published on April 07, 2026 in devlog
In this week's devlog Michi talks about issues with the influence generation.
Michi (molp)
It has been a short week, I had a few days off over Easter, and yesterday was a public holiday here in Germany. Nonetheless, at least a short devlog is in order.
Hard to believe, but the first quarter of the year already lies in the past. Time really flies, as they say. Here is the third economic report of 2026:
Click the image for the full report
A while ago I deployed the faction generation to production (also see devlog #521). It is not visible for players yet, but we want to collect some data first to refine the game design and get a feel for the numbers. We have an internal reporting tool that can generate faction influence reports of all planets, systems and factions. This is what Fabian primarily uses to improve the game design. This week I added a few more fields to the report and some aggregated values that Fabian requested.
Unfortunately, transferring the influence from companies -> planets -> systems -> factions has lead to some server instabilities that I have yet to solve fully. In the first implementation the influence was transferred every day right before midnight. It seems that naive implementation was a bit too much to handle for the servers, and after a while they restarted, kicking everyone out of the game in the process. I decided to stagger the influence transfers on each level over half an hour. That did help a bit, but the real culprit was a sync mechanism that tried to update all connected clients every time a new influence value arrived. Imagine a planet like Promitor for example, that has more than 2000 bases. Around the same time all of these bases send their daily influence update to the planet, and the planet would update everyone that subscribed to Promitor updates for each of these updates. That gets out of hand pretty quickly. It is better now with the staggering, but I still want to disable the automatic update and only send one update once the influence transfer is complete. I plan to implement and deploy that later this week.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!