also looked into an interesting bug, that was triggered by a player naming a planet Hub. As some of you might know, HUB is also the code for the commodity exchange in the Hubur system. So, when opening the command WAR HUB we expect to see the warehouses of Hubur Station, but instead the warehouses on the newly named planet will open.
Right now, APEX does not support planet names in commands like WAR. Instead, it uses the natural ids HUB for the station and UP-170b for the planet. It turns out the extension Refined PrUn can replace planet names with their natural ids and I think that is exactly what happened here. I am not sure what the best solution here is, and I am looking forward to your ideas.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!