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In other words, if the number of items that are itemQ+2 or higher equals or exceed half the storage available, the item is obsolete.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.

Server Deadlock
Vooker helped by showing me a bug that caused a server deadlock. It happened when he used his ship to attack a pirate base.

This was an elusive bug to find. The read/write lock at the heart of the problem was getting unlocked one too many times when a ground-based gun tower fired its weapon. That caused its internal lock counter to roll over backward to a large positive number, since it is unsigned. After that, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to lock the lock for write...deadlock.

Thanks again to Vooker525 for making me observe this bug. It is fixed.

HQ Spam
It was reported that multiple military HQ buildings on a world is a nuisance due to the additional city names that are created.

This isn't a bug because there was no limit placed on the number of military HQ buildings.

That said, the consequence of placing lots of them is very annoying and it serves no useful purpose.

One HQ is enough because you have to destroy all other military buildings first, before the HQ. It doesn't matter what those other buildings are. Other HQs are not particularly useful and it is only confusing.

I changed the build rule for military HQ buildings. They can no longer be built on a world that already has a military HQ building.

Existing worlds with multiple HQ buildings were left unchanged. While a nuisance, the extra HQs do not cause problems.

Bounty Dates
It would be nice if the list of bounties showed the date they were placed.

Bounties now show their create date on the Bounties page of the Bio window and also in the Bounties section of the avatar's web page.

Bounty Links
It would be nice if the list of bounties on the avatar's web page made a link to the person who placed the bounty.

Bounties on the avatar page now link to the avatar who placed the bounty.

Also, the emperor name in the Empire section of the avatar page is now a link.

Skills Page
It was suggested that the Skills table be moved to its own page on the Bio window.

Done. Skills are now on a separate page of the Bio window.

Animal Slaughter
I started investigating the cause of the servers working so hard.

I found a problem that caused animals to spawn at farms and immediately die, over and over, constantly. This was creating a load and wasting resources. I think the problem is fixed, pending testing.

Server Deadlock
Trapped another server deadlock. This one was a building trying to find the altitude of the terrain on its site.

Deadlock was fixed.

Resources
Someone pointed out that you can make a 10k process mine on one rock of ore. You don't really have to find another one after that. In the past, mines were limited by the number of actual rocks on their site.

The process limit, based on rocks present, has been restored for mines, wells, and drilling rigs.

• When placing a mine, well, or drilling rig now, a list of icons appears with numbers next to them, to show resources present on the proposed site, and the number of each.
  
• On the Building page of the Building window, mines, wells and drilling rigs now show the resources present at their site, with the count of each.
  
• Existing buildings are not affected until you try to make any changes to their processes. Then they will impose limits.
  

• You can now add a process if all workshops are already assigned. The new process starts out with 0 workshops.
  
• Stock limit can now be assigned to manufacturing processes. The process will not run if the current stock of what it makes, stored at the building, equals or exceeds the stock limit. A stock limit of zero results in the current/old behavior of filling all available space in the building.
  
• When adding a new process, you can now specify the number of workshops, minimum production quality, and stock limit right away.
  
• Manufacture panel replaces workshop count and production quality with a single button. The button shows the current values. When pressed, a dialog appears to configure workshops, minimum production quality, and stock limit.
  

So recently I had spent roughly a week in the designer working on a new barge type ship, and put as much time and care into it as possible.  During this time, I found myself missing quite a few quality of life commands to the designer that would make the development workflow a bit smoother and easier to handle.  Forgive me as I'm going to be referring to a lot of these from the 3DS Max framework, (I'm assuming Blender terms would be the same, or near to these as well).

Vertex & Face Selection Modifiers -
Currently when selecting vertices using CONTROL to add to your selection, it simply toggles selection pieces.  If I have half a sphere selected, hold CONTROL, and select the entire thing, then the opposite half of the sphere becomes selected, not the entire sphere.  I propose fine tuning the selection controls to include ALT in the selection process.  In 3DS Max, using CONTROL while selecting vertices adds all the non-selected ones to the selection, while holding ALT, removes them.  This will make trying to get more ornate "non-square" pieces selected, then fine tune down the parts you don't want versus trying to get it in one go, or select faces individually.

Selection tools -
Simple enough, sometimes I find myself needing the lasso, polygon lasso, circle, or other selection tools I do not have, these would help the fine tune selection of vertices/faces.

Grow & Shrink in Vertex/Face Selection -
When selecting a vertex (if your using an editable poly modifier), and want to work on the mesh in any way shape or form, there is an option to "Grow" and/or "Shrink" your selection.  Doing so adds the adjacent pieces to the selection in 1 tier.  So for example, if I have a mesh plane that is 25x25 in terms of polygons (not triangles, should still be the same concept though), and I have the center vertex/faces selected, by clicking grow, the 3x3 in the center would then be selected.  Shrink would obviously work in the same fashion only in reverse.  The caveat to this is, if two pieces of mesh are of the same object, but are not welded, then grow & shrink only effects the a single piece of mesh, it will not jump to non-contiguous vertices/faces.  This may seem like a trivial idea, but when texturing large crafts when more than say 300 faces, it tends to be difficult to select each face you want individually and get the entire segment you want to texture, this would save some time in that department.

Ignore Back-facing Option -
When making large selections, or even ones on the individual level I've noticed that hitting the spots is sometimes, well... spotty?  This is usually because it is selecting something behind where I'm clicking that I cannot see.  Being able to ignore back facing vertices/faces in the selection process would help solve this issue.

Mouse Cursor vs. Hand - 
While I love the novelty of the hand cursor during game-play, I don't believe it fits a development environment like the ship/building designer.  Even after being in the designer for hours, I'm still not exactly sure where the proper hot-spot is for the hand, and I end up missing selection pieces quite often.  With something more intense, I think a mouse cursor, JUST for this area would be a better idea, I have no issue with it during proper game-play.

Unwrap UVW -
Now I know from a programmatic standpoint I have absolutely NO IDEA how this could be handled.  I know it has however, and is an option for export in 3DS Max to help with creating textures.  This simply allows you to color faces with base colors, and then unwraps the mesh as best as possible with all faces connected as the texture should sit if it was just applied with minimal modifiers.  Think paper-craft 3D characters before they are folded up and finished.

If these options are available in the designer, I apologize I must have over looked them, I promised I tried looking for them; but I have a feeling, even with this slight "complexity(?)" added to the designer; players when more acclimated to the environment will appreciate some of these new options to help the workflow a bit.  I know I have grown accustomed to them, and as I was designing I went to go use them, and realized I wasn't in 3DS max any more lol.

I suggest something that a lot of other MMORPG games have, "dungeons". Adventure/exploration content that is normally quite popular as PvE content.

A new type of temporary wormhole that is either completely random, or maybe around neutron stars or stellar black holes.

Entering these special temporary wormholes would takes you to a temporary solar system filled with space monsters, space pirates and loot. After a couple days the temporary solar system explode, destroying everything left inside it and the wormhole disappear.

This would however require more pirate blueprints and maybe some new space monsters to be created. And of course we would need some new interesting loot to find.

Weltreich is gearing up to deploy fleets of up to 20 officered harvesting ships with looping missions per system to replace lost capacity. The lag will be delicious.

Under the Neutral Zone Empire Standings, Weltreich counts as having 0 worlds despite having over-overlordship of an empire that has 45 worlds.

Don't think we can declare Weltreich as the true victors of the Universe yet until both banners on the frontpage fly their colours.

A very simple idea.

Add in a way by which a race's creator may decide the names his people will take.
Instead of having just a random hodgepodge of names for all races this will let the species feel more unique and cultural.

Two ways this could be done. A simple list of male, female, an neutral names; and a list of surnames (if desired for your species).
Another way is to instead allow the user to create list of name parts to use. I.e. A list of prefixes, interfixes, and postfixes to be randomly combined into names. With potential separate lists for male, female, neutral, ect.
Having other options to say that your race makes use of surnames or middles names or other such additional naming stuff would also allow for more interesting naming.

A proposal has been made to declare Weltreich the undisputed conquerer of the Universe. Then, restart the database.

In the next Universe, the sixth, old style spacecraft will not exist. I also have a short list of changes that must wait until a reset; those would get done.

Does anyone have any strong opposition to restarting?

What things do you think must be fixed at the next restart? I don't mean every bug you know about. I mean what must be fixed before a restart.

Are there any exploits that will allow someone to max out their empire in the first week, like last time?

With this heads up, it would be a good idea for everyone to store their building and spacecraft designs in local .SoH files. You should already be doing this.