When a new Empire is created isn't there was some formula that keeps your starting sector some distance from another claimed sector?

It is quite disheartening to spend literally days making a new Empire only to be next door to the most powerful Empire in the game?  Understandably a long lived empire would have far reaching "probe" territory, but landing next door to such a power on the outside fringes of the galaxy just sucks.

Sticky Roofs, Broken Floors, Ghostly Walls
The work on stick roofs created more problems than it fixed.

I think the problems with sticky roofs, falling through floors, and ghostly walls are fixed.

I could not eliminate the need for a hull void on top of areas where vehicles are intended to operate. That includes on top of the road span of bridges and the landing pad at the airport. The void nullifies the obstruction margin that normally exists around hull parts. The void only has to be about a meter thick; more is ok because it is ignored outside the obstruction margin.

I updated the Airport Terminal, Colony Airport Terminal, and Highway Bridge blueprints. I unpublished the other bridges until I have a chance to work on them.

Server Crash
A couple of servers crashed in the past few days.

Fixed an error that happened when a passenger used a turbo lift while someone aboard was in a designer instance. This was positively identified as the cause of the crash in both cases.

Street Lights
I keep going to the roads page to find street lights.

Street lights button moved to roads page on the construction window.

Street Lights in Top Down
In top down view, street lights show an icon in the buildings overlay. They can be overpowering when there are lots of them.

Street lights and bridges were moved to the roads and landscaping overlay in top down view. This is consistent with their placement on the roads and landscaping page of the construction window. Street light icons are now 1/2 the size of road and bridge icons.

Grass on Roads
Sometimes my roads have grass on them in front of buildings, if the building site overlaps the road.

Grass is now removed from roads, even if they are overlapped by building sites.

Finalize Bug
Get a copy of a design from the exchange. Go to the designer and use the open from gear option. The design will not finalize after you tinker with it. Save the design to a file and reload the file and it finalizes ok.

Fixed architect id error.

Boat Scrape Bottom
Sailboats and submarines should make a scraping noise when they rub against the bottom.

Sailboats and submarines now make a scraping noise when they touch bottom while moving.

There are some cases where you'd want to posts guards at what is technically a civilian building. You might want soldiers at an airport or a dock, or guarding your capitol, bank etc - even your avatar's private bedroom.


Right now, you have to somehow splice in a guard post site, which can be difficult, especially if the target location is on an upper floor. Could guard posts, as well as being a standalone building, become a mechanism by which troops are drawn from the military population just as citizens are for citizen posts - to any location? You eradicate all military presence by destroying the military homes, so I don't think it affects balance at all.

You can already do this on ships, more or less - would it be hard just to extend the system to all building types?

A player recently suggested a system of shield frequencies. I think it would work kind of like this.

• Defending shield station sets a number, which is the shield frequency. Perhaps has to be set before shields are brought up.
  
• Attacking weapon station sets a number, to penetrate shields using that frequency.
  
• If you get lucky, and your weapon frequency matches their shield frequency, their shield is nullified.
  

• NPC gunners would fire using random frequencies until they got lucky, then would continue using the same frequency.
  
• NPC defenders would lower shields, change frequency, then raise shields when attacker gets lucky.
  
• Frequency would need to be 3 digits or less or the odds of the gunner getting lucky would be extremely low. Is 1 to 255 enough?
  
• Anyone who sits at a shield station aboard a ship should see its frequency number.
  

One of the debug servers started dying about a week ago and finally slipped below the waves a couple of days ago. This killed the debug server grid for a while. It was up and working again by the end of yesterday. Consequent to the down time, some of the changes in this update were not tested yet.

Shields
Shields should charge faster when down. Shields on big ships take a long time to charge, like a month.

Shields received a few changes.

• Shields now have three states: Up, Down and Off.
  
• Shield station power button cycles through the three states.
  
• Shield capacitor charge time is 10 minutes when shields are down, if enough power is available, unless the old charge rate was faster, then that is used.
  
• When up, shield capacitor charge time is 1/10 of the shields down charge time, unless the old charge rate was faster, then that is used. (Should they charge at all when up?)
  
• Shields maintenance power is consumed when the shields are up; this did not change. Maintenance power not consumed when down or off.
  
• Shield capacitor does not charge or discharge when the shield is off.
  
• Stand down order is satisfied by shield down. Off is not necessary.
  
• Repairs and hiding in ground clutter require shields off.
  
• Crew turns shields off when the ship is moored.
  
• Shield projector bases now take 10 minutes to charge from empty, if enough power is available. They are never off or down.
  
• Tool tips, mission orders and NPC verbiage were update to distinguish between "down" and "off" appropriately.
  

• Framework is now the default volume for buildings and spacecraft.
  
• Other volume categories are considered to have the minimum framework necessary to exist. The framework category adds to that minimum structure.
  
• Volume allocated to framework is valued at 4x the hit points of other volumes.
  
• This has the effect of taking away hit points as volumes are "carved out" of the framework, without breaking existing designs.
  
• Street lights no longer allow cargo storage volume. I will republish my street light designs to the exchange.
  
• Increasing framework enables a building to be built in harsher conditions, the way armor does, with thresholds at the same volumes. Armor still works too, so existing designs are not broken by this. They do not assist each other in this determination. One or the other must be sufficient for the environment.
  

• Refit is not really done now but it might work without breaking the ship.
  
• The quality of the resulting systems will likely be incorrectly reset back to the original construction quality of the spacecraft.
  
• All damage to the spacecraft will likely be repaired.
  

userfriendlyness

planetary shield hosted on a space station and will only go down if the station dies

Is there a good resource for designing buildings?  I enjoyed the videos on space craft design, but was unable to find anything specific to buildings.  For the most part it seems intuitive after watching the space craft design videos, but things like site choices and how to design buildings for use on the shore are not entirely clear to me.

Taking some inspiration from Stellaris' Species Rights system.

Currently we only have one species per city/building, this is defined by the avatar that builds them. The only way to change the species that live in the city/building is by removing all population and debarking passengers of the desired species. This might even be harder for new-style cities, since species DNA is per building.

I suggest that we get empire-wide controls over the species in our empire. List the DNA of all avatars in the empire and let us chose which we want to consider citizens, soldiers, crew, troops and officers.
Then whenever citizens are going to spawn they are chosen at random between any species that has the right to be a citizen. Same with crew and other spacecraft boarding, take a random species with the right to be that role.

Could extent it to also list species DNA of avatars that belong to allies or vassals. Other than that I don't know how else to determine which DNA should be listed, any ideas?

Sticky Roofs
Building roofs are sticky. Step off the edge of a roof, such as the airport landing platform, and you fall a bit then get stuck with no way to get free.

Buildings and spacecraft under foot got some attention.

• Roof surface slope now correct for vehicles driving on top of buildings and spacecraft.
  
• Obstruction margins now easier to escape.
  
• Obstruction margins reduced slightly. Only affects buildings and spacecraft finalized after this update.
  

1. I drew the hull extrusion from the side, so I could draw the shape of a ramp going up to a flat area (5 sides).
   
2. I placed a hull void (box 1m thick 3m tall) in front of the edge of the ramp where you drive|walk onto it. The void is needed to allow things to move close enough to the ramp to get on top of the ramp slope. Otherwise, the obstruction margin keeps things away.
   
3. I drew a site around/under the whole thing because that is required of all buildings. Street lights are an exception but you won't be able to stand on top of portions that extend outside their site.
   

The stairs at the Hospital by Haxus building do not work. You walk through them. Jumping puts you up on top of them.