Players can invite other players to teleport to their location.

This teleporting is kind of an exogame activity. Its intended purpose was to enable friends to easily join up with one another. Without it, players who start far apart might have a hard time getting together.

I would like to make changes to reduce its usefulness as a convenient form of transportation.

One simple change would be to permit teleporting be used only between two avatars in the same empire.

Thoughts?

I just watched my crew dive straight into a habitable world instead of going to orbit.
I was not able to catch it in time.  Instead of slowing down as the ship got closer to the planet the AI seemed to go to full throttle.

This was on a 14 day build ship.

Haxus please...

Officer's final log:

Land
Avatars now have land associated with them, in the form of solar systems. Land is an important factor in the next topic Abandonment and Decay.

The solar system that contains the avatar's home building is automatically part of their land. The solar system is not protected from abandonment if the home building is destroyed. The solar system remains protected even if the home building is destroyed.

In addition to their home system, each avatar may designate up to ten solar systems to be their land. The land designation is arbitrary. Any solar systems can be chosen.

This does not claim those solar systems as property. There is no way to know if a solar system is already part of another avatar's land. Any number of avatars may designate the same solar system as their land.

Land is shown on a new Land page on the Bio window. There, land can be removed and the current solar system can be added to your land.

Land can also be added using the Cities and Bases, System Scan, and Star Map windows. The cities list supports multiple select, so you can do a bunch of them at once.

Abandonment and Decay
The previous update produced some good ideas on this topic. Here are the new rules for abandonment and decay, with some clarifications.

Abandonment
A building can become abandoned.

• Building abandonment begins three days after: 1) an avatar on line was last present in its solar system or 2) it stops being protected by the land designation of an avatar.
  
• Buildings in the land solar systems of an avatar are protected from abandonment while the avatar's account remains active.
  • Buildings do not have to be part of a city. All buildings in land systems are protected.
    
  • Empire of the avatar and the buildings is not a factor.
    
• Abandonment appears as a negative morale modifier on the city report. The negative modifier is the number of days since the building began feeling abandoned, up to -1000.
  
• Land may take up to 24 hours to register the change of an avatar's account status, whether active or inactive.
  
• Solar systems may take up to 24 hours to be notified when they become land, to gain that protection.
  
• There is no extra benefit to overlapping the lands of multiple avatars.
  

• Up to three abandoned buildings in a city will decay at each city report cycle. Decayed buildings are listed on the city report.
  
• Unincorporated buildings on a world will decay. This goes unreported.
  
• When a building decays due to abandonment, it is completely destroyed.
  
• Probability of decay increases as the negative abandonment modifier increases.
  
• Decay conforms to city build rules so bases will decay before cities, on any given world.
  
• A city report with decaying buildings is marked with a highlighted icon.
  
• The final city report from a decaying city does not expire in the mail queue. It is marked with a highlighted icon.
  

I'm experiencing another instance of the old scan quality vs harvest quality bug. 
AFAIK this had been fixed once before.

The issue occurs on Hub System 01 Beta Ia(YP,RSF,MC,c Beta Ia)

I'll leave Impel(WLEFXKB) on site if you want to have a look.

Buildings in Zone 3 are harvesting crystals and minerals, scan report says Q236 crystals, and Q212 minerals
Mines are harvesting Q99 crystals, and Q50 minerals.

Gathering by hand gets the same results, Q99 and Q50.

Edit: It seems this is affecting multiple systems, number of bodies listed, as well as types is not always correct either.

Abandonment and Decay
Some kind of decay is needed for the new style buildings. The data load keeps getting bigger and heavier, with no relief. Also, it is possible for one person to maintain a ridiculously large empire, something that was expicitly not supposed to happen. If possible, the mechanism for decay should not penalize players who cannot log in for a while. Something must be done; the smaller servers are getting overwhelmed.

There is a finite amount of server resource available. It must be managed and shared by all players.

One way to keep the servers running smoothly is to eliminate data that nobody is using. A big contributor is buildings that get constructed then forgotten or abandoned. Those buildings chug away, doing their work forever, even if their emperor never comes back.

Several strategies have been tried over the years to do this in a way that is fair and works with the way people play the game. We are about to experience the carnage of yet another attempt. If anyone is going to rage quit, now is as good of time as any.

This is how buildings will decay, once this code is fully enabled. The update today does not destroy any buildings due to abandonment. Abandonment will be reported in city reports as a negative to morale, to give people time to make adjustments.

Buildings that are not incorporated into a city are subject to abandonment and decay, the same as buildings in cities or bases. There are no reports to show the abandonment status of unincorporated buildings.

Abandonment
A building can become abandoned.

• Building abandonment begins three days after an avatar on line was last present in its solar system.
  
• Exception, every building is immune to abandonment, in the supersector (3x3x3 sectors) centered on the home building of any avatar on an active account. Empire of the active avatar is not a factor. This is only signaled once per day so don't bother running around declaring new homes everywhere.
  
• An avatar whose account status changes, becoming active or inactive, may take up to 24 hours to register the change of account status.
  
• There is no extra benefit to overlapping the home supersectors of multiple avatars.
  
• Abandonment appears as a negative morale modifier on the city report.
  

• Up to three abandoned buildings in a city will decay at each city report cycle. Decayed buildings are listed on the city report.
  
• Unincorporated buildings on a world will decay. This goes unreported.
  
• When a building decays due to abandonment, it is completely destroyed.
  
• Probability of an abandoned building decaying increases as the negative morale modifier increases.
  
• Decay conforms to city build rules so bases will decay before cities, on any given world.
  
• A city report with decaying buildings is marked with a highlighted icon.
  
• The final city report from a decaying city does not expire in the mail queue. It is marked with a highlighted icon.
  

Servers Crashing and Burning
The Thanksgiving break did not go as smoothly for the servers as I hoped it would. A problem appeared that results in death of the manager server and subsequent death of the entire grid. This happened several times recently and seems to be slowly increasing in frequency.

This one had me stumped because there was never anything left to trace. One or more servers were usually uncommunicative, requiring remote hands assistance from the computer center to reboot them. The rest were all dead.

Sunday morning, yesterday, I checked the server monitor only to see red text and flames from a few servers that weren't completely dead. The rest were gone.

I got to work cleaning up the zombies. Most of them needed a slight wave to send them on to the promised land. One of them wasn't dead! It wasn't deadlocked either. It was using 37GB of memory! What could it be doing?

I got to work sifting through the call stacks of its thirty plus threads. This revealed a world suffering the effects of an asteroid collision. The world was destroying all of its buildings. One building was stuck in an infinite loop trying to destroy itself. A peculiarity of its tiny design caused it to fail.

Once understood, the bug was easily fixed. It was also fixed in similar code copied from spacecraft, though the condition could never logically occur in a valid spacecraft design.

Four days of time were added to all active accounts, to make up for the server down time.

1. Make the game free to play again, possibly with buyable cosmetics/whatever, as long as it doesn't affect the gameplay whatsoever.
2. Make a patreon, add a link leading to it to the launcher.
3. Get sseth to review it.[url=https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6VugMZKRhSyzWEWA9W2fg][/url]
4. Wait.
5. Watch as servers crash due to new players, which quite possibly will donate on patreon. (which they have link to on a silver platter)
6. Upgrade the servers from patreonbux allowing more players to join, creating an infinite money-upgrade loop.

I've seen the playercount and it's what, less than 100 at any given time these days? Heartbreaking. Entire universe to explore, but for who?

• Wormhole P = 1 hour
  
• Wormhole PN = 1 day
  
• Wormhole PNN = 2 days
  

we can't even make anything other than glabrians and yet the new creature creator is the best video game thing ever made. i genuinely think it is incredible! post your fancy guys and your freaky guys and your spindly lil rat bitches



here is my contribution i made it to show it off to the peasants without their own subscriptions, who did not believe it could be intuitive.

Currently, most patents just require chronos, some materials, and time.  This is boring.  The need to go out and manually mine new ores before we can research how to mine them properly is pretty cool, though.  Very hands-on.  We need more of this.

So for example, let's consider the wormhole drive patents.  Researching the P drive should require us to fly up next to at least one positive wormhole and "gather data" for a bit.  Perhaps we'd even need to visit the specific negative wormhole it's connected to and gather data on that end as well, requiring us to deadhead to another system at least once before we can build wormhole drives of any sort.  Then once we have the P drive and start wanting the PN version, we'd need to go collect more data on wormholes, this time by traveling through them, so that we'd have an incentive to actually use the damn thing instead of just spending the next 48 hours screwing around in the ship designer while our grad students slave away to invent the PN drive without us lifting a finger.  The PNN, of course, would similarly require actually visiting a neutral wormhole to gather more data, maybe this time launching some kind of sacrificial probe through it.

Unlocking the submarine should require spending a certain amount of time sailing around on boats and diving sufficiently deep underwater (perhaps while carrying some sort of sensor device), and submersible ship hulls should require gathering data from deeper yet by using the submarine.

Aircraft should require gathering data from high altitudes, whether by flying with your own wings, climbing a mountain, or building and ascending a tower.  Environment suits would require data from even higher altitudes.

Plastic explosives should require some experience with dynamite.

Obviously not everything will make sense to have a hands-on component, but I think enough things do that it's worth adding where appropriate.