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.

Brains
How do I eat brains?

Use a knife to butcher a head. It now produces a Bone and a Brain. The brain retains the DNA and inscription of the head, so you know whose it was.

There is no 3D model for the brain yet. It appears as the default bolt-cube model.

Server Deadlock
A server deadlocked last night.

I was happy to trap this one. There have been a number of server crashes recently that could not be traced because the computers were too far gone by the time I got to them. This one crashed on a beefy computer with tons of memory.

The bug was definitely the cause of the deadlock last night and it probably was not the first time. The bug was created while integrating the new animal DNA.

Stock Limit Bug
The stock limit seems to have no effect on some manufacturing processes.

Fixed a bug that affected processes with only one shop enabled. The bug caused those processes to not show their stock limit, even though it was there.

FTL Drive Patents Cost
When patents were introduced, all of them were configured to take 5 minutes. My intent was to revisit the data to increase the time to develop various patents. I did not do this right away so as not to penalize long-time players who already had developed warp 9 but did not have the patents yet.

Time to run FTL patent development processes was increased.

• Wormhole P, 1day
  
• Wormhole PN, 2days
  
• Wormhole PNN, 3days
  
• Warp 1, 1week
  
• Warp 2, 2weeks
  
• Warp 3, 3weeks
  
• Warp 4, 4weeks
  
• Warp 5, 5weeks
  
• Warp 6, 6weeks
  
• Warp 7, 7weeks
  
• Warp 8, 8weeks
  
• Warp 9, 9weeks
  

I entered a solar system with my ship that had two asteroids. Immediately my sensors officer started repeating this message every couple seconds.

Upgrade DNA
Someone asked if it would be possible to upgrade existing gen3 avatars to use the new gen4 DNA.

Gen3 avatars can now upgrade their DNA to gen4. Start by using the gen4 DNA editor to create an avatar and save the DNA into a .dna file.

If your avatar has gen3 DNA, an Upgrade DNA button appears on the Biology page of the Bio window. The upgrade will ask for a .dna file. After upgrading, the avatar can not do it again.

There is no time limit to do this. Someone could choose to wait until more features are available in the gen4 DNA editor.

Doing this causes the client program to break. You must immediately close the client program after upgrading your DNA.

When the client is restarted, the avatar shown at the startup screen may still be using gen3 DNA. That will update eventually; it takes a few minutes before the login server picks up the change to the DNA. You do not have to wait for the avatar on the startup screen to update to enter the game; your avatar will be gen4 in the game.

Targoss Not Needed for Demis and Highborns
Targoss is annoying when he shows up to greet a newly born demiavatar.

The Reach for the Stars story no longer starts for demi avatars and highborns.

Head Lag
I get a huge lag spike when killing gen4 creatures. It's brutal if you slaughter a village full of indigenous.

The lag spike is due to the time it takes to construct the OpenGL model of the head, worse depending on haircut and beard styles.

Gen4 heads now construct their 3D model in the model maker thread. This could result in a delay of a few seconds between a head existing and it becoming visible in your render scene.

Hair Triangles
Hair on gen4 creatures creates a huge number of render triangles for its OpenGL model. It takes a long time to build the OpenGL model and its a lot to render.

Hair on gen4 creatures now uses 1/4 to 1/3 the triangles it was previously.

This likely contributed to the screaming GPUs reported by some players.

Avatars with Exotic Lungs
Lungs offer a choice of Exotic, for their atmosphere type. Avatars don't come from worlds with exotic atmospheres.

Lungs now offer all atmosphere types as choices. However, any choices other than Standard and Tainted are not valid for use by avatars.

Avatars are now required to have lungs that can breathe Standard or Tainted atmospheres.

Asexual Sex
Asexual creatures should not be able to have sex.

Asexual creatures can no longer enter the mating pose. They cannot mate at all.

They should go through a periodic and/or environmentally based reproduction cycle. That is not implemented yet. Currently, asexual creatures cannot reproduce at all.

Hermaphrodite Sex
How does hermaphrodite sex work?

Hermaphrodites are only sexually compatible with hermaphrodites.

Hermaphrodites may impregnate each other during sex.

Crew Wear BDUs
Someone asked if crew would wear BDUs.

Crew will now wear BDUs, if they are available in the crew's city of origin. Crew prefer uniforms so if you want them to wear BDUs, don't manufacture uniforms.

Someone suggested an empire or ship policy for uniforms and hair styles. This might be implemented at some point.

Married NPCs
Some NPCs should be married.

Officers, crew, troops and passengers now have a possibility of being married. Probability varies by class. The married ones will not have sex with players.

This allows the use of terms like Miss and Mrs, which helps to distinguish NPCs and give them some detail.

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows their marital status.

NPC Skills
How can I see the skill set of an NPC?

A tool tip on the Unit Orders window shows the skills of each NPC. The only skills listed are those that apply to their job and contribute to their rank. They could have other skills.

Sex with NPCs
How do you have sex with anybody other than indigenous?

In addition to indigenous people, it is now possible to have sex with officers, crew, troops and passengers.

The mechanism is the same as with indigenous. Any of these methods will work.

• Enter the mating pose and engage in a conversation with them.
  
• Start a conversation and use some euphemism for having sex in a sentence.
  
• Enter the mating pose and order someone to mount you.
  

Fairly simple idea, the first 20 or so infrastructure objects (bridges, aerial platforms, sea platforms, land platforms, biodomes) should not affect the world volume/building limit similar to how the first 20 street lights and fences do not count against you. Why? It makes using these incredibly disadvantageous especially on smaller worlds. Let's say you want to colonize a gas giant with a small core of Sphere 1. You pop up the nice Aerial Platform 820m by Haxus and woah! you just lost 1,370,602m³ out of your 1,625,639m³ total! You have barely any room left for the actual city!

You want to colonize a Sphere 2 moon to mine some sweet resources, but you'll want all the civil and factory buildings under a dome. Pop a few Biodome 300m Level Lawn by Haxus and oh shoot, each of these eats 847,169m³ volume?! 

Even all the way up to Sphere 4 with their limit of 26,010,072m³ your infrastructure is going to take a huge chunk out of usable city space. Why does this matter? Most hostile environments such as moons or gas giants are where these infrastructure projects shine the most and most of these environments are going to be on the smaller world size. Why bother using them when they can cut into so much of your usable volume?

I originally understood why this limit was in place, if they were free people would absolutely spam them, however I noticed that street lights and fences allotted a free amount before they start counting against you and then I decided that would be a very workable solution to preventing spam of these infrastructure projects and still allowing them to be used where they are needed the most, on small worlds.

These three spacecraft have been broadcasting for way too long. Must be a bug keeping them in orbit.

(03-20-2019, 07:25 PM)Haxus Wrote: Spacecraft SOS Spam
A spacecraft was crying out a fuel emergency for a really long time, like days or weeks. How could it stay alive that long?

Agent teleported to the ship. It then began falling from orbit because it had no fuel. It fell into a lava sea and was destroyed.

A bug prevented the ship in that situation from receiving any physics/movement processing. The bug was fixed.

Weapon smith cannot have production limits set.  Always returns to 0.
Edit: also seeing this with the electronics factory.

Within the <head> of the main site, the description is broken due to the quotation marks used within it. See here:



This causes Google and other search engines to produce weird results when crawling it, such as showing the galactic chat in the description. See here

There should be no quotation marks within the description unless ending it, to ensure this doesn't happen

Server Load
Server load has grown steadily worse for days, maybe weeks.

Some investigating took me to a small city that was taking almost five minutes to prepare its city report. The mystery grew deeper when the lag was caused by consolidating the inventories of the various buildings in the city into one inventory for the city report. How could that take minutes?

Digging deeper showed that some of the buildings were storing lists of nearly 100,000 different items. That is different items, not counts. Counts of items are just numbers on the items. Differences arise from items that cannot be stacked with other items.

The problem was hidden by the way the inventory is sorted for the city report. The sorting process expected the list items to have unique names. They didn't. I fixed the city report but that fix will not appear until the next client update, not needed for this server fix.

An error was found in an operator== override for old style DNA. The error was introduced recently when a pure base class was implemented for handling old and new DNA uniformly.

The solution fixes inventory lists as they are loaded. You don't have to do anything.

Then we'll find the next most greedy bit of code, eating up CPU time needlessly.

Aspiring programmers should always remember; make it part of your DNA. No CPU instruction is free.

Obsolete Items
Old style cities used to throw away obsolete items. New style cities never throw away obsolete items. This results in long lists of items with slightly different qualities.

New style cities now discard obsolete items when the city report is created. This should further reduce those big lists of inventory items in cities.

Buildings individually maintain their own inventories and residents. Buildings individually decide which of their inventory items are obsolete. The city accumulates all items from all buildings, so the city report may show items that would be considered obsolete if all of the items were considered together.

What makes an item obsolete?

• Air and Water are never obsolete in a harsh environment.
  
• Food is never obsolete if it is edible to the residents of the building.
  
• Upgrade Modules are obsolete if the inventory contains more of them at a higher Q.
  
• Other items are obsolete if the inventory is more than half filled with items at least 2 Q's higher than the item. In other words, if the number of items that are itemQ+2 or higher equals or exceed half the storage available, the item is obsolete.
  

There's been a lot of talk about how the next galaxy should be shaped...

From one super massive galaxy to a handful of medium sized ones. Though most all agree that the number of galaxies should be reduced and their size should have an actual limit instead of just floating off into infinity.

Why not have say have about five or six medium sized galaxies that are not infinite that occupy the same core galactic grid map?

In essence all galaxies are on the same map and have set sizes where their stars can generate. Past those regions there is just galactic void space where stars are super rare; that can be flown though allowing players to warp travel or even deadhead to other galaxies... providing they have the supply/fuel to make the extremely long trip.

The edges of this pan-galactic map loop around so there is no hard end instead if you go off the side you just end up on the other side of the universe. Or you could just have the player be killed by dark matter.

This can allow players if they choose to hide or make use of the void space to house secret bases and such. Also if say a powerful empire manages to lock down major wormhole travel between galaxies other players will always have the option to take the long rout there.

This will make the galaxy in my mind feel more unified and like a real place and allow even more paths and strats to unfold.


If anyone has their own thoughts or comments on this subject feel free to talk about it in this thread also.