When you run a process, it has a stated run-time. After reaching zero, instead of immediately resetting, it hangs there for as much as 6-8 seconds without adding anything to the inventory or allowing you to run again.

This makes the stated times very misleading: a 3 second process can actually take up to 4 times as long to run, and throws your production calculations severely and unpredictably out of whack.


This is by no means new, but it is quite frustrating and I wonder if something can be done to improve it? Really, there is little point even telling the player a process will take 3 seconds to run when it could be anything between 3-4 times that....obviously for the 60 day processes it's less of an issue.

Land at Airport Order
NPCs have trouble landing at airports.

Fixed two errors when checking for a landing site.

One error caused an inconsistency between what obstructions they perceived when inside vs outside the atmosphere, causing crazy flight behavior.

The other error caused the pilot to sometimes get close, then think the landing site was on the other side of the planet, and execute a vertical takeoff to fly there.

Land at City Order
NPCs don't follow this order at all.

Reworked NPC landing logic to land on roads when no empty spacecraft landing spots are available. They first prefer level graded roads over sloping grades. Second, they prefer concrete, asphalt, then dirt.

NPCs currently land at the end points of roads and slabs and they don't care about road width. The landing spot must be inside city limits because then they can trade. They check for obstructions; they insure the spot is not inside an enclosure; and they make sure it is above sea level if the world has surface liquid.

Turret Ordnance
I was unable to load ordnance into a turret. The window showed nothing.

Fixed an error in identifying the turret station. This may have broken old style space ships but I don't care.

Observatory Report Asteroid Position
City report could show position of asteroids.

City report now shows the position of asteroids relative to the solar system.

It should also only report one event per asteroid, per city report. I was getting multiples. That may have only been a temporary problem on the debug servers.

Remote Camera Buttons
When at a command station, it would be handy if the on-screen buttons at the right included controls for remote cameras.

Remote camera buttons now appear among the buttons at the right, when you are at a command station of a spacecraft that has remote cameras in its design. There will be no camera buttons if the design has no cameras.

Organs
Commodities needed for body organs.

Heart, lungs, gills, and stomach added.

• Edible to carnivores, omnivores, and scavengers.
  
• Can be manufactured at a meat processing plant.
  
• Butchering an animal carcass now produces: meat, leather, bone, heart, lungs, and stomach.
  
• Butchering a fish now produces: fish meat, heart, gills, and stomach.
  

This is just a rant. I figured the cantina was an appropriate place. Since its imaginary, I can imagine myself crying in my beer; I can't really drink beer in the real world, so I stick to bourbon.

The Expanse is a SciFi series on Amazon Prime. The first two seasons were fantastic, so good that we didn't hesitate to fork out the $30 or so that it cost to watch season three. It did not disappoint.

The Expanse is an intricate and detailed sci fi story. The Earthers, the Martians, and the Belters inhabit the solar system but have not traveled outside the system yet. They are the main factions of the story as it develops. Spacecraft are highly advanced rockets, with at least a nod to Neutonian physics. Its like reading a really good sci fi novel, edgy and modern, with cool and interesting twists along the way. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes sci fi.

Season 4 was just released.

We're five episodes in to the fourth season; there are ten episodes. Paula's wondering when they are ever going to do anything. It's like watching a comic book unfold. Story depth, characters, all became so shallow as to be comparable to some of the worst sci fi movies I've ever seen. The CGI is fantastic, but the story, poised at the point of incredible potential at the end of season three, fell off a cliff.

:'(

They need to get the old writer(s) back! Pay them whatever it takes!

Asteroid
I'm in my system, within 200K meters of an asteroid and it doesn't show up either as a command target, or even on the Fire Control terminal of my ship. How am I supposed to protect my world if I can't attack an incoming asteroid?

Fixed numerous problems here.

• Asteroid will now show up on the unit list for Attack and Follow orders.
  
• NPCs will now attack and follow asteroids in response to mission orders.
  
• Asteroids are now considered to be enemies.
  
• Fire Control console now targets asteroids.
  
• Fire control reticle now shows weapon range and range to target when target is out of range.
  

My first week in the universe has been pretty eventful. Some key bugs / items, like Targoss and the Rocket Training mission were missing. I found out about the asteroid in game after hearing Haxus tell another player. That started a 4 day countdown of when it would hit my planet...

Many hours were spent building and getting things ready to launch into space for the the first time. On the big day, I enlisted some help from other Avatars, and we went hunting. With crappy sensors, a good calculator, and some navigational prowess from Vectorus, we got a sensor hit. We honed in on it, got visuals and were right on top of it when the unthinkable happened. A server crash with only 3.something hours left.

Needless to say the servers were down for about 3 hours and I was bricking shits. There was just enough time to build a 25 minute ship (Badger 1 by Deltova) and take care of this menace once and for all.

Taking off with no time whatsoever to spare.

https://youtu.be/EiXC-2H9Ou8

WTF....

Ok plan B. The F2 fighter sitting at the factory. There are only seconds left. I get into orbit and get visuals.

https://youtu.be/HA1ANwqtsO0

I get a little turned around on the direction, but it was too late anyway. RIP! Oh, and if that's not good enough, it kicks you off the server as well. I logged back in with my ship at about half health watching the pieces drift into a descending orbit around the sun.

Some say the asteroid can be overcome, but I don't believe it. Just from my time here, and what I've seen in-game (in a week), there is a 0/6 success ratio.

After sitting in my fighter, watching the pieces get destroyed by the sun, mourning the loss and dusting the salt off my skin, I recall to a new homeworld since there was nothing left.

I was greeted by a binary system in which I had 3 moons, a ring planet, a gas giant with rings, another gas giant with moons with rings, and a spectacular view.

Total upgrade ;)

-FinalGen

When I send on of my harvester ships to run a harvesting cycle on a target, it occasionally gets trapped in an endless loop.

If the next harvesting pulse from a ship/stations harvesting bay is set to exceed the harvesting quantity threshold, it won't take the in the resources from that pulse. This means the ship never exceeds the threshold and the ship gets trapped in an infinite harvesting loop, that it only exits when the fuel threshold is met.

This can be circumvented by manually completing that mission order.

This bug has caused some major delays in my remote resource harvesting operations.

Asteroids look really cool. Actually, a lot of space-objects look really cool in Hazeron.

We have observatories, but you can't actually observe anything from them. This is a shame, since watching distant planets slowly rise in the sky is half the fun of the game.

What about adding telescopes to buildings and ships? Works like an external camera. Press "E" when you're at the viewing end. Your view becomes an external camera pinned to the far end, but with the difference that the view is magnified to the level specified in the building/ship blueprint and the LOD redrawn accordingly. Perhaps there's also a black circle effect around your scene to simulate what you see in real life.

Could also add a lower-magnification telescope as a personal item. Useful for Space Piracy, together with eyepatches and parrots.

Fun and easy?

Where's Targoss?
Targoss stopped showing up.

Fixed an error in the story engine when testing lineage of avatar to insure Targoss story doesn't start for highborns or demiavatars.

Trespass
New cities do not report trespassers. Old cities did.

Buildings with radar will now report trespassers in their radar range. Trespassers are buildings or stations that belong to a neutral empire.

Login Chat Lag
When I first log in, I cannot chat for a minute or two.

This happens when the Construction window requests the current public building design exchange information for the first time.

You can prevent it by leaving the Construction window closed when you log out. It will remain closed at login. When the window is opened, it will request the data.

Building exchange data is now compressed prior to sending. This didn't help much since the data was already pretty tight. My tests got about 10% reduction in data size due to compression.

Building and spacecraft exchanges are now preceded by a thought message warning when the data is large, exceeding 5MB. It informs the player that they cannot receive chat messages until the exchange data is received. A follow up thought message informs when the data transfer is complete.

World Approach Building Lag
I get a huge lag spike when approaching a world with buildings.

Found/fixed a scene sync bug that caused a little stutter when receiving new atoms into the scene. That stutter caused buildings to create and delete their rendering objects several times. Many buildings quickly added up to a huge lag spike, especially bad if any were under construction or destroyed.

Moved creation and management of building models into the model maker thread pool. This allows the grunt work of building the OpenGL model to be done in a thread that is not the foreground rendering thread, relieving some scene lag. This didn't actually save much on completed buildings because their final models take almost no processing before feeding them to OpenGL. However, this saved a lot of foreground processing time on buildings under construction or destroyed, because the board framework model takes a lot of work to construct.

The model maker offers an additional huge benefit. Multiple buildings using the same design now share the same OpenGL model, instead of each of them building/managing their own model. The creation of only one common model reduces the scene construction lag time and memory usage, when multiples of the same building designs are present. All buildings benefit, including buildings under construction and destroyed.

World Departure Building Lag
I got a moderate lag spike when departing a world with buildings.

Fixed a problem that eliminated the lag spike almost entirely. There was still a bit of grinding as building models were removed from the scene.

Implementation of the model maker thread pool completely eliminated those last grinding bits of lag.

World Map Buildings
World map sometimes does not show all the buildings on the map until you move close to the planet.

Fixed. Due to this change, you may now see airport beacons from much farther away.

I'm in my system, within 200K meters of an asteroid and it doesn't show up either as a command target, or even on the Fire Control terminal of my ship. How am I supposed to protect my world if I can't attack an incoming asteroid?

   

My homeworld recently experienced some unplanned restructuring thanks to an asteroid. The planet remained intact but there are now some wicked craters on the surface. The world map onboard my spacecraft has correctly updated to represent the new geography, but the menu map hasn't.


Spacecraft Map:
   


Menu Map: