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:
   

Would like to see a few "fun" skills added to the avatar skill screen that might be used to entice other in-game activities and perhaps lead to the addition of leader-boards for a selection of skills.

With the new changes to the decay and "Empire Standings" page, I think is is about time we discuss how empires should be ranked on the leaderboard once again.

We have discussed it at least once before, and I'll link to what I found here for discussion.

• (Idea thread) Scoring on Empire Standings
  
• (Idea thread) Empire ranking by population
  

Server Deadlock
A server deadlocked last night while a world was being destroyed by asteroids.

This was a great bug to flush out. The relevant code hasn't changed in years but the flurry of activity involved in hitting a world with all those asteroids made the deadlock situation happen. It's a good day.

Officer Trade
Officer could not buy tools at an airport.

Fixed numerous bugs that were preventing this from working.

Request Cargo Bug
Landed at airport in ship without transporters. Requested cargo for sale. No answer.

Fixed.

Trade With City On Road
Ship cannot trade with a city while sitting on a road of the city.

Fixed. The ship has to be on a road. The location of the ship must be within the city limits, as defined by its capitol and police station jurisdictions.

Government Target Value
Government target value was used as the basis for assassination mission payments. It was multiplied by an empire reward value that no longer exists. The result is that the payment for assassination missions is very low.

Government target value is now expressed in cronos. It will appear on the avatar's web page that way. That is the amount that the payment for assassination missions will be.

Conditions Error
An error message keeps appearing while loading avatars from the database. Something about a bad condition.

Fixed an error reading pregnancy conditions that were stored before the DNA change.

Founded City Stats
Someone suggested that showing all the cities founded by every avatar was giving away too much information about them.

Removed city stats from avatar web pages. Also removed solar system name containing their home building, which appeared there briefly.

I have some suggestions for an improvement to how spaceships and fleets are handled. Most of this focus is on the current follow command.

The goal: Be able to form groups of ships with each performing a specialized function. This could include, for example, a fleet consisting of a heavily shielded command ship, an atmospheric harvester for remote refueling, an orbital bombardment ship, and an anti-ship craft.

Key components:
-When going to warp and a follow ship command is active for a ship within a certain distance that belongs to the same empire, fix the ships relative to each other so they stay together during warp and system transition.
-Include a "Follow at relative position" command. This would allow a ship to always be positioned in a formation.
-Allow "Fleet" mission orders to be issued at once. For example, a mission disk that tasks ships 1-3 to orbit above a planet 120 degrees from each other while ship 4 harvests hydrogen then transfers this fuel to ships 1-3 in order.

Together, this would allow much better coordination of groups of ships for military or harvesting missions. Discussion would be helpful.

First, this is amazing. The asteroid impact you recorded haxus, truly breathtaking. 
Now on to the suggestion, currently it seems the results are:
Whole asteroid -> world destroyed
large chunk -> world destroyed
small chunk -> city wipe

I'd like to suggest a slight change:
Whole asteroid -> world destroyed
large chunk -> world transformed into lava world
small chunk -> city/life wipe

Inspired by real life, a simulation of a 500km asteroid hitting earth.

For reference the asteroid that caused the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs (and most life) was 10-15km in diameter... I know scale is 'wonky' at times, but I think this change would be more interesting, imagine you are exploring and find a lava world in the habitable zone. You then realize, it used to be someone's home. The poor buggers.

Lag Spikes
Servers are getting hit by crippling lag spikes that last for minutes at a time.

Found/fixed a problem when stacking items that have DNA. They weren't stacking, resulting in inventories at meat packing plants with tens of thousands of discrete items. This was causing a huge lag spike during a periodic maintenance function.

Avatar Page Cities
How do I know the current status of my cities that I have lost?

Cities founded by an avatar are now listed on their individual avatar web pages.

Empire Standings
The empire standings page shows a big confusing table of numbers.

Reworked the empire standings page to simplify the information and freshen the appearance.

Made links of avatar names.