News Development Update - 8th Jan

[Michael Brookes]

Any more progress on backgorund sim ?

The focus at the moment is monitoring the various actions players are taking and looking for issues that need fixing. As we add new content and features then we'll also need to update the sim as well.

Michael

 

[Michael Brookes]

Copy/Pasta from latest newsletter???

No - it's the other way round. These updates will be posted in the forums first and then sent out in the newsletter as well. Don't forget that there are many people who read the newsletter who don't visit the forums.

Michael

 

[Michael Brookes]

Hi Michael,

will there be any chance for users who bought the Mercenary or Final Edition to join the beta testers group?

Cheers,
SanMiguel

Currently no, but that might change.

Michael

 

[ollobrains]

The focus at the moment is monitoring the various actions players are taking and looking for issues that need fixing. As we add new content and features then we'll also need to update the sim as well.

Michael

Ok mikunn specifically stuck at 9.1% for nearly a month, any comment on that specific case, is there anything we can do ( maybe without telling us ) to get it moving or should we give up until a fix or patch is applied

 

[Wisdomlikesilence]

Cheers Michael. I wonder will you guys be able to implement city lights on nighttime faces of inhabited planets. Earth looks pretty dark atm!

 

[Michael Brookes]

So what about a Linux port ? ( shouldn't be that much harder than the Mac ? )

There are no plans for a Linux version at the moment. We are actively considering different platforms though.

MIchael

 

[Michael Brookes]

Ok mikunn specifically stuck at 9.1% for nearly a month, any comment on that specific case, is there anything we can do ( maybe without telling us ) to get it moving or should we give up until a fix or patch is applied

I don't know the details for this, there has been a bug raised with some information I believe so we will investigate and see.

Michael

 

[Michael Brookes]

Cheers Michael. I wonder will you guys be able to implement city lights on nighttime faces of inhabited planets. Earth looks pretty dark atm!

It's on the list.

Michael

 

[ollobrains]

Cheers Michael. I wonder will you guys be able to implement city lights on nighttime faces of inhabited planets. Earth looks pretty dark atm!

This is a pretty good idea actually, looking forward to dark side planetary lighting

 

[GibMeister]

This is a pretty good idea actually, looking forward to dark side planetary lighting

Yes, although one could argue that in the future our streetlighting may be so efficient that it may not be visible from space as it is today! But that aside, it would be a nice touch.

 

[orfeboy]

I don't know the details for this, there has been a bug raised with some information I believe so we will investigate and see.

Michael

Michael, once again thankyou for looking into these issues. I (and many others) am currently loving the background sim so the more that is greatly appreciated by the community. I noticed you guys were working on this even over Christmas so I just thought I should point that out. I would however like to point out that there are a number of missions we are experiencing at the moment in Lugh that when you deliver non-lethal weapons are currently bringing civil unrest down and also lockdown up. This seems like a contradiction to me. Also there seems to be one such mission that decreases famine as its result. It looks like that one is supposed to be a food mission?

I relalise this may be the way the missions are intended so if so fine but if you notice this to be the wrong results for said missions then it may be something to look at.

Also, I will just say that we have been sitting at civil war pending constantly for over a week and now have boom critical. I remember there was an issue with these states implementing before so I am saying this just to make you aware should any of these issues still exist.

 

[ollobrains]

Michael, once again thankyou for looking into these issues. I (and many others) am currently loving the background sim so the more that is greatly appreciated by the community. I noticed you guys were working on this even over Christmas so I just thought I should point that out. I would however like to point out that there are a number of missions we are experiencing at the moment in Lugh that when you deliver non-lethal weapons are currently bringing civil unrest down and also lockdown up. This seems like a contradiction to me. Also these seems to be one such mission that decreases famine as its result. It looks like that one is supposed to be a food mission?

I relalise this may be the way the missions are intended so if so fine but if you notice this to be the wrong results for said missions then it may be something to look at.

A good point, perhaps a full review of all missions and their impacts at some point, and if the opposite type of mission is missing perhaps be creative and have us killing food transports for example to cut a factions food supply.

 

[_Flin_]

A good point, perhaps a full review of all missions and their impacts at some point, and if the opposite type of mission is missing perhaps be creative and have us killing food transports for example to cut a factions food supply.

Furthermore mission generation seems to be bugged and generating missions that do not fit to the economy type of systems, e.g. Scrap import missions for a Industrial / Extraction system on an extraction station.

 

[ollobrains]

I don't know the details for this, there has been a bug raised with some information I believe so we will investigate and see.

Michael

Had the same line for a while now, is it to much to ask even a rough eta on when we might finally get someone to look at it, instead of perhaps small scale exploits. This has a lot of ppl ( here and other groups across lots of solar systems) trying to do things with the open sandbox and a lot are rapidly loosing interest, so id rate this a much higher importance affecting well thousands of players at best and it would generate a lot of goodwill if answers were at least forthcoming a little bit.

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Furthermore mission generation seems to be bugged and generating missions that do not fit to the economy type of systems, e.g. Scrap import missions for a Industrial / Extraction system on an extraction station.

well actually if the faction is a minor faction and not a station owner in that system, then they may want scrap to be dlivered so they can take delviery and take it elsewhere to build ships etc.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

There are no plans for a Linux version at the moment. We are actively considering different platforms though.

MIchael

Hi Michael,

I plan to do sort of online campaign to get some numbers of potential commanders to weight in that they would get behind ED if there would be Linux port (I have lot of people saying that these days). Is it worth to do such campaign or it won't sway your decisions?

Thanks for answer.

 

[RealNC]

I'm trying to source a commodity (combat stabilizers) for a naval progression mission, so in order to find where they sell them, I bought trading data for dozens of the surrounding systems until a trade route showed up on the map. I found a system (Leesti) that is exporting them (according to the map's trade route display) to several other systems around it.

I went there, and combat stabilizers weren't even listed in the market on any of the stations (I tried all stations.)

Bought more trade data and found another system (Arexe) using the map's route display (again the direction of the flow on the map indicated that the commodity is exported). That system has only one single station. I went there, nothing. Not even listed.

Note: the commodity wasn't just sold out. It was *not even listed at all* on the commodities market.

I do not understand. Is this working as intended? Surely not?

Another member of the forum said that this is simply just broken and doesn't work. Is this true? Are you going to fix this? The game currently seems to waste our time by sending us on wild goose chases all over the map.

 

[Tinman]

No substantive changes beyond bug fixes as they arise are immediately planned. We'll need to see how it works in conjunction with planetary surfaces in the longer term.

Michael

What about a "mining drone module" and maybe some sort of scanner that creates a heat map on top of the asteroid where it shows more (or less) profitable areas of the rock to blast away at?

Especially mining drones for ships bigger than the Cobra is really something that would make mining more lucrative. Filling up a Lakon Type 9 completely by scooping the chunks one by one isn't...fun...

If drones for bigger ships where implemented together with the wings functionality I see some great scenarios playing out where a group of players can head out to really profitable belts (with high pirate spawn rates). A big ship could then mine away while the others provide backup.

 

[Brucolac]

Michael, once again thankyou for looking into these issues. I (and many others) am currently loving the background sim so the more that is greatly appreciated by the community. I noticed you guys were working on this even over Christmas so I just thought I should point that out. I would however like to point out that there are a number of missions we are experiencing at the moment in Lugh that when you deliver non-lethal weapons are currently bringing civil unrest down and also lockdown up. This seems like a contradiction to me. Also there seems to be one such mission that decreases famine as its result. It looks like that one is supposed to be a food mission?

I relalise this may be the way the missions are intended so if so fine but if you notice this to be the wrong results for said missions then it may be something to look at.

Also, I will just say that we have been sitting at civil war pending constantly for over a week and now have boom critical. I remember there was an issue with these states implementing before so I am saying this just to make you aware should any of these issues still exist.

There's either a problem with the mission generation, or a problem with displaying the results of missions. Last night I accepted a mission from faction A to deliver cargo to faction B at a station. When I handed it in the successful mission text reported an increase in influence for faction A as expected, but also an increase in influence for faction C, a faction that were not in the mission text, not at the station and in fact not even present in the system at all.

I've ticketed issues like this last week, although it's tricky to capture since you don't know when a mission is going to produce odd results until you hand it in, which means taking screenshots of accepted missions in case one of them doesn't work.

I suspect the problem may be with some sort of client-side lookup table for reporting factions that gets it's indexing mixed up, so what the game tells you the effect is, isn't necessarily what is actually happening.

As for systems getting locked into "just about to change but never actually doing it" states, that's being going on for weeks.

 

[Michael Brookes]

A good point, perhaps a full review of all missions and their impacts at some point, and if the opposite type of mission is missing perhaps be creative and have us killing food transports for example to cut a factions food supply.

Missions is due for a major update which I'll go into more detail in a dev update soon.

Michael

 

[Michael Brookes]

What about a "mining drone module" and maybe some sort of scanner that creates a heat map on top of the asteroid where it shows more (or less) profitable areas of the rock to blast away at?

Especially mining drones for ships bigger than the Cobra is really something that would make mining more lucrative. Filling up a Lakon Type 9 completely by scooping the chunks one by one isn't...fun...

If drones for bigger ships where implemented together with the wings functionality I see some great scenarios playing out where a group of players can head out to really profitable belts (with high pirate spawn rates). A big ship could then mine away while the others provide backup.

We're not short of ideas, we just need to balance and prioritise the various work streams.

Michael