Putting the Pieces Together - Development Log #499

Michi continues on putting the pieces together that will make gateway travel a reality (at least in Prosperous Universe ;))

Michi (molp)

My work on the gateway flight segment continues. More and more pieces come together, and I am testing the system locally on my development machine. In the last devlog #498 I explained that we need to introduce additional communications between the ship and the gateway to make sure the gateway is actually ready to support the ship with the gateway jump. That system is now in place. I ran into a very interesting bug on the way: If the flight starts at the gateway and the gateway cannot perform the jump dispatch it would abort the flight, as specified. But since the first flight segment is the gateway's LOCK segment, aborting the flight at this point meant that the flight effectively became a flight with zero flight segments. This caused the flight not to end properly and the ship became stuck, unable to end the flight and start a new one. I am glad I caught that edge-case early.

We have been asked what a flight using two consecutive gateway traversals would look like. Here is an example going from Umbra to Griffonstone (LS-300c) via Etherwind. You can see that in between the first and second LOCK-GTW-DCAY flight segment triplet is a small transit flight segment that brings us from the inbound to the outbound gateway in orbit of Etherwind. Flight times are still subject to change, we are interested in your opinions on them.

I also have been working on the accounting of gateway fees. As gateways and their operators are separate entities, the fees will be paid to the gateway operator, a government for now, instead of the gateway directly. Gateway operators will see the gateway fees as revenue:

Companies, on the other hand, will see them as expenses:

I spent some time this week on building a new Steam client, as we haven't updated that in a long time, and we feel that it might help discoverability on Steam. It will hopefully also allow us to address some usability issues, like the small default font. It is not working yet, but I wanted to let you know that we are working on it.

The Discord server now has a PrUn server tag, many thanks for the boost!

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

Happy trading!