News Cycle - Development Log #548

In this week's devlog Michi shares the progress on the NEWS command.

Michi (molp)

In the previous week's devlog #547 I presented the idea of a NEWS command. It was just a rough sketch and I found some time this week to make some progress on it. Here is what it now looks like:

The news command is now based on in-game events and manual additions. Right now we have the following news types:

• Devlog and economic reports: These two are added by the team manually whenever a devlog or economic report is published. Clicking on them will open a new EXTLINK buffer that leads to the blog or forum.
• Naming: I already covered them in last week's devlog. The news item tells what planet/system was named by whom.
• Colonization: The first base on an uninhabited planet will trigger this news event. If a planet has been deserted for over a year and someone settles it again, that will also create the event.
• Population: Once a planet's population has its first engineers and/or scientists, a news event will be created.
• Infrastructure: The completion of a planetary project creates a news event.
• Gateways: Once two gateways are linked, a news event will be generated mentioning both gateways and planets.

I also added a filter section at the top. It will allow filtering events based on their location in faction space. If a news event happened in faction space it will have a small faction badge to its right. Events outside faction space and events that don't have a location, like devlogs for example, won't have that badge. The filters are persisted on the server. They will also influence the indicator in the top bar that tells how many unread news events there are.

Here is a short video of the filters in action:

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

Happy trading!