2019-04-05 Query Starmap, Finalize Progress, Server Config

[Haxus]

Query Starmap
The star map window has a button to request empires and a button to refresh the map. Having two "refresh" buttons is confusing and clunky.

Star map query reply now includes empire data that is needed by the client.

Refresh Empires button was removed from the Star Map window.

Hulls Inside Hulls
It is possible to cheat the designer into thinking a blueprint has more volume by placing hull parts inside of hull parts.

Volume calculation of spacecraft and building hulls now does a better job of estimating the volume of the model, without being fooled by overlapping parts. Unfortunately, this added some grueling processing to the Finalize and Refresh Obstructions processes, making them take longer, especially on large sized blueprints.

This will not affect blueprints that have already been finalized. Their hull volume will not change.

Finalize Progress
Finalizing a blueprint can take a long time. A cancelable progress control would be welcome.

Progress control added when finalizing spacecraft and building blueprints. It can be canceled.

A progress control is not necessary when finalizing assemblies.

Refresh Obstructions Progress
Refreshing obstructions in a blueprint can take a long time, longer now with the change to the hull volume calculation. A cancelable progress control would be welcome.

Progress control added when refreshing obstructions in spacecraft and building blueprints. It can be canceled.

Cannot Climb Down Ladders
I can climb up ladders in a spacecraft but I cannot climb down them. My legs move but my guy doesn't go anywhere.

Fixed downward movement on ladders.

Blueprint Number
It would be nice if the blueprint number was shown on the spacecraft specifications window.

Blueprint number now appears on the spacecraft specifications window.

Server Configuration
Since updating the servers to use the qt5-default package, gdb no longer provides useful stack trace information. This makes tracing server crashes impossible.

Reconfigured servers to use Qt libraries built by me. This was successful on the test servers. Stack traces are back where they belong.

Server restart will take a little longer than usual. Public servers will be reconfigured after they shut down for the restart. This takes a few minutes per server. Then they will be restarted normally.

[Deantwo]

Query Starmap
The star map window has a button to request empires and a button to refresh the map. Having two "refresh" buttons is confusing and clunky.

Star map query reply now includes empire data that is needed by the client.

Refresh Empires button was removed from the Star Map window.

Always nice when you can remove a button and make it easier to use at the same time. ^^
Nothing worse than querying the whole starmap only to notice you forgot to query the empire flags first. I have done that way too often.
Also believe that was part of my old starmap improvements list.

Hulls Inside Hulls
It is possible to cheat the designer into thinking a blueprint has more volume by placing hull parts inside of hull parts.

Volume calculation of spacecraft and building hulls now does a better job of estimating the volume of the model, without being fooled by overlapping parts. Unfortunately, this added some grueling processing to the Finalize and Refresh Obstructions processes, making them take longer, especially on large sized blueprints.

This will not affect blueprints that have already been finalized. Their hull volume will not change.

I guess the only benefit that could be gained from this (second TARDIS) exploit would be a smaller ship. So not a huge rush to say that blueprints using it should be removed, but maybe sone day when you have to go through all blueprints anyway.

[Vectorus]

Good fixes here; just going to pitch on the hull thing.

I've mentioned it before but will again. There's no way to stop someone making a ship look smaller than its performance suggests. I think you may as well make it easier rather than harder - perhaps by divorcing aesthetic volume from ship requirements and capabilities. 

You can make a big cube of intangible, invisible hull and use it to bulk up your stats. It's really ugly because the shield bubble goes a weird shape and you have to fiddle about with voids in odd places. But if you make a true-to-scale replica of something and find its performance is just a bit off, or a lot off, it's a good thing to be able to do. I don't see that there's a huge rush to make it extra difficult; no one is gaining any unfair advantage by doing so, unless people are really judging whether or not to fight a ship by looking out the window.

It makes sense that different cultures using putatively different technologies would produce roughly equivalent ships quite different in size; if the Star Wars races were two inches high, as a Hazeron race can be, they'd make their Star Destroyers a lot smaller: a lot of that volume is corridors and hangars.