Launch Colony Ships! - Development Log #502

Michi prepared the upcoming release involving colony ships, called Colonization!

Michi (molp)

Two devlogs ago, in devlog #500, we announced a new feature around colony ships. This feature is going to go live soon, probably even within the next days. As usual, there is a Release notes topic in the forum with all the details.

Naturally, I spent the week preparing the release. I prepared the world data, that is the file that contains all sectors, stars, planets, resources, materials and so on. Then I ran some tests locally to make sure that a universe with the old world data state will migrate successfully when presented with the new world data. I also run our suite of automated tests (unit test mostly) to make sure everything still works. The next items on the release checklist are centered around communication: I wrote the above-mentioned release notes topic, a newsletter that will be sent out via mail, a blog post, a Steam news post, the release entry for the website and a few smaller things. I also merged the latest translations from our community translation team.

I also looked into a bug report that we recently received. The player stated that they don't receive any faction contracts at all, even though they finished all introductory contracts. We have received similar bug reports in the past but haven't found/fixed the issue yet. Time to look into it! It is a requirement to have finished all introductory contracts before faction contracts are being generated. Although the player stated they finished all of them, I noticed that they only have completed five and not received the last one yet. After a while of digging I found the issue, and the fix was implemented easily. Since I had to reboot the servers for a maintenance issue anyway, I deployed the fix. The user reported that it is working now.

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

Happy trading!